Culture

When you enter the new exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the enormous pool table that monopolises a large floor area in the centre of the room grabs your attention. The exhibition is “Sir Frank Brangwyn: Captain Winterbottom and the Billiard Room of Horton House”, and it is this billiard room that the exhibition endeavours to recreate.

Sir Frank William Brangwyn (1867 –1956) was an Anglo-Welsh artist – a painter, water colourist, engraver, and illustrator extraordinaire. The exhibition strives to display Brangwyn’s many artistic talents, and depicts a range of his styles and textures in an attempt to showcase the breadth of his work. The exhibition also emphasises to the viewers Brangwyn’s attention to detail and the specificity of his artworks.

The exhibition has been curated by the Gallery as part of the 2012 Otago Festival of the Arts, and contains many of the artist’s works, with the addition of his magnificent large-scale murals and a range of period furniture in order to reconstruct the memory of the famous billiard room at Horton House. The house was based in Northhamptonshire, England but has since been demolished. The village in which the house once stood is now called “Horton” (not to be confused with the one that “hears a who”).

The exhibition flows well, with the billiards table in the centre of the enormous murals which frame the back half of the room. The pieces are grouped together, exhibiting several different mediums, including watercolours, oil on canvas, etchings, and lithographs. Among the artworks are antique furniture pieces that not only complement the era of the exhibition, but also add great visual interest to the arrangement of the exhibition as a whole.

What lets the exhibition down is the lighting, which comes across as too harsh, reflecting off the large murals and giving them a glossy quality which makes them hard to view. Paintings of such a high calibre should not be reminiscent of a bald man’s head under bright stage lights. However, despite this, the wall murals are beautiful. Their soft colour and striking detail give them an arresting quality that grabs attention and is aesthetically attractive. The murals are stunning, and they can’t help but pull focus and demand attention. Whether deliberate or coincidental, they are the stars of the exhibition and their companion artworks merely supporting actors. The whole exhibition is worth going to for these pieces alone.

What is appealing about the exhibition as a whole is the broad range of elements included in it. Brangwyn’s subjects are varied – people, landscapes, buildings, as well as the assortment of mediums that come together in this collection. Brangwyn’s pieces have the kind of inconsistency that you don’t always find with artists, and each piece brings with it a unique sense of character that is exclusive to that particular piece. The variety that the display showcases is remarkable, and this certainly adds to the appeal.

The exhibition includes a snooker demonstration by Adam Marlow (the number one ranked poll champion in New Zealand) and Sam Chin (New Zealand Master’s Champion) on Sunday 21 October, and there will be tours for those who are blind, partially sighted, deaf or hearing impaired.