Blueprints - Rugby Art Gallery & Museum
Blueprints
21 June - 6 September 2025
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Blueprints invites you to explore the foundations of both the building itself and the remarkable collection it houses. This exhibition delves into the literal and metaphorical blueprints that have shaped our cultural landscape.
Featuring works from The Rugby Collection alongside rare artist sketches, this exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the creative processes that underpin iconic pieces of 20th Century British art. These "blueprints" reveal the early stages of artistic thought, where imagination meets technical precision.
Blueprints also takes a step back in time to examine the architectural journey of the gallery and museum. Designed to house Rugby’s growing art and museum collections, this purpose-built space stands as a testament to the town's commitment to the arts. Through historical photographs and original blueprints of the building, we trace the story of why and how the gallery came to be - a place built for the people of Rugby to experience art in a new, dedicated environment.
Exhibition Talk
Crisis? What Crisis?
In conversation with Chris Orr and Dr Richard Davey
July 9th from 6pm
£5 ticket
Sketchbooks offer a fascinating insight into an artist’s working practice. More than a finished work, they can reveal the disparate ways an artist translates what they see or imagine into a visual language where a grammar of marks and colours stand for movement, time, space and physical presence.
Join the writer Dr Richard Davey and the artist Chris Orr RA, in a conversation that will explore this visual language and discuss how Chris’s use of it in his drawings and prints brings insights and meanings that expand and contribute to his distinctive narratives.
Dr Richard Davey is a Senior Research Fellow in Historical and Critical studies at Nottingham School of Art and Design. He is an internationally published author on art, having contributed to catalogues on Anselm Kiefer and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and written books on Tess Jaray RA, Anthony Whishaw RA and Leonard McComb RA.
