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Yearly Archives: 2022
Jim Threapleton: LOREM IPSUM at No 20 Arts from 7 October 2022 to 23 December 2022
No 20 Arts presents LOREM IPSUM, a solo exhibition of new works by Jim Threapleton. LOREM IPSUM is Jim Threapleton’s third major exhibition with the gallery.
Jim Threapleton – Maecenas VII 2022
This expansive new body of work continues to follow the artist’s pursuit of abstraction. It marks the development of a uniquely contemporary approach to traditional techniques.
Jim Threapleton – Pariatur I, 2022
Jim Threapleton is an artist working in London and Vancouver. He studied History of Art at Manchester University. In 2008 his BIFA nominated debut feature film, Extraordinary Rendition premiered in competition at the Edinburgh and Locarno International Film Festivals.
Jim Threapleton – Obcaecati II 2022
He completed his Fine Art MA in 2010 and was awarded his doctorate from Chelsea College of Art, London in 2016. He has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Courtauld, London, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore and Carles Taché Gallery, Barcelona. He was included in the 2021 Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting.
About No 20 Arts
Opened in January 2017, No 20 Arts is a centre for contemporary arts. A multi-functional space, the gallery hosts a programme of exhibitions, performances and events that support emerging and established artists working across all media.
No 20 Arts
20 Cross Street
London N1 2BG
For more information, visit the No 20 Arts website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in 2014, we attract thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Medi-Culture Festival at London Bridge – 20 to 26 October 2022
The Medi-Culture Festival is a free six-day festival at London Bridge which celebrates one of the most important medical areas of the capital that has been a home of pioneering medical development for nearly 1,000 years. Medi-Culture will bring live events, talks, walks, workshops, stories and stand-up to a string of venues from London Bridge to Westminster. World-leading medical and scientific sites such as Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals and King’s College London will join with cultural partners such as the Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret, Florence Nightingale Museum, Gordon Museum and Science Gallery to take their stories, ideas, thoughts and innovations directly to audiences.
Medi-Culture will cover a wide range of subjects from live Victorian surgery at the world’s oldest surviving operating theatre to medical stand-up and stories, delivered by comedians and health-care scientists; from talks on menopause, gene therapy, alcohol and convalescence, to anatomical drawing classes; from a Thames-side walk through medical history and modern health, to a beer-centric, yet medicinal, crawl of the area.
Medi-Culture tells the story of London Bridge’s contribution to world-class medicine, connecting institutions to a local audience of residents, workers and visitors.
Medi-Culture 2022 Highlights:
Thursday 20 October
For the Care of the Sick: A Brief History of St Thomas’ Hospital
Join Monica A. Walker, Ph.D. in Art History, for this fascinating journey into how old St Thomas’Hospital firmly established London Bridge as a centre of a medical culture that continues to develop today.
Time: 12.00 – 13.00 via Zoom.
Menopause – What would Florence do? Practicalities of Menopause
Wellness and fitness coach Karen Webb Green explores the experience of menopause throughout history and in the present. Find out how a new form of exercise, Trigger Point Pilates, is helping thousands of women reduce stress, release trauma, and balance hormones—all of which are key to reducing many of the symptoms of menopause.
Time: 13.15 – 14.00 via Zoom.
Friday 21 October
Stitch and Stem
Join scientists from the Centre for Gene Therapy and Regenerative Medicine (CGTRM) at King’s College London to learn all about stem cells, while embroidering them!
Time: 13.00 – 14.00. Venue: London Bridge Hive, 8 Holyrood Street London SE1 2EL.
Surgery and the Victorian Operating Theatre
Join us at the Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret for a trip back to the Victorian era and the surgical procedures that took place high above London Bridge in the attic of the 18th century St Thomas’ Church. You will witness the most common surgical procedures that took place in this original space nearly 200 years ago, learning about the horrors of surgery before anaesthesia and antiseptics helped pave the way for our modern medical procedures. Shown live from the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe, a remarkable survivor of the old St Thomas’ Hospital.
