The exhibition, called A Celebration of Talent, features 30 examples of illustration, painting, sculpture, embroidery, fashion, design and film created by emerging artists from Salford University and Manchester Metropolitan University, and tutors hope the show will provide them with crucial experience ahead of their professional careers.
One Salford graduate, Tom Williams, has used the opportunity to display a large piece - Installed Painting - illustrating his fascination with street art and psychedelia.
Tom's work is made of two-dimensional shapes that play with the viewers' perspectives to appear three-dimensional. It achieves this sense of illusion by layering textures and materials and, like his heroes Fabian Marcaccio and Franz Ackerman, Tom works outside a traditional frame to let the painting take on many possibilities of space and form.
Regular springboard
Urbis hopes the event will provide a regular springboard for talent in Manchester. Curator and art critic Louise Brookes and Michael Brennard Wood, visiting professor at MMU, selected the pieces and have both been blown away by the standard of this year's graduates.
"For the last three years, Manchester has been a source of inspiration for our future artistic generation," said Louise. "This year's selection contains everything you'd hope for from the work of these young creatives.
"They have pushed the buttons and the boundaries of contemporary practice and precedent and should inspire and influence future generations."
A Celebration of Talent is showing on Level 3 at Urbis until Sunday, February 18. Entry is free. Open Tuesday - Sunday. 10am - 6pm. Call 0161 605 8200 for more information. Entry is free.
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