Visual arts: The Hirst you can take home

Galleries now offer more than mugs and diaries. A mini art collection is on sale at tiny prices. By Iain Gale

Iain Gale
Tuesday 19 December 1995 00:02 GMT
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It sounds like an offer you can't refuse. A complete art collection for pounds 300. There's Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde, Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, Carl Andre's bricks, Rachel Whiteread's House... a ready-made collection of ready-mades - and they all fit on to one bookshelf. These are Paul St George's "Minuments" - beautifully finished, miniaturised versions of key late 20th-century art works, currently on sale at the ICA in "The Glass Shelf Show".

If you're still looking for the ultimate original Christmas present, you could hardly do better than one of St George's sculptures - at pounds 50 each - or any one of the multiples by the 40 other artists featured in this innovative show. Forget the "artist-designed" ties, scarves and coffee cups pedalled by the RA and the Tate. This is affordable art as raw as it comes, from Diana Lorenzo Saxby's witty Barbaric Dolls (pounds 22.99) to Georgio Sadotti's polystyrene cup with Biro-written obscenities (pounds 50) and Martin Creed's Work Number 88 - a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (pounds 5). Prices range from as little as pounds 2 for one of Andrea and Philippe's fridge magnets with a picture of a pill-box, to what seems a very reasonable pounds 300 for Keith Coventry's Painting Kit in an edition of 100 - a box containing all you need to make a "white abstract painting". For the investment-conscious, Anya Gallacio's tins of preserved rose petals at pounds 35 and Hadrian Piggott's giant Saponiton pill at pounds 200 must be the bargains of the show.

Piggott turns up again in another exercise in inspired artistic merchandising at Bristol's Arnolfini Gallery, where multiples by artists showing in the "Now Wash Your Hands" show are for sale in the shop. Piggott's signed and editioned bars of pink and blue soap, stamped "Girl" and "Boy", can be had for a mere pounds 5. But place one of these in a perspex case and it is transformed into an object of "museum quality". Fun can also be had with Dermott O'Brien's Luminescence III, a numbered edition of chrome- covered lightbulbs (also on sale at the ICA at pounds 9.50), and Harriette Jackman's Mini Loafers, loaves of bread baked with shoe-laces (pounds 2.50). For the more conventional, the Tate's Clore Gallery shop is offering limited edition artists' books by artists such as Ron King, John Dilnot and Christian Ide, for between pounds 5 and pounds 160.

For my money, though, it's hard to beat Gallacio's can of rose petals. Just the thing for great aunt Agatha.

n ICA, London SW1 (0171-930 3647); Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (0117 929 9191); Tate Gallery, London SW1 (0171-887 8000)

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