Time: 17.30 – 18.30.
Venue: Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret, 9a St Thomas Street London SE1 9RY.
Science Showoff with Dr. Steve Cross
Join us for a night of medically-themed stand-up comedy, stories, and silliness from some of London’s funniest people. Our MC, Dr Steve Cross has carefully collected an incredible line-up of comedians, historians, and medics to entertain you in the historic surroundings of Guy’s Medical School Chapel.
Line-up includes writer, comedian, podcaster and history presenter Iszi Lawrence; Kate Devlin, Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society at King’s College London; award-winning comedian, writer, and researcher, Cerys Bradley; NHS healthcare scientist Kip Heath; and game maker and writer Ed Jefferson.
Time: 19.00 – 21.00.
Venue: The Guy’s Chapel, King’s College London (entrance via St Thomas Street) London SE1 1UL.
Saturday 22 October
Medieval to Modern Medicine – Health and Wellbeing Walk Along the Thames
Take a walk through medical history and modern wellbeing along the banks of the Thames, as we explore the area’s medicinal connections, from the Florence Nightingale Museum to the Old Operating Theatre. With guide Julie Chandler, you will discover a monastic herb garden, 1950s exercise regimes, Victorian workplace risks, the founding of a children’s hospital, and the health benefits of boxing, chocolate, and beer!
Times: 11.00 – 13.00.
Venue: Meet at the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue, gardens of St Thomas’ Hospital, London SE1.
How to be Funny – with Dr. Steve Cross
A guide to making things fascinating through stories and comedy. Join coach and comedian Dr Steve Cross for a chance to find out how to bring your work, interests, and ideas to life for other people. He’ll steal tricks from the world’s best storytellers and joke-makers, and work together on how to perform them.
Time: 14.00 – 17.00.
Venue: London Bridge Hive, 8 Holyrood Street, London SE1 2EL.
Sunday 23 October
Hops, Herbs & Hospitals
Join Blue Badge Guide, Dafydd Wyn Phillips, on this beer-centric tour of London Bridge. Learn about some of the most famous local watering holes and the significance of the hop trade to the borough, as well as the medicinal value of hops and herbs utilised by the historical hospitals.
Time: 11.00 – 13.00. Venue: Meet at Southwark Needle London Bridge, south side, London SE1.
Monday 24 October
‘It’ll never happen to me’ – Alcohol Change
From the organisers of ‘Sober January’, London-based charity Alcohol Change UK presents an interactive talk for those who want to learn more about alcohol and re-evaluate their relationship with it. This will be a non-judgemental exploration of our relationship with alcohol and the reality of the progression of alcohol dependence.
Time: 13.00 – 13.45 via Zoom.
Tuesday 25 October
What would Florence do? Practicalities of Menopause
In this session, wellness and fitness coach Karen Webb Green explores the experience of menopause throughout history and in the present. Find out how a new form of exercise, Trigger Point Pilates, is helping thousands of women reduce stress, release trauma, and balance hormones—all of which are key to reducing many of the symptoms of menopause.
Time: 12.15 – 13.00. Venue: London Bridge Hive, 8 Holyrood Street, London SE1 2EL.
Anatomical Art
Join anatomical modeller and sculptor Eleanor Crook and curator William Edwards as they guide you around the Gordon Museum and Museum of Life Sciences, followed by a drawing class looking closely at exquisite and accurate wonders of medical history. Hosted by Performing Medicine, a Clod Ensemble initiative that provides creative training programmes for healthcare professionals and students.
Time: 14.00 – 17.00.
Venue: Gordon Museum of Life Sciences, Hodgkin Building, Guy’s Campus, London SE1 1UL.
Wednesday 26 October
Recovery – The Lost Art of Convalescence with Dr Gavin Francis
Dr Gavin Francis, author of the Sunday Times bestseller Recovery – The Lost Art of Convalescence, an uplifting account of hope and healing, speaks about the book and explores the role that compassion plays in recovering from illness.
Introduced by Dave Green, Director of Florence Nightingale Museum. Time: 17.30 – 18.30 via Zoom.
