There were queues around the block for the new Whitworth gallery when it opened after a £15m revamp over the weekend.
Some 17,938 people visited over Saturday and Sunday – more than the Oxford Road venue used to receive in a month.
On Friday night most of London’s art world appeared to have come up on the Pendolino, with certain guests rather more likely to have flown in via private jet. At a packed dinner in the Grand Hall on Friday night, the billionaire philanthropist and art patron Pauline Karpidas, originally a Manchester lass, was squished in elbow-to-elbow with Antony Gormley, Susie Orbach and Jeanette Winterson.
Apologies to my scruffy neighbour at dinner for asking what he did for a living. His reply: “I paint pictures”. It was a pleasingly humble way for Gary Hume to describe how he pays the mortgage. I should have recognised him as one of the YBA’s photographed in Johnnie Shand Kydd’s Hydra exhibition downstairs, but he wasn’t bothered.
A few seats down was St John chef Fergus Henderson, who has been serving offal to Tracey Emin and her mates in Spitalfields for over a decade. He seemed to enjoy the curry - Whitworth director Maria Balshaw said there could be no other choice of food for the banquet, given the gallery’s proximity to Manchester’s Curry Mile.
Nobel prize winner Kostya Novoselov was there to celebrate the first cultural use of graphene, the wonder substance he discovered with another Manchester colleague a decade ago. He had collected tiny graphene particles from some of the Whitworth’s most prized works and, along with artist Cornelia Parker, created what they called a “meteor shower”. To the rest of us it looked suspiciously like a firework display, but a good one.
Massive snaking queue for the grand reopening of Whitworth Art gallery @TheNubianTimes @TNTWhatsOn pic.twitter.com/wa7MQIlw6J
— Siobhan White (@SiobhantheHack) February 14, 2015
On Saturday the gallery opened to the public for the first time since autumn 2013. When I popped in at teatime, the place was heaving with a fairly representative cross-section of modern Manchester. I saw groups of girls in headscarves, lads in tracksuits, elderly couples, families with buggies. Outside, bicycles were secured to every inch of railing (I do hope some proper bike racks are in the offing).
The two most popular exhibits were Parker’s 1991 Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, her spectacular exploded shed, and Cai Guo-Qiang’s Unmanned Nature (2008), which includes a 45 metre-long, four metre-high drawing created from a gunpowder explosion, wrapped around a (real) pool.
But the highlight came when the Hallé youth choir gathered at the back of the gallery and sang Blake songs to a huge crowd in Whitworth park. On the roof was a light installation reading Gathering of Strangers, which glowed as more fireworks burst out into the sky. Near me a group of women had a little cry when the choir sang Jerusalem. It was that special. Welcome back, Whitworth.
