VENICE.- V-A-C Foundation is presenting The Explorers, Part One at their Venice headquarters Palazzo delle Zattere.

Organised with the Whitechapel Gallery in London and curated by its Director Iwona Blazwick, the exhibition is the first in a two-part project that revisits and expands four displays from the V-A-C collection that premiered at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2014/15.

The Explorers, Part One, is the result of a journey made by two artists and a curator through the V-A-C collection, bringing their discoveries to Venice. Renowned painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, recently celebrated in a solo show at the New Museum and winner of the Jarman Award and Turner Prize nominee, filmmaker James Richards, were invited to explore the entire V-A-C collection. They found themselves drawn to art about nature, from the depiction of flora and fauna to expressions of human nature.

The thrumming rhythms of Stravinsky’s 1913 revolutionary ballet and orchestral work, The Rite of Spring, introduces visitors to a display of paintings, prints and photographs that plot a bucolic journey through nature as still life, wilderness or sensory arcadia. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye reaches across the century to bring together paintings by artists such as Aristarkh Lentulov (Bathers, 1910), Enrico David (Rite of Spring, 2012) and Gary Hume (Garden Painting, #2, 1996) to show the human figure as part of the natural environment and as a metaphor for primal energy and sexual desire. While Andy Warhol’s ‘cow’ wallpaper (1966) shows how nature has become industrialised, Nikolay Bakharev’s sequence of bathers photographed on Russian beaches (Novokuznetsk, various from the series Relationship, 1980-1995) show nature as a worker’s paradise. Human nature is the subject of James Richards’ immersive audio environment (To Replace a Minute’s Silence with a Minute’s Applause, 2015) emanating from a single canvas—Francis Bacon’s 1953 work Study for a Portrait.

A middle-aged man is seated in what could be a throne or an executioner’s chair. Richard’s symphonic work translates paint into sound, evoking its material and philosophical poetry. In attendance is a chorus of single figures: from Pierre-August Renoir’s sensuous reclining nude (Femme nue couchée, Gabrielle, 1903) to Alberto Giacometti’s male figure looming through a grey void (Figure grise (Téte en gris), 1957); or Chaim Soutine’s stylish woman exiled in Paris (Le femme au grand chapeau, 1919), to Cindy Sherman’s modern girl at large in Manhattan (Untitled (#58), 1980).

The exhibition has been installed over three floors of Palazzo delle Zattere.