AT HOME WITH MONSTERS: The GDT Bleak House exhibition

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Guillermo del Toro is taking Bleak House, his personal collection of art, film artifacts and bizarre collectibles is going on the road.

A special exhibition entitled GUILLERMO DEL TORO: AT HOME WITH MONSTERS is touring North America through early 2018.  Here is a description from the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario press release):

Co-curated by Britt Salvesen of LACMA, Jim Shedden of the AGO, and Matthew Welch of Mia, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters brings together elements from del Toro’s films, objects from his vast personal collections and objects from the permanent collections of all three institutions. The diverse range of media featured in this exhibition—including sculpture, paintings, prints, photography, costumes, ancient artifacts, books, maquettes and film—totals approximately 500 objects and reflects the broad and alluring scope of del Toro’s inspirations.

The Exhibit opens at LACMA in Los Angeles on July 31st and runs until November 24th 2016

Then the exhibit moves to Minneapolis Institute of Art and opens on February 26th 2017

3rd stop is AGO in Ontario Canada and opens on September 30th through January 7th 2018

Here are the highlights:

The exhibition is organized into eight thematic sections, including:

Childhood and Innocence, exploring the central role children often play in del Toro’s films;

Victoriana, loosely referencing the Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian ages and latter-day interpretation of the Victorian era;

Rain Room, a recreation of a favourite spot in del Toro’s personal residence (“Bleak House”) where he installed a false window with special effects to simulate a perpetual thunderstorm;

Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult, exploring the many puzzles, talismans, secret keys and quests for forbidden knowledge that appear in del Toro’s films;

Movies, Comics and Pop Culture, delving into the scope of his obsession with cinema, from B-movies and horror films to Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel;

Frankenstein and Horror, revealing del Toro’s lifelong love affair with the tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster;

Freaks and Monsters, considering del Toro’s fascination with monsters of all types, from those found in horror movies to those in nature, literature, myth and art; and finally

Death and the Afterlife, which speaks to the disturbing confrontations with death that del Toro experienced growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the late 1960s and ’70s.