Polychromies: Surface, Light And Colour

This exhibition takes place across the newly refurbished Sculpture Galleries, celebrating and showcasing the excellence of the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection.

Sculpture has often been considered in opposition to painting, as concerned with form and not with tone and colour. However, all sculpture is coloured in some way, whether it is inherent to the material or applied over the top and has surface effects, revealed by light, which are integral to the perception of the work.

The central display focuses on qualities of surface in bronze, marble and stone sculpture, highlighting embedded, applied, reflected and environmental colour in sculptures that are not generally considered as polychromatic.

A second gallery examines the relationship between colour and abstraction, focusing on the development of a visual language where colours, lines and planes are the basic components.

The third part of the display takes as its starting point three framed miniature wax portraits from the first half of the nineteenth century by George Bullock, Samuel Percy and Richard Cockle Lucas. Their place within the artistic canon lies somewhere between sculpture and painting and fine art and collectable curiosity