When last Spring Martino Gamper set up his vision of design as a ‘state of mind’ at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, he invited a number of designer friends to exhibit their personal collections of objects. While the entire show focussed on design of bookshelves, they were examined in an unexpected way – as a sort of a metaphysical objects, a place where ideas, memories and recollections are collected together. A new show, now open at the Barbican in London, disregards the physical space where collections are stored – boxes, bookshelves, rooms, cellars – and focusses on the concept itself. Here, you have Damien Hirst’s skulls and tropical birds, Peter Blake’s enamel elephants and toys, Edmund de Waal’s Netsuke figurines, or Andy Warhol’s cookie jars. “Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector”, running through May 25th 2015, wishes to propose a new reading of artists’ work through, perhaps, one of the most revealing aspects of their everyday lives – their personal collecting compulsions.
