Griselda Pollock
EXHIBITIONS
EXHIBITIONS CURATED
Although Griselda Pollock has not worked formally as a curator, she has conceived, curated and installed several exhibitions since 1978 when she worked with T J Clark to mount a ‘counter-exhibition’ Purity and Danger, drawing on the collections of the City Art Gallery and the University of Leeds challenging the Thatcherite promotion of ‘Victorian Values’ and the revival of Victorian painting (see catalogue essay
She was commissioned to curate a major exhibition at the newly opened Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, focussing on Van Gogh’s five-year career in the Netherlands and debt to both contemporary Dutch painting and drawing in the Hague School. The exhibition had an innovative form to enable the drawings, which need protection from light to be exhibited within sight of the paintings to which they are linked.
The museum only printed the catalogue in Dutch thus limiting the impact of Griselda Pollock’s reinsertion of Van Gogh into the Hague School and the interpretation of his ‘apprenticeship’ to that group and its own inspiration in the Barbizon group of French landscape and peasant painters.
Brief English summaries were appended. Longer versions of the chapters appeared in articles (see list of publications such as ‘Stark Encounters: Modern Life and Urban Work in Van Gogh’s Drawings in the Hague 1881-83’, Art History, 1963,vol. 6, no.3, 330-58. ‘Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves’, Art History, 1988,11: 3. 408-432)
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Griselda Pollock has curated several exhibitions on the artists Christine Taylor Patten and Bracha L Ettinger, both of whom were shown later at the Istanbul Biennial in 2014.
As part of the programme on migration and memory at Centre CATH, Griselda Pollock also curated Migratory Aesthetics that featured Martine Attille, Mieke Bal, Sutapa Biswas, Bracha Ettinger, Lubaina Himid, Isaac Julien, Lily Markiewicz, Fanozi Chickenman Mhkize, Roger Palmer, Ingrid Pollard, Judith Tucker:
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This exhibition is not about migrants; it explores the movement of aesthetics and the aesthetics of movement: passage, encounter, change, interface, combination, departure, separation, relocation, displacement, loss, memory, revisiting, reconnecting, trauma and transformation.
Eleven artists are represented. In varied ways and different media, each by means of their own singular artistic strategy, explores the aesthetic dimension of migration histories. They demonstrate that artistic practice generates knowledge of the migratory at many levels: ideas, pain, people, art forms, language, memory. pdf of the catalogue.
Using a series of portraits of Hannah Arendt, Griselda Pollock curated a small exhibition about the image of woman as thinker in terms of the varied poses photographers chose for the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and not listed was an exhibition by photographs of drawings and painting by women of their own ageing in the works of Kaethe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and Helen Scherfbeck (1852-1946).
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Shortly before her retirement, with artist Sam Belinfante, she co-curated a two-site exhibition at the University of Leeds celebrating the history of the School of Fine Art through the work of its staff and students, over 70 years since its foundation, under the initiative of Herbert Read (1893-1968), and first led by artist and theorist of Basic Design Maurice de Sausmaurez (1915-1969).
She authored the three catalogues which traced a history of the School and its ethos and challenges, and provided detailed notes on all the works and objects exhibited including an special exhibit in each of the venues of a ‘library’, an intellectual portrait of the collaboration of fine art, social history of art, feminist interventions, cultural studies and more which define the ‘project.
In 2022-4 Memory and Medium was first exhibition commissioned by a commercial gallery in London.
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https://hackelbury.co.uk/exhibitions/117-medium-and-memory-curated-by-griselda-pollock/overview
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https://hackelbury.co.uk/publications/medium-and-memory-curated-by-griselda-pollock
1978 Purity and Danger in Victorian Painting University of Leeds (with T J Clark).
1980 Vincent van Gogh and His Dutch Years Guest Curator at the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam.​​​​​​​​​​​​
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1981 Northern Young Contemporaries. Manchester University, Whitworth Art Gallery: prize adjudication.
1989 Images of Women City of Leeds Art Gallery, consultant and author of catalogue essay. Curator Corinne Miller.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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1999 Memories of Oblivion and Loss: Lydia Bauman, University of Leeds, Art Gallery.
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2000 Interventions: Alfred Stevens at the Clark, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Museum.
2001 Places: Lily Markiewicz, University of Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds.
2003 Bracha Ettinger: Eurydice, Jerwood Gallery, LMH, Oxford.
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​2006 Judith Tucker RESORT iv,v,vi,vii University Art Gallery, Leeds.
2006 Migratory Aesthetics, University Art Gallery, Leeds.
2006 The Face of Thinking: Hannah Arendt in Images, University of Leeds.
2006 Micro-Macro: Drawing Series Christine Taylor Patten, Drawing Gallery, London.
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2006 Drawing Time: Time of Drawing: Christine Taylor Patten, University of Leeds Art Gallery.
2009 Resonance/Overlay/Interweave: Bracha Ettinger in Freudian Space, Freud Museum, London and the Academy of Fine Art, Helsinki.
2015 Drawing Time: Christine Taylor Patten. Leyden Gallery, London.
2015 Advisor to 14th Istanbul Biennial: Saltwater:
A Theory of Thoughtforms, curating the solo shows at ARTER of Christine Taylor Patten and Bracha L. Ettinger.
2019/2020 Lessons in the Studio/Studio in the Seminar: Seventy Years of Fine Art at Leeds, Audrey and Stanley Burton Gallery and Fine Art Project Space, University of Leeds. Curated with Sam Belinfante.
There are 3 catalogues authored by Griselda Pollock: Situated Reflections on Beginnings, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery and The Project Space, School of Fine Art.
2023-2024 Medium & Memory: Four Conversations, HackelBury Fine Art, London.
