MARIANNE Faithfull has been announced as Tate Liverpool’s latest celebrity co-curator.
The singer-songwriter and actress follows milliner-to-the-stars Phillip Treacy, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and fashion designer Wayne Hemingway in creating an exhibition for the Albert Dock gallery.
Faithfull, who was a member of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones’ set in the 1960s, has worked with Tate Liverpool’s curatorial team to select works from its national collection.
These will form a new display, entitled Period Piece, as a meditation upon her artistic influences and her very public life.
Faithfull, who spent several years living in Ormskirk as a child while her father completed his doctorate at the University of Liverpool, said: “I was brought up to appreciate art and as a teenager was a frequent visitor to what was then the Tate Gallery in London.
“I have been fortunate in that my life is intertwined with those of artists and performers whose work is a continuing inspiration, which has guided the selection of works for this exhibition.”
Featured artists include Francis Bacon, Balthus, William Blake, Marlene Dumas and Lucian Freud, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s striking 1976 photographic portrait of Faithfull providing a starting point for the display.
Many of the chosen art works have personal significance for Faithfull, drawing upon friendships or collaborations with artists and performers across a variety of different forms.
Pieces such as Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London 67 are linked directly to Faithfull’s public life, signalling her position within the pop aristocracy.
The selection also reflects Faithfull’s long-standing interest in Romantic presentiments of darkness and the edgier side of human nature and eroticism – elements found in her own songs and performances.
Also assisting the singer with the exhibition, part of the DLA Piper Series, is her ex-husband John Dunbar, co-founder of London’s Indica Gallery, where John Lennon famously met Yoko Ono in 1966.
Darren Pih, Period Piece co-curator, said: “We have very much enjoyed co-curating this fantastic and diverse Tate Collection display with Marianne.
“ Her artistic influences and experiences permeate the display and her enthusiasm for the project reflects her lifelong love of the visual arts.”
Period Piece follows Duffy’s The Sculpture Of Language, which closes on April 8. The exhibition will run alongside Conversation Pieces, co-curated by Treacy, and conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin’s Sculpture: The Physical World.
