Exhibitions Peggy & Venice - detail

2009

LISA BARMBY
Peggy and Venice

19 May – 27 June 2009

Lisa Barmby’s installation of paintings and sculptures explore her fascination with Venice – its oddities and eccentricities and most particularly the palazzo of Peggy Guggenheim. On a recent visit to the Gondola Room at the Naval Museum in Venice, Barmby came across Peggy’s custom made gondola, all black, sexy and sinister, adorned with elaborate bronze lions, Neptune’s spears and a crested shield. Already keenly drawing upon Venice, this discovery led Barmby to focus on the distinctive universe Peggy Guggenheim created for herself in her palace of art and surrounding canals. With her striped turquoise gondola poles, contemporary art collection (she ‘discovered’ Jackson Pollock), Peggy’s Venetian masks, (her outrageous sunglasses), Peggy lived daily life theatrically. Ever the eccentric she was the last person to possess a personal gondola, with two gondoliers at her service. In this exhibition the intimate scale of the mailboxes, like small stages, provide a perfect setting for the theatricality and other-worldliness of Peggy and Venice, and in turn Barmby wishes to make ‘a piece of Venice of her own’.