Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season
Slide Nr 1The international art calendar can be a wonderful travel guide. It will take you to the big creative capitals, as well as to emerging destinations and unlikely communities off the beaten track. For an itinerary saturated with art, we present the season’s top 25 must-see art exhibitions, opening events and new museums around the globe. [MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 3São Paulo, Brazil – The São Paulo Biennial seems positively ancient by comparison. Held every two years without interruption since it was founded in 1951, it remains South America’s foremost art event. In 2018, the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo – as it is known in Portuguese – proposes “an evolution in the pervasive curatorial model in contemporary art exhibitions”. Instead of a central curator or curatorial committee, this year’s event will host seven different exhibitions, each curated by a different artist. The “guiding principle” Affective Affinities is intended to function not as a theme, but as the overarching idea, “showing the artistic and cultural links and affinities and the multiple influences that are intrinsic to the artistic process.” [Exhibition “Song”, at The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago (2017). Courtesy: Alejandro Cesarco and Tanya Leighton Gallery. Photo: Useful Art Services]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 4Chicago, USA – Never underestimate the power of seeing an artist’s work in the place where he was from, lived or first found success. John Singer Sargent’s work is often seen in museums, especially in the US, but John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age at the Art Institute of Chicago shines a spotlight on his work in the city, his influence on the contemporary local art scene and the popular reception of his opulent paintings. The fact that this retrospective is taking place in the very museum that first showed Sargent’s work is a particularly poignant touch that adds to the appeal. [John Singer Sargent, Street in Venice, 1882. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Avalon Foundation]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 5Cornwall, NY, USA – It seems particularly fitting that an art centre largely defined by its unique natural setting and carrying a potentially violent phenomenon of nature in its name is holding an exhibition devoted to climate change. Storm King, the sprawling sculpture park in Upstate New York presents Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, exploring the impacts of the changing climate in the very place where it first becomes visible – in nature. The centre has always been concerned with the environment, using art to achieve land conservation, amongst other goals. This exhibition finds an artistic language to convey the impact of a changing environment. [Elaine Cameron-Weir, A toothless grin. A STAR EXPANSION! GLOBE OF DEATH A graveyard orbit, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson.]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 6Potomac, Maryland, USA – Glenstone, the private art museum near Washington, DC will grow exponentially in size once its expansion opens in October. Founded in 2006 to hold the private art collection of Mitchell and Emily Rales, the museum features “iconic examples of modern and contemporary art”. With the new museum building, it will continue to do so on five times the exhibition space and with twice the outdoor space for the sculpture garden. The new buildings, collectively referred to as the Pavilions, will provide a new public entrance and arrival building, two cafés and rooms of varying size to host single artist installations, as well as frequently rotating displays from the collection. [Water Court of the Pavilions, 2017 Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Glenstone Museum]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 7New York, USA – The Metropolitan Museum hasn’t lost its knack for hosting crowd-pleasing blockbuster exhibitions (Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination), beautiful shows highlighting treasures from the collection (In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met) and in-depth examinations of niche subjects (On the Ropes: Vintage Boxing Cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection) – all at the same time. Add to that list fascinating pop cultural examinations of artistic themes, like Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy. Like all art, the works featured are partly based in reality, part fiction, but what sets them apart is a subject matter that is built on unclear and shifting lines between truth and lie, fantasy and reality – just like a good conspiracy theory. [Jim Shaw. Martian Portraits, 1978]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 9London, England – Clearly the exorbitant real estate market isn’t stopping galleries and museums from launching new ventures and/or expanding all across London. This autumn alone will see the opening of South London Gallery’s Fire Station Building, a redesign of a historic building across the road from the gallery’s main building, and the completion of the Goldsmiths University Centre for Contemporary Art in a heritage-listed Victorian bathhouse. The London Museum of Photography is set to open later in the year in Whitechapel, while other galleries and museums are building and expanding. [South London Gallery’s Fire Station Building. (1) Peckham Road Fire Station, 1905. London Metropolitan Archives. (2) View of proposed new entrance by 6a architects. (3) Former Peckham Road Fire Station, April 2016. Photo: Andy Stagg]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 10Hastings and St Leonards, England – Hastings and St Leonards, two merged towns on the Sussex coast less than an hour from London, have in recent years become hotbeds for young artists and designers escaping the big smoke. Leaning into the title “Shoreditch Of Sussex”, the town hosts an annual festival designed to introduce locals to the thriving arts scene and draw visitors from the nearby capital for an artsy seaside jaunt. Coastal Currents is planned around a curated programme featuring bespoke contemporary art commissions, plus two weekends of open studios and special events throughout the month.