Date: 30-05-2010
Owning Institution: Mostyn Gallery
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

Founded in 1902, the Mostyn Art Gallery in Llandudno has had a somewhat chequered history. It was originally the offspring of an idiosyncratic, aristocratic, quasi-feminist initiative. Peeved by the refusal of the nearby Royal Cambrian Academy to admit female members, Lady Augusta Mostyn had the place built purely so that works by members of the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society could be exhibited in public. But the First World War soon put a stop to their artistic activities and the gallery itself was requisitioned as a drill hall.

Its use changed many times over the next fifty years or so. It served, variously, as a Post Office, a showroom for pianos and organs and a novelty goods shop. But by the mid-1970s it had been turned once again into a public art gallery, albeit one with a considerably broader remit than that of its earliest incarnation. As “Oriel Mostyn” it quietly established a reputation as one of the few truly enterprising galleries showing contemporary art in North Wales.

In 2007 it was closed again, this time for reasons not of war but of increased civic ambition. Having secured a lottery award from the Arts Council of Wales, as well as additional funding from Llandudno Town Council and a number of other benefactors, director Martin Barlow and his team set out not only to refurbish the gallery but, in effect, to reinvent it.

Last week “The Mostyn”, as it is henceforth to be known, opened its doors to the public once more. A little over five million pounds has been spent on the redevelopment, carried out with flair and sensitivity by Ellis Williams Architects, whose track record also includes the conversion of a disused flour mill into Gateshead’s now-flourishing Baltic Centre.

In Llandudno, the Edwardian facade of Lady Augusta Mostyn’s building has been retained, and the slightly old-world character of the main toplit exhibition space preserved, but otherwise the place has been transformed.

There are now a total of four main galleries, one of which uses a so-called “saw-tooth” roof to flood the central space with light, plus a new education area. An equally light-filled corridor connects the front of the building to its much extended rear, and also houses a stylish ziggurat-like staircase.
The stated aim of the new Mostyn is to promote appreciation of Welsh contemporary art while simultaneously striving to place it in the context of broader international developments. Baldly stated, that might seem to have a whiff of worthiness about it. But the definition of “Welsh” art has been drawn in a refreshingly un-parochial way, to include any practising artist who has chosen to live and work in Wales.

Therefore, the opening exhibition includes work not only by some of the more interesting Welsh-born artists of the present day, such as Bedwyr Williams and Elfyn Lewis, but also sculpture by Englishman David Nash, who has lived and worked in Blaenau Ffestiniog for more than 30 years.

The commitment to showing the best of contemporary art from elsewhere, inevitably a challenge for a relatively small gallery in rural Wales, is triumphantly fulfilled by the screening upstairs of one of the most memorable and surreally strange video installations of the last few years, Flooded McDonald’s by a collective of Danish artists who call themselves Superflex – a work that the Mostyn is not merely showing, but actually co-commissioned.

With its stunning coastal scenery, Llandudno is already one of the most picturesque places to visit in the British Isles. With the advent of the new Mostyn, its cultural landscape has also been hugely enhanced.