Highlights from six years of annual collaborations with Slade artists.

The 2015 Slade Collaboration exhibition, RE-LAUNCH, marked the reopening of UCL’s Art Museum’s main space after a programme of improvements, supported by a DCMS/Wolfson award for the improvement of museums and galleries, and HLF funding.  The exhibition presented a selection of objects, prints and video, including site specific artworks, made in response to our collections and the theme of re-launch. These works were shown within the surrounds of the UCL Art Museum's permanent collection of prints and drawings, including plaster models by the renowned neoclassicist John Flaxman.

The featured artists included:

Ian Giles, Jonathan Kipps, Katja Larsson, Nadine Mahoney, Julia McKinlay, Milou van der Maaden, Janne Malmros, Kate Keara Pelen, Cyrus Shroff, Printers’ Symphony

The RE-LAUNCH (2015) catalogue Includes an introductory text by Dr Nina Pearlman, Head of UCL Art Collections and a conversation between Dr Andrea Fredericksen, Curator UCL Art Collections, with Professor Susan Collins, former Director of the Slade about the collaboration.

For more information about the exhibition please visit our blog that includes a conversation on the occasion of the 2015 relaunch between Helen R Cobby (UCL History of Art Alumna 2015) and the two artists who supported the project, J. Yuen Ling Chiu and Keef Winter.

In collaboration with the Zabludowicz Collection, an accompanying symposium, Collecting the Emerging (2015), brought together 15 researchers, artists and curators to examine issues around collecting new and experimental art. 

This is part of UCL Art Collections’ commitment to interdisciplinary research-impact collaborations. For more information or expressions of interest to collaborate contact museums@ucl.ac.uk

More about the exhibition

Amongst the works in the show visitors found literal references to the notion of re-launch such as Katja Larrson’s cast digger bucket representing the idea of construction and development. Ian Giles’ Leap of Faith was a revisited video work that expands upon Yoshikuni’s Bat and a Full Moon, a Japanese woodcut of a vertical-flying bat placed by the artist up near the ceiling. Kate Keara Pelen presents a set of ‘ritual objects’ referencing 16th-century prints by Hans Sebald Beham and Lucas Cranach the Elder, creating 3D objects in felt that brought the prints off the paper into a sculptural reality. Jonathan Kipps’ full-size column, made from re-appropriated building materials and methods of construction, interrupted the ordered neoclassical system used by the original architect William Wilkins.

While the works by the participating artists were visually and spatially accessible, over 8,000 works of art remain co-present. With a world-class collection of prints and drawings by past masters ensconced on-site in cabinets and boxes and plaster models by the neoclassicist John Flaxman on open display, visitors were reminded of the art collections’ Victorian origins. At UCL Art Museum that which is visible is in constant dialogue with the hidden and vice versa, bringing to the fore the tensions between access to art and the regulation of its visibility. A limited edition printed catalogue was available alongside the exhibition.