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 11Dundee, Scotland – The Victoria and Albert Museum, reliable deliverers of at least one sure-fire blockbuster exhibition per year, is opening its highly anticipated Scottish outpost. Presumably this means that Dundee will feature more heavily in future must-visit art event listings. For now, their opening weekend sets the mood with the permanent collection of the Scottish Design Galleries and the inaugural exhibition Ocean Liners: Speed and Style accompanied by a weekend-long launch programme. The free 3D-themed festival will feature music, activities and design workshops, ties in with Scotland’s Year of Young People 2018 and will pay homage “to Dundee, design and the city’s spirit of discovery”. [Photo © Hufton+Crow]
10/25
Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 12Scheveningen, The Hague, Netherlands – As beach season begins to wind down, Scheveningen’s Seaside Celebrations move from the ocean to the museum. After a summer of sand sculpture competitions and sailing races to mark the 200th anniversary of the Dutch seaside resort’s first public bath, local museums examine the impact of the North Sea scenery on artists who were inspired by the light, the landscape and presumably the holiday atmosphere. Most famously on an international level, Piet Mondrian was amongst the Dutch painters who summered in Scheveningen. See how he and others depicted the district in The Hague School & Scheveningen and Beside the Sea – Jan Toorop, Piet Mondrian, and Jacoba van Heemskerck, both at the Gemeentemuseum. [Gemeentemuseum, Beach Life]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 13Brussels, Belgium – Many would currently choose political stability and artistic stagnation over political unrest and artistic innovation, but in retrospect, the exciting art created during times of upheaval has an undeniable intrinsic value. Case in point: the work created by artists such as Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the German capital during the turbulent beginning of the past century. The New Berlin 1912-1932 “focuses on politicized art and the urban challenges of the modern but war-scarred metropolis”. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium also takes into account the links between the Belgian and German art scene, but the lasting impression is that of radical change serving as the impetus for radical innovation, no matter the price. [Herbert Bayer, Lonely Metropolis, 1932, photography of the original photo, Köln, Museum Ludwig, © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 14Berlin, Germany – An upcoming exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin is likely to appeal to many for reasons beyond the art on display. The exhibition, which has already been shown in Bern and Bonn, has been criticised for catering to the more salacious and sensationalist reasons for public interest. We say: may those who are truly not even a bit interested in a collection containing art looted by Nazis cast the first stone. Gurlitt: Status Report shows a selection of the over 1,000 works, some of questionable origin, found in the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012. The Berlin update of the exhibition is expected to address some of the criticism and offer a more realistic context for the actual provenance of the art, merely a handful of which has been confirmed as looted. [Max Liebermann, Figures at the Seaside. Bequest of Cornelius Gurlitt 2014, Provenance undergoing clarification]
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Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 15Berlin, Germany – If you have ever enjoyed a Long Night of the Museums in any city anywhere in the world, you may not have realised that the idea for such an event first originated in the German capital over 20 years ago. The Lange Nacht der Museen is still going strong, so visit the original on the 25 August, when around 80 museums invite more than 30,000 visitors to enjoy 800 events across the city. As part of a parallel event called MuseumSommer, many of the highlights take place in outdoor settings, making the bustling city part of the attraction.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 16Halberstadt, Germany – As we’ve discussed recently, biennials have become a must-have for any city that perceives itself as a cultural metropolis, drawing attention to a thriving art scene, renowned art galleries and well-frequented museums. Monat_Kunst_Halberstadt (Month_Art_Halberstadt) takes a different approach. A local non-profit launched the contemporary art event in a town that is and has none of the above. Halberstadt is a pretty yet sleepy town in the economically underdeveloped Sachsen-Anhalt region of former East Germany. Under the theme of Klimawechsel – Climates of Change, the biennial brings life to empty shopfronts and other locations throughout town.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 17Rüsselsheim, Germany – The visual arts get an olfactory twist in an exhibition at Opelvillen Rüsselsheim. Housed in a villa once occupied by the son of the Opel car company founder, the municipal gallery presents varied arts programmes that appeal to all ages. The exhibition Der Duft der Bilder (The Scent of Pictures) is centred around the collection of olorVISUAL (visual odor), founded by Spanish perfumer Ernesto Ventós Omedes. True to his profession, he doesn’t just amass paintings, sculptures, videos and photographs, but creates scents that capture the essence of each work. Visitors get to decide if the synaesthesia mirrors their own associations, and whether it deepens or alters their perception of the art.