Art Basel’s Jessica Lack examines how Britain’s historic houses have become places to encounter some of the country’s most challenging contemporary art, placing Wolterton within a growing summer circuit alongside Houghton Hall, Goodwood Art Foundation, Boughton House, Mount Stuart and White Cube at Claydon.
At Wolterton, Lack focuses on the curatorial transformation of the house, writing that Simon Oldfield and Clare Lilley “have cleared out rooms entirely”, enabling Phyllida Barlow’s “dynamic monuments to instability to run free.”Daisy Parris, meanwhile, responds to the estate’s landscape and social history, bringing what the artist describes as its “mud and grit” into the formal interiors.
Lack concludes that historic houses are increasingly becoming places where history is not simply preserved but challenged — “unlikely laboratories for art” that are expanding Britain’s cultural life and reclaiming a centuries-old tradition of artistic patronage.
Read the full feature on Art Basel.