Recommended by Eleanor Nairne
Eleanor Nairne is a curator based at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, where her exhibitions include Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017-18), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019-20) and the forthcoming Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty (2020-21). She was previously Curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate. A regular contributor to catalogues, she writes for the London Review of Books and frieze, is a former Jerwood Writer in Residence and has lectured and presented on modern and contemporary art internationally. She sits on the Association of Art History's board for museums and is an active participant in curatorial peer review networks.
Eames House. Photograph by John Morse
What is your favourite art space to visit? Somewhere you have been that had brought you joy.
It’s so hard to name a single favourite art space! But in London the Rothko room at Tate Modern is one of my special places, which I often visit to think through a problem – these days, I sometimes like to travel there in my mind.
What have you seen in the past year which made you think you are looking at a new way of experiencing art? This can be an artwork, an exhibition, or a space.
This wasn’t in the past year, but I think often about the installation of the Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which was brilliantly curated by Tracey Bashkoff and I visited in November 2018. The Swedish mystic painter could not have been a more inspired choice for the iconic Gehry spiral and I found the relationship between the architecture and the artist’s ideas of sacred geometry very moving as I made my way through the unfurling space.
What show, gallery, institution or museum have you visited that you thought was worth the travel?
Again – the agony of choice! I find artists’ homes and studio environments particularly inspiring in terms of thinking about culture in a more holistic way. Some favourites include Charles and Ray Eames’s Mondrian-style house on Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, with a swing overlooking the ocean; and, closer to home, Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s extraordinary Charleston House in Sussex with the lavishly potato-printed walls. (*to donate to Charleston House’s emergency appeal click here).
Charleston House. Images: P Fewster.
If time and budget were not an obstacle, where would you like to visit (or revisit) from the places listed on The Art Pilgrim?
Can the trip be miraculously carbon-neutral too? If so, then I would be glad if one of your agents could book for me to visit Naoshima Island please. A dear friend of mine used to work at one of the museums and I have heard that it’s a pretty magical place.
In your opinion, which city, other than London, Berlin or New York, has a really interesting and exciting art scene?
There are so many interesting art scenes around the world! I was very impressed by Mexico City when I visited at the end of 2017 – not just for the visual arts but for architecture, music, writing, a whole bustling creative field.
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Ciudad de México, Mexico. Photo: Manuel Arroyo. Mexico City gift shop detail.
If the world were coming to an end, and there was space for only one museum collection on the spaceship, which collection would you nominate and why?
Oh God, I find the thought panicking. Probably the Museum of Modern Art’s – and ideally, can we find some room on the spaceship for their archives? My research interests are postwar American Art so that should give me enough to keep going…