Art Exhibitions in London - Autumn/Winter 2010

These are the major art exhibitions in London in late Autumn 2010 / Winter 2011.  The links in the names of the exhibitions are to their microsite pages (where available) of the relevant art gallery or museum where you can see them.

I've organised it this time according to the location rather than the timeline.

UK - Major Museums

National Gallery

• Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals 13 October 2010 – 16 January 2011

This exhibition presents the finest assembly of Venetian views since the much-celebrated display in Venice in 1967. It features works by Canaletto and all the major practitioners of the genre.
Remarkably, considering the dominant role of British patronage in this art form, 'Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals' is the first exhibition of its kind to be organised in the UK.
Bringing together approximately 55 major loans from public and private collections across Europe and North America, the exhibition highlights the rich variety of Venetian view painting.

• Bridget Riley: Paintings and related work 24 November 2010 – 22 May 2011

The exhibition focuses upon Bridget Riley’s most recent paintings. Two of Riley’s works will be made directly on to the walls of the exhibition space. Riley and her studio will create a new wall drawing, ‘Composition with Circles 7’, especially for the longest wall of the Sunley Room. In addition a version of the wall-painting, ‘Arcadia’ – last seen at the major 2008 retrospective in Paris – will be recreated on a larger scale.

• Jan Gossaert's Renaissance 23 February – 30 May 2011

Jan Gossaert (active 1503; died 1532) was one of the most startling and versatile artists of the Northern Renaissance. A pivotal Old Master, Gossaert changed the course of Flemish art, going beyond the tradition of Jan van Eyck and charting new territory that eventually led to the great age of Rubens – yet this is the first major exhibition dedicated to him in more than 45 years.

National Portrait Gallery

• Thomas Lawrence - Regency Power and Brilliance 21 October 2010 - 23 January 2011

Thomas Lawrence was the greatest British portrait painter of his generation and one of the most celebrated artists in Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This exhibition, the first in the UK for over thirty years, presents fifty-four works drawn from international public and private collections, some never before seen in public.

• Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 11 November 2010 - 20 February 2011

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 celebrates and promotes the very best in contemporary portrait photography.

Tate Modern

Gauguin Preview, Tate Modern

• Gauguin 30 September 2010 - 16 January 2011 (warning - this exhibition is extremely busy)

Gauguin is one of the world's most famous and best-loved artists from the early 20^th century. For the first time in the UK in over 50 years, Tate Modern presents an exhibition dedicated to this master French Post-Impressionist, featuring paintings and drawings from around the world. His sumptuous, colourful images of women in Tahiti and beautiful landscape images of Brittany in France are some of the most popular images in Modern art.

• Ai Weiwei 12 October 2010 - 2 May 2011

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.  Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.

Tate Britain

• Turner Prize 5 October 2010 – 3 January 2011

The Turner Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding exhibition. Four artists are shortlisted and they present their work in a three month exhibition at Tate Britain.  The winner will be announced at Tate Britain on 6 December 2010

• Romantics  9 August 2010  –  31 July 2011

Romance is in the air in the Clore Gallery, a major new display presents Romantic art in Britain, its origins, inspirations and legacies. Drawn from Tate's collection, it showcases major works by Henry Fuseli, JMW Turner, John Constable and Samuel Palmer, as well as newly-acquired works by William Blake. From Turner's reinvention of landscape to Blake's visionary histories, the display reveals the imagination and innovations of a generation defined by belief in creative freedom, rather than tradition or style. In addition, two rooms look at the legacy of The Romantics, presenting work by Graham Sutherland and others.

• Eadweard Muybridge 8 September 2010 - 16 January 2011

British-born Eadweard Muybridge, who emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, is one of the most influential photographers of all time. He pushed the limits of the camera's possibilities, creating world-famous images of animals and humans in motion. Just as impressive are his vast panoramas of American landscapes, such as the Yosemite valley, and his documentation of the rapidly growing nation, particularly in San Francisco

Royal Academy of Arts

• Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele 25 September—12 December 2010 

This exhibition showcases the breadth and wealth of one of the finest collections in Central Europe.  Comprising works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with additional key loans from the Hungarian National Gallery, the exhibition features over 200 works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, El Greco, Rubens, Goya, Manet, Monet, Schiele, Gauguin and Picasso. Many have not previously been shown in the UK.

•  Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 – 1900 30 October 2010—23 January 2011

The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major exhibition in London for over 40 years to celebrate the achievement of the Glasgow Boys, the loosely knit group of young painters who created a stir at home and abroad in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The exhibition features over 80 oil paintings, watercolours and pastels from public and private collections by such artists as Guthrie, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Walton, Henry and Hornel. Together they presented a new art, which had a major impact at home and abroad in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The resultant works were, from c. 1880 to 1900, among the most experimental and ambitious to be produced in the UK.

• Modern British Sculpture 27 January - 7 April 2011

In 2011, the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first exhibition for 30 years to examine British sculpture of the twentieth century. The show will represent a unique view of the development of British sculpture, exploring what we mean by the terms British and sculpture by bringing the two together in a chronological series of strongly themed galleries, each making its own visual argument.

British Museum

• Picasso to Julie Mehretu 7 October 2010 – 25 April 2011

Collected over the past 35 years, this exhibition showcases many of the great artists of the 20th century, starting with Picasso’s study for his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting that shook the art world in 1907. It also features works by E L Kirchner, Otto Dix, Matisse, Magritte, David Smith and Louise Bourgeois and major contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and William Kentridge and Julie Mehretu

Courtauld Gallery

• Cezanne's Card Players 21 October 2010 – 16 January 2011 

The Courtauld Gallery’s two masterpieces from this series, The Card Players and Man with a Pipe, are joined by exceptional loans from international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, to offer a visual feast of some of the artist’s finest paintings.

Dulwich Gallery

• Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic 15 September - 28 November 2010 

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major UK Rosa exhibition since 1973.  Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) was one of the boldest and most powerfully inventive artists and personalities of the Italian 17th century. He invented new types of painting: allegorical pictures, distinguished by a haunting and melancholy poetry; fanciful portraits of romantic and enigmatic figures; macabre and horrific subjects; philosophical subjects, which bring into painting some of the major philosophical and scientific concerns of his age.

• Norman Rockwell's America 15 December 2010 - 27 March 2011

The best-known and most beloved American artist of the 20th century. 

To find out more about these museums you can consult my resource sites for art lovers:

• Top 10 Art Galleries and Museums and
• The Top Ten Museums in London

UK - National Art Societies

Mall Galleries

• New English Art Club Annual Exhibition Fri 26 November - Sun 5 December 2010 
• Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition Wed 8 - Sun 19 December 2010  
• Designer Crafts Sat 8 - Sun 16 January 2011
• Pure Gold - 50 years of the Federation of British Artists Wed 9 - Sat 19 February 2011 
• The Wapping Group of Artists: London and its River Mon 21 - Sat 26 February 2011 
• Landscapes of Sunlight and Evening in British Art by the Society of Landscape Painters Mon 21 - Sat 26 February 2011

Bankside Gallery  

• The Mini Picture Show 26 November 2010 - 18 January 2011
• Society of Wood Engravers 73rd Annual Exhibition 21 January 2011 - 2 February 2011