Animals & Us at Turner Contemporary. Photo: Stephen White
Animals & Us
A major exhibition exploring artists’ reflections on the relationship between humans and other animals.
There’s a distinctive pizzazz to the exhibitions programme at the Turner Contemporary gallery on Margate’s seafront. This exhibition’s energetic ideas, which bounce around like AA Milne’s springy Tigger (whom we encounter, in a lovely sketch by EH Shepard), are all thought-provoking and compelling.
– The Telegraph
At a time when scientists warn that humans may be causing the sixth mass extinction on earth, how do we see and relate to other animals?
Focusing on contemporary and 20th century artists and including historical artworks and artefacts, Animals & Us explores our lives and encounters with animals, and how these have been reflected in art.
Animals painted in prehistoric caves were the first subjects of art, reflecting our closeness to them. The artworks in this exhibition explore both our closeness and distance to animals, from our relationships with our pets, to zoos and animals as food.
Artists are using animal symbolism and creating human-animal hybrids. They are staging animal encounters, investigating animal intelligence, and questioning the human-animal divide.
Installed across all Turner Contemporary’s first floor galleries, Animals & Us encompasses a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to video and installation. Drawing on subjects from biology and evolution, to anthropology and technology, it asks questions about how we relate to or differentiate ourselves from other living beings.
Artists featured: Cory Arcangel, Keith Arnatt, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Beuys, William Burch, Marc Chagall, Marcus Coates, Mark Dion, Charlotte Dumas, Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan, Laura Ford, Lucian Freud, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, Conradi Gesneri, Laura Gustafsson & Terike Haapoja, Paul Hazelton, Mishka Henner, Candida Höfer, Andy Holden, Marguerite Humeau, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Permindar Kaur, Laura Knight, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Stephen Melton, Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Kananginak Pootoogook, Beatrix Potter, Stephanie Quayle, Paula Rego, Michal Rovner, Khvay Samnang, Roelandt Savery, Raqib Shaw, Ernest Howard Shepard, Maria Sibylla, Shimabuku, Gilbert Soest, George Stubbs, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, JMW Turner.
