GSK Contemporary, Earth: Art of a changing world is the second annual contemporary art season at 6 Burlington Gardens. The exhibition will present new and recent work from more than 30 leading international contemporary artists, including commissions and new works from the best emerging talent.

The show will begin with an introduction to the key factors that make up the natural world and the actions and activities that are impacting upon the equilibrium. Works by artists including Ackroyd & Harvey, Spencer Finch, Mona Hatoum and Marcos Lutyens & Alessandro Marianantoni, engage with the earth, air, sky, nature and carbon elements to encourage a deeper consideration of our cultural relationship to earth’s stability.

At the centre of the show sits a group of exhibits that help us understand the role of the artist in the cycle of our evolution. In this section we are able to consider the role of artist as communicator, reflector and interpreter of key issues of their day. Historically, in the time of Darwin, David Livingstone and Captain Cook, then subsequently in the World Wars, artists have played a crucial part in recording man’s explorations, conquerings and discoveries whilst ‘describing’ them in such a way as to make them more understandable, more striking to a wider world. Within this section artists Sophie Calle, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Cornelia Parker, the poet Lemn Sissay and Shiro Takatani hold up a mirror to our changing world, producing work that will encourage us to examine the issues from a variety of angles, to reflect and question. Other works will confront the viewer with the consequences of human behaviour through natural disasters and physical collapse, counterpoising the beauty of the planet with the damage that is being inflicted upon it.

Conclusion

Earth navigates us through a series of realities - perceived, real, threatened and super-real, which will allow the visitor to register the conversations and stories that will guide us to a different level of understanding. Beginning in Darwin’s anniversary year, and within the very organisation where he delivered his significant lecture on the Origin of Species, the consideration of the issue of climate change through the work of artists, encourages fresh provocations in relation to the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’. It will engage more with the notion of transition than that of final endings, of new realities and possibilities as we reclaim a different future.