What’s On – London Art and Design Events November 2016

London Glassblowing is hosting a diverse collection of work by some of the UK’s foremost artists working in glass. Following her installation at Salisbury Cathedral, Sabrina Cant is showing examples of her extraordinary cast glass pieces. From the Czech Republic Ondrej Novotny is displaying his minimal and dramatic blown glass forms by rising star.

Eclectic will also feature Harry Morgan’s striking sculptural forms that juxtapose concrete and glass. Also on show are the exquisite sea-polished glass jewellery by Gina Cowen; smart designer lighting by Sarah Colson; cheeky cast mice by Morag Reekie with a serious message; and a wall sculpture by Keiko Mukaide.

The Winter Art & Antiques Fair Olympia returns to London for the 26th year with an impressive dealer lineup of 100 of the world’s leading specialist exhibitors. The exhibition is a key event in the art and antiques winter calendar, with dealers showing around 33,000 items from antiquity to the present day and prices ranging from £100 to £1million.

The show is popular with collectors, interior designers and those looking for exceptional pieces for stylish interiors. A full programme of talks accompanies the exhibition. Look out for interior designer Rachel Laxer, who will be discussing her formula for creating interiors that increase in value over time.

The astonishing variety and innovation of Picasso’s art is epitomised by his portraits. This major exhibition of over eighty works focuses on the artist’s portrayal of family, friends and lovers and reveals his creative processes as he moved freely between drawing from life, humorous caricature and expressive painting from memory.

On display will be portraits from all periods of Picasso’s career and in all media, from the realist paintings of his boyhood to his later ultra-spontaneous canvases. The works on show will range from celebrated masterpieces loaned by international institutions to works in private collections being shown in the United Kingdom for the first time.

This group exhibition – curated by Will Corwin – examines what it is to be human in view of the many pivotal technological changes that are taking place. The assertion is that faced with these epochal changes, humans are becoming fairly hybridised. The exhibition isn’t about new art media (there’s ceramics, tapestry, collage, photography, drawings and sculpture), but it’s theme is about the emerging new human.

Contemporary gallery Gazelli Art House supports a wide range of international artists, presenting a broad and critically acclaimed programme of exhibitions to a diverse audience through global public projects and exhibition spaces in London and Baku. Gazelli Art House was founded in 2003 in Baku, Azerbaijan where it held exhibitions with Azeri artists. From 2010, having hosted conceptually interlinked off-site exhibitions across London, Founder and Director Mila Askarova opened a permanent space on Dover Street, London in March 2012. The same year, the Window Project was launched utilising the frontage of the gallery as additional display platform. In 2015, the initiative was remodelled to solely accommodate art school graduates through open call competitions three times a year. In 2015, the gallery launched its Digital Art House, an online residency for artists working in the digital realm. As part of the gallery’s on-going commitment to art education, a series of events and talks are organised to run alongside each exhibition.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Elton John’s unrivalled modernist photography collection, drawn from the classic Modernist period of the 1920s–50s. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, including portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Breton.

There are over 70 artists and nearly 150 rare vintage prints on show from seminal figures including Brassai, Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. This is an opportunity to peek inside The pop star’s home and delight in seeing such masterpieces of photography.

Internationally acclaimed artist Romuald Hazoumé (b. 1962) – like El Antsui – epitomises the best of up-cycled art coming out of Africa. His fourth solo exhibition at October Gallery consists of three major installations, paintings, photography and masks. Hazoumè’s works are humorous and wryly political. His assemblages are specifically tied to his highly individual vision of society and his take on global problems. This timely exhibition, which will feature a five-metre long crashed boat and a dice made of thousands of found flip-flops, addresses the movement of people across the world and reflects upon the dramatic narratives created by migrants forced by war or famine from their home country.

This multi-faceted artist works in multiple media. He’s a painter, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, and his powerful creations mark him as one of the most innovative and exciting personalities to emerge from Africa. Hazoumè’s work first came to prominence in the U.K. with the inclusion of his ‘masks’ in the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Out of Africa’ show, in 1992. In the past twenty years his work has been widely shown throughout Europe, the United States and Asia, including the British Museum, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and recently this year, in two different sites at Gagosian, Paris.

