Category Archives: Exhibitions

Records of deadly 1934 pit explosion in Wrexham to be displayed near site

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Documents include letters calling for recovery of bodies and a falsified safety log that was part of a cover-up

Poignant records relating to a colliery disaster in the 1930s that lay unseen for decades at the National Archives are being put on display close to the site of the mine in north Wales.

Among the documents at the west London archive are petitions and emotional letters calling for the bodies trapped in the underground explosion at the pit in Gresford to be recovered. Despite the heartfelt entreaties, the vast majority remain there.

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UK bans Israeli officials from flagship defence show

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Israel says Britain’s decision to exclude it from military weapons showcase is a ‘regrettable act of discrimination’

The UK has banned Israeli officials from attending the country’s flagship defence event next month.

Israeli industry, including UK subsidiaries of Israeli companies, will be able to attend London’s Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) show in September but the UK government will not invite representatives of the Israeli government to the major industry event.

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London museum tells forgotten story of African and Indian troops in second world war

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National Army Museum’s Beyond Burma exhibition examines stories of soldiers from Britain’s colonies

The forgotten story of African and Indian troops who fought in south Asia against Japanese forces during the second world war and who have largely been omitted from the official history is to be brought to life in a London exhibition.

The National Army Museum’s Beyond Burma: Forgotten Armies show includes rare items from Indian and African soldiers who toiled in some of the harshest conditions seen anywhere during the conflict.

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Early Beatles photos by Paul McCartney to go on show in London

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Portraits taken in early 60s reveal intimate moments before band’s fame became all-consuming

A collection of photographs taken by Paul McCartney when the Beatles were on the brink of global stardom are to be shown in an exhibition that sheds light on intimate moments as the group first experienced fame.

Rearview Mirror: Liverpool-London-Paris, which opens at Gagosian in London on 28 August, features 18 shots taken by the singer-songwriter during late 1963 after the release of the Beatles’ first album, and early 1964 as they travelled to the US.

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‘Like an academic’: private papers reveal John le Carré’s attention to detail

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Exclusive: Oxford’s Bodleian libraries to put archive items on display for first time, celebrating spy author’s ‘tradecraft’

The extent of John le Carré’s meticulous research and attention to detail are among insights into his working methods that will be revealed when the master of spy thrillers’ private archive goes on display for the first time this autumn.

His classic cold war-era espionage novels have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and inspired acclaimed films and television adaptations.

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‘Smoke and confusion’: exhibition points out Jane Austen’s true thoughts on Bath

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Georgian city is not shy of milking its links with the author, but actually she was not happy during her time there

The city of Bath does not fight shy of promoting its Jane Austen connections, tempting in visitors from around the world by organising tours, balls, afternoon teas and writing and embroidery workshops inspired by the author. If you have the inclination, you can buy souvenirs ranging from Jane Austen Top Trumps to a Mr Darcy rubber duck.

But in this, the 250th anniversary year of her birth, an exhibition is being launched daring to point out that in truth Austen wasn’t terribly happy during the five years she lived in the city.

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Charles Dickens’s ‘sliding doors’ moment: how a cold turned an aspiring thespian into a writer

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An exhibition explores the authors’ love of theatre, highlighting the dramatic impact of his works

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he “had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others”.

Bartley responded saying they were producing “the Hunchback” and arranging an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano.

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‘The eighth wonder of the world’: China’s terracotta warriors to march on Australia for blockbuster show

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Perth will host huge exhibition of ancient treasures from first emperor’s tomb in June, with 40% of the artefacts leaving China for the first time ever

Two thousand years ago, in a bid to conquer death itself, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang commissioned a city of the dead: a 49 sq km mausoleum guarded by an army of clay warriors, built to defend his tomb for eternity.

When farmers near Xi’an unearthed the first clay head in 1974, they cracked open one of humanity’s greatest archaeological mysteries, with more than 8,000 Terracotta Warriors discovered over the last 50 years. Now, fragments of that dream of immortality rise again – this time in Perth, where the largest exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors ever staged in Australia will head later this year

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Why the weasel testicles? Cambridge show explains medieval medicine

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Exhibition aims to help visitors get inside the minds that thought mercury and roasted apples would cure lice

Medieval treatments might make you question the sanity of the doctors of the day, but a new exhibition is set to take visitors inside the minds of such medics and reveal the method behind what can seem like madness.

Curious Cures, opening on Saturday at Cambridge University Library, is the culmination of a project to digitise and catalogue more than 180 manuscripts, mostly dating from the 14th or 15th centuries, that contain recipes for medical treatments, from compendiums of cures to alchemical texts and guides to healthy living.

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Embrace of Indigenous artists reaches London thanks to influence of Venice Biennale

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Curators and artists say this is a time of overdue recognition but others are cautious about the longevity of the moment

At last year’s Venice Biennale, the pavilions were packed with Indigenous art from around the world.

Artists from the Tupinambá community in Brazil sat alongside work by the late Rosa Elena Curruchich, who made pieces about Indigenous women in Guatemala. The Amazonian artist Aycoobo was celebrated, as were carvings by the Māori artist Fred Graham. The eventual winner of the Golden Lion – the event’s highest accolade – was the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore.

