Human Touch: Making Art Leaving Traces

Photograph copyright © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, Human Touch: Making Art Leaving Traces explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking.

The curators explore anatomy and skin; the relationship between the brain, hand, and creativity; touch, desire and possession; ideological touch; reverence and iconoclasm. A final section collects a range of reflections, historic and contemporary, on touch.

Objects range from ancient Egyptian limestone sculpture to medieval manuscripts and panel paintings, from devotional and spiritual objects to love tokens and faith rings from all over the world. Drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures by Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carracci, Hogarth, Turner, Rodin, Degas, and Kollwitz will be re-analysed, seen alongside work by contemporary artists Judy Chicago, Frank Auerbach, Richard Long, the Chapman Brothers, Richard Rawlins, Donald Rodney and others.