EXHIBITING BRITISH ART ABROAD We invited three BAN Members to reflect on their experience of exhibition projects taking British art abroad – their responses ask us to think about art’s role in generating global links and understanding, and how our sense of British art itself might be changed and expanded in the process.
Mark Bills on exhibiting Gainsborough in Germany, the Netherlands and Russia British national galleries are far more used to international collaborations than their regional counterparts, something which is just as true for galleries internationally. It appears that regional museums are missing a real opportunity to give visitors the prospect of directly experiencing a bigger picture of the art and art history and to share British art with the world. At Gainsborough’s House, the international dimension has always been part of our wider ambition. Until we closed for redevelopment we took Gainsborough into Europe, but now with new galleries of a much larger scale we can also receive reciprocal exhibitions. Working with galleries in Holland, Germany, and Russia, we loaned our own Gainsborough paintings and drawings to form the basis of exhibitions, supplemented with loans from European collections and national Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews on the side of a bus in collections in Britain. In Hamburg (photo: Mark Bills) 2016, Gainsborough in his own words opened at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, in 2018, Thomas Gainsborough, The Modern Landscape was shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and from 20192020 Thomas Gainsborough was the great draw in winter at the Pushkin State 8
