00:00For visitors to the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead, a major new exhibition is bringing together more than
00:0760 works by Leonard McComb, covering painting, drawing, watercolour and sculpture.
00:13It's taken up three of our wonderful gallery spaces. We've received quite generous support from the Western Loans programme through
00:19Art Fund, and that's enabled us to have some absolutely monumental pieces into the entire exhibition.
00:25And we're standing in front of quite a few of them now. So one of them is Rock and Sea,
00:30Anglesey, which we've got on loan from Oriel Mon, which is the biggest drawing in any UK public collection.
00:36And we've got one of the most iconic sculptures in modern British art behind me as well.
00:41It's the largest ever exhibition of the artist's work and brings together works from McComb's estate alongside loans from public
00:48and private collections.
00:50Yeah, so the majority of the exhibition is actually on loan from the estate of Leonard McComb, which is represented
00:56by Anne, his sister.
00:58So we've got that really beautiful sort of family ethic, I think, to a lot of the exhibition as well.
01:03McComb lived from 1930 to 2018 and received acclaim and accolades through his career for work across different mediums.
01:12The Williamson says this exhibition has a particular focus on McComb's ecological outlook.
01:17That outlook can be found across his portraits, still lives, landscapes and sculptures, reflecting his belief in the beauty, energy
01:25and interconnectedness of all life.
01:28His contemporaries, so we're looking at, you know, likes of Bacon and Freud and Auerbach, who are quite grim and
01:33dark.
01:33But with a lot of McComb's outlook, it's very positive in nature, with a lot of things that's showing humankind
01:41at its best and showing us how we are sort of interconnected to everything in a really beautiful and positive
01:45way.
01:46So with Young Man Standing, the sculpture behind me, he has one fist closed and one open, both to show
01:52sort of humanity's capacity for destruction, but also humanity's capacity for great and beautiful things.
01:58The exhibition brings an important and celebrated artist to Merseyside.
02:03McComb's environmental outlook speaks to fundamental debates of our time.
02:07The whole thesis of the show is basically going into sort of Lendon McComb's whole history and philosophy and outlook
02:14and arguing that he is incredibly prescient and important for our own modern times.
02:19McComb's whole outlook is about how it is incredibly important that we see humankind as a part of nature, as
02:25an interrelated sort of part of a greater whole,
02:27rather than standing on its own as individuals.
02:31So it is his message and his art is not just incredibly impressive, but it's incredibly prescient to our own
02:36times as well.
02:37Leonard McComb, Nature and Humanity, is at the Williamson Art Gallery until Saturday, the 31st of October.
02:44I really want people to sort of be inspired and sort of take away not just the artistic pleasure of
02:51the works themselves, but also sort of the philosophy behind a lot of the works and really see themselves as
02:57sort of an interrelated part of nature.
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