Vincent Van Gogh, 'Van Gogh's Chair',1888.
London, The National Gallery.

The Stuff of Life

The fourth exhibition under the Touring Exhibitions Partnership.

A National Gallery Touring Exhibition in partnership with Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery: 14 January - 3 April 2005
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle: 16 April - 3 July 2005

and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

and at The National Gallery, London: 14 July - 2 October 2005
by The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation

In paintings the most ordinary objects can carry the most extraordinary significance. This exhibition of paintings from the 16th century to the present day focused on the depiction and meaning of objects in art and explored the development and aims of still life paintings as well as the various roles objects play in art.

These range from their use as attributes and symbols to the 20th-century appropriation of the 'ready-made' object as a work of art. Works include Van Gogh's famous 'Chair' conceived as a self portrait and Velázquez's 'Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', in which the miraculously painted still life objects in the foreground assume a religious significance. Another group, including works by Steenwyck, Chardin and Sam Taylor-Wood, explored artists' long-standing preoccupation with the transience and fragility of things, a fragility that is, of course, knowingly shared by the works of art themselves.

This was the fourth exhibition in the National Gallery's Touring Partnership organised in collaboration with Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

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