The Bright Eyes of Children

The Bright Eyes of Children, is OCD Gallery's pop-up exhibition for Frieze Week London, opening Thursday 15 October at 41 Whitfield Street, Fitzrovia.

This is not an exhibition about childhood, nor a nostalgic one. It is about a way of looking that artists spend whole careers protecting: attention before interpretation, curiosity before certainty, and the instinct to make before the need to explain. It runs through sculpture, painting and print by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Luke Hamel Cooke, William Lowry, Selena Corsellis, Talia Golchin and Atalanta Xanthe.

In place of white walls, the work fills a nineteenth-century house of uneven floors, narrow stairs and decades of layered paint. Once part of the neighbouring pub, it spent more than fifty years as one half of Pollock’s Toy Museum, keeper of the Victorian toy theatres that children cut out, coloured and brought to life by hand. Its shopfront still reads Pollock’s Theatrical Print Warehouse. Here the building is not a backdrop but part of how the work is seen.

The title comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 essay in praise of Pollock’s toy-theatre shop: “If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock’s…”