Exhibitions Archive
The National Gallery, London
Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance
February – May 2011
“ ‘Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance’ is the first exhibition dedicated to the artist for over 40 years, and presents the results of a complete re-examination of his work, including new technical discoveries.” — National Gallery
The design of the exhibition features a range of richly saturated wall colours, balanced to unify the presentation of the works of art, and modulated room by room to create a subtle spatial dynamic.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: National Gallery Design Office
- Photographs: Credit to follow
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The Royal Academy
Burlington Gardens, London
Aware: Art, Fashion, Identity
December 2010 - January 2011
This was the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions presented by the Royal Academy in Burlington Gardens.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Spin
- Photographs: Francis Ware
Images, top to bottom:
Hussein Chalayan, ‘Son’ of Sonzai Suru, 2010 and Andreas Gursky, Kuwait Stock Exchange I, 2007.
Marie Ange Guilleminot, Kimono Memories of Hiroshima, 2005 with Susie MacMurray, Wido, 2009 behind.
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University College London
Grant Museum of Zoology
Semi-permanent installation.
The brief here was to provide a means of housing a varied collection of existing showcases in an Edwardian library space. The linear structure gives the diverse cases a coherence while leaving the delirious displays in their original form. By making a continuous thick wall around the edge of the room it was possible to provide a new and much-needed teaching and events space in the centre of the museum.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Photographs: Credit to follow
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National Portrait Gallery, London
The Indian Portrait
March – June 2010
The design intention here was to make a single, simple intervention in the exhibition space. A bright yellow curved wall created both a route round the exhibition and a contrast to the surrounding dark walls.
Here is a review of the exhibition by Rachel Campbell-Johnston
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: National Portrait Gallery Design Office
- Photographs: ©Natalia Calvocoressi and Mahtab Hussain, National Portrait Gallery
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Wien Museum, Vienna
Madness & Modernity
January – May 2010
This was an adaptation of 
the Madness & Modernity exhibition originally staged at the Wellcome Collection in London. The museum, opened in 1959, was designed by the Austrian architect Oswald Haertl. The space in which the show was housed retains furniture and many details from the original interior and the redesign exploited these features while keeping the concept of the layout intact.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie with co-ordination in Vienna by Robert Mago
- Graphic design: Lucienne Roberts with co-ordination in Vienna by Dechant Grafische
- Photographs: Suzanne Dechant
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The Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington Gardens, London
Earth: Art of a Changing World
December 2009 – January 2010
This exhibition presented the work of 35 artists in the context of the debate around climate change.
Earth was organised by the Royal Academy of Arts
in collaboration with Cape Farewell.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Bullet Creative Ltd
- Photographs: Francis Ware
Images, top to bottom:
Spencer Finch, Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst MA, August 28, 2004), 2004 over the staircase of Burlington House.
Mona Hatoum, Hotspot, 2006 with Anthony Gormley’s Amazonian Field, 1992 emerging from the doorway.
Kris Martin, 100 Years, 2004 with work by Darren Almond and Tacita Dean in the background.
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
The Artist’s Studio
September - December 2009
The Artist’s Studio was situated in the temporary exhibition spaces on the first floor of Compton Verney encompassing both galleries in the old house and in the new purpose-built exhibition gallery. The latter space had at its centre an ‘unfinished’ room-within-a-room in which documentary photographs of contemporary studios were shown.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Tim Harvey
- Photographs: Jamie Woodley ©Compton Verney
From the Compton Verney press release:
The first exhibition to allow UK audiences a fascinating insight into the world of the artist’s studio opens at Compton Verney on 26 September. While concentrating on Britain, the exhibition also refers to Renaissance Italy, seventeenth century Holland and nineteenth century France, where the development of images of the studio exerted a strong influence on Britain......
University College London
Disposal?
October 2009
This exhibition invited you ‘to comment on the most challenging question faced by museums today: What should we collect and hold on to and what should we get rid of?’.
The exhibition took place in an empty engineering lab at UCL and ran for just two weeks. The design reflected both the temporary nature of the show and the atmosphere of the laboratory in which it was sited.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Lucienne Roberts
- Photographs: Richard Hubert Smith
Related:
Agatha Christie's picnic basket?
