How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art [group exhibition]

How to Improve the World (60 years of British Art) is the title of an exhibition, which was held at the Hayward Gallery in autumn 2006. Drawn from the Arts Council Collection, the exhibition featured work by 130 artists from the last 60 years.

Amongst the selected pieces in the show was the second of my vitrine landscape works, Stolen Sunset , which was donated to the Arts Council Collection by Charles Saatchi. It is a 'signature' piece that was followed by an extensive series, investigating a new form of Contemporary Romanticism. With this research I was exploring the interrelationship of the intellectual, emotional and physical response to a given, re-presented image. These depictions of images were 4-dimensional in that the chemical reaction within them was time-based.

Also, some of the pieces by other artists in the exhibition at the Hayward had been purchased during my time on the regularly changing acquisitions committee of Arts Council England (2000-01). The selection panel of the Arts Council Collection changes every eighteen months, correspondingly so do its views and priorities. In How To Improve the World, we see works in a wide variety of media: painting, sculpture, video and conceptual works.

The exhibition included works by Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon, Martin Creed, Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili. The whole exhibition presents insights into the dynamic changes the art world has undergone since the inauguration of the collection in 1946.

The exhibition toured to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery this summer (2007) in a re-selected smaller version, including the tank piece Stolen Sunset.