For more information or to book tickets, visit the Event website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Exhibition Review – To Be Read At Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural at the Charles Dickens Museum from 5 October 2022 to 19 February 2023
A new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum entitled To Be Read At Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts & the Supernatural celebrates Dickens’s interest in the paranormal. Opening in time for Halloween, the exhibition runs from 5 October 2022 – 19 February 2023 at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, the home of Dickens and his family in the late 1830s.
Charles Dickens wrote twenty ghost stories throughout his life, published from 1836 onwards. From A Christmas Carol to The Signal Man, to elements of Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby, as well as The Chimes and The Trial for Murder.
The exhibition brings together a collection of objects, posters, letters and books to reveal just how much Dickens enjoyed creating eerie scenes, disturbing characters and building tension to play with the emotions of his audiences.
Among the highlights of the exhibition:
The first public display of a letter from Dickens to his spiritually minded acquaintance, William Howitt, in which Dickens asks whether Howitt can suggest a haunted house that his friend might visit. On 31 October 1859, Dickens writes to Howitt about ghosts and asks whether he knows of “any haunted house whatsoever within the limits of the United Kingdom where nobody can live, eat, drink, sit, stand, lie or sleep without sleep-molestation” as he has a friend ready to pit himself against it.
Charles Dickens’s own copy of The Haunted Man, his 1848 ghost story. Dickens physically altered copies of his books for his public readings, adding stage directions and, in this edition, uses different coloured inks to indicate deletions, express emotions and emphasise emotive words.
While Dickens was undeniably fascinated by the notion of ghosts and hauntings, he was certainly sceptical, becoming more so as he grew older.
The power of Dickens’s ‘in person’ performances of his tales was legendary, and he enjoyed evoking emotions in his live audiences, as well as his readers, with ghostly stories. He performed his ghost-laden A Christmas Carol reading 127 times.
Dickens was a lifelong admirer of ghostly fiction and influenced many who followed him, including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. As a boy, Charles Dickens read the weekly horror magazine, The Terrific Register, later admitting that it had “frightened my very wits out of my head.”
This fascinating exhibition illustrates that Dickens, although a sceptic understood the value of using the supernatural in his stories. The ghosts in A Christmas Carol are a wonderful example of using spirits to highlight less than good human attributes. The exhibition makes full use of the museum and with its creaking stairs and small rooms is a perfect setting for tales of the supernatural.
Visiting London Guide Rating – Highly Recommended
Exhibition and Museum Information
To Be Read At Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts & the Supernatural
The Charles Dickens Museum, 48-49 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX
Dates: 5 October 2022 – 19 February 2023.
Opening hours: 10am to 5pm, Wednesday – Sunday (closed Mondays and Tuesdays)
For more information or to book tickets, visit the Charles Dickens Museum website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Exhibition Review: Cezanne at the Tate Modern from 5th October 2022 to 12 March 2023
Tate Modern presents a once-in-a-generation exhibition of paintings, watercolours and drawings by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Cezanne remains an influential figure in modern painting whose work has inspired generations of artists.
The exhibition brings together around 80 selected works from collections in Europe, Asia, North and South America, giving UK audiences their first opportunity in over 25 years to explore the breadth of Cezanne’s career.
The exhibition features key examples of his still life paintings, Provençale landscapes, portraits and bather scenes, including over 20 works never seen in the UK before such as The Basket of Apples c.1893, Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902-06 and Still Life with Milk Pot, Melon, and Sugar Bowl 1900-06.
The exhibition explores the events, places and relationships that shaped Cezanne’s life and work.
Cezanne was a young ambitious painter from the southern city of Aix-en-Provence, determined to succeed as an artist in the 1860s, yet constantly rejected by the art establishment.
Although he befriended Camille Pissarro and was for a time associated with the impressionists in the 1870s, he was determined to create his own radical style.
The exhibition traces Cezanne’s artistic development from early paintings made in his twenties such as through to works completed in the final months of his life.
