Dimensions: support: 1524 x 1264 mm
Copyright: © The estate of Robert Medley | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Robert Medley's "The Antique Room at the Slade: Niobe and Hermes," held in the Tate Collections, presents a rather intriguing composition. Editor: It feels like a ghost world. All these classical figures reduced to plaster and dust, rendered in such muted tones. Curator: The materiality certainly speaks to the academic exercises within the Slade School. Note the layering, the evidence of process. Editor: But isn't it more than just an exercise? It's about how art history shapes artistic production. The labor of copying, the consumption of ideals. Curator: Perhaps. But I'm drawn to the formal arrangement, how Medley orchestrates the planes of the canvas to create a dynamic visual field. Editor: Even the making of the painting itself feels like an archaeological dig, excavating these forms and their place in a new context. Curator: A unique perspective on artistic training. Editor: Absolutely, something to consider on our way to the next work.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/medley-the-antique-room-at-the-slade-niobe-and-hermes-t00498
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This painting celebrates the room of plaster casts taken from antique sculptures which was used as a vital teaching tool in the Slade School curriculum. This Antique Room no longer exists. In 1952 Medley was a visiting teacher in the Department of Theatrical Design, while William Coldstream was Slade Professor of Fine Art. Easels and partly finished work by the students fill the foreground while the background is dominated by a cast of Praxiteles's 4th century BC Hermes with the infant Dionysus. Medley attempted in this painting to experiment with interior space and the tension wrought by combining perceived reality with an imaginatively conceived composition. Gallery label, September 2004
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