Margate: Curiosity: Art and The Pleasure of Knowing
24 May – 15 September 2013
An eclectic collection of artefacts brought together to reveal humanity’s thirst for knowledge.
The artist and writer Brian Dillon has a skilful ability in finding unexpected connections between objects and ideas. This exhibition focuses on the human compulsion for knowledge together with our more frivolous desire for things that are strange and new.
Presenting a veritable cabinet of curiosities taken from museums, galleries and institutions across the nation, Dillon guides audiences through the passions and obsessions of latter day naturalists, and in the process, reveals how these fascinating specimens have influenced the history of art.
Don't miss
There are some lovely artefacts here, from the wonderful woodcut of an iron clad Rhinoceros made by Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth-century to some exquisite models of aquatic creatures by the German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka.
From the miniscule to the mammoth, there are detailed illustrations of a flea and a stuffed giant walrus. A penguin collected on Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition reveals just how far humans are prepared to go in their quest for knowledge.