Progress

Innovative exhibition at the Foundling Museum showing four contemporary artists variation of a theme of the “Rake’s Progress” alongside Hogarth’s original.

There is a really good little brochure with the show which explains the story in each picture and it was the best description I’d seen of the Hogarth set. They are so rich in detail that you could look at them for a long time.

Grayson Perry’s Tapestries “The Vanity of Small Differences” more than matched the detail of the Hogarth. I met a nice lady in front of them and we spent quite a lot of time pointing new things out to each other and laughing at things we owned in them.

I’d seen the Hockney prints recently but it was nice to see them again in a different setting. He makes himself and his first visit to New York the core of the story. I also thought I’d seen Yinka Shonibare’s work before but with hindsight I think it might have been his take on Dorian Grey so in fact it was good to see a work by him I’d not seen before.

Finally the museum had commissioned a work by Jessie Brennan which was a gradually crushed photograph representing how London’s urban landscape has changed and is still changing. I wasn’t so sure of the Rake’s Progress link though.

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