The Evening Standard’s Alison Roberts got an invite to Elton John’s new art gallery at his country home in England and gushes all over it:
On the wall above hangs a huge Gilbert & George, on the other side of the room, expertly lit, a classic Antony Gormley from the key show Blind Light A grisly spoof by the Chapman Brothers hangs on the far wall; to the right sits a sculpture by Grayson Perry.
I spy a large self-portrait by Gillian Wearing; an Andreas Gursky; a beautiful series by Louise Bourgeois; and a colourful painting with a snake motif by Phillip Taafe that once hung, rather extraordinarily, in the New York townhouse of Gianni Versace.
Welcome to the art gallery that Elton John and David Furnish built. It’s taken more than a year to construct, was finished barely a month ago, and it nestles between their chintzy country house, the floodlit tennis court and the finely-manicured acres of garden. Designed by London architect Jack Schneider, it has waterfalls cascading down one wall, and copper cladding on another.
On the mezzanine level there’s an exhaustive library of art books — indexed using the latest technology by a professional librarian — and in the roof, hi-tech photo-sensitive grilles that control the light levels. I could spend all day in Sir Elton’s office upstairs, with views from cleverly-placed windows into the gallery space itself, outside towards the garden and over a cunningly built bed of lilies apparently floating in space between the two.
Inside the brave new world of Elton John’s shrine to modern art (Evening Standard)
