Langlands & Bell

This exhibition curated by Miriam O’Connor Perks at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, UK explores the diverse ways in which artists have used pattern and ornamentation, from Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard to contemporary artists Bridget Riley and Langlands & Bell. Throughout history, ornamentation has often been seen as merely decorative, despite the multitude of cultural, political and religious meanings that can be communicated through pattern. Spanning themes such as optics, codes, fashion and nature, the works on display will show how pattern expresses cultural identities, our relationship to technology and responses to the environment. Drawn from Pallant House Gallery’s collection, ‘Pattern: Rhythm and Repetition’ will feature recent acquisitions of work by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lubaina Himid, Hormazd Narielwalla and Soheila Sokhanvari.

It is often said today that more people visit museums than visit football matches. In the UK seven out of ten of the top visitor attractions are museums. In a competitive environment, proliferating museums depend for their survival on their ability to attract large numbers of people and the income generated by visitors to museums has become a major source of their revenue funding. In some respects museums have become leisure brands and their (abbreviated) names are key to their public image strategy. Langlands & Bell’s ‘A Muse Um’ (2007) is a portfolio of 10 digital pigment prints published by Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, that juxtaposes the acronyms by which museums of modern and contemporary art are commonly known with photographs of museum facades, grounds and interiors taken by the artists. In multi-coloured sequences, the neo-classical gives way to the brutalist and the post-modern, while monumentality and the language of corporate lobbies are supplanted by the transparency of glass. Like the acronyms by which they are known the museums’ different architectural styles are codes that define social and cultural space. The sky lit white cube, the outdoor sculpture court, the cafe, the gift shop, the row of flags, all have become universally familiar.