Exhibitions2017Collection

For Collection, three contemporary artists were invited to show works within the context of the Metropole’s layered history, creating a dialogue with the hotel’s own collection and museum-like display of antiques, tapestries and objects. Gavin Turk, Nancy Fouts and Joseph Kosuth each presented works that spoke to the hotel’s guest heritage which includes iconic intellectual figures such as Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust.

Turk presented Rosy Lee (2013), a provocative mechanical sculpture of a fortune-telling gypsy, veiled in his signature ambivalent play between concepts of identity and authenticity. This belongs to Turk’s investigation of mystic automatons that all bear an uncanny likeness to himself. Cockney rhyming slang for a-cup-of-tea, Rosy Lee is a nod to Turk’s interest in tea and its relation to cultural trade, working class Britishness and, of course, the tradition of reading tea leaves.

In the reception area of the Metropole, Nancy Fouts presents Peacock in War Bonnet (2017) together with a series of her customized Old Masters Paintings, Adam and Adam (2014) and Eve and Eve (2014), an ironical twist on the famous 1528 Adam and Eve double painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

In the Oriental Bar, Joseph Kosuth presents a neon work from his Freud Series titled C.S. #41 (1987), as a tribute to Sigmund Freud, one of the Metropole’s most illustrious guests. Kosuth had been referencing Sigmund Freud since the 1980s and has appropriated, decontextualized and re-worked a number of Freud’s texts in his installations and site-specific works.