Paul Nash was one of the most distinctive British painters and his beautiful landscapes have a surreal and mystical quality. Fascinated with Britain’s ancient past, Nash spent time in southern England exploring the downs and coastal areas. Equally inspired by the equinox and the phases of the moon, he used all these influences in his work, interpreting his environment according to a unique, personal mythology, evolving throughout his career.

This important exhibition reveals Nash’s importance to British modern art from his earliest drawings through to his iconic Second World War paintings.

This exhibition may not have had too many good reviews but don’t be put off. It’s still a great opportunity to experience the powerful collective impact of Pollock, Rothko, Still, de Kooning, Newman, Kline, Smith, Guston and Gorky. The 50s were a febrile watershed moment in the evolution of 20th-century art. The exhibition does well to express the boundless creative energy – centred on New York – of this era as it emerged from the horrors of the 2nd World War. These were the years of free jazz and Beat poetry, when artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted conventions to unleash a new confidence in painting.

These works were often monumental in scale, intense, spontaneous and deeply expressive. Occasionally these radical creations are more contemplative, presenting large fields of colour that border on the sublime. Bearing in mind what a game changer these works were, it is remarkable that there has been no major survey of the movement since 1959.

Unexpectedly photography and sculpture are also included in this survey of the phenomenon that saw New York take over from Paris as the capital of the art world.

London-based Lithuanian artist, Indre Šerpytytemost’s recent series of works uses collages of photographs to trace the transformations of Lithuania’s Soviet-era statues: from grand public spaces, to a kitsch theme park saturated with nostalgia. What happened between these two times and places – including the mysterious death of the artist’s own civil servant father – is buried in the glaring fault lines between the photographs. “Through my images I attempt to reconstruct my inherited memory in the attempt to make the past more tangible. By rebuilding the inherited history I try to reclaim it,” – Šerpytyte. Also featured in this exhibition is a new audio work, exploring the triumphant toppling of political statues, alongside new sculptural works, which use the allure of polished granite to delve into the connotations of the pedestal itself.

‘Vulgarity exposes the scandal of good taste’ Adam Phillips

This fascinating exhibition examines the boundaries of good taste and vulgarity through fashion over a period of 500 years. Examining the constantly evolving notion of vulgarity in fashion whilst revelling in its excesses, you are invited to rethink what makes something vulgar and why it is such a sensitive and controversial term.

Interestingly the exhibition is conceived by psychoanalyst Adam Philips in collaboration with fashion curator Judith Clark, and takes Phillips’s definitions of ‘the vulgar’ as its starting point. Drawn from public and private collections, with contributions from leading modern and contemporary designers, the exhibition presents pieces from the Renaissance to the present day, weaving together historic dress, couture and ready-to-wear fashion, textile ornamentation, manuscripts, photography and film.

The Vulgar showcases over a hundred objects, ranging from historical costumes to couture and ready-to-wear looks, with contributions from leading contemporary designers such as Walter van Beirendonck, Chloé, Christian Dior, Pam Hogg, Charles James, Christian Lacroix, Lanvin, Moschino, Miuccia Prada, Agent Provocateur, Elsa Schiaparelli, Philip Treacy, UNDERCOVER, Viktor & Rolf, Louis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood.

Moonlit scenes scenes were more a genre of 19th-century Romantic painting, but this show curated by artist Tom Hammick, begins a conversation that stretches over two centuries of sundown. 60 works explore the ideas and influences that have wound their way around paintings of nightfall from Edvard Munch and JMW Turner, to LS Lowry’s drunken pub scenes, to Louise Bourgeois’s sleepless spirals. Familiar themes creep out of the shadows, from wonderment and love, to revelry, anxiety and dystopia. Recent works elevate the activities of the contemporary nighttime, from Betsy Dadd’s indistinct portraits of women drinking, to Phoebe Unwin’s murky cinema, to Michael Craig-Martin RA’s ashtray, and the cold glow of the TV from outside Danny Markey’s windows.