Highlights include a room of paintings depicting the limestone mountain Sainte-Victoire, charting the dramatic evolution of his style.
Another gallery brings together several examples of Cezanne’s bather paintings, a lifelong subject for the artist, including The National Gallery’s Bathers 1894–1905, one of his largest and most celebrated paintings created in the final stage of his career.
The exhibition also considers his important relationships, particularly his wife Marie-Hortense Fiquet and their son Paul, immortalised in paintings such as Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair c.1877 and Portrait of the Artist’s Son 1881-2.
This fascinating and comprehensive exhibition challenges the idea that Cezanne was a solitary figure by considering his relationships with family, friends and fellow artists. The exhibition suggests that Cezanne did not want to be constrained by belonging to a group or school of art and he understood the importance of developing your own style and experimenting with materials and techniques.
Visiting London Guide Rating – Highly Recommended
For more information or to book tickets, visit the Tate Modern website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
IAAPA Expo Europe at London’s ExCeL Exhibition Centre from September 12th -15th 2022
IAAPA Expo Europe returns to London for the first time in over ten years, the Expo is a one-stop shop for the latest tech, innovation and trends driving the leisure industry.
As UK tourism and attractions ride the wave of recovery after the challenges of the pandemic. IAAPA Expo Europe explores some of the themes like innovation, technology, and sustainability across the recovering ‘experience’ market, attracting industry leaders from the biggest theme parks to hotels, local attractions, and zoos.
Over 500 exhibitors take over the enormous trade show floor, the event includes not only the trade show, but also a four-day education conference with leading industry professionals giving unique insights into the industry.
The exhibitors showcasing their latest products and services, including state-of-the-art rides, virtual reality, motion simulators, design and theming,
food and beverage, health and safety, point of sale, playground equipment, arcades and coin machines, pools, water equipment and much more.
Whilst the Expo is for trade only, the rides and products will be enjoyed by people in amusement and theme parks, zoos and aquariums,
family entertainment centres, historic and cultural tourist attractions, museums and science centres to shopping malls, hotels, and retailers all around the world.
For more information, visit the IAAPA Expo Europe website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in 2014, we attract thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Winslow Homer: Force of Nature at the National Gallery from 10 September 2022 to 8 January 2023
The National Gallery presents the first in-depth exhibition in the UK of the art of Winslow Homer (1836–1910), one of the most celebrated and admired American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The exhibition, which will display around 50 paintings and watercolours from public and private collections, spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, and presents an opportunity for visitors this side of the Atlantic to discover an artist who, although a household name in America. Homer is not well known in Europe. There is no painting by Homer in a UK public collection.
The exhibition will be both chronological and thematic and focus on powerful imagery of conflict and its resolution. It will explore the complex social and geopolitical issues of his era as well as broader concerns with the fragility of human life and dominance of nature.
Winslow Homer: Force of Nature explores show how the artist’s ability to distil complex situations to the most powerful, yet simple, compositions led to many of his paintings and dazzling watercolours becoming emblematic of post-Civil War American life.
Largely self-taught, having begun his career as a commercial illustrator for US publications such as Harper’s Weekly, Homer was adept at graphic art and visitors will see how he skilfully captured moments of historical significance without creating overtly political statements.
Highlights of the exhibition include his paintings from the front lines of the American Civil War (1861–1865), where he sketched battle scenes and camp life. The Civil War is the subject of one of his most famous paintings from this period, Prisoners from the Front (1866), shown at the beginning of the exhibition. Prisoners will be displayed with other Civil War-era pictures such as Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg (1864).
A section of the exhibition will be devoted to Homer’s return to the United States when he continued to be interested in the lives of African Americans after the end of slavery in a period known as Reconstruction (1865–1877). Homer’s A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876), depicting an encounter between a group of newly emancipated women and their former mistress. The Cotton Pickers (1876), features two Black women silhouetted against troubled skies while working in the cotton fields. This ambitious painting was acquired in New York in 1877 by a British cotton merchant who exhibited the painting at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1878.
