Here is the Artlyst pick of out-of-London exhibitions on view this winter. There is renewed interest in the Bloomsbury Group and its circle with solo presentations of works by Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington. Other solo shows include Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Walker and Glenn Ligon. The Barber Institute embraces a new way of interacting with the Pre-Raphaelites (spoiler alert, it’s through scent), while Hastings Contemporary explores a fascinating new take on the still life genre.
Vanessa Bell
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
19 October 2024 – 23 February 2025
The exhibition surveys Bell’s entire career for the first time. It presents a complete picture of the range of her practice through more than 140 works, including paintings, drawings, furniture, ceramics, designs for murals, advertising, and book covers, some of which have rarely been seen before.
A pioneer of British abstraction, Vanessa Bell was born in London in 1879 and died in Sussex in 1961. Along with her sister Virginia Woolf and fellow painter Duncan Grant, she was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group. Her role in creating the conditions in which artistic practice could flourish, from the Friday Club to the Omega Workshop, has left an indelible mark on the history of British art.
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Read Sara Faith’s Review Here
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury
Pallant House, Chichester
9 November 2024 until 27 April 2025
This will be the first museum exhibition of works by Dora Carrington (1893-1932) in almost 30 years. The Barbican Art Gallery held the last major exhibition of her work in 1995 and in the same year Emma Thompson starred as the free-spirited painter in the film Carrington. Co-curated by Anne Chisholm, editor of Carrington’s Letters (2017) and Ariane Bankes, the exhibition will reveal the continued relevance of Carrington’s remarkable work and unconventional life.
As a significant contributor to Modern British art during the interwar years and an associate of the Bloomsbury Group, Carrington was described as ‘the most neglected serious painter of her time’ by former Tate Director, Sir John Rothenstein. This exhibition aims to reposition Carrington in the history of Modern British art. Spanning paintings, drawings and prints from across her career, the exhibition will include film and photographs from private and public collections. It will form a powerful portrait of Carrington, exploring her defiance of gender norms and her circle of eminent friends. Taken together, her artworks, many made for her friends, capture a Bohemian way of life: loving, creative, domestic and intimate.
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Read the Review by Brian Childs Here
Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances
Firstsite Colchester
26 October 2024 – 23 February 2025
This autumn, the first exhibition of Leonora Carrington’s artwork in the East of England will take place at Firstsite in Colchester.
Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances (26 October 2024 – 23 February 2025) delves deep into the extraordinary artistic and personal worlds of the British-Mexican artist and the artistic friends she made through her travels. The show also marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington’s 1974 surrealist novel.
Over 70 artworks by Carrington and her circle of friends – including rarely seen paintings, drawings and prints from private collections – along with artefacts, archive material, and objects will be shown in a region that holds a special significance to the artist.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent many of her early years in the east of England. The influence of these experiences and local landscapes can be seen in the mystical and magical pictures she produced throughout her extraordinary career, drawing on religious iconography, patriarchal motifs, witchcraft and fairytale themes.
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Read the review by Revd Jonathan Evens Here
Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Spectacular Diversions
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
26 October 2024 – 1 March 2025
A major new solo exhibition by one of the most celebrated and exciting artists working in the UK today – Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE (b.1957) – will open in October at Compton Verney.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Spectacular Diversions (26 October 2024 – 1 March 2025) will feature newly commissioned work, including a neon and a series of works on paper, and will explore a broad range of themes, from Hindu Punjabi identities to feminist thought, Bollywood idols, the blending of popular culture and high art, and working-class experiences, all through a prism of colourful multi-layered works.
Filling a suite of galleries at Compton Verney, the exhibition will feature work in every media Burman has used during her 40-year career including drawing, printmaking, collage, painting, sculpture, installation and film.
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Scent & the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
Barber Institute, Birmingham
11 October 2024 – 26 January 2025
A new exhibition this autumn at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, promises to be a delight for the senses – both visual and olfactory.
The link between scent and memory, and that certain smells can instantly evoke strong emotions and recollections has long been recognised. For the Victorians, sensory details in paintings were thought to be able to trigger a variety of visceral responses: a still life of flowers might prompt the viewer to believe they could smell the blooms.
