Friday 20 February 2015

Art Shows in London, Bexhill, Turin...

Out of the Maze, by William Kurelek

Bethlem Museum of the Mind

Bethlem Royal Hospital
Monks Orchard Road
Beckenham
Greater London
BR3 3BX
The Maudsley Hospital (original the Bethlem hospital) has reopened its collection of works by former patients, including Richard Dadd and Canadian William Kurelek.

Tate Liverpool
Leonora Carrington

6 March-31 May
Leonora Carrington, 1917-2011, was a member of the Surrealist movement. Her paintings feature flying women with trees growing out of their heads, surrounded by fierce birds. She wrote short stories: in one, she turns into a hyena to avoid a dreary party. "Beautiful women have special lives like prime ministers but I don’t want that."

Dulwich Picture Gallery
Eric Ravilious

1 April-31 August
Ravilious painted the chalky landscape of Sussex, threaded with rain, barbed wire fences and leafless trees, using a tiny brush and very dry watercolour, building up an image with calligraphic strokes.  Expressionist distorted perspective adds dreaminess. When war broke out, he painted uniforms, battleships, planes, and the gun emplacements that had sprouted on the Downs. In 1942 on the way to Iceland his plane went missing.

National Portrait Gallery
London
from Feb
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was a portrait artist in the style of Velasquez. His subjects were the wealthy and leisured of his day in their plushy drawing rooms. These are more relaxed portraits of his friends and fellow artists, working or on holiday.

Palazzo Chiablese, Turin
Tamara de Lempicka
19 March-30 August (then travels to Budapest)
On the run from the Russian Revolution, Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) turned Cubism into high fashion, dressed her sitters in Vionnet, posed them in racing cars, and threw in some streetscapes from Metropolis. "Her young women may have geometrically simplified arms, perfect cones for breasts and hair that seems sculpted from sheets of steel, but they also have large, heavy-lidded eyes and languorous bodies," wrote somebody in Time in 2004.

Whitworth, Manchester
to 31 May
Cornelia Parker
Includes the contemporary artist's Cold Dark Matter, a constellation of charred wood suspended from the ceiling and lit from within. I shall always admire her for steam-rollering a huge heap of formal silver tableware.

Ladybird by Design
De La Warr Pavilion
Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex
The original art behind the Ladybird vision of perfect middle-class life in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Portsmouth
St Agatha's church
12-20 June
Embroidered church vestments and altar frontals, from the 15th century to now.

RIBA
Langham Place, London
to 23 May
Drawings by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

No comments:

Post a Comment