Great Art Tailor-made For Your British Staycation 2015

Regional art

If you’re planning on leaving the metropolis for your staycation, Artlyst has put together a selection of the best UK shows outside of London. Art ranging from 20th century leaders like the New York Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, the British sculptor Anthony Caro to contemporary masters like James Turrell and Fiona Tan, all will be on view this summer. Whether it be a regional gallery or a stately home it is often best to see great art outside of the mainstream urban venues.

North West

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots: Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 30 June – 18 October 2015

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at Tate Liverpool is the first exhibition in more than 30 years to explore the artist’s black pourings, a lesser known but extremely influential part of his practice. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see the largest number of Pollock’s black pourings ever assembled in the UK, with some never before seen in this country.

Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Voted Museum of the year 2015 and shortlisted for the 2015 RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture. This newly renovated and extended gallery is worth a visit.

Current exhibition: Portraits 14 February to 22 November 2015

A glimpse of the people behind the collections, the artists, collectors and individuals who shaped the Whitworth including works by Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer.

North East

Fiona Tan: Depot BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 10 July – 1 November 2015

This summer BALTIC presents a survey exhibition and a major new commission by the Dutch artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan. Born in 1966 in Pekan Baru, Indonesia, Tan works within the contested territory of representation: how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others.

North 

Terry Frost Leeds City Art Gallery 19 June – 30 August 2015

Celebrating the career of the leading modern painter, including a body of work he produced in the city of Leeds.

This exhibition brings together a selection of the artist’s most significant paintings, collages and sculptures to consider Frost’s work through the themes of performance, construction and colour. A collaboration between Leeds Art Gallery and Tate St Ives, the display spans his formative years in Cornwall to his time studying in Yorkshire, and his final years as Professor of Painting in Reading.

Anthony Caro: in Yorkshire The Hepworth Wakefield/ Yorkshire Sculpture Park18 July – 1 November 2015

A summer-long celebration of pioneering artist Antony Caro, staged simultaneously at venues across the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle.

Midlands

Pablo Bronstein And The Treasures Of Chatsworth: Nottingham Contemporary until 20 September 2015

For Season 1 of The Grand Tour at Nottingham Contemporary Pablo Bronstein has chosen 62 works of fine and decorative art to bring to our galleries – Chatsworth’s largest UK loan for 30 years. Works by Rembrandt and Franz Hals, Delft porcelain, the coronation chairs for William IV and Queen Adelaide, and a colossal Roman marble foot are among the objects that will appear within and alongside work by Pablo Bronstein, across all four of our galleries.

East Anglia

James Turrell Lightscape:  Houghton Hall Norfolk Until October 24th 2015

Houghton Hall, Norfolk, will host an ambitious and important exhibition of James Turrell’s light pieces, many collected by the Marquess of Cholmondeley, owner of Houghton, who has long been an admirer of his work.  You musn’t miss the illumination on the Hall from dusk until an hour after dark.

South Coast

William Gear 1915-1997: The painter that Britain forgot Towner, Eastbourne 18 July – 27 September 2015

In the centenary of his birth, Towner presents a major retrospective of William Gear, one of the leading abstract British painters of his generation.

Michael Petry  A Twist in Time:  Pallant House Gallery 4 July – 1 March 2016

A new contemporary installation in the Queen Anne townhouse by the American multimedia artist Michael Petry (b.1960), featuring glass sculptures created in direct response to the forms of the grand staircase and historic mirrors echoing the story of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Utilising traditional glass-making techniques Petry’s installation creates a dialogue with the Gallery’s historic glass collections, exploring questions of gender, craftsmanship and decoration.

Lowry by the Sea Jerwood Gallery, Hastings 10 June – 1 November 2015

A display of the artist’s lesser-known seascape paintings go on display in Hastings.

 

South East

 

Grayson Perry: Provincial Punk Turner Contemporary, Margate Sat 23 May – Sun 13 Sep 2015

Perry is one of the most prominent and incisive commentators on contemporary society and culture. His uniquely subversive art combines autobiographical reference, from his childhood to alter-ago Claire, with wry social commentary on class, taste, consumerism, war, and art versus craft.

See more than 50 works in this focussed survey of Perry’s practice, only on show in Margate. From a young artist forging his own language in Thatcherite 1980s Britain to his work today, the exhibition explores the idea of ‘Provincial Punk’ as an anti-elitist and teasingly unfashionable spirit of creativity at the heart of his work. 

South West

Tate St Ives Images Moving Out Onto Space

What happens when art works are set in motion? When they move around the gallery or out into the world? Images Moving Out Onto Space is an exhibition that asks these questions. The galleries are animated by light, colour and movement, and are full of bodies in all kinds of different states: flattened and fragmented, illuminated and reflected.

The exhibition brings together eight artists, with works spanning 50 years. The title and inspiration for Images Moving Out Onto Space is borrowed from a series of psychedelic kinetic sculptures that Cornwall-based artist Bryan Wynter began to make in the 1960s. The exhibition uses this series, Wynter’s ‘IMOOS’, to think about how abstraction can move us.

Scotland

Phyllida Barlow – Set – Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 27 June – 18 October 2015

A major exhibition of new work made specially for The Fruitmarket Gallery by Phyllida Barlow, one of the international art world’s brightest stars. Born in Newcastle in 1944, and with a career spanning five decades, Barlow is known for monumental sculpture made from simple materials such as plywood, cardboard, fabric, plaster, paint and plastic. Physically impressive and materially insistent, her sculptures are inspired by the outside world, and with the experience of living and looking.

Amazing World of MC Escher Scottish National Gallery (Modern 2) 27 June – 27 September 2015

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art brings together over 100 works, including original drawings, mezzotints, prints, woodcuts and lithographs, allowing a new audience the chance to witness his artistry first hand. Archival material is also featured, demonstrating his incredible creative collaborations with geometer HSM Coxeter and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose. The latter aided Escher in his development of the ‘impossible triangle’ in which an eternal physics-defying loop is created.

Wales

Chalkie Davies the NME Years National Museum Cardiff Until 6 September

The first retrospective exhibition of the Welsh (born 1955) photographer Chalkie  Davies The NME Years’ explores his photographs of musicians taken from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition looks mainly at the much revered Rock and Punk era, celebrating 40 years since his career at the NME began. The event will also coincide with the artist’s 60th birthday.

Words: Sara Faith © artlyst 2015

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