In January 2011 the Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival returns for its 12th year with six concerts across the region. The festival is renowned for presenting music of international calibre in intimate venues, with a core of the same musicians returning year on year. Artists who return in 2011 having been at the original festival include the founder Daniel Tong, internationally recognised pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, and Matthew Truscott, leader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Shows & Exhibitions
To bring on the festive season, Gagosian Gallery presents a pop-up exhibition of catalogues, posters, prints and limited editions by gallery artists including John Currin, Ellen Gallagher, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Anselm Reyle, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Franz West. This exhibition presents a selection of the works available for sale at the permanent Gagosian Shop in New York, which opened in 2009.
Throughout much of her career, Vija Celmins has been known for her captivating paintings and drawings of starry night skies, fragile spider webs, and barren desert floors—quiet, expansive worlds meticulously executed in gradations of black and grey. As a young artist in Los Angeles during the early 1960s, however, Celmins's work was marked by a distinctly different tone, one influenced by the violence of the era and the mass media that represented it.
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, commodity cult and critique of capitalism, high and low art, the women artists' works on display in many aspects resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter, style, and working method. Documenting and hypostatizing the prosperity of the postwar era and reflecting upon the superficiality of consumerism, the artists unmask the commodity myth as an empty civilizational achievement by turning them into oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth with her Soft Sculptures.
Moscow City Ballet with an exquisite and powerfully emotive performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is at the Sheffield Lyceum from Tuesday 11 January to Sunday 15 January. Appearing at The Lyceum for six days only, Sheffield Theatres welcomes a magical must-see performance for ballet-lovers of all ages. This breathtaking production with opulent costumes, lavish sets and accompanied by its live orchestra is sure to capture the hearts of those who see it.
Now is the moment to reconfigure our notions of time to reveal alternative ways of thinking and being for the future. In Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years Indigenous artists imagine the future within the context of present experiences and past histories. By radically reconsidering encounter narratives between native and non-native people, Indigenous prophecies, possible utopias and apocalypses, this exhibition proposes intriguing possibilities for the next 500 years.
After her stay at Villa Iris, where she directed the international Fundación Botín workshop in July, the artist Mona Hatoum becomes the central figure of the exhibition Le Grand Monde, which is intended as an intense reflection on the world in which we live. This artist's work characteristically reflects her personal experience and aims at involving the spectator as much as possible, provoking contradictory sensations of attraction and rejection
Not in Fashion. Fashion and Photography in the 90s is the title of the new special exhibition at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. As the title already indicates the focus here is not on the glamorous fashion world of the rich and the beautiful. On the contrary, the show at MMK presents an anti-movement that in the 1990s consciously ran counter to the images of prêt-à-porter, haute couture and the mainstream fashion magazines.
The Hayward Gallery presents seminal works and new commissions by leading artists in Move: Choreographing You. Exploring the historical and current relationship between visual arts, dance and performance, the exhibition focuses on visual artists and choreographers from the last 50 years who create sculptures and installations that turn the audience into active participants, becoming more aware of their body – or even becoming a dancer.
BFI Gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to the work of the legendary American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer (b.1934) whose practice is amongst the most influential on the newest generation of video makers and choreographers alike. In the last few years there have been a number of important publications on her work and museum shows dedicated to her but this is the first time she has had a gallery exhibition in the UK.
