The World We Live In: Art and the Urban Environment
Leicester Museums & Art Galleries
5 February - 2 May 2022
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
21 May - 4 September 2022
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery
18 September 2022 - 1 January 2023
City, 1999
Oil on canvas, 167.5 x 152cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© David Austen
Meet Me in Arcadia, 1996
C-print mounted on aluminium, 61 x 76cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© Rut Blees Luxemburg
Barcelona in Outer Space, 1986
Oil on canvas, 25.4 x 25.5cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© Suzanne Treister
Arts Council Collection presents The World We Live In: Art and the Urban Environment, an exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography and film that explores urban life. Featuring 29 works created between 1950 and 2020, as well as photographs from the Collection’s rich archive of documentary photography, the exhibition launches at Leicester Museums & Art Galleries before touring to other venues across the UK.
Cities around the world have developed and diversified more rapidly in the last ten years than ever before and today over half of the world’s population lives in an urban environment. The many facets of urban life - architecture, migration, commuting, crowds, noise, lights - have long been a rich source of inspiration to artists. The World We Live In, which takes its title from an artwork by Carel Weight, brings together twentieth century and contemporary works to explore these issues, while offering a space to contemplate the role of the city, especially in light of events of the last two years.
Exploring themes from urban development – such as in works by Victor Pasmore and Toby Paterson – to migration and the relationship between inner cities and suburbia, the artists presented in this exhibition respond to a variety of places across the world. George Shaw’s The End of Time depicts the area of Coventry where he grew up, while Melanie Smith’s Parres shows the de-personalised outskirts of Mexico City, the place she has lived and worked in since 1989.
The sensory experience of living in urban environments is also addressed in the exhibition, with works such as Michael Andrews’ Lights II: The Ship Engulfed depicting glittering cityscapes and neon signs and Rut Blees Luxemburg’s Meet Me in Arcadia capturing the artificial lights from a block of East End London flats. A changing schedule of sound and video works, selected by each touring venue, includes Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The All-Hearing, a film reflecting on the high levels of noise pollution in Cairo, Egypt.
Parres (No. 2), 1995
Acrylic enamel on acrylic sheet,
mounted on aluminium, 130.5 x 200 x 4.2cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© Melanie Smith
Grille (landscape), 2020
Steel, chicken wire, foam, newspaper, UV resistant PVA,
household acrylic paint, plaster, 131 x 150 x 42cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© Olivia Bax. Courtesy of the artist and Standpoint Gallery, London.
Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Townscape, 1959
Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 63.8cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© Estate of Brian Robb
While some artists have sought inspiration from real life surroundings, others have drawn on failed utopias of the past and imagined structures for the future, opening up conversation about how cities have served and failed the needs of their inhabitants. Mark Lewis’s film Children’s Games, Heygate Estate, highlights the gap between utopian views and everyday realities as his camera glides around a complex of empty walkways in a now demolished South London estate.
Alongside the exhibition’s broad range of works, The World We Live In also includes some of the Arts Council Collection’s outstanding collection of documentary photographs from the 1960s and 1970s which present an unparalleled view of inner city life across the UK.
Deborah Smith, Director, Arts Council Collection, says: “We look forward to working with our touring partners on this exhibition in which artists bring many different ways of looking at our urban environment and, through art, raise questions and encourage people to keep interrogating the world we live in”.
Established in 1946 as a national collection for the UK, today the Arts Council Collection cares for over 8,000 works by close to 2,200 artists. The Collection is managed by the Southbank Centre on behalf of Arts Council England, and is committed to supporting artists from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines, most often at an early stage of their career, in order to reflect the rich, diverse culture of the UK. It is a widely circulated national collection that can be seen in museums, galleries, schools, universities, hospitals and charitable associations across the UK and abroad.
ARTS COUNCIL COLLECTION
