The Royal Academy has announced their exhibition programme for 2019 and it’s a force to be reckoned with. The exhibition programme includes major shows by Sir Antony Gormley, Phyllida Barlow and Bill Viola. See the full line-up below.
Bill Viola / Michelangelo Main Galleries 26 January – 31 March 2019
In January 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts will bring together the work of the pioneering video artist, Honorary Royal Academician Bill Viola (b. 1951), with drawings by Michelangelo (1475-1564). Though working five centuries apart and in radically different media, these artists share a deep preoccupation with the nature of human experience and existence. Bill Viola / Michelangelo will create an artistic exchange between these two artists and will be a unique opportunity to see major works from Viola’s long career and some of the greatest drawings by Michelangelo, together for the first time. It will be the first exhibition at the Royal Academy largely devoted to video art and has been organised in partnership with Royal Collection Trust. The exhibition will comprise 12 major video installations by Viola, from 1977 to 2013, to be shown alongside 15 works by Michelangelo. They include 14 highly finished drawings, considered to be the high point of Renaissance drawing, as well as the Royal Academy’s ‘Taddei Tondo’.
Bill Viola / Michelangelo is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in partnership with Royal Collection Trust.
Phyllida Barlow – The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries
23 February – 23 June 2019
Royal Academician Phyllida Barlow will transform the RA’s recently opened Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries with a series of large-scale installations which will spread across all three of the classical galleries, interrogating the spaces and challenging our perception of the architecture.
Throughout her long career, Barlow has consistently directed her focus away from the formal permanence of the sculptural tradition – eschewing notions of the monument and the monumental. By employing materials far removed from those associated with the traditions of sculpture, her work is unweighted from the past and from its dependence on heavy and uncompromising media. Utilising inexpensive everyday material to construct her work, she adapts, paints joins and takes it apart to create her sculptural installations.
The Renaissance Nude – The Sackler Wing of Galleries
3 March – 2 June 2019
In March 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts will present The Renaissance Nude, an exhibition examining the origins of the nude, and how it inspired some of the most renowned masterpieces of the western canon. Bringing together works by artists such as Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dürer and Cranach, the exhibition will examine a dynamic visual tradition that permanently altered the character and values of European art.
The Renaissance Nude will explore the emergence of the nude as a prominent artistic theme in Early Modern Europe within the contexts of the revival of the antique and the rise of naturalism. The exhibition will trace the broad scope of this achievement in Italy, as well as in Germany, France, and the Low Countries, arguing that important contributions to the establishment of the nude as a pivotal subject of European art can be found across the continent.
This exhibition has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and The J. Paul Getty Museum.
London Original Print Fair 2019 Main Galleries 25 – 28 April 2019
As the world’s longest running specialist fair dedicated to prints, The London Original Print Fair 2019 will welcome exhibitors from around the world, covering all periods of printmaking from Old Masters through to contemporary artists. For more information visit: www.londonprintfair.com
he Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show, is now in its 251st year. It provides a unique platform for emerging and established artists to showcase their works to an international audience, comprising a range of media from painting, printmaking and photography, to sculpture, architecture and film. It has been held each year without interruption since 1769. Around 1200 works will go on display, the majority of which will be for sale offering visitors an opportunity to purchase original work. A significant part of funds raised continue to contribute to financing the postgraduate students at the RA Schools.
Felix Vallotton The Sackler Wing of Galleries
30 June – 29 September 2019
In June 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts will present an exhibition of the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925). Comprising over 80 paintings and prints, the exhibition will be the first ever to show Vallotton’s paintings in the UK. Often overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries in the Paris-based Nabi group of the 1890s, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Vallotton remains comparatively little known outside his native Switzerland. Presenting a highly focused overview of his life and work, from his Nabi-style interiors and street scenes, to his bitingly satirical prints of bourgeois Paris, to later nudes, landscapes and his response to the First World War, the exhibition will demonstrate the intensity and breadth of Vallotton’s unique vision.
