The Art Exhibitions Blog

August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run.  The one major opening is  Gwen John: Strange Beauties  at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023.  Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...

London's Courtauld Gallery is our first stop this month, for Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection in the Swiss city of Winterthur. Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh are among the artists featured in this show, which is taking place because the villa Am Römerholz, where the collection is usually housed, is being renovated this year. This exhibition is on from February 14 to May 26.  Think of Chelsea, and you may think of the annual flower show. The Saatchi Gallery, right on the King's Road, is picking up on that theme, playing host to some 500 artworks and objects in what looks to be a somewhat overwhelming exhibition entitled Flowers -- Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture . Dozens of artists are listed as being featured -- Pedro Almodóvar, Elizabeth Blackadder, Michael Craig-Martin and Damien Hirst, to name just a handful. It's on from February 12 until May 5. And with a younger audience in mind, Young V...

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...

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...

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...