Mudlarks & Connoisseurs

 Mudlarks and Connoisseurs, is an extraordinary imaginative journey through the history of collecting, from the nocturnal scavengers of the Thames mudlarks to the obsessive tulip-mania of 17th Century Holland. According to Umberto Eco ‘We like lists because we don’t want to die’ and it is this eternal human pursuit of permanence through collection, recording and collation which lies at the heart of McGlashan’s latest exhibition. 

The exhibition builds on McGlashan’s reputation for painstaking detail and exacting research, most recently demonstrated in ‘The Burning Heart’ his highly-acclaimed 2014 exhibition in which he recreated artists at work in their studios from Botticelli and Henry Moore to Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. In Mudlarks and Connoisseurs McGlashan exquisitely combines the language of Art History with a sharp wit and keen sense of observation to create a body of work which lays bare mankind’s instinctive and varied response to collecting objects from the noble pursuit of scholarship and taxonomy, to obsessive greed.