Palaeoart is the term used to describe artwork that attempts to reconstruct prehistoric animals and their habitats using fossil material and the latest scientific knowledge. This display brings together a wide range of palaeoart, from nearly 200 years ago to the present day. Artists and scientists depicted long-lost creatures together for the first time in the early nineteenth century – Read more...
As we approach another major turning point in automotive design, this exhibition looks at the role of the car in shaping the world we live in today. Over its short 130-year history, the car has become one of the most loved, contested and influential innovations in the world. It has revolutionised manufacturing, transformed how we move, forever changing our cities, Read more...
The Wallace Collection presents Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company. Guest curated by renowned writer and historian William Dalrymple, this is the first UK exhibition of works by Indian master painters commissioned by East India Company officials in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Forgotten Masters showcases the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each Read more...
The millions of images in our collections are testament to the allure of London as a subject for artists – its buildings, traditions and its people. London – Portrait of a City explores the formats chosen by artists and surveyors to create images of the city since the eleventh century. From simple wax seals to intricate engravings, from watercolours to Read more...
Music festivals sprang up in the eighteenth century in an age of philanthropy, following the tradition of benefit concerts for charities. This display explores some of the festivals across Britain from the Handel Commemoration in 1784 to the Crystal Palace concerts of the late nineteenth century, looking at the logistics behind their organisation and the expectations of the audiences. Closed Read more...
You enter a shifting landscape. The tectonic plates are moving beneath you. What can you hear? Plates is based on field work undertaken in Ethiopia and Northern Ireland by artist Rachel Pimm (b. 1984, Zimbabwe) with a soundtrack by Lori E. Allen (b. 1975, USA). For this commission, the artists create a visual and sonic topography with words, images and Read more...
”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art Selected by Verónica Gerber Bicecci A forest creeper invades the gallery with its sinuous tendrils. This hanging sculpture by Concha García (b. 1960, Spain) is made of bright red wool, alerting us to the danger that all is not right in the world. Nearby, an enlarged eye looks out at the viewer from a Read more...
For Tullio Crali (1910-2000) Futurism was not just a school of painting, but an attitude to life itself. Reflecting the movement’s enthusiasm for the modern world, his imagery embraced technology and the machine as important sources of creative inspiration. However, with its particular focus on “the immense visual and sensory drama of flight”, Crali’s work is most closely associated with Read more...
How can you play with colours to see the world differently? Can you imagine having eight legs or being invisible? What would you make out of a pile of spoons? Discover the playful and colourful world of photographer Jan Von Holleben in this interactive display showcasing a selection of his most recent artwork. His images invite you to think playfully, Read more...
Our latest display shines a new light on works from the Gallery’s Collection and seeks to question the nature of migration from the 17th century to today. Journeys has been co-curated by a group of Community Curators, with personal experiences of migration hailing from all over the world. The display will be shaped around the personal and diverse stories of the curators; Read more...
‘When we walk in that space we are walking between the past and the future and we are the present’. Carlos Bunga (b. 1976, Portugal) creates monumental structures out of everyday materials to propose architecture as transitory and corporeal in his first major UK commission. Bunga makes cardboard constructions and repurposes domestic furnishings to create an evolving installation in dialogue Read more...
Gallery 31, Somerset House Studios’ permanent exhibition space, presents the exhibition I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now. Featuring Maeve Brennan, Vivienne Griffin, rkss, Rhea Storr, Sam Williams & Roly Porter. Gallery 31 is a new permanent exhibition space dedicated to profiling the Studios community and work developed through our residencies. With a rolling programme and a different theme Read more...
Portraying Pregnancy is a major exhibition exploring representations of the pregnant female body through portraits, over 500 years. Until the twentieth century, many women spent most of their adult years pregnant. Despite this, pregnancies are seldom apparent in surviving portraits. This exhibition brings together images of women – mainly British – who were depicted at a time when they were Read more...
Textiles and costume give us a beautiful and intensely human insight into our history. Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles celebrates seven pioneering women who saw beyond the purely functional, to reveal the extraordinary artistic, social and cultural importance of textiles. From the exquisite anthropological collections of traditional Balkan costume by Edith Durham, to the ground-breaking contemporary South Asian collection of Read more...
Picasso didn’t just draw on paper – he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for ‘Guernica’ to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this exhibition brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist’s 80-year career. For Picasso, paper was both a tool to explore his ideas and a material with limitless possibilities. He experimented with everything Read more...
Cameron Rowland WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majesty’s Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived Read more...
Explore the tattoos worn by members of the Armed Forces community and the powerful stories of identity, comradeship, bravery and sacrifice they represent. Tattoos play an important role within the Armed Forces community. Inked onto the skin of soldiers, sailors and airmen, they reveal powerful stories. They serve as personal acts of remembrance, statements of belonging, or records of significant Read more...
A new exhibition celebrating the remarkable mushroom, and all the progressive, poetic and psychedelic wonder it evokes. Bringing together the work of over 40 leading artists, designers and musicians, Mushrooms looks at fungi’s colourful cultural legacy, as well as the promise it offers to reimagine our relationship with the planet. Highlights in this new exhibition from writer and curator Francesca Read more...
This is the first time that Tate has staged a show devoted to the later 17th century and the first to explore baroque art in Britain. It will be a chance to encounter a rich, sophisticated but overlooked era of art history. Many of the works will be on display for the first time – some borrowed from the stately homes they Read more...
Velvet Black – Notes is Fleur Olby’s first solo show combining her series ‘Velvet Black’ and ‘Notes’. Velvet Black is a present-day ode to Victorian plant shows, with black velvet backdrops and their cultivation of indoor-outdoor window theatres. The series started as a photographic notebook of planting a garden, and is resonant of a flower press, portraying the transience of Read more...
After a decade of conceptual and minimal art, the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, took the art world by storm. Lavishly painted, epically scaled canvases reasserted the centrality of painting – and the hand of the artist. The 38 exhibitors hailed from Europe and America and were exclusively male. Was this show Read more...
