Emily Allchurch | Manchester Art Gallery | 13 March – 8 June 2015

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”, bemoaned the author of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. While this quote has been used to berate artists across the centuries for a lack of originality, modern pieces are more likely to be referential, and often deferential, to the precedents set before them.

Emily Allchurch’s work is based around making modern photographic recreations of old master paintings of iconic scenes, allowing the viewer to see the changes not only in artistic medium but in the places themselves. There’s nothing quite like juxtaposing the past and the present to show us not only how far we’ve come as a society, but how much things have stayed the same.

As part of the first UK solo exhibition of…