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Top 10 events in London
EVENTS IN LONDON ARE UPDATED DAILY - last update (09/03/10 - 4pm London time)
- Gillian Ayres at 80: New Paintings and Works on Paper - Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition contain many familiar motifs but also represent a marked progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers. Until 13 March. www.alancristea.com
- Annie Ralli - London Life - Her present series of abstract paintings were developed from a piece commissioned early last year. Annie’s private client asked for the “vibrancy” and “buzz” of the London streets by night and got exactly that. She started this series with a typical photograph of London’s Oxford Street as a guide and used an iconic red bus as the painting’s feature. In the conversion from photo to abstract painting she added bold colours, blurs and urgent movement, whilst keeping the essence of the photograph intact. Her unique stylised paintings are recognisable to all, Londoners and tourists alike. From familiar city wide hot spots to the solitary texting youth, each piece is a stylised and unique snapshot of the city that we all know. Until 13 March. www.colombart.co.uk
- Lucky Dragons - Lucky Dragons is a communal music experiment from Los Angeles based artists Fischbeck and Rara. Live performances involve participation between audience and band and aim to generate equal power-sharing situations. Created in the spirit of celebration Lucky Dragons is a communal music experiment relying on show goers to to compliment each other by linking themselves and the audience through sound to video, dance, and interactive technology. Lucky Dragons will perform their ongoing project 'Making a Baby', a piece which involves sound production by creating human circuits through touch. Using cyber-psychedelic imagery and circuit jammed synths, Lucky Dragons challenge hierarchy and rhetoric and focus on communal music production and contact. Field recordings, feedback loops, and found sounds are mixed with thematic references to folk tradition and protest songs placing the emphasis on the experience of live music and togetherness. Lucky Dragons injects humanity into typically 'cold' technologies and uses these to inspire friendship, solidarity and discovery. 13 March. www.autoitaliasoutheast.org
- Dieter Rams - Less and More - For 40 years, from 1955 until 1995, Dieter Rams designed or oversaw the design of over 500 products for the German electronics manufacturer Braun, as well as furniture for Vitsœ. Audio equipment, calculators, shavers and shelving systems are just some of the products created by Dieter Rams, each item holds a special place in the history of industrial and furniture design and has established Dieter Rams as one of the most influential designers of the late 20th century. This exhibition is the first UK definitive retrospective of Dieter Rams’ career in over 12 years. Showcasing landmark designs for both Braun and Vitsœ, this exhibition will examine how Dieter Rams’ design ethos inspired and challenged perceptions of domestic design and assesses Dieter Rams’ lasting influence on today’s design landscape. Archive film footage, models, sketches and prototypes will be displayed alongside specially commissioned interviews with Dieter Rams’ contemporaries, which include Jonathon Ive, Jasper Morrision, Sam Hecht and Naoto Fukasawa. Until 14 March. www.designmuseum.org
- John Gibbons: Portraits - The first display of portraits by the sculptor John Gibbons has opened at the National Portrait Gallery. It is the latest in the Gallery's Interventions series focusing on twentieth-century artists who have developed innovatory approaches to portraiture. This display, comprising dramatic works in welded steel, explores Gibbons's treatment of the human head as a 'container' for experience, identity, personality and mind. A special wall-mounted installation has been constructed to showcase five powerful sculptures, dating from 1981 to the present, which transform industrial materials into enigmatic cage-like forms. Three of the sculptures appear to float high up on angled shelves built into the Gallery walls whilst two smaller ones are given a more intimate setting at a low level. Until 14 March. www.npg.org.uk
- Four Fatrasies - Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson - ‘Four Fatrasies’ is an exhibition that marks a new and important development in the dialogue between Glasgow-based artists Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson. Both influenced by decadent French literature and its fascination with medievalism, dandified amorality and the notion of excess to the point of collapse Pollard and Stephenson will present a hyper-theatrical, sculptural installation over the four floors of Pump House Gallery that integrates the viewer within a total collaborative art-work. A fatrasie is a medieval nonsense poem, overtly paradoxical and strange by its nature, it disrupts any semblance of established logic or rationalism through repetition and absurdity. Pollard’s work focuses on the rituals and exaggerated styling of medieval and Victorian dandies. Drawing from Victorian paintings and caricatures, the paintings collide neo-romanticism and pastoralism with the covert languages of Polari (a secret language spoken in gay sub-cultures) and medieval prison slang. He will also exhibit a series of ‘Bum Sovereigns’ (large black cast–rubber coins with bottoms represented on them) as well as a pair of bespoke medieval sports shoes produced by an Italian sportswear manufacturer. Until 14 March. www.wandsworth.gov.uk/gallery
