The curator and gallery director at jaggedart, Andrea Harari, thinks: "yes, you can". She does not know what the artists are going to bring until they make their presence in the gallery. Then, Andrea has to make sense of an eclectic array of artworks.
Every year jaggedart has a Winter Show during the Christmas period where most of the gallery artists are exhibited. This show has been going on for the last seven years since the gallery moved to Marylebone.
As Andrea says: "The Winter show is always a surprise in the sense that, although invitations to the artists to participate occur in the summer, and we do discuss works with them, we do not know exactly how all the works will work together until they arrive right before the day we hang. It is always a challenge to hang this show and especially when there are so many artists involved (18 in the current one). But the gallery has a style and an aesthetic that all of the artists share, so that makes the challenge easier.
"It is very exciting and when we start hanging, somehow the works create a dialogue between each other. It can be, like in this show, that a diagonal is repeated in many works, or a curve, or that the works are hung in pairs. So there is a rhythm, a connection or a line that underlies in the show and which takes the eye from one work to the other. It may appear unnoticeable, but it is often recognised and appreciated by the visitors.
"In my experience, one can never have a fixed idea of how a show is going to look like or plan a hang. When the works are together and they are in the space, interacting with each other, a magic occurs that places them. There are so many ways to hang an exhibition, and the possibilities are endless, but miraculously, every piece in the end falls in its place, opening to visual connections with the others and with the exhibition as a whole".