Silent Partners wins Apollo exhibition of the year

Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish has won the Apollo award for exhibition of the year.

The winter 2014-2015 exhibition explored the use of the artist’s mannequin as a substitute for live models in art. A number of the works of art in the exhibition were from the Fitzwilliam’s collections.

The exhibition was selected from an international shortlist of five, which included entries from Tate Britain, the Musée du Louvre-Lens, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.

The award review was penned by James Purdon, who wrote: "The excellence of Jane Munro’s curation was evident not only in the new and surprising connections that emerged between disparate artworks, human bodies, and other objects, but in the small details that served to draw the visitor in and to expand the scope of the exhibition beyond the museum. The funereal display of the lay figure used by Walter Sickert for The Raising of Lazarus (1929), for instance. The articulated hands grasping earphones for audio exhibits. And the tattered dummies, seated like weary museum guards which, in the Fitzwilliam show, drew newly attentive eyes to painted and sculpted forms.

This, as several reviews noted, was an exhibition of uncommon wit and intelligence, the culmination of an extraordinary six-year project of research and restoration."

25 November 2015