The exhibition will also focus on Homer’s time in England. In 1881, he docked at Liverpool before heading to London where he visited the museums, studying ancient Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum and British painting at the National Gallery, including Constable’s landscapes and Turner’s oils and watercolours of peaceful seascapes and tumultuous scenes of storms and shipwrecks alike. From London, Homer headed to Cullercoats, a small fishing community on the North Sea near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which provided him with poignant and inspirational motifs of the dangers and hardships of maritime life and of the power of the ocean. The exhibition includes paintings from this period such as Inside the Bar (1883) and The Gale (1883-1893).
Between 1884 and 1909, Homer travelled to the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida, and Bermuda where he created many watercolours which suited the subjects of warm clear waters, lush vegetation, humid climate and dazzling light. Homer considered these works as integral and important parts of his art and legacy.
His fascination with the Caribbean increased alongside his life-long engagement with the charged subjects of racial prejudice, geopolitics and ecology. This culminated with his landmark tropical painting: The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906).
The exhibition will chart the final years of Homer’s life when he increasingly retreated from large urban centres, living in nature on the rugged coast in Maine, where he painted scenes of symbolic reflections on mortality. Paintings such as Driftwood (1909) and Right and Left (1909) will be on show.
Homer, Force of Nature is part of the National Gallery’s strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to American art.
For more information and tickets, visit the National Gallery website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in 2014, we attract thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Exhibition Review – Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics at the Barbican Art Gallery from 8 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics is the first survey in the UK of the work of American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) and the first major exhibition since her death in 2019. The exhibition explores Schneemann’s diverse and interdisciplinary work over six decades.
The exhibition features over 300 objects, from the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, as well as numerous private and public collections. Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics brings together paintings, sculptural assemblages, performance photographs, films and large-scale multimedia installations, as well as rarely seen archival material including scores, sketches, scrapbooks, programmes and costumes.
Although today, the personal and political are often enmeshed by many artists, Schneemann using this approach in the 1960s and 70s was considered radical. Schneemann often took her own body as a model and starting point to recognise and challenge how history had defined the lives and bodies of women.
Although predominantly known as a performance artist, she considered herself foremost a painter. Opening the exhibition are the artist’s rarely seen early gestural paintings, including Aria Duetto (Cantata No.78): Yellow Ladies (1957) and Pin Wheel (1957), a kinetic painting activated by the potter’s wheel on which it is mounted.
In her early works on canvas, Schneemann was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and Paul Cézanne, but was desperate to find her own style.
From the early 1960s, she experimented with ‘painting-constructions’ and ‘box-constructions’. For the assemblage Colorado House (1962), she slashed, ripped and reconfigured what she considered to be failed paintings, while for the diorama-like Pharaoh’s Daughter (1966), she filled a wooden box with glowing lights, slides of biblical scenes and mirrors.
The exhibition charts Schneemann’s radical work using her own body as a medium, key works from this period include a series of photographs from Schneemann’s first solo performance Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963), in which she staged a series of gestures amid a sprawling environment of materials.
For Up to and Including Her Limits (1976), she hung naked from a harness suspended in the corner of a paper-lined stage set, creating gestural abstract marks with crayons as she swung back and forth in a trance-like state.
In the early 1960s Schneemann was living in New York City and was part of the downtown scene. She became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a group of avant-garde interdisciplinary artists including Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, David Gordon and Steve Paxton, who took everyday gestures and materials as their medium.
Schneemann described her group performances as ‘kinetic theatre’, incorporating complex movement scores, sets, lighting, sound and technical innovations. Numerous performances are represented through photographs, films, scores, sketches, notes and costumes, including one of Schneemann’s most iconic performances Meat Joy (1964).
A focused section of the show shines a spotlight on Schneemann’s time spent in London. The city provided the context for several of her experimental performances, including Round House (staged at the Roundhouse in 1967, as part of a line-up that included poet Allen Ginsburg, anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing and Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, among others), Naked Action Lecture (performed at the ICA in 1968), and ICES STRIP/ISIS TRIP (performed on roller skates on a train travelling from London to Edinburgh in 1972).
