The small market town of Bruton, nestled in Somerset 120 miles from London (or 1 hr 45 mins from Paddington by train) has become a cultural hub over the past decade. Many artists live in the area – I visited the studio of Nina Murdoch, for example – and there are now main three galleries worth visiting.
Much the biggest is, of course, Hauser & Wirth, which put Bruton on the contemporary art map when it opened in 2014. The site features a 1.5-acre perennial meadow designed by Piet Oudolf, a working farm, farm shop, bookshop and the Roth bar as well as art within and without. Currently, you can see a joyous celebration of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, who were partners in life from 1956 (though both married to others at the time) until Tinguely’s death in 1991 – they married each other in 1971. You can see a through survey of their – very different – individual languages, as well as some collaborative work. De Saint Phalle can make even a skull look pretty lively as its mirrored surface reflects in the sun…
Jemma Hickman, founder of the Peckham-based gallery bo.lee in 2009, joined forces with Alice Workman, who had directed Hauser & Wirth Somerset since its foundation, to open Bo Lee and Workman in a former Methodist church on Bruton’s historic High Street in 2023. Adeline de Monseignat is making the most of that striking setting at the moment with her immersive installation ‘Playscape’. Using river pebbles as her primary material, she channels the inspiration of how her own children explore the world to cast adults into the childlike place of encounter with creaturely forms frozen in apparent motion as they echo the shapes and gestures of toddlers at play: crouching, crawling, tumbling, testing the world around them – ‘worming about’, as de Monseignat puts it.
Fred Levine is a recent addition to the Bruton scene, a change of name for ‘Informality’, which ran from 2019 in Oxfordshire and London. The space is ‘The Old Silk Barn’, though director Frederick McDonald (who owns the gallery with his partner Zsanett Der Levine) told me was more likely to have housed livestock. Either way, it’s an attractive space and has followed up an outstanding show by Rebecca Partridge with the German artist Raffael Bader. His paintings abstract from landscapes to the point where the sources might be unapparent, if not for his suggestive titling. Thus ‘Elevated Water’ originates from a mountain reflected in a lake at its foot.
