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24 March 2004 - 20 June 2004
Sunley Room. Admission Free
A rare and revealing exhibition devoted to the great renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer opens on the 24th March at the National Gallery in the Sunley Room. Using a series of drawings and prints, the exhibition traces the development of Dürer's images of the Virgin and Child in a garden. It brings together some of Dürer's most famous watercolours and shows them in London for the first time. Making their London debut are some of Dürer's most famous works: 'Irises' (from Bremen, Kunsthalle), 'The Virgin with the Animals' (Albertina, Vienna) and the 'Great Piece of Turf', which has never before left the Albertina.
The centrepiece of the display will be the National Gallery's painting 'The Virgin with the Iris'. Bought by the Gallery as a Dürer in 1945, it was subsequently dismissed by scholars as a later copy or pastiche. The examination and restoration of the painting by the Gallery in 1997-9 supports more recent proposals that the painting originated in Dürer's workshop in the early sixteenth century and draws on a number of his meticulous studies of plants, flowers and other motifs. During the examination of the painting, a remarkably detailed underdrawing which may be the work of Dürer was revealed by Gallery experts using infrared reflectography. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see this underdrawing and compare it with Dürer's drawings on paper.
Additional highlights of the exhibition include 'Peonies' by Martin Schongauer (Getty Museum, LA) a watercolour that was owned and used by Dürer himself and a 1503 painting by Dürer of the Virgin and Child, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The origins of the Virgin in the Garden theme lie in the richly symbolic medieval cult of Christ's mother, which celebrated her life and personal attributes with imagery drawn from a garden filled with flowers. This subject was well established throughout Europe by the time that Dürer began work as a painter, printmaker and designer in late fifteenth-century Germany.
Exhibition curator Susan Foister says, 'As landscape depiction and the representation of natural phenomena in painting developed, artists took the opportunity to celebrate not only the Virgin herself, but also, increasingly, the natural world and the beauty of the spring landscape. Few were as well-qualified to take advantage of the opportunity as Dürer himself, with his atmospheric landscapes and exquisite depictions of individual plants, studied directly from nature.'
National Gallery Information for Public Enquiries: 020 7747 2885
Further Exhibition Enquiries: 020 7747 2512 / 2865 josephine.gaffikin@ng-london.org.uk
Press Images: 020 7747 2596 / nathalie.griffiths@ng-london.org.uk
January 2004
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