White Cube at Arley Hall & Gardens

Located in the Cheshire countryside, Arley Hall's admired gardens have been created over the last 270 years by successive generations of the same family. White Cube introduces international contemporary art to this historic setting for the first time in a special exhibition of outdoor sculpture, placing more than twenty works by artists including Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin, Isamu Noguchi, Cerith Wyn Evans and Danh Vo on Arley’s sweeping lawns, in ponds and woodland groves, surmounting the mellow brick walls, and on the beams of a Tudor barn. 

Some are to be searched out while others punctuate the framed vistas of the formal gardens; some, like Noguchi’s Play Sculpture and Virginia Overton’s Chime, invite visitors to touch and climb. Familiar tropes of the country garden appear in unexpected forms, as Vo’s Chinese pavilion stands in for a summerhouse and David Altmejd reconfigures the classical nymph, and sculptures by Takis, Marguerite Humeau and Mona Hatoum flourish like strange new forms of nature.