Any excuse.

People have always looked for reasons to come together, to share an experience that lifts their lives out of the rut of the run-of-the-mill. Curtain Up, like an end-of-the-pier variety bill in which Lowry’s curator Zoe Watson acts as impresario to an impressive roster of artists, promises all the thrills and spills of a seaside amusement park and all the fun of the fair. For the most part, it delivers.

Perhaps reflecting the present day fracture and shift of collectivity, in which the arena tour exceptions run counter to the rule of self-curated niches, the artists on show have a tendency to look over their shoulders for inspiration, back to the church of popular entertainment in its broadest sense. Carrying the scent of popcorn and the smell of sawdust, their works evoke fairgrounds on their fabled ‘Death Nights’, as well as the strange assortments on offer in summer season theatres in coastal resorts. Topping the bill are a trio of newly-commissioned star turns by Ulla von Brandenburg, Chris Paul Daniels and Rowland Hill.

Von Brandenburg’s harlequinade drapes set the stage with dramatic flair, but, for me, the piece with the greatest razzle dazzle is Hill’s elegantly-conceived Relic. Returning once more to the travelling fair which itself revisits her native Loughborough on an annual basis, a touchstone which has long informed her work, at the heart of Relic is an invitation to step over its threshold. To peer into the kaleidoscope of its hexagonal carnival, to take a waltzer ride through the dodgem car shunts of its backdrops, press-ganged and emboldened by the ever-present press of highly-sugared pop, one must first place one’s head into the noose of an oddly-familiar ellipse. Saying more, perhaps, would undo the delight of subsequent discovery. Nonetheless, it’s a ride well worth the queuing.

Working to similar effect, on a smaller scale, Abigail Reynolds’ meditative collages of The Minack Theatre unfold time with scalpel-like precision. Taking old guidebooks as her raw materials, the simple origami she uses to disrupt the layered surfaces of her pieces quietly suggests the discordant echo of the past’s monochrome ghosts beneath the coloured gloss of the present.

While nostalgia need not be inherently melancholy, that same bittersweet emotion pervades Southend-born Bridget Smith’s widescreen cyanotypes. Their forms reproduced in the deepest of blues, the two prints, taken from the fall of a theatre curtain drawn shut and the seats of an empty playhouse respectively, evoke the form of the gentle waves of a closed season sea, the absence that the crowds of summer leave following their departure.

Coming inland, and moving downtown, Simeon Barclay’s installation Look No Hands beckons its visitors through its name written large in three separate vibrant neon signs, luring them from the imagined pavements of city streets to the basement bars below. The reversed hanging of its ‘look’ suggests the codified ‘kool’ of the metropolitan hep, while a looping film focuses on fancy footwork, both human and equestrian. For those of a certain age, it’s like turning the glossy pages of The Face magazine in 1982.

In common with the best of the works staged across Curtain Up, it perfects the delicate act of performing corrective surgery on jaded eyes, like a Proustian ophthalmologist bringing the half-forgotten then into the vivid now. To paraphrase the words borrowed so pertinently by Daniels in his punning unpinning of the North West Film Archive, not only those who I’ve chosen to spotlight, but all those involved should give themselves a round of applause.

Roll up, roll up. No excuses. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Ulla von Brandenburg, installation view Thoughts Are Things (Day and Night), 2024 -25. Photo – Christian Kleiner. Courtesy the artist and Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Lud.

 

Curtain Up is at Lowry until June 21, 2026. For more information, click here.