Leeds Art Gallery: Victorian building meets white cube refurb

So I shouldn’t be too harsh, right?  Bringing all my London expectations to a regional museum and expecting it to live up to them?  As regional museums go, the Leeds Art Gallery is ok.  As a newly refurbished regional art gallery that was shut for a couple of years to fix the roof and do a general spruce-up and rehang, I was a bit disappointed.

What’s Good?

I thought the upstairs rooms did quite a good job of making the collections accessible.  Come up the stairs, and there’s a new commission on the wall by Lothar Götz, followed by a mix of paintings and sculptures displayed together and encouraging an idea of art as human relationships and interconnections, and the collection as a cross-section of local people as subjects, artists and donors.  So far so good.  Continue into the next room and the duality of messages about art and collection continues: inspiration can be drawn from work and the working class, including the industries traditionally associated with Leeds and the North.  After that a focus on a specific local artist and his context and contemporaries, then some contemporary pieces were introduced.  So far, so good.

What’s Not Good?

I got to the room with the much feted Victorian roof and it had one monumental sculpture and not much else.  A bit of a missed opportunity, I thought, or it could have been that I just didn’t like the work on display, Arena by Alison Wilding.  Not much that interested me downstairs: a Tate/National Galleries of Scotland Artist Room of works by Joseph Beuys, which I think I saw before (in Cardiff?) and some local watercolours by John Sell Cotman (quite nice).  Perhaps the thing that would have drawn it all together was the big collection display downstairs, but that was closed.  For repairs.  When they’ve only just reopened after a big refurbishment programme…  I would have liked to see the gallery’s collection of Grimshaws if nothing else, so I hope they’re on display next time.

As a general comment, I thought there was little of the collection out on display: a few good thematic rooms, a little too much space given over to contemporary works where you can’t fit in as much, and a large space for education and engagement (ok fine, that last one is a good thing).  Given that they’ve brought the gallery space back closer to what it was originally in the Victorian period, I thought they could have played up to this more.

Other

The cafe, which has great tiling, is cavernous and has cheap furniture, but is definitely worth a stop.  I went twice while I was in Leeds so can vouch for both the soup and the cake.