‘Beyond Caravaggio’ brings together exceptional works by Caravaggio and the Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish artists he inspired. This is the first exhibition in the UK to explore the influence of Caravaggio – and the phenomenon known as Caravaggism – on the art of his contemporaries and followers.

After the unveiling of Caravaggio’s first public commission in 1600, artists from across Europe flocked to Rome to see his work. Seduced by the pictorial and narrative power of his paintings, many went on to imitate their naturalism and dramatic lighting effects.

Paintings by Caravaggio and his followers were highly sought after in the decades following his untimely death at the age of just 39. By the mid 17th century, however, the Caravaggesque style had fallen out of favour and it would take almost three hundred years for Caravaggio’s reputation to be restored and for his artistic accomplishments to be fully recognised.

It’s a bittersweet pleasure to admire these ingenious photographs of the amazing creatures who co-habit this planet with us. That is because this year’s exhibition rather poignantly comes moments after a rather sobering CITES meeting. CITES has announced that we are facing a global “extinction crisis” facing many species that is the most critical in its history.

So I wonder if when we look at clever photographs of foxes or monkeys in urban environments, we stop to think that they are here because we are squeezing them out of their habitats? When we look at stunning photographs of shoals of fish – do we realise that we are emptying the oceans of life?

The legitimate global imports of wildlife products are now worth more than $300bn (£200bn) a year; and when you add that to that the ruinous black market trade that has collapsed elephant and rhino numbers – then we see the scale of the problem. The question is who will stand up for animals? Meanwhile we can be entertained by this well-intentioned show.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery once again brings us another exciting exhibition of a little known great master. This is the first ever exhibition devoted to the Dutch painter and draughtsman Adriaen van de Velde (1636 – 1672). Van de Velde tragically only lived until the age of 35, but this prolific artist – whose many masterpieces were to earn him posthumous fame – is recognised as one of the finest landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

A Dutch Italian, Van de Velde represents a point of artistic cross-communication across borders, fusing agricultural landscapes in Holland with mythological Arcadian scenes in Italian settings. Compared by the renowned art historian Wolfgang Stechow (1896-1974) to Mozart’s chamber music, Van de Velde’s paintings are delicate, carefully composed and demonstrate his mastery of lighting effects as well as the human figure.

As well as bringing together 60 works, the exhibition will reunite these paintings with their preparatory studies in red chalk or pen and ink for the first time. The exhibition will offer not only a survey of the artist’s oeuvre but also a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter at work, from conception to completion.

This blockbuster of an exhibition examines whether the finished and unfinished revolutions of the late 60s and its counterculture changed the way we live today and think about the future. Exploring the era-defining significance and impact of the late 1960s, expressed through some of the most popular music and performances of the twentieth century alongside fashion, film, design and political activism.

The extraordinary volume and diversity of exhibits and cacophony of colours and sounds is appropriately mind-blowing. There’s Barbarella of course, Twiggy-themed coathangers, the Sergeant Pepper uniforms, John Peel’s record collection, and CIA handbills that aimed to disrupt the Black Panther movement. If that isn’t enough there’s also a whole room carpeted with fake grass, recreating the Woodstock festival on vast screens, which you can enjoy from the obligatory bean bag. As you leave – the suggestion is correctly made that 60s counterculture led to the green movement; rather confusingly however the exhibition also suggests that it led to the rise of home computers and the internet.

Following on from one blockbuster after another, like the amazing McQueen show and 2013’s wildly successful David Bowie Is – that is still touring three years on – Martin Roth, the director will be bowing out with style.

The V&A – which is of course many people’s favourite museum in London – is flying high, having been named Museum of the Year 2016. It has won the UK’s largest arts prize, for providing visitors with what judges called an unforgettable experience. The London museum was praised for an exhibition programme that included its most visited ever show, an Alexander McQueen retrospective, and the opening of restored permanent galleries devoted to European arts and crafts from 1600-1815. More than 493,043 visitors from 87 countries went to the McQueen show – Savage Beauty – making it the museum’s most visited exhibition.

From its excellent temporary exhibitions on subjects as varied as Botticelli, Bowie or underwear, to its magnificent collections and beautiful spaces and Italianate courtyard, the V&A is one of the best experiences in town.