Guardian article
Wellcome Collection, London
Madness and Modernity:
Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900
2009
Madness and Modernity is an exhibtion looking at the relationship between art and mental health in fin-de-siecle Vienna.
The layout is structured around a series of doorways that refer to particular places and architecture in the city. The doorways appear solid from the entrance side but are exposed as stage sets to the back. Other elements of the build also have a half-built or unfinished character.
The exhibits cover a wide range of material from models and furniture through artworks to film.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Lucienne Roberts +
- Photographs: David Shaw
- Film (six minutes): Marc Bennett, courtesy of the Wellcome Trust.
. . .an enthralling and beautifully mounted exhibition . . .
Lisa Appignanesi, New Statesman, 16 April 2009 Read the full review.
Related:
Madness & Modernity leaflet with drawings by Calum Storrie.
Download pdf
The Royal Academy of Arts, London
Byzantium 330-1453
2008
This major exhibition was held in the main galleries of the Royal Academy.
The design was based around architectural fragments that referred to Byzantine architecture without becoming pastiche. A large proportion of the exhibits were shown in bespoke glass showcases with built-in lighting and environmental conditioning.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Tim Harvey
I had underestimated the ability of the Royal Academy’s designers to construct a sumptuous journey through this sometimes stern but always glorious religious bling. Set mostly in twilight, the show does a decent job of implying the solemn religious atmospheres for which most of this art was made. But the melodrama is smartly rationed.
— Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times, October 26, 2008
This exhibition must be one of the most beautiful that the RA has ever staged …Each gallery has been painted a different colour and the palette has been carefully chosen to create a sumptuous backdrop to the artefacts – rich burgundy, imperial purple, deep terracotta.
— Jane Weeks, Museums Journal, February 2009
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British Library, London
From East to West:
Traditional East Asian and Contemporary European Printing
2008
This exhibition of Chinese, Korean and Japanese books was held in the entrance hall of the British Library.
The simple layout and bold colour gave the exhibition a coherent identity in a space with complex through routes. Deep walls provided shelter for delicate and sensitive works on paper and gave the display a robust architectural character in marked counterpoint to its surroundings.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Lucienne Roberts +
- Photograph: John Cairns
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House of Fairy Tales, London
thefoldingdrawinghouse
A portable drawing room made for the children’s organisation House of Fairy Tales in 2008.
The hinged panels can be configured in a number of ways depending on location. After each use the room’s drawings are recorded and the surfaces are re-painted.
- Design: Calum Storrie
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The Wellcome Collection, London
Skeletons: London’s Buried Bones
2008
This display consisted of 26 skeletons in the collections of the Museum of London and discovered at sites across London.
The skeletons were shown in individual cases laid out in a grid. Each case had an inset label detailing the facts that could be gleaned from the evidence of the bones.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie
- Graphic design: Jon Hares and Laurent Benner
- Photographs: Wellcome Collection
...this extraordinary, powerfully personal and historically valuable show at the Wellcome Collection is by some distance the most interesting and best presented exhibition currently on in London.
Twenty-six skeletons (borrowed from the Museum of London’s vast collection) have been laid out in what amounts to open coffins, illustrated by plaques explaining what the skeleton can tell you about the life of the deceased. It’s an excellent way of looking at the hardships ordinary Londoners have suffered over the years, with the bones given real pathos by sombre presentation and careful descriptions. Some of the younger skeletons especially are profoundly moving – a youthful skull scarred by syphilis and the shards of bone left by a 22-week foetus. Colour comes from large pictures of the contemporary locations of these lost burial grounds but this is a suitably minimalist treatment of a complex subject, and a lesson in how to get the most meaning out of limited but powerful artefacts.
— Peter Watts, Time Out, 4 August 2008
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The British Museum, London
The Past from Above
The design of The Past from Above exploited the fan shape of the room and referred to the plan of the adjacent Round Reading Room. A continuous ribbon-like wall created varied spaces and provided a surface for 100 aerial photographs by Georg Gerster.