- Parallel Voices 2010 - Missing Link - This spring, Siobhan Davies Studios will be filled with creative thinking and activity, as Parallel Voices 2010: Missing Link takes over the building, bringing with it internationally renowned musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers and artists. Blixa Bargeld, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, Christian Fennesz, Alexandra Gilbert, Ryoji Ikeda as well as Siobhan Davies are among the luminaries invited by multi-disciplinary artist Carsten Nicolai to take part with him in this packed series of talks, performances and installations. For his Parallel Voices, Carsten Nicolai brings together personalities who form a Missing Link – artists and performers who have served as bridging figures in the arts, crossing or simply ignoring boundaries. Alongside the events, Carsten Nicolai presents a specially commissioned large scale light installation, monitor consisting of custom made neon tubes. Conceived to create a link between the inside and outside of the building, it will be mounted on the façade, its light play communicating movement and sound. From 17 March until 19 March. www.siobhandavies.com
- Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence - The first ever exhibition in the UK devoted solely to the work of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) reveals the enduring power of one of the most singular voices in contemporary art. This survey of work that has rarely been seen anywhere in the world focuses on vintage photographs of her silueta series, a number of films of her performances and a restaging of an important performance-installation piece, affording a rare opportunity for British audiences to discover in depth this inimitably passionate artist. An artist who both inhabited and transcended her status as a woman and a Latin American émigré, Mendieta’s generous embrace of a wide range of media, from film, photography, drawing and installation, and her poetic, meticulous explorations of the complexity of human identities foreshadowed many disciplinary and conceptual developments in art during the last two decades, making her one of the most significant yet unacknowledged artists of the late twentieth century. Until 20 March. www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
- John Gerrard - Extending from Animated Scene, his critically acclaimed presentation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, the artist exhibits two new works, Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009, which depicts a sprawling, unmanned, computer-controlled agricultural complex on the American Great Plains, and Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) 2009, a portrait of an oil derrick in the same region. The works, painstakingly constructed by the artist and a group of collaborators over periods of up to eighteen months, employ the new temporal medium of realtime 3D. Since his discovery of it in the late 1990s, the artist has pursued a unique engagement with this form, creating eerilyompelling virtual portraits, which extend and develop traditions of painting, photography, cinema and sculpture. Until 24 March. www.thomasdane.com
- Jitish Kallat - In February 2010, Haunch of Venison London will present an exhibition of new work by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat. Kallat's new work showcases the full range of his visual vocabulary incorporating video, sculptural installation, photography and the large format paintings for which he is best known. Tackling his foundational themes of sustenance, survival and mortality in the contemporary urban environment of Mumbai, Kallat offsets a vivid, hand-made aesthetic with digitised renderings of streets fit-to-burst, where the cumulative impression of daily existence is pushed to the extreme. Until 27 March. www.haunchofvenison.com
- Sensescapes - With technological evolution continuously questioning this theme of the “visible”, the exhibition will present works by four artists whose practices focus on the status of the image through the use of technological mediums such as video, photography and works based on mechanised elements. The exhibition will question our personal recognition of landscapes and such so-called “sensescapes” which are defined by being subjective and inter-subjective mental constructions composed of meanings and symbols specific to each individual. Until 28 March. www.nettiehorn.com
- Crash - Gagosian Gallery London presents "Crash," a major group exhibition which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard. Ballard's novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard's great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, "Crash" includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision. Until April 1. www.gagosian.com
- From Floor to Sky - A major exhibition bringing together early and recent work by some of the most significant British artists of our time opens this March in the vast subterranean gallery of Ambika P3 in London. Each artist is contributing two pieces of work, one from the earliest period of their career and one contemporary piece. The show, which includes sculpture, painting, film and performance, bridging up to 30 years, will provide a crucial assessment of contemporary British sculpture and give a unique insight into the development of each artist’s work. Until 4 April. www.p3exhibitions.com
- A Positive View - A new photography exhibition comes to Somerset House, bringing together more than 100 pieces, including rare and vintage works across almost a century of photography. Until 5 April. www.somersethouse.org.uk
- Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives - What influences or determines our sense of who we are? What makes one person distinct from another? How does science inform human identity? This major new exhibition explores the tension between the way we view ourselves and how others see us. Nine individual stories introduce eight distinct rooms. One room begins with the story of scientist Alec Jeffreys' invention of DNA fingerprinting 25 years ago. The diaries of Samuel Pepys introduce another. While self-portraiture is explored through the work of the Jewish artist Claude Cahun, who despite being sentenced to death for acts of resistance, survived the Nazi occupation of Jersey. Other subjects tackled include twins, phrenology and brain imaging, gender and sexuality, race and prejudice, and acting and improvisation. Until 6 April. www.wellcomecollection.org
