A new art gallery has recently opened right on my doorstep in Bloomsbury. Dairy Art Centre is a not-for-profit initiative by Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm in a 12,500 sq ft milk deposit formerly used by Express Dairies. I visited the latest exhibition Island as part of Bloomsbury festival this the weekend.
Island brings together the works of over forty established and emerging international contemporary artists. It is constructed as the unfolding chapters of a novel based on Aldous Huxley’s Island of 1962, a utopian story and counterpart to the Brave New World written thirty years earlier.
Inspired by some of the themes of the novel, the exhibition presents a selection of works from the collection of the centre’s founders, Frank Cohen as well as loans from the Americas, Asia and Europe, and a dozen new commissions and first-time releases.
New commissions include Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s giant mushrooms, a clock work by John Armleder, a new wall painting by U.S. artist Ann Craven, and new works by Ursula Mayer, and Franck Leibovici & Diemo Schwarz.
Stepping into the exhibition the visitor is invited to retrace the steps of Bloomsbury-born Island protagonist Will Farnaby, observer, actor and catalyst, as imagined by the organisers of the exhibition.
Outside Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has made several tree sculptures that are casts of olive trees from Basilicata (the Italian region where he was born).