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 18Vienna, Austria – It’s been 450 years in the making, so we might as well start celebrating early …seems to be the thinking at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Bruegel, their exhibition marking the anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 2019, “the world’s first-ever major monograph exhibition” on the Dutch painter, opens in October 2018. 12 of the artist’s 40 surviving paintings are already in the Vienna museum’s collection. Many more will be there on loan for the period of the exhibition, in some cases leaving the museums and private collections to be exhibited elsewhere for the first time ever.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 19Venice, Italy – Venice is sticking a little more closely to anniversary dates as it celebrates 500 years of Jacopo Tintoretto. The painter was born as Jacopo Robusti in Venice in September 1518. His native city shows pays tribute to his work and the mark it left on the churches, palaces and museums of Venice. He was a productive painter who rarely left home and more than 700 of his paintings can still be found in his home town today. The Gallerie dell’Accademia, which has many of his works on permanent display, is putting on a special exhibition titled Tintoretto Giovane and Palazzo Ducale, the former seat of Venetian government, is showing the results of an international research project, Tintoretto: The Artist of Venice at 500. [Photo: Palazzo Ducale]
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Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 20Paris, France – If you haven’t been to Paris since it opened, we highly recommend you pay a visit to Lafayette Anticipations. The 2,200sqm art space has found a home in a light-filled, loft-like 19th century building in the Marais, renovated by Rem Koolhaas and his architecture firm OMA. The goal was to create a place that encourages creativity by being flexible and adaptable. The current group show Le centre ne peut tenir (the centre cannot hold) is a litmus test of its ability to inspire artists, as most of the work was exclusively commissioned by the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette and created on site.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 21Bilbao, Portugal – The work of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, presented in one of the most recognisable architectural sculptures in the world. Alberto Giacometti. A Retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao presents a comprehensive overview of all creative periods in the Swiss artist’s life, encompassing Cubist, Surrealist and Expressionist phases. It’s one of the rare opportunities – in fact, only the second time since 1956 – to see the Femmes de Venise group in public. For a special experience, visit on the one Friday a month that the museum opens for “Art after Dark“, and explore the exhibition between 10pm and 1am accompanied by live DJ sets. [Alberto Giacometti, Women of Venice (Femmes de Venise), 1956. Fondation Giacometti, Paris. © Alberto Giacometti Estate]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 23Beirut, Lebanon – Unlike most art capitals, Beirut has had to persevere through decades of adversity to stay afloat. In recent years, as museum (re-)openings and gallery openings have created a sense of hope for the future, Beirut Art Fair has become a formal platform for the local art scene to come together annually. The associated Beirut Art Week takes in events at local galleries museums, but also public spaces throughout the city, serving to draw in even those members of the public who don’t consider themselves part of the scene. [Young-Deok Seo, Despair #205, 2016. Courtesy of Opera Gallery]
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 24Tokyo, Japan – No doubt the most unusual museum opening of 2018, some might even argue that MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless barely even qualifies as a museum. It definitely needs a catchier title, but what it lacks in titular appeal, it more than makes up for in innovation potential. The collaborative project merges art and entertainment, immersive and participation elements, digital and traditional art forms. Perhaps most intriguingly, it does away with – as the name puts it – borders. In practice, this means that artworks aren’t housed in separate rooms and don’t end at the door. Rather, there is a seamless transition between them, as well as between the roles of onlookers, creators and the art itself.
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Special Unmissable Events
Destination Art: The Top 25 Art Events This Season.
Slide Nr 26Melbourne, Australia – Not so much an opening announcement as an opening warning. With the Lyon Housemuseum public gallery to be completed in early 2019, Melbourne is due to lose one of its most delightful art secrets. Once the dedicated gallery is open to the public six days a week, the pre-booked visits, strictly limited to short time slots on a handful of days per month, will be a thing of the past. On the upside, more people will have the opportunity to enjoy Corbett and Yueji Lyon’s private collection of Australian contemporary art, and the Lyon family will have less punters traipsing through their home, where the collection is currently housed. On the downside, the secret will be out, so book a slot for one of the last under-the-radar tours now before the crowds arrive.
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