Current Exhibition

He're But I'm Gone
Rebecca Fortnum
13 May 2024 – 7 September 2024

DKUK Presents work by local artist and academic Rebecca Fortnum.

Wandering around sometimes bustling, sometimes abandoned, sculpture corridors and courts in museums is an encounter with the dead. In the statues and busts we confront the preserved portraits of those who have lived before us.  We can imagine their physicality, the way they stood before their image to review it, the image that now we are also in front of. 

These drawings of historical sculpture are called Prosopopoeia, a figure of speech in which an imagined, absent, or dead person or thing is represented as speaking. They show women with a downward gaze; are they being modest? Or are they lost in their own private thoughts and ideas? 

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic, currently Professor of Fine Art at Central St Martins.  Her solo show, Les Praticiennes, that drew on work by the unknown women sculptors in Rodin’s circle of fin de siècle Paris, was at the Henry Moore Institute in 2023.