This exhibition has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne.
Helene Schjerfbeck – The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries
20 July – 27 October 2019
The Royal Academy of Arts will present a survey of the long and productive career of Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Celebrated as one of the most famous and highly regarded artists in Finland, it will be a rare opportunity to see key works of Schjerfbeck’s unique and distinctive paintings oeuvre together for the first time in the UK. The exhibition will feature around 60 portraits, landscapes and still lifes, charting the development of her work from a naturalistic style inspired by the French Salon in the early 1880s to a radically abstracted and modern approach from the turn of the century onwards. Included are striking examples from Schjerfbeck’s time spent in France and in the artists’ colony of St Ives, Cornwall, in the late 1880s. The highlight will be a sequence of progressively abstracted and increasingly raw self-portraits painted throughout her life from the age of 22 to 84 that reveal her fascination with ageing and the physical deterioration of the self.
The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Ateneum Art Museum/Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki.
Antony Gormley Main Galleries 21 September – 3 December 2019
In autumn 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts will present a solo exhibition of the internationally acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950), the most significant in the UK for over a decade. The exhibition will bring together both existing and major new works especially conceived for the occasion, from drawings and sculptures to expansive and immersive installations that will energise the RA’s Main Galleries. Gormley sees the exhibition as a ‘test site’; engaging the senses, employing scale, darkness and light, and using elemental, organic and industrial materials. The works will confront the Beaux-Arts architecture, creating a series of distinct encounters that will come together as a collective experience. It will be a summation of Gormley’s enduring concern with the dark space of the body and the body’s relation to its surroundings: the body as space and the body in space. This exhibition will follow in the Royal Academy’s tradition of celebrating its Royal Academicians, continuing a strand of programming that has showcased some of the most important living artists including David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer.
Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits – 27 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 The Sackler Wing of Galleries
Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits will be the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s self-portraits. Executed over almost seven decades on canvas, paper and etching plate, around 50 works will chart the trajectory through Lucian Freud’s (1922 – 2011) development as a painter: from his early, more linear and graphic works to the fleshier painterly style that became the hallmark of his mature work. They also chart a life’s journey, from young boy to old man, in what was effectively an ongoing study into the process of ageing and the changes it inflicted on his own physical form. Few other artists in the 20th century have portrayed themselves with such consistency. These works place Freud in a long lineage of artists, from Dürer and Rembrandt onwards, who made self-portraiture a recurring feature of their practice.
Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Eco-Visionaries The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries
24 November 2019 – 23 February 2020
Eco-Visionaries will explore current practices of art and architecture that, beyond mainstream notions of sustainability, respond with innovative approaches to the environmental transformations that are disturbing our planet. Through photography, film, installation, architectural models and digital media, architects and artists including Superflex, Unknown Fields, HeHe and Andrés Jaque, will examine the impact of human action on earth, suggesting ways in which we might respond to a rapidly changing world.
A project initiated by MAAT (Lisbon, Portugal), Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden), HeK (Basel, Switzerland) and LABoral (Gijón, Spain), in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts.
RA Schools Programme 2019
Premiums Interim Projects 2019 Weston Studio and The Ronald and Rita McAulay Gallery 14 February – 13 March 2019
Premiums Interim Projects will feature the work of artists in their second year at the RA Schools. This annual exhibition provides an opportunity to view new work by emerging artists at a point when their work is still developing whilst on their three-year postgraduate course. The exhibition will include works across a wide range of media including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, site-specific installation and video.
RA Schools Show 2019 RA Schools Studios and Weston Studio
20 – 30 June 2019
The RA Schools Show is the annual exhibition of works by artists graduating from the UK’s longest established contemporary art school, the RA Schools. The show will present work by emerging artists in a range of media with each exhibiting in solo spaces in the rarely-seen working studios within the Royal Academy. The show will coincide with the 250th anniversary of the RA Schools.
Top Photo: © P C Robinson Artlyst 2018