UCL Art Museum

UCL Art Museum

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News

The museum is currently closed for the summer, with the exception of occasional events, so please watch this space for pop-up displays and talks in June and July.

Portrait of a Young Woman by Winifred Knights long-listed by Art Everywhere

Portrait of a Young Woman by Winifred Knights, a painting from our collection, has been long-listed for Art Everywhere, the Art Fund's initiative to create the largest exhibition of its kind in the world. 

For two weeks in August some of the nation’s greatest art will be on display across tens of thousands of billboards up and down the country. Artists, curators, media owners, and entrepreneurs joined by a love of art are supporting this great charitable celebration.

For Portrait of a Young Woman to be short-listed as one of the 50 works displayed on a billboard this summer, to join in the selection process by ‘Like’ the work on Facebook and comment on it at http://arteverywhere.org.uk/artwork/portrait-of-a-young-woman/

First UCL Art Museum Prize

UCL Art Museum is delighted to announce the new UCL Art Museum Prize, to be awarded annually to a Slade student, selected from the annual UCL Art Museum/Slade collaboration or the Slade degree shows. The focus of the prize is on works that relate to current research and teaching with UCL's art collection or enhance engagement with existing aspects of the collection.

This year the prize is awarded to A Printers’ Symphony a collaborative work by Dana Ariel, Julia McKinlay, Eleanor Morgan and Georgina Tate, featured in the exhibition Duet at UCL Art Museum (6 May – 7 June 2013).

Pop-up display: July 3, 1-5pm

Join us for a pop-up exhibition devised in tandem with the Sculptural Mobilities, a one-day symposium organised by the department of Scandinavian Studies about the cultural mobility of sculptural artworks.

Pop-up display: July 4, 1-5pm

Join us for a pop-up display combining Japanese woodblock prints and items from UCL's Special Collections to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Choshu Five.

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UCL Art Museum by UCL Sound

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Over 10,000 works of art make up the collections of UCL Art Museum, from the 1500s to the present day.

Works separated by centuries are linked by a desire to experiment with new materials, theories, and reproduction techniques in order to produce new meanings, share ideas and inspire.

The experimental spirit is present in early printmaking techniques as used by Dürer, studio model books employed in Renaissance artists’ workshops, Neo-classical plaster modelling and pointing machines, the study of the human figure in the life room, Japanese colour woodblocks, screenprinting popular in the 1960s, early computer art of the 1970s and contemporary digital media.

Visitors watching Apertures (Triptych), 2012 by Freddy Tuppen, at the Vincula exhibition private view ©installation photograph Matt Clayton

International in scope, many art works relate to the history of teaching art in Britain and show stages in the creative process. Outstanding examples include: Van Dyck’s portraits of people of influence in his Iconographia, Turner’s annotated landscape prints, torn up sketches by Augustus John saved by his peers, artists’ anatomy albums, as well as drawings by artists such as John Flaxman, Henry Tonks and William Coldstream used for instruction.

Since the museum has its origins as a teaching and research collection tied to the history of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, the collections present a unique archive of art education. As the Slade was the first school to admit women into the life room, a large number of works by women artists entered into this public collection, through the Slade prize system, as early as the 1890s. The museum holds examples of early works by pioneering artists such as Gwen John, Dora Carrington, Winifred Knights, Ithel Colquhoun, Diana Cumming, Paula Rego, and Anna Maria Pacheco.

As a university art museum, interdisciplinary teaching and research are core to its mission, with the research process opened up through one-hour Pop-Up displays curated by UCL academics. Recent collaborative exhibitions have focused on the relation between word and image inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse series, explorations of London’s urban landscapes over time, and fame and celebrity interrogated through representations of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The museum is situated in a traditional Print Room at the heart of UCL, its collections publicly accessible through temporary exhibitions and displays across the university campus. Under UCL’s dome in the library is The Flaxman Gallery, the pinnacle of a vast collection of art works by Flaxman, showcasing the artist’s plaster models in a unique architectural setting.

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