The final section of the exhibition includes a series of works that address the precarious nature of life and the politics of human suffering in the context of the Vietnam War, the Civil War in Lebanon, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the artist’s own fight with cancer.
This fascinating exhibition illustrates that Schneemann was a radical pioneer who often often had to deal with considerable hostility to her work. Using deeply personal experiences in art can lead accusations of being narcissistic and a number of feminists raised this criticism of Schneemann’s work. Her later work concentrated on local and global politics especially related to how images from the media are diluted to obscure the suffering of war victims. Schneemann may not be widely known outside of the art world, but this exhibition is an opportunity to access her legacy in feminist art history.
Visiting London Guide Rating – Recommended
For more information and tickets, visit the Barbican website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
William Kentridge at the Royal Academy from 24 September to 11 December 2022
In September 2022, the Royal Academy of Arts will host a major exhibition of the work of the internationally celebrated South African artist, William Kentridge. Working closely with the artist and his studio, this ambitious and immersive exhibition has been specifically curated for the Royal Academy and will encompass the broad repertoire of Kentridge’s forty-year career. It will bring together important works spanning from the 1980s through to the present day, including charcoal drawings, animated films, a mechanical theatre, sculptures, tapestries and performance pieces.
William Kentridge, Drawing for The Head & The Load (The trumpets we used to blow), 2018.
William Kentridge is known for his distinctive drawings, animated films, performances, and largescale productions. While at times his work is semi-autobiographical, he also uses history to highlight the inequities, barbarity, and absurdities of the modern world. A particular area of focus is the European colonisation of and the ongoing post-colonial legacy across the African continent. The issues of racial inequality combined with social, political, and economic injustices are a critical component of Kentridge’s work. For many years Kentridge has also worked closely with a group of creative collaborators including composers, dancers, stage designers, puppeteers, weavers, printmakers, and metalsmiths.
William Kentridge,The Conservationists’ Ball, 1985.
A selection of Kentridge’s early, rarely-seen drawings from the 1980s and 1990s will be presented, including three triptychs displayed together for the first time and the most significant work from the period, The Conservationist’s Ball, 1985. Around 25 large charcoal drawings, made for the creative process of the eleven animated Drawings for Projection, will also be shown. An extensive selection of drawings from the entire series will be displayed together with five of the eleven animated charcoal-drawing films made between 1989 – 2020.
Several further important films, performances and installations will feature in the exhibition. A key installation will be Black Box / Chambre Noire, 2005, a mechanical theatre piece including puppets and projections, which interrogates the harrowing story of the massacre of the Herero people in Namibia, now considered the first genocide of the twentieth century.
Ubu Tells the Truth, 1997, is a sharply critical animated film referencing the play Ubu Roi (1986) by French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, which reveals the brutality of the apartheid system in South Africa. Alongside the film, Kentridge will create a large site-specific wall drawing to complement the film. Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015, is a three-screen projection which reflects on modern Chinese history and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Two of Kentridge’s films will have their first UK presentations in the exhibition; the short, animated film, De como não fui ministro d’estado, 2012 and Sibyl, 2019.
Willliam Kentridge, Comrade Tree, I Report to You, 2020.
Amongst the most recent works, made in 2021 – 2022, will be a sequence of large-scale tapestries, created especially for the Royal Academy galleries and made in the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot, Johannesburg. There will also be a group of large flower drawings, as well as a selection of Kentridge’s distinctive tree drawings. Many of these include rubrics, recalling a tradition that dates back to medieval manuscripts to emphasise certain words within a text. Conjunctions of words are gathered by Kentridge and used in his drawings in an apparently random manner.
For more information and tickets, visit the Royal Academy website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
Maria Bartuszová at the Tate Modern from 20 September 2022 to 16 April 2023
Tate Modern will present the UK’s first major exhibition of the work of Maria Bartuszová (1936-1996), an artist who created a world of sculpture on her own terms using innovative methods in plaster casting. From raindrops and eggs to the human body, Bartuszová took inspiration from organic forms and cycles in the natural world. Spanning the breadth of her remarkable 30-year career, this show will reveal a prolific body of tactile, sensual, and evocative sculptures, shaped by the artist’s personal experiences and deep love of nature.
