Grundy Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Victoria Gallery & Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery
Bear Work Wear (black) (2011) was co-acquired for Grundy Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool and Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool through the Cathy Wills Sculpture Fund.
The Cathy Wills Sculpture Fund was generously initiated by Contemporary Art Society Trustee, Cathy Wills in 2011. The fund enables five museums in the North West of England to develop their collections with contemporary sculpture through co-acquisitions over a five year period.
The first work purchased through the fund was Haroon Mirza’s A Sleek Dry Yell in 2010/11.
Working primarily with sculpture and installation, Brian Griffiths’ work is imaginative, witty and tinged with a peculiarly British realism. Whether using impoverished materials like cardboard, fabric and concrete or assemblages of existing manufactured objects such as furniture, clothes and toys, Griffiths’ work has an inevitable relationship with the past. Most often by the time the artist gets hold of these materials they display what he calls the quality of ‘used-upness’, having come to the end of their ‘useful’ life. Griffiths’ work is imbued with qualities of overt theatricality, frequently drawing on literature and narrative as sources of inspiration.