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...

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...

The year was 1967. In Chichester (of all places), Mick Jagger was on trial for drug possession, and amid the media frenzy he was photographed in the back of a police van handcuffed to fellow defendant, art dealer Robert Fraser. In 2018, Richard Hamilton's reworking of that press snapshot into one of the iconic images of British art in the 60s -- Swingeing London '67 -- is one of the highlights of  Pop! Art in a Changing Britain , in the very appropriate surroundings of Chichester's Pallant House Gallery. Hamilton, one of the pioneers of the movement in Britain, said that among the characteristics of Pop Art were that it was transient and expendable. And yet 50 years on, Pop is still all around us. Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of the technique of the comic strip has become an advertising cliche, Eduardo Paolozzi's mosaics  and statues are all over London, and Peter Blake's Everybody Razzle Dazzle  ferry lights up the Mersey. This exhibition in Chiche...