Objects from the museum’s collection were displayed in specially built cases embedded within the wall. A complex layering of graphics made links between photographs, objects and text.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: sans + baum
- Lighting: DHA Design
- Photograph: Richard H. Smith
Design Museum
Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka :
The Glass Menagerie, 2002
This touring exhibition was commissioned by the Design Museum, London and the National Glass Centre, Sunderland. The exhibits were a collection of model glass jellyfish made for museums in the 19th Century and a number of contemporary art works related to these pieces.
The design consisted of a series of small acrylic showcases linked by curved components to provide stability. The layout was reconfigured to suit the various venues for the exhibition.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: Pony
- Photograph: Graham Simpson
Kensington Palace
Apartment 1a, 2004
This project was for the empty apartment once occupied by Princess Margaret.
The installation consisted of free-standing lightboxes giving the history of the rooms and various former occupants. The intention was to make a clear distinction between the historic interiors and the new design elements.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: sans + baum
- Photograph: Andrew Penketh
Kensington Palace
Working Wardrobe, 2004
This exhibition of some of the Queen’s costumes incorporated a space where visitors could record and display their own relevant memories.
The showcases contained a mixture of costumes, contextual material, graphics and photographs.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: sans + baum
- Photograph: Andrew Penketh
- Lighting: Philip Rediough
National Portrait Gallery, London
Self Portraits, 2006
This painting exhibition spanned a number of separate spaces in the gallery: a sequence of rooms and passages usually used for the permanent collection, a shop and entrance lobby and, the largest space, the Wolfson Gallery.
The design unified these diverse spaces by making a series of simple walls of a deep red hue that acted as markers through the exhibition. The final and largest intervention was the arcaded wall shown here.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics and Lighting: The National Portrait Gallery
- Photograph: Graham Simpson
The Royal Academy, London
Joseph Beuys Drawings, 1999
The need to display the complete series of these drawings meant increasing the available hanging space.
The solution lay in siting free-standing lecterns running the length of the galleries. As well as altering the usual route around the rooms the gable-ended lecterns created a counterfoil to the barrel vaults above.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Lighting: DHA Design
The Royal Academy, London
Frank Auerbach, 2001
This exhibition occupied half of the main galleries at the Royal Academy (with Rembrandt’s Women also designed by Calum Storrie in the other part). The emphasis here was on sympathetic lighting and wall colours that would compliment the paintings.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: Tim Harvey
- Lighting: DHA Design
- Photograph: Graham Simpson
The Royal Academy, London
The Return of the Buddha, 2003
Calum Storrie has designed numerous exhibitions for the Sackler Galleries, mostly consisting of paintings and works on paper. This was the first sculpture exhibition in the space.
The design exploited the axial nature of the rooms while making a dramatic environment where it was possible to view the works in the round.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: Tim Harvey
- Lighting: DHA Design
- Photograph: Graham Simpson
The Royal Academy, London
The Unknown Monet, 2007
This design had to take into account a very full picture hang and a mix of paintings and works on paper.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: Tim Harvey
- Lighting: DHA Design
Women's Library, London
Office Politics, 2004
The first of a series of four exhibitions undertaken for the Women’s Library with the graphic designers sans + baum. In each case the design problem was to mediate between the exhibits and the space, giving visitors a ‘way in’ to the exhibition.
In this case the solution consisted of colour coded doorways to orientate visitors, differentiate themed sections and contain the graphic content.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: sans + baum
- Photograph: Andrew Penketh
Women's Library, London
Beauty Queens, 2005
The solution to the problem of the space in this exhibition lay in wrapping the central room in a colourful striped wall. This device served as a means of orientation and as a way to organise the exhibition’s themes.
- Exhibition Design: Calum Storrie
- Graphics: sans + baum
- Photograph: Andrew Penketh
Women’s Library
Sinners, Scroungers, Saints?
2007
This exhibition explored the way that society has treated single mothers over the last century.
The lightboxes were used to show dry statistics in a way that would engage the viewers who were also invited to share their personal experiences on the adjacent wall.
- Exhibition design: Calum Storrie 2007
- Graphic design: Lucienne Roberts +
- Photograph: David Shaw
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