Madeleine Kennedy

Image description: An install photo of the final room of ‘The Enchanted Interior’ exhibition, in a grand gallery with a vaulted ceiling and rich purple walls, on which can be seen two artworks: on the left, ‘Laus Veneris’ by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, which shows a languid Venus sorrowfully cossetted in her opulent subterranean lair, and on the right Anya Gallaccio’s 2003 ‘can love remember the question and the answer’, comprised of a pair of mahogany doors whose windows are crowded with 60 red gerbera flowers, slowly decaying as time passes. There is a cushioned bench in the foreground.

Image description: An install photo of the second room of ‘The Enchanted Interior’ exhibition, with a glass case in the foreground containing a life-size ivory and bronze bust of an eerily life-like ‘Lamia’, by George Frampton. On the wall to the left is a large painting of Pygmalion looking shocked at the beautiful woman he has sculpted into life, and to the right is what initially appears to be a classical painting of a Grecian woman between two pillars, in a gold frame that seems to be melting onto the floor. It is in fact a 2018 sculptural photographic work by Maisie Broadhead entitled ‘Hero’.

Image description: An install photo of the pale blue first room of ‘The Enchanted Interior’ exhibition, showing a small semi-enclosed space in the centre of the gallery housing a jewel-like watercolour by Victorian painter John Frederick Lewis, which depicts an imagined harem scene of two women in lavish silks. The enclosed space is darker than the rest of the gallery, and a lattice work shadow is cast on its internal walls.

Image description: A view of two artworks in a white cube gallery space: in the foreground, a semi-figurative work on paper resembling a face in the process of transformation, pressed between glass in a freestanding clean-lined black metal structure; on the wall in the background, a painting in an ornate gold frame of a man in a business suit screaming, seemingly himself contained in a diaphanous cube-like structure. The work in the foreground is from the 2008-9 ‘Morphia’ series by Ellen Gallagher, and the work in the background is Francis Bacon’s 1952 ‘Study for a Portrait’.

Image description: An install photo of the last-known self-portrait by Anthony Van Dyck, showing the artist with long wavy brown hair, wearing a blue and white striped blouse, and turning his head over his right shoulder to look out at the viewer. The painting is on an oval canvas in an ornate gold frame, and sits alone on a black wall.

Image description: The tapered end of a serpentine swathe of fabric is suspended 3 metres in the air, the rest of its length coiling down to rest on a low mirrored plinth, casting long winding shadows on the gallery floor all around it. The pattern on the fabric features occasional motifs of big blue eyes with long tufts of blue thread for their eyelashes. A small collage just visible in the background – tiny by comparison – echoes its silhouette.

Image description: In a white gallery space with symmetrical white pillars and ornate plasterwork, one wall is covered with a large close-up image that looks like carefully arranged sheets of mottled pastel-coloured paper. Towards the bottom right of the wall is an unframed painting of abstract forms on a grey-blue background. To the left, leaning against two of the white pillars, is a 5 metre square rose-tinted mirror, angled so that it reflects a glimpse of the other end of the gallery, where another abstract painting hangs. Affixed to the surface of the mirror is a painting of a female form made of folded paper, and hand-drawn on the surface of the mirror in black lines is the outline of a woman, looking back at the viewer over her left shoulder.

Image description: In a public square in a city centre, with tall trees in the foreground and people and buses passing by in the background, sits a pavilion made of white wood anchored in concrete blocks which double as seats. Mostly open to the elements, three sides of the pavilion are partially enclosed by articulated metal sheets – one in red, one in yellow, and one in light blue – on which are pasted vintage exhibition posters. A man in a hat stands inside the structure, and the roof slats cast a long striped shadow on the floor in front of it.

Image description: An installation photograph of the architectural commission 'Gathering', showing a corner of the gallery in which a cave-like structure made out of elegant wooden struts and stretched canvas is waiting to accommodate new artist commissions. To the left is a large custom-made table with a matching bench.

Image description: An install photo of the corner of a gallery where natural light falls through a large bay window with a tall sculptural object nestled in its recess. To the right is a wall painting of a rhomboid shape in blue with pink vertical lines, at the base of which sits a pale orange arrow-shaped sculpture with multi-angled edges like a cut diamond. The gallery smells like pomegranates.

Image description: A man sits in a wooden chair with his back to the camera, wearing a VR headset. In front of him in the physical gallery is a freestanding wall with a window and a painting of a still-life, a few tables with houseplants on, and some speakers and a DJ deck. Unbeknownst to us, the VR headset is showing the seated visitor an abstracted digital avatar of the room in front of him.

Image description: A series of paintings of different shapes and sizes play across the surface of a wall: all unframed and sharing the same visual palette of iridescently pale curves and circles. Beneath the largest central canvas in the middle of the wall, an arrangement of curved shapes made of board congregate along the skirting board, with tiny round paintings balanced atop them.

Image description: A view of a gallery painted light grey: straight ahead is a large work on paper of a spiral of hand prints; to the left is a photograph of the trail left by walking through a field; and to the right is an impression of the lead pattern of a stained glass window in a sunburst shape. In the centre of the room, a glass case holds a small mechanised sculpture in which a metal arm spins slowly through a box of sand, one side of the arm continuously etching lines in the sand, and no sooner than it has, the other side of the arm smoothing them away. The artworks are ‘River Avon Mud Har’ and ‘A Line Made by Walking’ by Richard Long, ‘Sunrise / Sunset’ by Anna Barriball, ‘+ and –‘ by Mona Hatoum.