Carnivalesque

A National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery organised in collaboration with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

Carnivalesque is the major exhibition for Brighton Festival 2000. It celebrates the rich imagery of Carnival and its associated traditions as seen in western art from the Middle Ages to the present. It has four underlying themes:

• The Tumultuous Crowd 
• The World Turned Upside-down
• The Comic Mask
• The Grotesque Body 

In Rabelais and his World Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary critic invoked the transforming power of 'festival laughter', "....that peculiar folk humour that always existed and has never merged with the official culture of the ruling classes". The exhibition concentrates on manifestations of this spirit.

The medieval content of the show presents the perennial battle between Carnival and Lent, as well as burlesque confrontations with Hell and Death - all the constituents of procession and performance.

These themes are carries into the Renaissance world with the works by artists such as Brueghel, Baldung and Jacques Callot. In popular art, the new imagery of the feasting giant Gargantua appears.

In 18th century Venice, commedia dell'arte and caricature come together in a new carnival genre, pioneered in the drawings of G.B. Tiepolo and Guardi. In London, the authority of neo-classicism is challenged, first in Hogarth, then in Gillray and Catchpenny prints. All these currents meet in the peepshow and punchinello imagery of Domenico Tiepolo and the drawings and aquatints of Goya.

the 19th and 20th centuries now show us popular imagery set alongside satirical works by Daumier, Ensor and Max Beckmann, while more recent artists include Diane Arbus, Red Grooms, Paul McCarthy and Leigh Bowery.

The lead curator for Carnivalesque is artist and writer Timothy Hyman. During Brighton Festival there will be a programme of related activities, including live performance, film and poetry.

The exhibition then tours to Nottingham Castle Museum and Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham.