FOSSIL


Interesting installation at the Royal Academy by Graham Allard and Stephen Johnstone examining the Academy’s collection of plaster casts of architectural details.

Once used as teaching aide these casts were hidden behind temporary studio walls after the architecture school closed in the 1960s. They were revealed as part of the recent refurbishment. Some of the casts were on the floor mounted on transport pallets which let you look down and closely at them. Unusually you see them  mounted high on the walls of the new wing.

These were shown with various works showing people working with copies such as a watercolour made for a Sir John Soane lecture surveying a temple and photographs of an artist painting the cornice of a cast gallery in Edinburgh.

The show examined the nature of copies and their role as well as the positive negative and also included a film of the casts being discovered and removed which switched between a positive and negative print to reflect the way they were originally made.

Closes 6 November 2019

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