Foundation Derbyshire, Derby Museum & Art Gallery and The Federation of British Artists at Mall Galleries present The Missing Act, an exhibition of work created by Max Gimson, the ninth winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award, in response to the people, culture, heritage and landscape of Derbyshire.

Over the past twenty-five years, the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award has become one of the most valuable art prizes in the country, bringing a rising artist to Derbyshire to produce a lasting legacy of contemporary work of national importance.

The exhibition opens at Derby Museum and Art Gallery on 13 December, before moving to Mall Galleries, London in March 2025.

About the Exhibition

The Missing Act is inspired by Max Gimson's discovery of the Derby Hippodrome.

To quote writer Will Eaves, "Many of the great variety acts of the pre- and post Second World War eras, and even some Hollywood stars, played the Derby Hippodrome in Green Lane, built in 1914 to palatial specifications with a swagged-plaster dress circle and a bioscope for the projection of entr’acte films. On its broad stage Marie Lloyd serenaded the boy in the gallery, Max Miller traded one-liners in his flowery suits, Margaret Lockwood comforted the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, and Bela Lugosi reprised his most famous film role, hearkening to the children of the night, in a 1951 revival of Hamilton Deane’s adaptation of Dracula. Then came TV, in the mid-50s, and regional variety never recovered. The Hippodrome closed in 1959 and three years later handed itself over to Mecca Bingo. The last pensioners filed out in 2006, since when the once-packed auditorium has been dark."

Max Gimson’s figures are made to shed their fame and context ... [a]nd yet Gimson remains sensuously aware of their identity in paint – their gaudiness, their hair, their gestures, their smell – even as the world that made them famous goes up in flames, even as the bills of performance disintegrate and the roof of the Hippodrome falls in. It is as if he were slowly deleting the captions of history, removing the dramatis personae from the title page, anonymising the archive in order to release a more fundamental awareness of creaturely variety.
Will Eaves - Writer

About the Artist

Max Gimson (b. 1990) is the ninth winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award, one of the largest art prizes for an emerging artist in the UK.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art in 2019, Max says about his work: “I’m interested in the temporal qualities of painting as a medium, how a painted surface can be fast and visually impactful and also slow, revealing itself over prolonged viewing through the use of gesture and materiality, somewhat like sensing the histories of a location, overlapping and interplaying into a present moment, through architecture, people and nature.”