We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country. Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw: Edvard Munch ...
Look into one of Anish Kapoor's sculptures at Pitzhanger Manor and what do you see? Well, it definitely depends on where you're standing.
Here we are in front of the two stainless-steel-and-lacquer concave circles of Glisten Eclipse in a corner of this brand new exhibition space in the west London suburb of Ealing and there's no real reflection, only the fuzziest of images in a glow of red and gold, like a couple of distant planets floating in white space.
Take just half a step to the side, and you experience how the room behind you begins to be revealed.
It's one of a number of disorientating, disarming moments in this hall of mirrors, displaying some of the most recent sculptures by Kapoor, known among other things for his gigantic Tate Modern installation a decade and a half ago and the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in London's Olympic Park.
This is an interactive exhibition, but there are no buttons to press or screens to swipe; this is you walking round Kapoor's devilishly clever creations trying to take on board how your view of yourself and your surroundings changes so dramatically as you do so. This is all about optical illusions.
In Red to Blue, the view changes disconcertingly and the colours mutate as you walk past. You and everything dotted about the room is upside down, with the round skylights reflected in the bottom of the mirrors where the floor should be.
Or perhaps, like Alice in Wonderland, you disappear down the rabbit hole that appears in a series of shiny spherical works like Alice -- Double Sphere.
The most menacingly distorting of all these works is in a side room. What appears at first to be a a flat mirrored wall turns out to be frighteningly concave, drawing gasps from visitors as they find their world turned alarmingly inverted. The doorway you came in through has become the brightly lit end-of-the-tunnel escape route in the distance, but to get to it you have to negotiate what is now a gridded floor, the reflection of the panes of glass in the skylight. The wooden floor has turned into an oppressive panelled ceiling.
This is a small but really crowd-pleasing show; people when we went were really enjoying exploring Kapoor's sculptures from every angle, and you could see faces lighting up and hear the appreciation.
As we've said, this new exhibition space has been created as part of the three-year restoration of Pitzhanger Manor. The radical architect Sir John Soane rebuilt the property as his country house in the early 19th century.
Renovations can be tricky: We found the place a bit too newly done to be really evocative -- you could smell how fresh the paint was -- and lacking in the sort of atmosphere you find in Soane's central London home in Lincoln's Inn Fields, now a museum. The house has been through a number of incarnations since Soane's time, including a long spell as Ealing's library.
Possibly the most impressive space is the restored conservatory, which is wonderfully light and airy with a view of the park through the full-length windows. In fact, Soane originally wanted to have the conservatory two stories high. That really would have been stunning.
Here we are in front of the two stainless-steel-and-lacquer concave circles of Glisten Eclipse in a corner of this brand new exhibition space in the west London suburb of Ealing and there's no real reflection, only the fuzziest of images in a glow of red and gold, like a couple of distant planets floating in white space.
This is an interactive exhibition, but there are no buttons to press or screens to swipe; this is you walking round Kapoor's devilishly clever creations trying to take on board how your view of yourself and your surroundings changes so dramatically as you do so. This is all about optical illusions.
In Red to Blue, the view changes disconcertingly and the colours mutate as you walk past. You and everything dotted about the room is upside down, with the round skylights reflected in the bottom of the mirrors where the floor should be.
As we've said, this new exhibition space has been created as part of the three-year restoration of Pitzhanger Manor. The radical architect Sir John Soane rebuilt the property as his country house in the early 19th century.
Possibly the most impressive space is the restored conservatory, which is wonderfully light and airy with a view of the park through the full-length windows. In fact, Soane originally wanted to have the conservatory two stories high. That really would have been stunning.
For an opening show in this new venue, the Kapoor exhibition was really absorbing and impressive. We'll be keen to see if Pitzhanger can keep up the standard.
Practicalities
Anish Kapoor is on at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing until August 18. The exhibition and house are open from 1000 to 1630 Tuesday to Friday and on Sunday, and from 1000 to 1500 on Saturday. Standard tickets are £7.70, including a Gift Aid donation, which is pretty decent value for London. You can book tickets online here.
The venue is less than 10 minutes' walk from Ealing Broadway station, which has London Underground's District and Central lines and Great Western services from Paddington. And if you fancy making a day of it and combining Anish Kapoor with another great sculpture show in west London, Dale Chihuly's glass, the 65 bus will take you from Pitzhanger to Kew Gardens in about 20 minutes.
Images
Anish Kapoor, Glisten Eclipse, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery (pictured twice)
Anish Kapoor, Red to Blue, 2016
Anish Kapoor, Alice -- Double Sphere, 2017
Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2018
Pitzhanger Manor, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg.
Conservatory, Pitzhanger Manor, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg.
Pitzhanger Manor, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg.
Conservatory, Pitzhanger Manor, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg.
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