A Skvader

A Skvader

Selected and Curated by Lawrence Leaman and Alex Sainsbury

11 December 2010 - June 2011

Celebrating the Centenary year of the Contemporary Art Society, OUTPOST have been invited to work towards a project with Kaavous-Bhoyroo editions for a 6 month exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum and Gallery.

Zoe Williams / Simon Davenport / Matthew Noel-Tod / Coco Crampton / Robert Filby / Simon Liddiment

Works from the Castle's collection and by OUTPOST's artist membership

The exhibition enjoys certain commonalities between objects and paintings from various periods of art history, all of which have a particular relation to Norwich. It also echoes qualities within the Castle Museum itself, where diverse categories of objects are often combined for visual pleasure and wonder, as in a cabinet of curiosities. To do this the exhibition invokes the Skvader, a fantastical hybrid - half-hare and half-woodgrouse - which was fabricated by a Swedish taxidermist in the early twentieth century and has since become part of Swedish folklore. The construction of the skvader - an individual's fantasy carried in to social reality - can be compared to the life of an art work.

Artworks from the Castle's collection have been chosen which by various means re- imagine nature. Artists have always invented as much as they have depicted, by accentuating a point of view or a detail, or confounding perceptions like conjurers. Contemporary artists, living in a culture of visual plethora, can treat art as a hybrid category. Sometimes they produce artworks as if they were artefacts, shifting the function of everyday objects, or combining familiar and invented forms.

To make this exhibition, artist Lawrence Leaman and collector curator Alex Sainsbury were invited by Norwich non-profit gallery OUTPOST and arts agency Kaavous- Bhoyrou to select rarely seen works from the Castle's collection. They combined this selection with works by three contemporary artists resident in Norwich, as well as in turn inviting OUTPOST to organize a series of solo presentations by artists from their membership during the course of the exhibition. Kaavous-Bhoyroo have commissioned Krzysztof Fijalkowski to produce a text exploring the idea of collecting to accompany the exhibition, and a series of talks related to collecting will also form part of the programme.