UCL Art Museum

UCL Art Museum

News

Duet, our next exhibition and fifth annual Slade collaboration opens on May 7. Join us for the private view on May 9, from 6pm.

Our collaboration with artist Marcia Farqhuar on Flaxman Exchange kicked off on the 11 March 2013 with a week of performances. Join us for the Flaxman Exchange Lecture on the 8th of May, 6:30pm. Marcia Farquhar will reflect on the creation and the legacy of the Flaxman Exchange project, UCL Art Museum's inaugural Flaxman Gallery artist commission.
The event is free but registration is required: Flaxman Exchange Lecture

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.