For those interested in art, 2015 looks set to be a vintage year, says Catherine Milner
February 12 – May 25
The National Portrait Gallery will stage a major exhibition in 2015 of works by one of the world’s most celebrated portrait painters, John Singer Sargent. On display for the first time will be a collection of the artist’s intimate and informal portraits of his impressive circle of friends, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.
February 14
When the Whitworth art gallery in Manchester reopens, it does so with double the space and new display areas that reach into the landscape – and with a major solo exhibition by one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker. Her signature piece, a garden shed blown up by the British army, will be on display.
March 6 – June 7
Leonora Carrington, Britain’s answer to Salvador Dalí, is the focus of a major exhibition at the Tate in Liverpool. It will bring together not only her haunting, dream-like paintings full of all the usual Surrealist imagery; hatching eggs, spidery figures and desert landscapes, but the films she made, too.
March 14 – July 19
Exciting news from Planet Fashion: the critically acclaimed Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition is coming to London. The V&A will trace the evolution of his work from his earliest 1992 collection – designed just after he just graduated from college – to his unfinished 2010 line.
March 25 – July 13
Velasquez, the most celebrated artist from Spain’s Golden Age of painting, is celebrated in a blockbuster show at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition features his early landscapes through to the dramatic portraits and history paintings of his later career.
May 5
Fondazione Prada, a vast new gallery designed to showcase the fashion house’s superb international contemporary art collection, opens in Milan with Serial Classic, an exhibition of Roman and Greek sculptures. Designed by Rem Koolhaus and fashioned out of an old distillery, the ten buildings will offer a rolling series of specially commissioned exhibitions and include a cinema, a library and other facilities. At the heart of the compound will sit the Haunted House, an intimate space which will house site-specific installations conceived by international artists. Running in tandem with this show is another at Prada’s palazzo in Venice, showing smaller works from the ancient world.
May 9 – November 6
The Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest and most prestigious art extravaganza, allows you to catch up on contemporary art from around the world while gliding between palazzi on water taxis. All The World’s Futures, the exhibition at the heart of the Biennale, is this year all about world politics. Move over Damien Hirst.
May 21 – 24
Photo London, a new fair focusing exclusively on photography, opens for the first time in Somerset House in London. Featuring works from 70 galleries around the world, alongside the fair there will be a lively programme of talks, screenings and events – even musical performances. “It should be a unique exhibition, and the work should be artistically sensible – the curators are looking for artistic quality, things they haven’t been seen before and work that has commercial impact,” says the fair’s director, Michael Benson.
10 June – September 6
Carsten Höller, master of the art Spectacular, who designed the 30ft-high metal slides at the Tate a few years ago will be creating new wonders for a show at the Hayward Gallery next summer – the last before the gallery closes for two years for a refurbishment. “A lot of his work is really about the psychology of making decisions – what happens when you don’t know something, how do you move forward, how do you make connections in the dark,” says Ralph Rugoff, director of the gallery. Good for a first date, then.
September 17 – January 24
The World Goes Pop at Tate Britain compares works from Latin America to Asia and Europe to the Middle East, the exhibition will show that Pop Art is not all about Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Around 200 works from the 1960s and 1970s will be brought together, many shown in the UK for the first time. The exhibition will reveal how pop art was never just a celebration of Western consumer culture, but was often a subversive international language for criticism and public protest.
Oct 9 – Feb 14 2016
A major retrospective at Tate Modern devoted to Frank Auerbach encompassing over 70 works including a number of portraits of the former director of the Whitechapel art gallery, Catherine Lampert, who has sat for the artist every week since 1978 and is helping him hang the show.
September 19 – December 13
Ai Wei Wei, who is still under house arrest in Beijing, is being honoured by an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.
September 25 – January 17
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will present the blockbuster exhibition Munch: Van Gogh to celebrate the affinity between these two artists. Never before have the underlying characteristics of the similarities between Van Gogh and Munch been fully addressed.
October 7 – January 10 2016
The National Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Goya – the first ever to focus solely on his portraits. It will trace Goya’s career from his early beginnings at the court of Charles III in Madrid to his appointment as First Court Painter to Charles IV. By bringing together more than 50 of his most outstanding portraits from around the world, including drawings and miniatures, and organising them in a chronological and thematic sequence, the show will enable viewers to engage for the first time with the full range of Goya’s technical, stylistic and psychological development as a portraitist.
Catherine Milner was the arts correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph for ten years and has written about contemporary art for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Financial Times, The Economist, Apollo magazine and Art Review
Main image: Douard and Marie by John Singer Sargent
Read more articles by Catherine Milner:
Highlights of the London art fairs
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