Viewing White Cube at Claydon

White Cube goes country.

White Cube leaves the cube with a debut intervention at Claydon House in Bucks. Presented with the National Trust; it spans the house’s interiors and grounds featuring over 40 works. Home to the Verney family since 1620, Claydon’s interiors span Rococo, Palladian and Chinoiserie styles, with rooms that carry stories of ambition, empire, inheritance and private loss. There’s four centuries of family history to contend with and buckets of drama and tragedy.

In the Saloon, Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I and Sir Edmund Verney are faced with Cai Guo-Qiang’s five-panel gunpowder painting Heaven Complex No. 1 and No. 2. In the North Hall, Rachel Kneebone’s mind-boggling porcelain sculptures echo the extravagance of Luke Lightfoot’s flamboyant stucco, while Tunji Adeniyi-Jones introduces a rhythmic counterpoint of colour and movement into the space. The sensorial beats are thrilling.

The exhibition soars when it draws out the house’s more complicated histories. El Anatsui’s bottle-cap sculpture in the Pink Parlour points towards labour, exchange and wealth, while Danh Vo’s work in the museum room considers how valuable objects trade across borders. Vo presents a luxe brand suitcase housing the limbs of a priceless wooden putto. Contraband! Upstairs, Florence Nightingale’s former bedroom is given over to Mona Hatoum, Julie Curtiss and Tracey Emin, where hair garments and embroidered nightmare imagery invoke trauma and misery.

The gardens extend the encounters outdoors. Emin’s neon I Loved You Until the Morning frames the house’s façade, while works by Anselm Kiefer, David Altmejd, Virginia Overton, Gabriel Orozco, Isamu Noguchi, Antony Gormley, Marguerite Humeau, Richard Hunt and Theaster Gates are positioned throughout. There are surprises in the two normally private gardens: the walled Pool Garden and Florence Nightingale Garden. Old power and contemporary imagination collide here and the conversations/debates en route will be fascinating.