Guildhall Art Gallery (and Roman Amphitheatre), Guildhall Yard, London, EC2V 5AE
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk Instagram: @guildhallartlondon
Given its scale and quality, the Guildhall Art Gallery flies somewhat under the radar. It was founded in 1885 to display the City of London Corporation’s growing art collection, and rapidly expanded its holdings of contemporary 19th century paintings. The building was almost entirely destroyed during the Battle of Britain, leading to temporising solutions until an impressive new building was opened in 1999. Now there’s free-to-enter space with room for a large permanent collection – still strong on Victorian art – and substantial special exhibitions, both looking to present aspects of London to Londoners. If you had to choose a star draw that would probably be Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s recently-conserved garlanded woman, seductively modelled on his frequent Pre-Raphaelite muse, Alexa Wilding.
The current special exhibition (to 27th Sept) is also a cracker: ‘Jock McFadyen with Jem Finer: Underground (and Surface)’ is a retrospective of the Scots-born (surely not? But yes – Paisley, 1950) Hackney-based RA. McFadyen’s figure-centred works from the 1970’s and 80’s and later landscapes of London are well represented, but the particular focus is the large-scale Tube station paintings of the 90’s: they’re immersively presented in a suitably low-level space with a layered soundscape by Jem Finer of The Pogues, composed from field recordings on the Northern and Central lines. These gritty paintings keep abstraction and representation in play while suggesting that they might also be simply walls lifted out of the underground. All in all, the Square Mile is well worth an art visit – the more so if you team the Guildhall up with the nearby Bloomberg Space and the Hypha Studios shows at No. 1 Poultry.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD Bazaar.
