Category: Exhibitions

Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance explores how printmaking forged novel, engaging and creative ways of living, knowing and making the world. The exhibition brings to life the intense focus on materiality generated by one of the most innovative Renaissance artists, Albrecht Dürer – and also the material world of one of the most influential cities of the Renaissance: Nuremberg. Though a detailed examination of Renaissance Nuremberg’s artistic and print culture, the exhibition will explore themes including music and dance, weaponry and conflict, fashion, bodies and social relations, religious piety and persecution, and daily life in Renaissance households. Drawing on the University of Melbourne's remarkable collection of early modern prints and books, exhibits will feature some of Dürer’s most famous prints, including Melencolia I, and other treasures including the Nuremberg Chronicle and a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

From fourteenth-century gold grounds, to the revolution of oil paints in the sixteenth century; from the Baroque of the seventeenth century, to the vedutisti of the eighteenth century; from nineteenth-century portraiture and genre scenes to the dawn of Impressionism; from the groundbreaking developments the twentieth century and the post-War Italian pioneers, to the rise of conceptual art; culminating in the present day with a selection of contemporary artists whose unique styles reflect the ever-growing global artistic conversation.

Artists represented are: Dirck Jaspersz van Baburen, Jacopo Bassano, William Beechey, Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, Alighiero Boetti, Agostino Bonalumi, Abraham Brueghel, Alberto Burri, Vincenzo Cabianca, Bonino da Campione, Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, Enrico Castellani, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Marc Chagall, Viviano Codazzi, Virgilio Costantini, Guillaume Courtois, Edgar Degas, Elger Esser, Familiare del Boccati Lavinia Fontana, Lucio Fontana, Ubaldo Gandolfini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gilbert & George, Francesco Granacci, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Francesco Hayez, Damien Hirst, Fabrice Hyber, Antonio Joli, Jim Lambie, Martino Piazza da Lodi, Pietro Longhi, Alessandro Magnasco, Michele Marieschi, Marino Marini, Master of San Jacopo a Mucciana, Master of Sant’Ivo, Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, Joan Miró, Giuseppe Molteni, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Giulio Paolini, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Alvaro Pirez d’Évora, Nicolas Poussin, Domenico Puligo, Mimmo Rotella, Paolo Scheggi, Rudolf Stingel, Michael Sweerts, Keith Tyson, Andrea Vaccaro, Gaspar van Wittel, called Vanvitelli, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina.

Depicted in hunting, portraiture or combat, animals feature among the most striking images produced by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. A gifted artist with an unrivalled mastery of his technique, he brings us face-to-face with the animal repertoire as it existed in the 18th century, including in a series of three hunting scenes he painted for the Château de Chantilly, scattered to the four winds after the French Revolution but exceptionally brought together for this show.

Animal scenes were extremely popular with the leading collectors in the 18th century, including the princes of Condé, who commissioned them from the artist. A set of exquisite drawings by Oudry loaned from a private collection will feature in this exhibition alongside works from Chantilly’s collections, allowing visitors to see pieces never displayed in public before. These include a large number of illustrations for La Fontaine’s fables, showing how the fabulist and the artist use the animal kingdom to help us laugh at and reflect on human nature. These illustrations were so effective they were copied by the arts and crafts industry and included in their decorative production, examples of which can also be admired in the exhibition. Through paintings, drawings, objets d’art and rare books, this show shines a light into every corner of the OUDRYMANIA that has gripped art lovers for centuries.

These 150 paintings, prints, drawings, costumes, accessories, sculptures, photographs and furniture items from the Rijksmuseum collection show that gender is everywhere. See the 17th-century portraits in which all the children are wearing dresses. Discover how, in the 18th century, anybody who could afford it was wearing pink – as well as glitter, frills and floral patterns. Displayed together, these objects show that our ideas about masculinity, femininity and gender in its broadest sense are defined by their time and place.

Includes artworks by Gesina ter Borch, Marlene Dumas, Bartholomeus van der Helst, Kinke Kooi, Robert Mapplethorpe, Erwin Olaf, Maria Roosen, Charley Toorop and Sara Troost.

Putti is a popular decorative motif that enriches countless works of modern European art. This charming phenomenon showing the image of small, winged angels certainly intrigues and arouses curiosity. The exhibition in the Main Building presents the subject on the example of the Renaissance, mainly Italian and German countries, against a broad background of ancient and modern European art.

