Controversy hits Marylebone art gallery GV Art.
It only went on show a week ago, but after a storm of controversy the London gallery that were exhibiting a human brain have had it removed. GV Art in Marylebone have made the decision to remove the brain after it was deemed to overshadow the work of the seven contemporary artists involved.
The exhibition, Brainstorm, was branded 'degrading' and 'disrespectful' by Conservative MP David Amess according to an article in the Evening Standard on 11th January, after Dr David T Dexter of Imperial College London had unveiled the brain. This classic example of an ill-informed reaction from a public figure meant that, although the exhibition generated a lot of coverage, the majority of it (like this piece in fact) was focusing on the brain and not the art.
If Amess had bothered to visit the exhibition, he would have discovered a series of sensitive, carefully researched artistic responses to the human brain and the fascinating field of research that is neuroscience. He would also have realised that the brain was not being displayed as art, but in order to raise awareness of Multiple Sclerosis and as an example of what had inspired the artists.
And it clearly has inspired them, as Brainstorm features several interesting pieces. Annie Cattrell's gilded bronze works are simultaneously weird and elegant whilst Helen Pynor's 'Headache' is calmly mesmeric. It's good to see new works by David Marron, although I think they're less successful than his Of Life and Death No More series: by responding to a specific event (the slicing of a human brain at Imperial's Tissue Bank) there seem to be less of the artist's own personal mythologies present.
The highlight though is Katharine Dowson's 'My Soul', two blocks of glass containing a 3D laser etching of the artist's brain. It's a beautiful, delicate, fascinating piece – both visually, as art object, and referentially, in terms of what it does and means. This intersection of art and science is exactly what GV Art is all about, and it's a shame that the media feels the need to pounce on (or create) areas of potential controversy.
Brainstorm is at GV Art until 22nd January 2011.
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Image credit: Katharine Dowson, My Soul (detail).
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