BEDTIME STORIES

BED TIME STORIES

During Frieze London and PAD and running alongside their booth at Frieze Masters, Gallery Charles Ede invites _Polimeno and Studio Ellie Peugeot inside their London gallery for Bedtime Stories — a curated exhibition bringing together works spanning design, antiquity and art, staged within the private chambers of an imagined collector. The exhibition takes as its point of departure the Renaissance studiolo, the early modern Wunderkammer, and the assembled interiors of great twentieth-century collectors, each of which treated the act of collecting not as mere accumulation but as a form of world-building.

As visitors proceed from room to room, the familiar territory of the domestic interior gradually gives way to something more enchanted. Categories begin to blur, history and fiction intermingle, and antiquity is recast as an interlocutor within contemporary life. The visitor enters through the dressing room, a liminal space in which the outside world is provisionally suspended, before passing into the bedroom where sculpture, painting and design are arranged within the rhythms of a lived, collected interior. Beyond this lies the library: a concealed chamber taking its cue from the Gabinetto Segreto, the celebrated collection of erotic antiquities in Naples, assembled from the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This room will be set up as a cabinet of curiosities, attesting to the fact that desire has been inextricable from the history of collecting since antiquity, no less than curiosity itself.

At its core, the exhibition constitutes an argument for cross-collecting — the proposition that antiquity properly belongs in dialogue with design and contemporary art, rather than in isolation from them. Within the show are around 50 works offering an entry point for a new generation of collectors and championing a selection of London based gallerists and artists under 50 with whom we regularly collaborate.