- From War to Windrush - To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush in Britain in 1948, this exhibition will tell the personal stories of the involvement of Black men and women from the West Indies and Britain in the First and Second World Wars. Among the exhibits on display will be pages from the MV Empire Windrush passenger list; the MBE belonging to Sam King, who returned to Britain on the Windrush after serving in the RAF and was later the first Black mayor of Southwark; and the telegram announcing the death of Walter Tull, the first Black British Army officer. Until 10 April. london.iwm.org.uk
- Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition - Come and see the exhibition of winning and commended images from the 2009 competition. This year they have a larger gallery and images are displayed in bigger formats. You can also hire audio guides, featuring comments from the awarded photographers and competition judges. Until 11 April. www.nhm.ac.uk
- Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - This landmark exhibition gives an inside view of how modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been shaped through the lens of their photographers. From the days when the first Indian-run photographic studios were established in the 19th century, this exhibition tells the story of photography’s development in the subcontinent with over 400 works that have been brought together for the first time. It encompasses social realism and reportage of key political moments in the 1940s, amateur snaps from the 1960s and street photography from the 1970s. Contemporary photographs reveal the reality of everyday life, while the recent digitalisation of image making accelerates its cross-over with fashion and film. Until 11 April. www.whitechapel.org
- Decode: Digital Design Sensations - Digitally growing plants and a mechanical eye that mirrors the blink of a visitor's gaze will be among the digital works that will feature in Decode: Digital Design Sensations. The exhibition will show the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations. Until 11 April. www.vam.ac.uk
- The Bloomberg Commission: Goshka Macuga: The Nature of the Beast - Goshka Macuga is widely acclaimed for her sculptural installations of artefacts and photographs, derived from art history, politics and anthropology. The artist focuses on a key moment in the history of the Whitechapel Gallery: the presentation of Picasso’s Guernica in 1939. Organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council in east London to raise awareness of the Spanish Civil War, the suggested price of entry was a pair of boots, left underneath the work, to be sent to the Republicans in Spain. Forming the centrepiece of Macuga’s installation is a life-size tapestry of Guernica. Macuga’s project draws connections across historic and contemporary world affairs, their protagonists and the cultural ripple effects they have triggered. Until 18 April. www.whitechapel.org
- Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010 - The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography over the previous year. Until 18 April. www.photonet.org.uk
- The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters - In January 2010, the Royal Academy of Arts will stage a landmark exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). The focus of the exhibition will be the artist’s remarkable correspondence. Over 35 original letters, rarely exhibited to the public due to their fragility, will be on display in the main galleries of Burlington House, together with around 65 paintings and 30 drawings that express the principal themes to be found within the correspondence. Thus the exhibition will offer a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the complex mind of Vincent van Gogh. This will be the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for over forty years. Until 18 April. www.royalacademy.org.uk
- Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain - Artist, musician and writer Billy Childish is a cult figure, and one who has gained an international following, but this is the first time a public institution has brought together a major solo exhibition to encompass his extraordinary career. His prodigious range of activities can best be understood as a total work of art - one which centres on his own persona. Unknowable but Certain presents the vitality of his recent work as a culmination of over three decades’ engagement across different media. Until 18 April. www.ica.org.uk
- Idris Khan - Idris Khan's show will consist of two major sculptural installations and a number of new photographic works that interlink seemingly disparate ideas of religion, Minimalism, music and poetry Khan's new body of work has a more formal engagement with the material he appropriates, in order to elicit a kind of lyricism and spirituality using a Minimal aesthetic. From 17 March until 24 April. www.victoria-miro.com
- 1001 Inventions - 1001 Inventions will trace the forgotten story of a thousand years of science from the Muslim world, from the 7th century onwards. Featuring many interactive exhibits, displays and dramatisation, the exhibition explores the shared scientific heritage of diverse cultures and looks at how many modern inventions can trace their roots back to Muslim civilisation. The exhibition is a British based project, produced in association with the Jameel Foundation. Until 25 April. www.sciencemuseum.org.uk