| An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily
paintings and sculpture. It is also
sometimes used as a location for the sale of art.
Generally, the term art gallery is used to mean buildings or locations dedicated to displaying and/or selling art,
though the large rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room
dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian
Gallery, for example.
Most large urban areas will have several art galleries, and most towns will be home to at least one. However, they may also be
found in smaller villages, and quite remote areas, often places where artists have congregated. Examples include the Taos art colony in Taos, New Mexico, and St Ives,
Cornwall.
Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host
other artistic activities, such as music concerts or poetry readings. Conversely, some works of visual art are not shown in a gallery and, due to their form, never can
be. Altarpieces, for example, are rarely shown in galleries, and murals generally remain where they have been painted. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art
and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however.
Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden (or
sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture installation has grown in popularity, whereby
temporary sculptures are installed in open spaces during events like festivals.
Architecture
The architectural form of the art gallery was established by Sir John Soane
with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in
1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely
uninterupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or
roof lanterns.
The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries
in Europe an America, being an essential cultural feature of larger cities. Art galleries were built alongside museums and public
libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.
In the late 20th century the dry old fashioned view of art galleries has
increasingly been replaced with architecturally bold modern art galleries, often seen as international destination for tourists
in their own right. The first example of the architectural landmark art gallery would be the Guggenheim Museum in New York by Frank Lloyd Wright. More
recent outstanding examples include Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Mario Botta redesign of SFMOMA. Some critics argue that these
galleries are self defeating, in that their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to
exhibit.
Notable art galleries
- Atlanta: High
Museum of Art
- Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, Museum Island
- Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum
- Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
- Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
- Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland
- Florence: Uffizi
- London: National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate
Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum,
British Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery
- Madrid: Museo del
Prado
- Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria
- Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin
Museum
- New York: The Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum of American Art
- Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada
- Paris: Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Musée
Rodin, Centre Pompidou
- St. Petersburg: Hermitage
- San Francisco: SFMOMA
- Taipei, Taiwan: National Palace Museum
- Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario
- Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
- Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art
External links
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