Young people and artists interpreting art together inspired by the work of Marc Quinn.
Manchester Art Gallery
Tuesday 28 October 2008–Tuesday 15 March 2016
For this exhibition, Marc Quinn’s sculpture No Visible Means of Escape IV (1996) was on loan from Tate and on display in our Victorian Galleries as part of the Visual Dialogues programme.
The sculpture is a rubber cast of Quinn’s naked body, split to the neck and suspended from a rope. Quinn describes it as ‘an extreme moment of transformation, a violent shedding of the skin.’
Young people aged 15-18 from across Manchester worked with artist Paul Needham to create new interpretation for the gallery. They explored themes in the Romantic gallery, particularly looking at Ford Madox Brown’s Manfred on the Jungfrau. Using the contemporary sculpture for inspiration, they developed new ways of thinking and looking at more traditional artworks.
Their new interpretation consists of a dramatic sound installation in the gallery created at Futureworks Media School. Quotations in vinyl also snake across the gallery floor. A DVD – produced by Let’s Go Global – and booklet also document the project.
Visual Dialogues was a partnership programme managed by Tate Britain working with Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Museums Sheffield and Tyne and Wear Museums. The programme was jointly funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Children, Schools and Families as part of the Strategic Commissioning Programme for Museum and Gallery Education.