Multiple Narratives brings together works by eight gallery artists. The pieces are linked through their use of repetition, series and classification, some are narrative-driven, while others focus on visual exploration. Spanning drawing, sculpture, photography and found objects, the exhibition ranges from the minimal and abstract to the richly figurative.
The show includes Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Anna Barriball, Tacita Dean, Shilpa Gupta, Cornelia Parker, Raqs Media Collective, Thomas Schütte, and Dayanita Singh.
The exhibition opens with The Line of Fate (2011), a sequence of photographs by Tacita Dean which together form a striking portrait of the late art critic Leo Steinberg. Here, Dean has captured Steinberg writing in longhand his magnum opus on Michaelangelo. The images capture, seemingly by coincidence, a top-left-to-bottom-right diagonal which continually appeared in Michaelangelo’s paintings.
To the right of this is Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press’s Life Drawing Drawings (2007-13), a group of hand-made ‘dummy’ figure drawing manuals, which reference and apparently simplify our relationship to the body. In this instance it is the books that have been drawn, not the human figure. With their blank pages they allude to drawings unmade and biographies unwritten.
Progressing further into the gallery, the corner features two works by Cornelia Parker. White Cliff Crossings (2024) is made from a salvaged window; each of its panes is marked with a single white ‘X’ using chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover. For the artist, cliff edges conjure up the spectre of the climate crisis with its crumbling coastlines and rising sea levels. The markings suggest the passing of time and there are various readings of the term “crossings”, both literal and metaphorical.
Adjacent is Parker’s Brontëan Abstracts (2006) – photographs of Charlotte Brontë’s original manuscripts for Jane Eyre which are held in the British Library. These images give us a direct insight into the immediacy of the progress of the celebrated novel. Here Parker invites the viewer to be present at the author’s elbow, we enter Brontë’s consciousness as she edits her masterpiece and become privy to her ideas as they emerge and recede.
Raqs Media Collective’s Drawings of a Conversation (2012) shows fragments of a digital pattern that emerged from the exchanges and conversations between the artists’ three computers and the outside world on a single hot afternoon in their office in Delhi. Each pattern is embellished by a flourish of silver – a flamboyant gesture towards the hope of salvaging snatches of meaning from a thicket of dense, rich noise.
Thomas Schütte enjoys the small scale of architectural models – objects which are, in his words, ‘a whole world inside a room or on a tabletop.’ His piece, Architektur Modelle (2006) (seen below) fills the back wall with 28 etchings which show versions of the artist’s own proposals for structures of varying scales. Buildings, whether fantastical or real, offer Schütte a vocabulary for examining the consequences of the built environment, its failures and its successes.
Anna Barriball often employs drawing to investigate ordinary objects, from door panels to windowpanes. Smoke Studies (2018) belongs to a series of works on paper made with a smoking candle held beneath a metal window grille which acts as a stencil. The lines of negative space indicated by soot are reminiscent of classic minimalism.
Barriball’s large floor-based installation Yellow Leaves (2011), seen across the gallery floor, is composed of scattered fabric ‘tree leaves’ cut from patterned curtains she discovered in a market which were identical to those in her childhood home. In this evocative piece, memory is inexorably linked to the object.
Time Capsule (2024) by Dayanita Singh is a wall panel composed of 12 individual photographs. The work emerges from her long-term interest in archives in India and elsewhere, (the current exhibition ARCHIVO, at the 61st Venice Biennale features works made in the Venetian State Archive). The bundles of fabric-wrapped documents depicted are of indeterminate age and their contents are unknown. At some stage the papers were enclosed in dyed cotton, placed on shelves and left untouched for many years. Every bundle is tied by a different hand with an individual knot to seal it. These knots, in combination with the forms and faded colours gives them very tangible personalities, turning each image into a singular portrait.
Shilpa Gupta’s A0-A5 (2014) is a set of six hand-woven pieces of fabric ranging in size from A0 to A5. In this work she uses the ordinary incremental measurements with which we surround ourselves such as a simple sheet of paper. The line embroidered on each part equates proportionally to the barbed wire barrier India has built 140 metres inside the border it shares with Bangladesh. This is one of the longest fences in world.
In the lower gallery To the Dance: eight works by Nancy Spero 1926–2009 marks the centenary of Spero’s birth with a special display of eight works that exemplify the range, themes and ambition of her practice.
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