The Art Exhibitions Blog

August is normally a quiet month for new shows, but there are two exhibitions moving on this month to fresh locations that really deserve to be highlighted. At the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the doors open on August 10 on Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light . Joaquín Sorolla is best known for his impressionistic light-filled paintings of the Spanish coast, but as the previous version of this show at the National Gallery in London demonstrated, he produced masterpieces of social realism and portraiture too. The Dublin show looks to be smaller than London's, with 50 or so works, but the best of Sorolla's work is remarkable. Until November 3. And if you're visiting Madrid at any point, Sorolla's atmospheric house and studio, now the Museo Sorolla , has a great selection of his paintings and is well worth a visit. Our tip, though, is to go somewhere less scorching in August. Copenhagen, for example. Because the best exhibition we've seen all year has f...

The Victorians had a taste for the exotic. The chance to be transported, as if on a magic carpet, away from rainy, smoky Britain to the delights of the East. And so they were captivated by the pictures John Frederick Lewis made of Egypt. Drawings and paintings so full of detail, so full of local colour, they were seen by his contemporaries as "accurately and intimately true".  John Frederick Lewis: Facing Fame at the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey traces the story of an English artist who not only travelled to the Orient, he was so wooed by it that he stayed in Cairo for a decade. And who, when he eventually returned to Britain, continued to paint Oriental-inspired scenes. "There was something un-English about him," John Ruskin said.  And here we are in Cairo's El Khan Khalil textile market. Full of colourful fabrics and carpets, turbanned extras, the obligatory sleeping dog and an Islamic arch. And in the foreground, a prosperous merchant himsel...

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...

Snow over Scotland. In July. Alright, the real white stuff isn't actually lying on the Pentland Hills at the moment, but there's a taste of winter in store if you go along to see Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting  at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It's a retrospective of the work of an artist who's originally English, but who settled in Scotland many years ago, and whose most memorable works, for us, are her haunting winter landscapes, a subject she's returned to throughout her career. Winters are harsh in Scotland (let's face it, the summers can be pretty miserable too); the days are short, the trees are bare; there can be snow on the ground. It's  Bruegel  or Sohlberg . Crowe made her home in the Pentlands, not so far from the centre of Edinburgh, where she taught art, but when winter comes, the hills can feel remote. In Blue Snow, Fiery Trees , the wood is captured at twilight, the branches illuminated by the setting sun, the frozen landscape glowing b...

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...

We felt a little bit short-changed a few weeks ago when we went to see Ivon Hitchens's flower paintings in a smallish exhibition at the Garden Museum in London. A big new show at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, Ivon Hitchens: Space through Colour , gives a much broader impression of the vibrancy and range of the artist's work. We enjoyed it from start to finish. West Sussex is an appropriate place to look back at Hitchens's long career, because he spent a lot of time in the county. The earliest works in this show include landscapes made during visits in the 1920s; he moved to a caravan near Petworth when bombed out of his London home and studio in World War II, and in his old age he bought a property by the sea in Selsey. And the two very first works in the Pallant collection were by Hitchens. He's a local artist then, but by no means a parochial one. We get the full overview during this comprehensive show, which demonstrates how his work was hugely influe...

So, it's Spain against Holland in Madrid, for a much-anticipated meeting in the heat of the summer. And, from a rich pool of talent, there are some really big names on both sides. But it's not football we're here for, we've come to the Museo del Prado for 17th-century art, in the shape of an exhibition called  Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer -- Parallel Visions . Is it any good? Well, the opening 25 minutes are fantastic and there's a real purple patch in the second half, but unfortunately they can't keep the pace up for the entire game. The idea of this show isn't so much a contest between the painters of opposing nations, it's to illustrate how similar their art was 350 years ago in the context of a united European culture (strong message here, one might say). National differences were overstated by art historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, the curators argue. Works by Spanish and Dutch masters hang side by side, for you to compare and contrast....

If you want a great view of London, there's always been one place to go: Greenwich Hill . Where else then, to depict the distant towers and spires of the City about a dozen years after the Great Fire of 1666 that razed so much of it, with a windmill on the heights of Highgate or Hampstead. These days, your eyes might be drawn more to the right, to the towers of Canary Wharf. This painting, attributed to the Dutch painter Johannes Vorsterman (or maybe Vorstermans ), is the opening image in The Architecture of London , a show at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the heart of the City that's sometimes quite fascinating, at other times a little bit on the dull side. This isn't really an exhibition full of great paintings, but it demonstrates both how London has changed down the years as well as how artists have interpreted one of the greatest cities in the world. That's not to say there aren't some big names. Such as the master of the cityscape himself, Canaletto, makin...