Contemporary artists are given a touring room of their own

Visionary UK art tour, Artist Rooms, is bringing Damien Hirst to Leeds and Francesca Woodman to Hull this year.

Damien Hirst’s infamous sheep in formaldehyde, Away from the Flock, is just one item that will be on show at the Leeds exhibition of his work as part of Artist Rooms on tour with the Art Fund.

For those with an interest in photography, Francesca Woodman’s haunting work is at the Ferens Gallery in Hull until October as part of the same innovative tour of contemporary art.

Both exhibitions are part of the Artist Rooms collection that is jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. This collection of modern and contemporary art was created by collector and curator Anthony d’Offay over 30 years and was acquired by the nation in February 2008 with the help of the Art Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Scottish and British governments. The idea behind the collection, which comprises over 725 works by 25 artists, is to show individual artists’ work in depth, in one or more “rooms” of their work, and to share them with the public across the UK by lending them to museums and galleries.

The UK tour of Artist Rooms, now in its third year, is the first time that a collection of this size has been shared in this way thanks to the Art Fund’s annual sponsorship of the tour.

The idea behind the tour is that the work reaches and inspires new audiences across the country, particularly young people. Since 2009 the collection is estimated to have reached around 12 million people nationally. This includes over one million people from Thurso to Bexhill, Eastbourne to Helmsdale and from Llandudno to Stornoway to have seen the works outside of London and Edinburgh. In the tour’s first year, the work of controversial American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe came to the Graves Gallery in Sheffield to great acclaim.

The Artist Rooms collection has five important works spanning Damien Hirst’s career including photography, painting, sculpture and installation. As well as Away from the Flock, visitors to Leeds Art Gallery can see one of Hirst’s large cabinet pieces Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology from 2000 and examples of his “butterfly” and “spot” paintings from 1994.

By contrast, the Ferens Gallery’s Francesca Woodman exhibition is showing 18 works from the photographer’s career which was cut short by her suicide at the age of 22 in 1981.

These unconventional works, many of which are self-portraits, once belonged to her boyfriend and are being shown in the 30th anniversary year of her death.

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