David Hockney's camera obscura goes on show in new gallery at Science Museum

Issue date: 15 March 2002

David Hockney's full scale reconstruction of a camera obscura is one of the highlights of a ground-breaking exhibition, 'Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind'. The exhibition opens on Friday 15 March 2002 in a new permanent gallery funded and programmed by the Wellcome Trust at the Science Museum, as a highlight of Brain Awareness Week.

'Head On' will present works by well-known artists on the theme of the brain, as well as a series of specially commissioned projects between young contemporary artists and world-famous neuroscientists. The new gallery is an exciting development in the long standing work carried out by the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust to explore the results of the latest collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers.

Works by John Beard, Tony Bevan, Ian Breakwell, Elisabeth Frink, David Hockney, Patrick Hughes, Richard Wentworth and Pat York will be shown alongside historical scientific exhibits which explore the workings of the brain drawn from collections of the Science Museum, Wellcome Trust, the Hunterian Museum, the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archive, and the Gordon Museum at King's College London.

Eight commissioned artists have spent over a year developing collaborative projects for the exhibition. These range widely from 'Parking' (a video installation exploring anxiety disorders through the artist's depiction of attempts to park a car), to a contemporary 'cabinet of curiosities' as a metaphor for the universe of knowledge and the palaces of the memory, to a series of works based on word problems, IQ texts and puzzles, inspired by the artist's dyslexia.

The artists are: Osi Audu, with Professor Christopher Kennard; Andrew Carnie, with Dr Richard Wingate; Annie Cattrell, with Dr Mark Lythgoe; Katharine Dowson, with Dr Piers Cornelissen and Dr Peter Hanson; Letizia Galli, with Professor Jeffrey Gray; Claude Heath, with Dr Emily Holmes and Professor Brian Rogers; Gerhard Lang, with Professor Uta Frith; Tim O'Riley, with Professor Christopher Kennard and Chris Frith.

'Head On' has been organised by Dr Ken Arnold, Head of Exhibitions at the Wellcome Trust, with Marina Wallace, co-curator of 'Spectacular Bodies' at the Hayward Gallery (2000–2001) and Caterina Albano, researcher of 'Spectacular Bodies', in collaboration with the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, the world's leading promoter of brain research. An illustrated catalogue will be published to coincide with the exhibition with an introduction by Richard Gregory.

'Head On' is one of the highlights of Brain Awareness Week organised by the European Dana Alliance for the Brain running from 11–17 March.

Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind
15 March–28 July 2002
The Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD
Open daily from 10.00–18.00, admission free

Erica Bolton/Jane Quinn for the Wellcome Trust
T 020 7221 5000
E jq@boltonquinn.com

Matt Moore for the Science Museum
T 020 7942 4364
E m.moore@nmsi.ac.uk