Exhibitions > Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

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Free admission
Open Tues to Sun and
bank holidays 10am-6pm

Cabinet-on-stand with ebony veneer and internal fruitwood and ivory marquetry, made in Paris and bought by Mary Evelyn in 1652 for her husband John Evelyn, Geffrye Museum, London

The Horniman Museum walrus Courtesy of The Horniman Museum and Gardens

Pablo Bronstein, Museum Section, 2013, courtesy Herald St, London
Photo: Andy Keate © the artist
Limited edition print of this work is available from our shop

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of emblems, geometrical diagrams, and notes. Verso studies of emblems, geometrical diagrams, and notes, c.1508-10
Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Albrecht Dürer, A rhinoceros, 1515
Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Nina Katchadourian, Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style
Courtesy of the artist

Corinne May Botz, Kitchen (Room from afar)
© Corinne May Botz

JMW Turner, Peacock, from The Farnley Book of Birds, c.1816
Leeds Museums and Galleries / The Bridgeman Art Library

Jeremy Millar, Masked Self-Portrait (2008), framed colour photograph in custom-made archival mount
Courtesy of the artist

Laurent Grasso, Specola, 2012
© Laurent Grasso

Argonauta argo, commonly known as the Greater Argonaut, is a species of pelagic octopus. This Blaschka glass models dates to around the 1880s and represents the female of the species. Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru - National Museum of Wales

Exhibitions

> Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

24 May 2013 - 15 September 2013

Enter a world of wonder, fascination and inquiry. Experience the spectacular and the bizarre, the startling and mysterious, contemporary art alongside historical artefacts, as the gallery becomes a cabinet of curiosities.

‘Like the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th century, which mixed science and art, ancient

and modern, reality and fiction, this exhibition refuses to choose between knowledge

and pleasure. It juxtaposes historical periods and categories of objects to produce an eccentric map of curiosity in its many senses’ says Curator Brian Dillon.

See the absurdly over stuffed Horniman Museum walrus, which has travelled to the seaside having left its current home for the first time since the 1890s, sit proudly in our North gallery. Works by contemporary artists including Katie Paterson, Pablo Bronstein, Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne expose past and present fascinations such as astronomy, animals, maps and humankind’s obsession with collecting, blurring the boundaries of art, science and fantasy.

Historical artefacts abound with intricate pen and ink studies by Leonardo da Vinci; Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated Rhinoceros woodcut (1515); beautiful bird studies by the gallery’s namesake JMW Turner; late 19th century models of aquatic creatures by German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka; the mineral collection of Roger Caillois from the Natural History Museum in Paris, the diarist and botanist John Evelyn’s cabinet, ivory anatomical models from the 17th and 18th centuries, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia with its startingly detailed illustration of a flea, and a penguin collected from one of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions from our neighbour the Powell-Cotton Museum in Birchington-on-Sea.

A Hayward Touring exhibition, in collaboration with Turner Contemporary and curated by Brian Dillon. Also in association with New York art and culture magazine Cabinet.

Turner Contemporary architect David Chipperfield conceived the design for the exhibition in Margate, and Curiosity is set to tour to the Norwich Castel Museum and Art Gallery followed by de Appel Museum in Amsterdam.

Catalogue
A playful, informative book with essays by Brian Dillon and Marina Warner will accompany the exhibition, available from our shop.

Limited edition Pablo Bronstein print
For the exhibition Curiosity, we commissioned artist Pablo Bronstein to create a new work, Museum Section. It encapsulates the many spectacular and bizarre objects within the exhibition, in an imaginary building. We've produced 200 limited edition prints of Bronstein's work, available to buy from our shop from 24 May. The print is £90 unframed. A framing service is available on request. Opening weekend special offer - just £70 unframed from 25 - 27 May.

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Brian Dillon is a writer and critic, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. His books include Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. He writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He lives in Canterbury and teaches critical writing at the Royal College of Art.

Agency, Salvatore Arancio, Anna Atkins, Sir Joseph Banks, Leopold Blaschka and Rudolph Blaschka, Corinne May Botz, Pablo Bronsteinm, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Gerard Byrne, Nina Canell, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Roger Caillois, Tacita Dean, John Dee, Albrecht Dürer, Jimmie Durham, Gunda Förster, Aurélien Froment, Galileo Galilei, Philip Henry Gosse, Laurent Grasso, Thomas Grünfeld, Susan Hiller, Robert Hooke, Ferrante Imperato, Toril Johannessen, Nina Katchadourian, Elad Lassry, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaes Maes, Jeremy Millar, Matt Mullican, Jean Painlevé, Katie Paterson, b Picart after Charles Le Brun, Francis Place, Aura Satz, Miroslav Tichý, JMW Turner, Richard Wentworth