Best art exhibitions in London 2019
Me Somewhere Else - Chiharu Shiota
Where: BLAIN| SOUTHERN
Date: 28th November 2018 - 19th January 2019
The Lowdown?
Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition centres around a new site-specific installation, along with sculpture and works on canvas.
In the titular installation, Me Somewhere Else, Shiota creates a vast net of yarn, which is suspended from the gallery ceiling and connected to the floor by a cast of the artist's feet. The blood red of the yarn is laden with symbolism, from the neural pathways in the human brain to the connections that bind us together…
Visit the Blain|Southern Website for more.
Moments - Yann Houri
Where: The Unit London
When: 20th Feburary – 11 April 2019
The Lowdown?
The work of Yann Houri focuses on the complexity of the human subject and human emotions in the virtual age. Through painting and installation Yann Houri portrays his passion for visually recreating human emotion in a violent and expressive form. Juggling between abstraction and realism, and employing an explosive colour palette, Yann Houri's rich works evoke feelings of resurrection, impalpable joy and an underlying sentiment of hope and joie de vivre…
Visit The Unit Website for more.
Tracey Emin – A Fortnight of Tears
Where: White Cube Bermondsey
When: 6th Feburary 2019 – 7th April 2019
The Lowdown?
Installed throughout the gallery’s spaces, this major exhibition includes sculpture, neon, painting, film, photography and drawing, all focusing on the artist’s own memories and emotions arising from loss, pathos, anger and love.
On entering South Gallery I, the viewer is confronted by fifty double-hung self portraits from an on-going series taken at different moments and states during the artist’s periods of insomnia. These unsettling and intimate close-ups, blown up in size and overwhelming in number, capture the habitual torment and desperation of these lonely wakeful hours.In her new paintings shown throughout the exhibition, Emin articulates the joy and suffering that is intrinsic to human existence, from the often fraught territory of sexual relationships, to the physical trauma of abortion, and the recent passing of her mother…
Visit the White Cube Website for more.
Shape Shifters
Where: Hayward Gallery
When: September 26th 2018- January 6th 2019
The Lowdown?
A major group exhibition of sculptures and installations that explored perception and space.Featuring 20 artists and spanning a period of roughly 50 years, the exhibition included innovative, minimalist sculpture from the 1960s as well as recent works that extend the legacy of this ‘optical’ minimalism in different ways. It also featured new commissions that have been made in response to the architecture of the Hayward Gallery.
Many of the artworks in this exhibition were constructed from translucent materials such as glass, acrylic and polyester resins. Others involved the use of reflective materials, including stainless steel, polished bronze and, in one case, engine oil…
Visit the Hayward Gallery Website for more.
Anthony Gormley Exhibition
Where: Royal Academy of Arts
When: 21st September - 3rd December 2019
The Lowdown?
The exhibition will explore Gormley’s wide-ranging use of organic, industrial and elemental materials over the years, including iron, steel, hand-beaten lead, seawater and clay. We will also bring to light rarely-seen early works from the 1970s and 1980s, some of which led to Gormley using his own body as a tool to create work, as well as a selection of his pocket sketchbooks and drawings.
Throughout a series of experiential installations, some brand-new, some remade for the RA’s galleries, we will invite visitors to slow down and become aware of their own bodies. Highlights include Clearing VII, an immersive ‘drawing in space’ made from kilometres of coiled, flexible metal, and Lost Horizon I, 24 life-size cast iron figures set at different orientations on the walls, floor and ceiling – challenging our perception of which way is up…
Visit the Royal Academy of Arts Website for more.
David Adjaye: Making Memory
Where: The Design Museum
When: 2nd February 2019 – 5th May 2019
The Lowdown?
This exhibition is part of the Design Museum programme inviting designers to think in public about a theme of their choice. The form that monuments take and the way that they are used is constantly changing. Monuments are a record of who we are in the world and what we have done.
Discover seven of celebrated British-Ghanaian architect, Sir David Adjaye’s landmark structures through the use of full scale installations, films, exquisite architectural models, rare artefacts that influenced the creative process and more. Projects include the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C and the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London…
Visit the Design Museum Website for more.
Mary Sibande: I Came Apart at the Seams
Where: Somerset House
When: 3rd October 2019 - 5th January 2020
The Lowdown?
An exhibition of new and celebrated works from one of South Africa’s most prominent contemporary artists, Mary Sibande. In her first solo exhibition in the UK, Mary Sibande presents a series of photographic and sculptural works exploring the power of imagination and constructive anger in shaping identities and personal narratives in a post-colonial world…
Visit the Somerset House Website for more.
Faith Ringgold Exhibition
When: Serpentine Gallery
Where: 6th June 2019 – 8th September 2019
The Lowdown?
As an artist, activist and children’s author Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem, New York) has challenged perceptions of African American identity and gender inequality for over five decades. Growing up in the creative and intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance and inspired by her contemporaries including writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka she is widely recognised for her painted story quilts combining personal narratives, history and politics ‘to tell my story, or, more to the point, my side of the story’, as an African American woman. This survey exhibition, Ringgold’s first in a European institution, is chronological and includes paintings, political posters and story quilts…
Visit the Serpentine Galleries Website for more.
Philip Colbert: Hunt Paintings
Where: Saatchi Gallery
When: 15th December 2018 – 13th January 2019
The Lowdown?
Unit London presents Philip Colbert 'Hunt Paintings', the London-based pop artist's largest solo exhibition to date, featuring twenty-five works. Philip Colbert will exhibit new pieces, including the large-scale Hunt Paintings and a series of monumental sculptures. The exhibition, curated by Sasha Craddock, will run over three galleries, including a virtual reality experience, which will allow the audience to immerse themselves in Colbert's World of Art.
Colbert's practice encapsulates the spirit of Pop art through his humorous, colourful, and flamboyant creations. Described as "the Godson of Andy Warhol", by Andre Leon Talley, Colbert continues the dialogue established by artists such as Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein. His multidisciplinary approach, with a focus on oil painting, updates the legacy of Pop art collage for the internet age, pushing the boundaries of artistic imagery…
Visit the Saatchi Gallery Website for more.
Nelson Mandela: The Official Exhibition
Where: 26 Leake Street Gallery
When: February - April 2019
The Lowdown?
Nelson Mandela: The Official Exhibition is the major new global touring exhibition that takes visitors on a personal journey through the life of the world’s most iconic freedom fighter and political leader. An immersive and interactive experience, the exhibition features previously unseen film, photos and the display of over 150 historical artefacts and personal effects on loan from the Mandela family, museums and archives worldwide.
This unprecedented exhibition provides fresh insight into the people, places and events that formed his character and the challenges he faced…
Visit the Official Mandela Website for more.
Es Devlin: Memory Palace
Where: Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery
When: 26th September 2019 – 12th January 2020
The Lowdown?
In this new large-scale work, commissioned by Pitzhanger, visitors are immersed within a vast chronological landscape mapping pivotal shifts in human perspective over 75 millennia. From the southern African caves in which humans made their first drawings, to the study in Switzerland where the world wide web was conceived to the steps of the Riksdaghuset in Stockholm where Greta Thunberg began her School Strike for Climate, the locations and moments represent a personal and subjective cartography and have been chosen by Devlin and her studio team to invoke our collective memories/history and to provoke dialogue and debate.
The 18-metre-wide sculpture physically fills the entire gallery space, with mirrored planes multiplying its dimensions to enable a reimagining of time and space…
Visit the Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery Website for more
