Guy Bigland: All the Paintings in the Museum

Softcover | 15 x 2.6 x 15 cm | 328 pp

Guy Bigland | 2020 

320gsm Popset Black iTone (cover)
Digital HP Indigo print on 118gsm Eggshell White iTone (interior)

Second edition of 50

All the Paintings in the Museum presents the titles of all 1620 paintings in the collection of the Fitzwilliam museum (Cambridge, UK) as documented on the museum's website in early 2015.

The words have been detached from the images they support and from their data-sets of artists names, dates and materials. They are corralled into a regimented list made of language informed by art historical conventions, clichés and the idiosyncrasies of individual archivists. The majority of the paintings in the collection would not have been titled by the artists as the practice of giving artworks ‘official’ fixed titles was established by dealers, collectors and archivists as recently as the 1800s. 

This new grouping creates unexpected juxtapositions and suggested narratives while exposing similarities and anomalies. Some titles are unique, others find they are but one of many, some are just one word while others are over thirty words long. We are reminded that when subject to the systematisation of an archive, objects become to some extent a homogenised stream of data, fragments of a historic continuum. 

Guy Bigland works with photography, text, books, print, digital media and painting to examine the mechanics of meaning, language and systems of order. His work is held in public and private collections in the UK (including Tate, V&A and the National Poetry Library), Europe and the USA.