Bringing together over 50 of Bartuszová’s delicate plaster works alongside bronze casts and aluminium reliefs, many of which have never been shown in this country before it will offer a rare chance to discover how this little-known artist created her own world of abstract sculpture.
Although born in Prague, Bartuszová spent the majority of her career in Košice, the second largest city in what was then Czechoslovakia, near the border with Hungary and Ukraine. Closed off from direct contact with European and global events during the Cold War, she worked in relative seclusion, with few opportunities to exhibit during her lifetime. Despite this, Bartuszová built an outstanding legacy of around 500 sculptures which remain a testament to her unique vision and persistent experimentation.
The exhibition will explore how Bartuszová worked inventively and quickly, using the fleeting and liquid process of casting to create simultaneously solid and delicate artworks. In the early 1960s, she created abstract shapes by pouring plaster into rubber balloons and moulding it using pressure and tension, a method she coined ‘gravistimulation’.
Maria Batuszová in her studio in Košice, Slovakia, with her sculptures c.1987 – photo: Gabriel Kladek
Experimenting further in the 1980s, Bartuszová developed a new practice of plaster shaping she termed ‘pneumatic casting’, in which she blew air into balloons and poured plaster over their surface. This created empty, negative volumes and ever more fragile, hollow shapes resembling shells and eggs – described by the artist as “a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe”. Works from Bartuszová’s Endless Egg series will be displayed alongside elaborate eggshell clusters such as Untitled (1984), expressing feelings of personal crisis in their fragility and destruction.
Bartuszová continually explored ways in which sculpture could engage the imagination and activate the senses. In the mid-1960s she began creating plaster sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, such as Folded Figure (1965), and later bronze and aluminium puzzle-like sculptures such as Folded Figure, Horizontal, Haptic, (1974 cast 1975) which could be taken apart and reassembled to spark creative thinking. A range of rarely seen archive photographs by art historian and photographer Gabriel Kladek document how her sculptures were innovatively used in expressive workshops for blind and partially sighted children.
The exhibition will also highlight how forms and themes that the artist developed in her studio were brought into public spaces through her state-funded commissions for buildings, monuments, playgrounds and fountains. The elongated droplets of Rain (1963) are echoed in the bronze fountain she created for the Institute for Physically Disabled Children in Košice (1967–71), while her geometric wall-based works inspired her monumental reliefs for the Southern Slovak Paper Mill (1973–5) and Eastern Slovak Steelworks (1974). Visitors will also discover the futuristic models Bartuszová designed for playground climbing frames and slides and explore the making process behind her monumental public sculpture Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.
For more information or to book tickets, visit the Tate Modern website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
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Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery from 1 October 2022 – 22 January 2023
The National Gallery stages a landmark exhibition to mark the centenary of the birth of the great 20th-century artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011.)
This first major survey of his paintings for 10 years will bring together a large selection of his most important works from across seven decades – spanning early works such as Girl with Roses from the 1940s; to Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) in the 1960s and right through to his famous late works.
This exhibition seeks to present new perspectives on Freud’s art, focusing on his tireless and ever-searching commitment to the medium of painting.
From his most intimate pictures to his celebrated large-scale canvases, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will give visitors the opportunity to see the wide range of work and the artistic development of one of Britain’s finest figurative painters.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will include more than 60 loans from museums and major private collections around the world including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate; the British Council Collection; London and the Arts Council Collection, London.
A connoisseur of European painting and regular visitor since his earliest days in London, Lucian Freud had a close association with the National Gallery. ‘I use the gallery as if it were a doctor,’ Freud told the journalist Michael Kimmelman. ‘I come for ideas and help – to look at situations within paintings, rather than whole paintings. ‘
For more information and tickets, visit the National Gallery website here
London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in 2014, we attract thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here
London Visitors 