The Museum of Everything #4, Selfridges, London
The Museum of Everything is exactly what it says it is. Everything. In the basement of Oxford Street’s Selfridges, the unusual collection of painting, prints and sculptures display themselves in an ecstatic way.
The Museum of Everything presents what it calls ‘outside art’. Art produced by people who suffer from physical, psychological or neurological difficulties. The art here is that which has been neglected from the cultural norm. Selfridges is an unnerving setting for such an exhibition. Yet, once in the maze of different passageways and oddly constructed home-styled rooms, the consumer backdrop is easily forgotten.
Curator James Brett has selected pieces that cover a range of techniques, themes and ideas, indeed within the Museum there is everything from the female nude to kitsch Frankenstein masks.
Jean-Jacques Oost, from Belgium, makes naïve, smudged impressions in black and white of grossly seductive women. They are crude caricatures in the style of Otto Dix or Georg Grosz.
Roy Wenzel, from the Netherlands, paints figures, fields and fast trains that are all recalled images from his childhood until the present day.
The eclectic mix of sexual imagery, childhood memories and real experiences are unnerving abstractions produced by deeply personal realties. It is engaging and thought-provoking exhibition like any other but is also unnerving, surreal and uncomfortable.
Whether in technique or theme, the produced art feels distressed. Despite the somewhat Magic Roundabout styled setting the art here is defensively mute. Each piece remains relatively unexplained, except for instances where it is described as having a ‘cryptic code’, known only by its creator. The often bright, striking images and sculptures are enticing but once in the Museum of Everything, we are left, deliberately and unapologetically, knowing nothing.
-Sian Gray
