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Showing posts from May, 2021

New Exhibitions in April

You may have noticed that it's the 250th anniversary of John Constable's birth this year, while JMW Turner was born 250 years ago last year and Thomas Gainsborough's 300th birthday falls in 2027. Put them all together and you get  Gainsborough, Turner and Constable: Inventing Landscape  at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk. This show, running from April 25 to October 11, explores the emergence of English landscape painting through three of its greatest exponents, and it features mostly rarely seen works from private collections -- including Turner's Abergavenny Bridge , which hasn't been on public display since 1799!  Meanwhile, the show that's just been on at Gainsborough's House --  Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk  -- transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, starting on April 4. On till November 1, the exhibition explores the pivotal role the time Spencer spent in Suffolk had on his career. You can read he...

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Opening in June

Peter Paul Rubens' Rainbow Landscape -- that symbol of hope seems a fitting image to start with this month as the weather finally turns summery and the coronavirus pandemic looks to be on the wane, variants permitting. June 3 will see the painting brought together at London's Wallace Collection with its companion piece, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning  from the National Gallery, for the first time in 200 years. Het Steen was Rubens' country estate outside Antwerp, and these paintings appear to have been made for his own pleasure. Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes  is free of charge, though there's a suggested £5 donation, and it runs until August 15.  Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern is, in principle, meant to be open to the general public from June 14, but the Tate says all tickets up to October 24 are sold out and the next lot won't be released until September. So you can either mock up your own Kusama-inspired immersive installati...

Opening in May

Those government-designated hotbeds of coronavirus infection that are England's public museums are due to open again on May 17, and all those exhibitions that have been stuck behind closed doors for months now will suddenly be able to welcome the public. So there's a lot of new shows to get through this month.... When the first lockdowns hit Europe last year, David Hockney was at his home in Normandy, and he spent three months recording in drawings on his iPad how nature in his immediate surroundings evolved day by day. The results can be seen at London's Royal Academy from May 23 to September 26 in  David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 , which features 116 works. You'll be familiar with Hockney's iPad drawings if you saw A Bigger Picture , the exhibition of his landscapes at the RA in 2012 (astonishing to think it was that long ago). The Normandy show goes on to Bozar in Brussels in October. Tate Modern also has a French theme, with the start on Ma...