The Unseen Masterpiece

From Friday 8 May find THE UNSEEN MASTERPIECE in our viewing room section of our wesbite here

A daily exhibition of artworks that no one will see, of works that will never be together.

Under a title borrowed (and slightly mistranslated) from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu Ingleby presents a series of interconnected images, posted daily in an exhibition that isn’t an exhibition.

The sequence began on Monday 13th April and will continue until the gallery is able to resume its normal programme, publishing a new work daily in a rolling sequence, with every selection being the work of an artist who has taken part in some aspect of the gallery’s more conventional exhibition programme over the past 22 years. It is in effect be a tribute to all of our favourite things.

The works appear each week day via our website and instagram and every Friday an email summarises the previous five days sequence, and releases a newly commissioned film from the studio of one of the artists featured that week. To subscribe to our weekly emails please join our mailing list here.

Part 70

And so, we reach part 70, the end of week 14, and, for now at least, the moment to stop this sequence of ‘the Unseen Masterpiece’. We said at the outset that we would host this (non) exhibition on Instagram and our website until the gallery itself was able to re-open, but of course we had no idea that we ‘d still be at it over 100 days later. However, I’m glad to say that we are now preparing the building to welcome visitors, by appointment, from the start of next month, and so this will be the final post.

Where better to end than with the work of our old friend Craig Murray-Orr? An artist we have known almost as long as any other, a friendship that pre-dates the existence of our gallery, and whose work we first showed back in 1998. Yesterday’s description of Lilian Tomasko’s work as hovering on the edge of abstraction, but steeped in memory and personal meaning, could equally be applied to the tiny paintings on panel that Craig has been making for many years. They appear to be landscapes, and feel like they come from somewhere, but the landscape itself is simply a vehicle for the artist’s depiction of an emotional and mental state. They are tiny poems.

Back in 2015, interviewed for a book about his work, Craig was asked to describe what these paintings are about: “Feelings. Emotions. Colour, tone and marks. I’m not trying to tell anyone anything. They are not demonstrative. But hopefully they are powerful. They are explanations to myself really, and to no-one else, but when they work, they hopefully have meaning for other people because I’m not so different from everybody else”.

As always, being a Friday, the week is rounded off with a short film about the artist’s life over recent weeks. Today’s was made at home in Dartmouth Park, London by Dana Purvis. Thank you, Dana, thank you, Craig, and thank you to everyone who has followed this sequence over the past few months. Above all, thank you to all 70 of the artists whose work has featured, and who collectively make up a history of our gallery over the past 22 years.