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Carl Bloch’s lost masterpiece Prometheus Unbound finds fame again in Athens

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Work that made its creator a superstar then mysteriously disappeared is mesmerising art lovers once more

It was commissioned by a Greek king, made its creator a superstar and in his native Denmark attracted crowds like no other painting before. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Now, nearly nine decades after it was last seen gracing the stairwell of the royal palace that would become the Athens parliament, Carl Bloch’s masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound, has found fame again in Greece.

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Transatlantic slavery’s role in shaping Manchester to be explored in exhibition

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Joint project between Guardian and city’s Science and Industry Museum will open in early 2027

The role transatlantic enslavement played in shaping Manchester is at the heart of a new exhibition developed in partnership by the Guardian and the city’s Science and Industry Museum.

The exhibition is the first time the museum, which tells the story of Manchester’s transformation into the world’s first industrial city, has put the links between enslaved African people, cotton and the city at the centre of a display.

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Prado show aims to highlight true colours of polychrome sculpture

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Madrid Exhibition intends to rescue the technique – coloured paint applied to statues – from centuries of indifference

In a darkened corner of the Prado, not far from an outsized crucifixion and a sculpture of a dead, recumbent Christ with eyes of glass, teeth of ivory and fingernails of horn, is another depiction of Jesus that is remarkable in its poignancy, its humanity and its history.

The tiny, painted terracotta scene, titled Los primeros pasos de Jesús (Jesus’s First Steps), is domestic rather than divine and shows a chubby, beaming infant ambling towards his equally beaming father. Its creator was the Spanish baroque artist Luisa Roldán who, despite becoming the first female sculptor to the royal court in 1692, is only now making her debut in the hallowed Madrid museum.

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Dressing for the dancefloor: creative explosion behind 80s’ most colourful club

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Fashion Museum exhibition charts how shortlived Taboo and its founder, Leigh Bowery, inspired decade’s fashion

With ITV’s drama Joan on our screens and the bubble skirt back on the catwalks, the 80s are once again having a moment. An exhibition at London’s Fashion Museum, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, takes a different look – by going deep into the creative explosion on the dancefloors of the decade.

It focuses on Taboo, a London club that lasted barely a year but was pivotal in the careers of people including the singer Boy George, the designers John Galliano and Katharine Hamnett, the choreographer Michael Clark and the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who started the club in 1985.

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Show shines light on overlooked artist who made UK’s first Holocaust memorial

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Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London

The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.

Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.

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V&A celebrates a century of national theatre archive with tribute to avid collector

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New exhibition, named after ‘theatrical encyclopedia’ Gabrielle Enthoven, showcases British stage history from the Restoration to Fleabag

She was an avid collector of playbills, programmes and props who kickstarted the largest theatrical archive of the nation, now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Without Gabrielle Enthoven, we would not have theatre studies as a discipline today, according to Simon Sladen, the museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary theatre and performance.

Yet many will never have heard of Enthoven. That is about to change as the V&A has named a new exhibition in her honour, celebrating a century of the national archive, which is now protected by law.

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‘Unique opportunity’ to see Italian Renaissance drawings in London

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Exhibition from royal collection will include about 160 works from Titian, Michelangelo, Leonardo and others

About 160 works from more than 80 artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci are to go on display in what has been described as the widest-ranging exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings ever to be staged in the UK.

Taken from the royal collection, the exhibition, which opens at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in November, will feature more than 30 works on display for the first time, and a further 12 never previously shown in the UK.

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Photographer Magnus Hastings celebrates the artistry and pride of drag

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Queen, his biggest show to date, opens in Liverpool and features new commissions of the city’s drag performers

As a child, Magnus Hastings loved stealing his sister’s clothes and wearing his mother’s heels and feather boas, before he got “shamed out of being a drag child”.

Now, decades later, the award-winning photographer is celebrating the artistry of drag and the collective spirit of pride in his biggest exhibition to date at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

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Silk Road leads from Uzbekistan to London for landmark exhibition

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British Museum will host treasures from Samarkand in a bid to dispel cliches of camels, spices and bazaars

A monumental six-metre-long wall painting created in the 7th century, and 8th-century ivory figures carved for one of the world’s oldest surviving chess sets, are among treasures set to be seen in Britain for the first time.

The items will travel from the ancient city of Samarkand to the UK for an exhibition opening in September, as part of the first-ever loan from museums in Uzbekistan to the British Museum.

Silk Roads will be at the British Museum from September 26 2024 to February 23 2025. Tickets go on sale on Monday.

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Guernica-style battle of Orgreave painting stars in miners’ strikes exhibition

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Bob Olley’s unsettling vision of clash between miners and police is part of 40th anniversary show in Bishop Auckland

Bob Olley was there 40 years ago at the “battle of Orgreave”. “I saw the violence,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought I was in a foreign country when I saw what the police did. It is hard to believe it happened in this country.”

The brutality he and others witnessed on 18 June 1984 as striking miners met 6,000 police officers on horses or wielding batons on foot will stay in the memory. It was in his head as, some years later, he embarked on his response to one of the world’s greatest artworks, Picasso’s Guernica.

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