The exhibition aims to evoke the smells of objects and scenes depicted in some of the most iconic works by Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse.
Immortal Apples, Eternal Eggs
Hastings Contemporary
21 September 2024 – 16 March 2025
The exhibition is a meeting of two of the UK’s most significant collections – The Ingram Collection and the David and Indrė Roberts Collection and includes work from artists Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Sir Anthony Caro, Patrick Caulfield, Michael Craig-Martin, Dame Elisabeth Frink, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Sarah Lucas and many others.
The exhibition juxtaposes world-class contemporary sculpture, video, and installation alongside traditional still-life painted works. It aims to challenge assumptions about this familiar genre, invite new perspectives, and ask viewers: What really is still life?
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Read the Review by Brian Childs Here
Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess
The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
As part of a series of interlinked exhibitions and programmes exploring Why Do We Take Drugs? celebrated artist Lindsey Mendick has created new ceramic works for the Sainsbury Centre to explore her thoughts on the topic.
In her most personal work to date, Mendick explores her intertwined relationship with alcohol, mental illness and antidepressants. Through mythology, pathos and humour, she unpacks her (at times) debilitating anxiety and how society has learned to self-medicate by taking drugs and drinking socially.
In this series, Mendick nods to the work of Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin, and Arman (Armand Fernandez). Her work has been positioned around the Sainsbury Centre collection display, disrupting the aesthetic to represent the hungover aftermath of a party.
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Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya
The Holburne Museum, Bath
27 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Both Goya and Rego have long been associated with the concept of the uncanny. Themes and imagery in their work draw on a feeling of disconcerting and unsettling familiarity, whether through the absurdity of social rules—as observed by Goya—or the ruthlessness of childhood verses, as noted by Rego.
The exhibition presents Goya’s Los Disparates (The Follies) (1815-1824) alongside Rego’s complete Nursery Rhymes, a series of over 30 etchings and aquatints. Exploring how two artists living a century apart resorted to similar visual motifs and narrative devices, the exhibition examines how Goya’s influence on Rego is apparent through the media and techniques she employed as well as through some of her themes and aesthetics.
In addition to the uncanny, the exhibition explores notions common to both artists such as absurdity and satire, folklore, humour, violence, sensuality, deception, the supernatural, and animalisation. It includes drawings and 3D objects, including some of Rego’s studio props that are equally indebted to Goya in their depiction of mythical and fairy-tale characters.
Embracing the wonderful, bizarre, and frightening aspects of human experience through the work of two Iberian artists, the exhibition will present the compositional and narrative mastery of two artistic giants.
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Barbara Walker Being Here
The Whitworth, Manchester
4 October 2024 – 26 January 2025
The first major survey exhibition by British artist Barbara Walker (b.1964, Birmingham, UK), charts her compelling figurative practice from 1990s to today.
Being Here presents over 70 extraordinary artworks, including rarely seen paintings, her Turner Prize nominated drawing series Burden of Proof (2022-23), and a newly commissioned printed wallpaper Soft Power (2024).
For over twenty-five years, Walker has been making intensely observed and empathetic figurative work that creates space for Black presence, power and belonging. Ranging from delicate graphite drawings on archival documents to a monumental charcoal wall drawing, Walker tackles wide-ranging themes such as the policing and surveillance of Black life, twentieth-century war histories, immigration and Old Master paintings to challenge conventions of representation and the histories they are rooted in.
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Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
20 September 2024 – 2 March 2025
Experience the work of American contemporary artist Glenn Ligon in a landmark exhibition that brings together his works alongside his unique interventions in our galleries.
Widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary artists working today, Ligon is best known for his text-based paintings, which include the words of writers such as James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston. Through these artworks, he explores the social, cultural and political constructions of race.
Alongside Ligon’s original paintings, sculptures and prints, All Over The Place presents a series of site-specific interventions curated by the artist throughout the Museum aimed at peeling back the layers of history and meaning to reveal a new perspective on our collection.
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Lead image: Compton Verney photo by Sara Faith ©Artlyst 2024