As part of the Flemish Masters in Situ art project, various Flemish masterpieces are displayed at their original locations. For example, a bozzetto by Anthony Van Dyck from our collection can be viewed in the Church of Our Lady in Dendermonde. This rare compositional sketch illustrates The Adoration of the Shepherds, which was designed for the church’s chapel.

The bozzetto offers a glimpse into Van Dyck’s initial concepts for the composition. The sketch was likely made to present his design and secure the commission. Most of the sketch is executed in grisaille, with a few color accents. Notable is the difference from the final composition, where various characters have changed in position or appearance, while other figures have remained unchanged.

In addition to the bozzetto and the final work, this summer you also have the chance to take a behind-the-scenes look at the restoration of another Van Dyck masterpiece, namely Christ on the Cross, which can also be seen in the Church of Our Lady.

To coincide with the equestrian events at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, to be hosted on the Versailles estate, the Château is holding a major exhibition dedicated to horses and equestrian civilisation in Europe – the first exhibition on this theme to be presented on such a scale. [...]

Nearly 300 works will highlight the roles and uses of horses in civil and military society, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, up to the eve of the First World War, which marked the end of horse-drawn civilisation and the relegation of horses to the realm of leisure.

The Paris show is intended to display the Torlonia Collection, little known in France, in a setting steeped in the history of museums of ancient sculpture. It will offer an intimate archaeological and aesthetic look at the extraordinary Torlonia marbles as they engage in dialogue with the artworks in the Louvre’s own collection.

It will be held in the summer apartments of Anne of Austria and in the adjacent ‘Salle d’Auguste’ , where Roman sculpture has been displayed in the Louvre since 1798. These spaces have been completely renovated as they will later be home to a newly designed display of the Louvre’s Roman collection.

In the 17th century, frigid winters and unusually cool summers blanketed northern Europe in what became known as the Little Ice Age. Dutch artists depicted this persistent global cooling in scenes of daily activities like ice skating and fishing. Highlighting human vulnerability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, these works offer opportunities to reflect on our current environmental crises. This exhibition features works by Hendrick Avercamp and other Dutch artists of the 1600s.

This year’s exhibition reveals how Turner captured environmental and social developments that would go on to change Britain and the world‘s climates forever. This will be the first exhibition dedicated to this subject. Highly attuned to changes in the landscape and atmosphere, Turner captured them in his ground-breaking paintings, drawings and engravings. Through his art, he documented plumes of smoke, burning furnaces, urban sprawl, deforested landscapes, overfishing and extreme weather. The exhibition will also seek to connect the changes that Turner was observing and capturing in beautiful works of art, with changes to the environment that we are currently seeing.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw has added several hundred new works of art to its collection in the past few years, including paintings, drawings, engravings, furniture, porcelain, items of silver and also militaria. Among the acquired objects were over 60 paintings dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, executed by representatives of important European art centres, as well as Polish and contemporary artists active in Poland. The acquisition of paintings is conducted strictly in compliance with the most significant tenets of the Royal Castle's approved activities, which include gathering historically significant items, putting on temporary and permanent exhibitions, and making its collections accessible to the public for scientific and educational purposes.

The eleven paintings on display in this exhibition span a wide range of genres, periods, themes and origins, including the Quattrocentro of Florence, the trend in Baroque painting initiated by Caravaggio's students and continuators, the animal portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, Venetian vedute, the Renaissance works of Piedmont and Venice, the portrait painting of the Enlightenment, and the Classicist depiction of ancient history.

The exhibition includes a study for Rembrandt’s first masterpiece; Greuze’s virtuoso depiction of a young cook made for his friend Jean-Georges Wille; Delacroix’s intimate portrait of Jenny, his confidante and caretaker; and a striking watercolor landscape by Cézanne. Also in the gift are significant sheets by major artists such as Rubens, Guercino, Jordaens, Watteau, Géricault, Constable, Degas, Renoir, Seurat, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Gris, including many rarely seen drawings. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

This exhibition sets out to decipher the elements of colonial power within the iconography of certain works in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections. A selection of paintings will reveal “invisibilised” stories of racial domination, marronage and the civil rights struggle, as well as the introduction of the modern mercantile system based on European military control, the use of enslaved African workers and the appropriation of firstly Latin American and later Asian and African land and raw materials. Visitors will be introduced to fictitious representations of new Arcadias and will witness the western projection of its unsatisfied desires in the form of the “Orient” and the construction of the “other” as barbarian or primitive.