Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style Exhibition Tour

15/03/2019 > 23/05/2021

Following a hugely successful run in the Summer of 2018 to coincide with the 150th Anniversary of Mackintosh’s birth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style exhibition is now on tour. 

The exhibition explores the life and work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). By following a chronological narrative, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style presents his work in context to Glasgow, key predecessors, influences and Glasgow Style contemporaries. Featuring more than 250 objects, the exhibition showcases the very best of Glasgow’s internationally renowned civic collections, alongside key loans from The Hunterian, Glasgow School of Art, the V&A and a number of private lenders. The works on show reveal the full spectrum of media worked, including: stained glass, glass, ceramics, mosaic, metalwork, furniture, textiles, stencilling, needlework and embroidery, posters, books, interior and tearoom design, and architectural drawings. Several of these works have never been on public display and the majority have not been shown in 30 or more years.

The 1890s gave birth to the Glasgow Style, a distinctive variant of Art Nouveau centered around the Glasgow School of Art and its Technical Art Studios. At the heart of it was the radically original work of ‘The Four’: Mackintosh, his future wife Margaret Macdonald, her younger sister Frances, and Frances’ future husband James Herbert McNair. These brilliant young Glasgow designers embraced the freedoms offered by the aesthetic movement and educational reform.

The dynamic and entrepreneurial creative spirit in the City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is captured; showcasing the rich diversity of designers and artists, educators, institutions, manufacturers and industrialists then working in Glasgow and in design and technical education of that time at the Glasgow School of Art.

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