The Art Exhibitions Blog

Let's start the New Year in Edinburgh, with two of the biggest names in Pop Art.  Eduardo Paolozzi, perhaps the pioneer of the genre with his collages from the late 1940s, was born in the Scottish capital a century ago, and you can see a retrospective of his varied work from January 27 in National Galleries Scotland's Modern Two building. Paolozzi at 100 is on until April 21.  Meanwhile, in Edinburgh's Old Town, Dovecot Studios will be presenting an exhibition of Andy Warhol's colourful commercial textile designs, dating back to the 1950s, before he found fame in New York. Andy Warhol: The Textiles is on from January 26 to May 18, when it might just be warm enough for you to enjoy an ice-cream sundae, if your tastebuds have been tickled by Warhol's fabric.  Rembrandt's earliest known works from the time when he was starting out as a painter in Leiden are pictures depicting four of the senses, and they're brought together at the city's Lakenhal museum f...

Newly knighted Grayson Perry has one of the highest profiles in the art world, not just as a creator of pottery and tapestries, but as an author and television presenter, commenting on the big issues of our time. So no wonder the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh is staging the biggest ever exhibition of Perry's work over the summer, looking back at a 40-year career. Grayson Perry: Smash Hits is on from July 22 to November 12.  On a distinctly smaller scale, you can explore Victorian Virtual Reality at the Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford. It's a look at the 19th-century craze for stereoscopic photographs that allowed images to be viewed as if in three dimensions, and it contains more than 150 pictures from a collection built up over the decades by the Queen guitarist Brian May. This one runs from July 4 right through to February 25 next year.  Our next couple of shows are all about travels by the Impressionists, and our first stop is at the Musée des impressionism...

Collage: Now there's an art form anyone can have a go at. For some of us, it brings back memories of primary school, using those scissors with the rounded ends and that glue that smelt of fish. Or for something a little more tactile, what about Fuzzy-Felt ? Art history has given us the view that it was the Cubists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and those daring Dadaists who first started cutting up pieces of paper and sticking them down together to form pictures in the early years of the 20th century. But as the excellently titled Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage  at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh makes clear, they really weren't breaking new ground at all. People were a-cutting and a-pasting long before Picasso, but then they weren't calling it high art. So our story of collage takes us back to the days before anyone had even coined the term, back to the Victorian era and long before, when lots of amateur artists found amusement in...

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...

The Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) is perhaps not very well known outside France and his homeland, but the Royal Academy in London is staging the first comprehensive exhibition in Britain, starting on June 30, of his quite varied work, which often conveys a sense of unease.  Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet  brings together more than 80 pictures, the majority of them loans from Switzerland. Fans of the Nabis and the German New Objectivity movement will find much to admire. Until September 29. And, of course, it's that time of year again at the Royal Academy: The Summer Exhibition , with well over 1,000 new works on show, starts on June 10 and runs until August 12. At the British Library, Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion provides an opportunity to explore the science, artistry and inventions of three of Leonardo's notebooks in another exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. It brings together manuscripts owned by the library, the V&A...

What a lot of contradictions in Emil Nolde, and in his art. How could the painter who, more than any other, had his art denounced by the Nazis as degenerate actually be a member of the National Socialist Party? How could a man who professed his Christian values in religious art hold such anti-Semitic views? How could the artist who seemed so at home in the windy, flat farming and fishing country of the German-Danish borderlands be so drawn to the clubs and cabarets of Berlin? And how could the maker of such delicate watercolours also produce violently Expressionist works that were sometimes so crude, so grotesque? All these questions are raised by Emil Nolde: Colour is Life at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Some are answered, but by no means all. Nolde was born in 1867 as Emil Hansen to a German father and a Danish mother. Nolde is actually the name of the small place he came from, which was then in Germany but became Danish after a plebiscite followin...

"What a coarse rugged Way of Painting's here, Stroaks upon Stroaks, Dabbs upon Dabbs appear." So wrote the English author John Elsum in 1700, musing on An Old Man's Head , by Rembrant, as he spelled it. Those Stroaks and Dabbs have been fascinating the British for almost four centuries, as an enticing exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh demonstrates with a stunning array of canvases, drawings and etchings. So many of the works in Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master have a fascinating story to tell. You'll find anecdote, mystery and drama aplenty, with a touch of forgery and plagiarism thrown in along the way. It's excellently presented, with really informative wall descriptions and plenty of space to appreciate what's on display.  What about the Old Man's Head? Well, the verse accompanies this Portrait of an Elderly Man , painted by Rembrandt in 1667, a picture that spent centuries in Britain but is now back...

Edinburgh takes centre-stage in July, with the start of two big exhibitions. Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master runs at the Scottish National Gallery from July 7 to October 14 and aims to show how the taste for Rembrandt's work has evolved over four centuries. It features major paintings by Rembrandt in British collections as well as some that used to be in the UK but are now overseas. There'll also be work by British artists influenced by Rembrandt, including Hogarth, Reynolds, Kossoff and Auerbach. A week later, on July 14, Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Running until October 21, this show comprises about 100 works, including 40 paintings from the Nolde Foundation in Seebüll on Germany's border with Denmark. Nolde's vibrant Expressionism led to his art being labelled as degenerate by the Nazis, yet he was also a supporter of National Socialism. It's worth noting that when this exhibition was on ...