Our friend Jo Hatton--Natural History keeper at London's excellent Horniman Musuem--has just alerted me to a wonderful looking project they are attempting to fund via Kickstarter. Your support will also win you a number of lovely rewards including art prints and photo books. Following is a description of the project; for more information, visit the Horniman's Art Fund page, Twitter feed, or website. Please consider supporting this unique and worthwhile project!
We want to stage an exhibition of Mark Fairnington's paintings alongside their inspiration, our collection's hidden taxidermy treasures.
We need your help to fund Mark Fairnington’s autumn exhibition at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, where we will display his paintings alongside the specimens that inspired them. The objects will be presented as they are in storage, evoking the wonder Mark experienced when he found them for the first time.
Mark Fairnington is a British painter whose work explores the lineage of animal and plant painting, and its relation to how humans understand the natural world. He has been exploring the natural history specimens at the Horniman over the past five years; looking into hidden spaces in our collection and painting the objects he has found. Like many museums, most of our collection is not on public display – thousands of objects are kept boxed and wrapped in storage. These storage depots are full of peculiar, breathtaking and surreal images: taxidermy specimens wrapped in transparent plastic sheets, skeletons perched in wooden boxes, a small pet dog lying in a nest of tissue paper.
Please help us raise the money so that we can show you more of Mark’s stunning work and reveal the secrets of the Horniman store. In return for your donation, you will receive one of a number of wonderful rewards. These include limited-edition postcards, prints and bags, as well as a chance to meet Mark behind the scenes.
About the artist
Mark Fairnington has shown extensively in museums and private galleries in the US and Europe. His practice is founded on painting as a primary method of research, and his pictures – which are drawn from many sources, particularly photography – combine obsessive surface detail with sensuous precision. They examine how painting, as a meticulously constructed surface, can interrogate and re-present an image. The subjects of Fairnington’s paintings are made more singular through being painted. He has worked with the Imperial War Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum and Gardens and the Wellcome Collection. Fairnington’s most recent solo exhibition Unnatural History was a retrospective at the Mannheimer Kunstverein and Galerie Peter Zimmermann in Germany.
Image list
- Mark Fairnington. Monkey Face. 2012
- Mark Fairnington. Nest. 2012.
- Mark Fairnington. The Night Watch. 2007
- Mark Fairnington. Zebra. 2004
- Horniman. e-flyer
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