BEING THERE

The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath
14 September 2024 – 23 February 2025

Four newly acquired Thomas Gainsborough paintings will be presented as key components of a kaleidoscopic group exhibition of portraiture featuring 18 contemporary British artists, selected by guest curator Ingrid Swenson MBE, opening in September at The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent. Being There will invite visitors to reflect on the experience of artists and their sitters or subject in the act of making the artwork, and to consider what similarities and differences there may be for the role of the artist in Gainsborough’s time and today. What motivates and inspires artists then and now to create likenesses of others? How has the role of the artist in society shifted since the 18th century? How have changes in art practices – and specifically portraiture – across the past two and a half centuries pointed to a wider shift in art’s ability to challenge assumptions and ask us important questions in today’s more diverse and yet fractured globalised society?

Echoing Gainsborough’s painting group of father, mother and two sons, a central thread of the exhibition is the depiction of family. In recent centuries portrait commissions such as these provided a staple income for even the most esteemed artists, whose job it was to depict status as well as likeness. Since the late 19th century however, artists have increasingly portrayed family members and close friends as a way of exploring intimate and deep emotion and the complexity of relationships – they are often acts of love. Other artists in the exhibition have placed portraiture and the human figure at the centre of their practice but depict imagined or anonymised individuals whose presence is more ambiguous and can be as much a reflection of the artist themselves as a representation of another.

The title, Being There, takes its name from a watercolour portrait by Lucy Jones of her husband made in 2018. The exhibition includes work in a variety of media including painting, photography, drawing and etching. It is also a multigenerational exhibition, with the youngest artist, Shaqúelle Whyte at 24, and the most senior, Frank Auerbach at 93. The other artists taking part in the exhibition are Michael Armitage, Sarah Ball, Richard Billingham, Glenn Brown, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Kaye Donachie, Paul Graham, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Chantal Joffe, Lucy Jones, Joy Labinjo, Melanie Manchot, Celia Paul and Gillian Wearing.

This is the inaugural exhibition of the relaunched Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent which will bring together themes and ideas from the historic house museum with a range of contemporary artists’ work.