How Museums Are Progressing Up Exhibition Designs?

Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, said that we have lost the ability to look at and appreciate small things. He expressed his lament as he talked about his exhibition Diane Arbus at the Beginning, which started life at the Met Breuer in New York in 2016 and opened last month at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Rosenheim while working with specialist designers overcame the difficulties posed by the small scale of the photographs for the Breuer show. Also, distinctive totemic columns displaying each work individually and prominently helped him to overcome the hurdles. The photos shone the Hayward instead of getting lost. Unsurprisingly, it takes the same approach.

The implementation of innovative and quirky exhibition design has been coming into the limelight in a wave of recent shows whose elements stick in the mind long after they have closed. Picasso 1932 of Tate Modern: Love, Fame, Tragedy exhibition last year, for example, make use of a neat device to delve outside the self-imposed time limit of a single year of the output of the artist, including earlier works by recreating the first major survey of the artist, replete with salon-hang, which took place that year.

With lavish scenography and dramatic lighting usually deployed in sweeping shows on fashion, the design of the exhibition can also veer towards the bombastic. This is just like last year’s Heavenly Bodies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the current Christian Dior show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But little interventions may be the most memorable like the mirror which is placed under a book in the 2017 Magnificent Gems show at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, for showing off its cover.

Some major museums have exhibition designers on staff. While others bring in outside studios. Third-party assistance is a necessity sometimes. Take the unpromising former office block housing The Store X in central London. It has recently hosted vast shows of film and video installations, including 2016’s The Infinite Mix, a collaboration between the Vinyl Factory and the Hayward Gallery, which is designed by Delvendahl Martin Architects that needed extensive soundproofing and partitioning without blocking a clear path through for visitors.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/feature/exhibition-design-the-art-of-seeking-attention