Friends in love and war | Ikon Gallery
Everyone at the Ikon Gallery seemed very well-meaning and eager to help, when I visited one rainy Friday afternoon in December. A school party was welcomed joyfully at the front desk as I arrived; a volunteer called after me as I tried to leave, just checking if I’d properly appreciated one of the sculptures in the entrance hall. This is all a testament to them, but also made me feel on edge: with my headphones rammed in my ears, trying to avoid eye contact with the volunteers in each gallery, ready to pounce and provide unasked-for context about this or that work.
My own damp misanthropy doesn’t match the spirit of the gallery’s current exhibition. The show is a joint effort between Ikon and the MAC museum in Lyon, and is all about friendship. It incorporates works from both institution’s collections, as well as some from the British Council. I guess the show’s theme is based on this macro-level linkup: Britain and France being the ultimate frenemies; the Council being an organisation explicitly committed to bridge cultural gaps.
Anyway, the standout work from the show came from Birmingham-born Gillian Wearing - an artist whose early video experiments and haunting lockdown portraits I’ve featured on here before. I’d found out she was from here when passing a statue of hers in Centenary Square, on my way to the gallery. Cast in bronze, it portrays two sisters and their children. Looking just like the locals that hurried across the square and past me in the other direction, on their way to the Christmas market - the shops.
‘Melanie and Kelly’, pictured above, is from 1997. It’s a photo of two little girls, horsing around together. Wearing asked them to describe their dream homes, room by room. What they wrote is reproduced too, below the photo. One wants purple tiles in her bathroom, a “big field” with a swimming pool outside, and in the kitchen “a pink light bulb with a picture of a bird on it”. The other wants “loads of animal pictures” in her living room, “white net curtains” and a “normal dinning table”.
Maybe the unifying factor in Wearing’s work is its normality. The humdrum Peckham shopping centre where she danced schulumpily; the quiet foreboding - that we all shared - of the lockdown paintings; the human-scale statue of that family of four; and finally, now, these two completely ordinary little girls, with their utterly modest though still childishly kooky dreams.
This humdrum normality is then artistically elevated: it’s a normality cast in bronze and hung on prestigious gallery walls, for me to look at - and remember. The solicitous gallery volunteers hovered nearby, ready to explain. An act of friendship all round.
Friends in love and war: L’Éloge des meilleur(es) ennemi(es). works from the British Council collection and MAC Lyon is at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham). 02 October 2024 - 23 February 2025