Cathy's Art Diary

Quirky exhibition   at the Whitechapel Gallery of work by contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. From the first room, where they had turned the space into a disused swimming pool, I loved this! The swimming pool was so realistic even down to the earth at the bottom of pool and peeling paint. The changing room at the side looked perfectly normal till you looked closely and found there were hinges and handles on both sides of the door. I loved the approach of having no labels on the walls but giving you a good booklet with the commentaries in which were well written and informative. This made you look at the work and think about it before reading about it. Heading upstairs you found smaller works from the last ten years. If you don’t think you know Elmgreen and Dragset’s work they did the boy on a rocking horse installation for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and these works were similar, being figurative and symbolic in style. “One Day” was a ...

Fabulous installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum by Elmgreen and Dragset, who did the boy on a rocking horse fourth plinth, recreating an imagined person and their flat. This was such an imaginative use of the space and the attention to detail was stunning. You were unsure which items were borrowed from the collections and which they had created. The whole thing was eerie as they created the fiction that the owner was just in the shower and you were looking round. The attendants were dresses as a maid and a footman and kept up the pretence beautifully.   You gradually worked out what the owner of the flat was like from their possessions and style. I loved the way they maintained the image outside with an advert for the flat on the hoardings of some building work with a plan of the layout, agent’s particulars and web address which links to the exhibition pages. It fooled me on the way in and I was about to text a friend to tell them there was a flat in the V&...