Skip to main content

Opening and Closing in July

A very eclectic mix of shows this month, and we're starting with an exhibition that's not art at all, but of vital interest to everyone. The Science Museum is investigating the Future of Food , looking at new advances in growing, making, cooking and eating it. On from July 24 to January 4, it's free, though you need to book. Oh, and you get to see this 3,500-year-old sourdough loaf..... At the Lowry in Salford, they're offering a double bill of Quentin Blake and Me & Modern Life: The LS Lowry Collection . The show about Blake, who's written or illustrated more than 500 books, looks aimed at a family audience, while the Lowry exhibition includes borrowed works, marking the Salford arts centre's 25th anniversary. On from July 19 to January 4, and entry is again free, though you need to book a timeslot.  Another anniversary this year is the 250th of the birth of Jane Austen; among the exhibitions around the country is one in Winchester, the city where she died ...

Subscribe to updates

The Ultimate Garden Ornaments: Chihuly at Kew

Is there a more spectacular exhibition on in London at the moment than Dale Chihuly's breathtaking blown-glass creations at Kew Gardens? We doubt it.

For Chihuly: Reflections on Nature, more than 30 works have been installed in the grounds and glasshouses at Kew, and the result is, for the most part, absolutely stunning.

Summer Sun stands outside Kew's Palm House overlooking the lake, a huge and dazzling fire of red and orange flame that seems to writhe with its own inner life.
And just inside the main gate, Sapphire Star, a shimmering modern explosion of blue and white, set in a landscape that evokes classical English parkland, recalls a globe thistle, Echinops ritro Veitch's Blue, to be precise, for the green-fingered among you.
It's Kew's Temperate House, the world's largest Victorian glasshouse and a marvel of design and engineering, which reopened last year after a five-year renovation, that's the focus for much of the action, or should we say interaction with the gardens.

Outside stand two of these Opal and Amber Towers, their tentacles spiralling into the air. So delicate and so fragile, in colours that blend with the structure of the glasshouse.
Inside, you can climb to the walkway that runs around the Temperate House for a view that reveals a range of often quite subtle glasswork that Chihuly has arranged amid the greenery. Here Chihuly's take on ikebana -- that minimalist Japanese art of flower-arranging -- contrasts with a new spectacular hanging work that he's created specifically for the space.
As you wander round the gardens, you keep coming on new surprises. This Scarlet and Yellow Icicle Tower was largely hidden from view in the direction we approached, until we were almost on it. It's one of those sculptures with a complete wow! factor, and here it seems to sit perfectly in the landscape, the Palm House glimpsed through the trees behind it.
Unfortunately, it's also almost directly under the Heathrow flight path. Planes come in on their approach for landing about every two minutes, so low that you can easily see which airline they're from. It's very loud....

Not all these art works are on a huge scale. Sometimes you'll stumble upon naturalistic grass-like installations amid the beds, beguiling in their curves. They can be flame-red; here, near King William's Temple, it's turquoise that dominates.
One of the most spectacular examples of Chihuly's work is in the Water-Lily House, where this wonderful white glass echoes the plants emerging from the pond amid the lily pads.
In an indoor exhibition space, you can see how Chihuly's glass has developed down the years. A vast array of his smaller works, beautifully lit, show shells and baskets among the favoured forms. The colours can be very intense.
And you can buy some relatively small examples for yourself. They're not cheap.

Not everything works. We found Nijima Floats, a collection of brightly coloured glass spheres set in the raked gravel of Kew's Japanese Garden, a bit crass and rather out of place. Surely Zen gardens are all about simplicity and calmness, a chance to empty the mind? This felt like an attack of the beach balls.
But overall? It's a cracker of an exhibition, a feel-good extravaganza. Just make sure you check the weather forecast first: You'll want to see the sunlight shimmering on these sculptures; it's not a show for a drizzly, overcast day. And then your next question: Can you fit Summer Sun in between the greenhouse and the water feature in your back garden....?

Practicalities

Chihuly: Reflections on Nature continues at Kew Gardens until October 27. Kew opens daily at 1000 and closing time varies, but until the end of July it's generally 1900 Monday to Thursday and 2000 Friday to Sunday. Adult tickets for entry to the gardens, including the exhibition, are £16.50 if you buy online (£18.15 including a Gift Aid donation), which you can do here, or £18 at the gate (£19.80 with a donation). The display has been so popular they'd run out of maps of the locations when we visited, but there were plenty of staff to point you to the next sculpture.

Kew's main Victoria Gate is probably closest to the Chihuly exhibits, and it's just 500 metres away from Kew Gardens station on the London Underground's District Line and the Overground.

Images

Dale Chihuly, Summer Sun, 2010
Dale Chihuly, Sapphire Star, 2010
Dale Chihuly, Opal and Amber Towers, 2018
Dale Chihuly, Ikebana, 2011-18, and Temperate House Persians, 2018
Dale Chihuly, Scarlet and Yellow Icicle Tower, 2013
Dale Chihuly, Neodymium Reeds and Turquoise Marlins, 2019
Dale Chihuly, Ethereal White Persian Pond, 2018
Dale Chihuly, Oxblood and Chartreuse Persian Set with Orange Lip Wraps, 1998
Dale Chihuly, Nijima Floats, 1992-2018

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

Caillebotte: This Is Modern Paris

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though  Caillebotte: Painting Men   was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it.  And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...