Now that we have penciled into our calendar the publishing news we are eager to read and the cinema releases that will be talked about in the coming weeks, the moment has arrived to delve into the programming of some of the most important museums in Europe. Because autumn arrives loaded with art and whether by the opening of a new cultural space, by the chance to contemplate the artistic legacy of an American icon, or by delighting in the creations of an unparalleled photographer, an exhibition can be the perfect excuse to travel or, simply, to approach a museum.
The return to normality awaits us inevitably, and there is nothing like facing it with an art program full of novelties. From painting to sculpture through photography, from Santander to Paris to Málaga, museums also refresh their spaces to become one of the ideal places to contemplate the arrival of autumn with new eyes.
Ah Xian / China/Australia / China – Bust No. 4, 1998.
Rising Voices. V&A South Kensington. London.
Until January 10, in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, one of the English capital’s most important art spaces offers an unprecedented view of the Asia-Pacific region’s creative panorama. Exceptional works by more than 40 pioneering creators, highlighting Indigenous peoples’ perspectives and diverse artistic approaches.
Across multiple geographies and communities, and reflecting on a changing relationship with its past, the exhibition reveals both the diversity and the points in common in the region’s artistic production, marking a crucial moment in the dialogue between the local and the international that the Asia-Pacific Triennial has driven for more than three decades.
From political conditions to artistic heritage and techniques of creation using local materials, the exhibition has been conceived to celebrate the region’s great wealth and the dynamism of contemporary art of the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting key moments and presenting pioneering artists across its wide range of artistic contexts.
The Dollar Sign by Andy Warhol.
Warhol in Landerneau. Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc for Culture. Landerneau, France
With more than 200 works from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, United States, this exhibition features some of his best-known pieces alongside others never shown before, inviting visitors, until January 24, to reflect on the American Dream and the construction of the United States’ myth.
From his beginnings in commercial illustration to his portraits of celebrities, Warhol recognized early on the power of commercial images, which inspired him and which he also incorporated physically into his works. The way he appropriated those images became iconic, a signature easily recognizable that propelled him to fame and made him the artist that celebrities sought out but also those willing to pay the price of the portrait. Thus he made the American promise tangible: fame is attainable and everyone has the same opportunities.
One of the rooms at Faro Santander.
Faro Santander Opening. September 8.
After five years of transforming the historic Pereda building, designed by British architect David Chipperfield, this cultural project is born with the aim of becoming a reference space where art, culture and technology come together in an open and accessible environment for all audiences.
One of the building’s floors will be devoted to the Banco Santander Collection, with a permanent and dynamic presence in the programming. The Masterpieces of the Banco Santander Collection exhibition will bring together great names in art history such as Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, or Goya, among others.
Another floor will be devoted to presenting ambitious temporary exhibitions with a very diverse focus. The kickoff will be the exhibition Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surrealism, in which Villa Pilar, the previously unseen painting that the artist created in the 1940s in a city sanatorium, will be on view until January 10.
View of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer, one of the paintings that is part of the exchange between the Mauritshuis and the Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Mauritshuis ♥ Thyssen-Bornemisza. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid.
From October 9 to January 10, the Madrid gallery and The Mauritshuis in The Hague simultaneously exchange twenty-five works from their permanent collections thanks to a collaboration agreement between the two institutions. In Madrid, an exceptional set of seventeenth-century Dutch masterworks is presented, gathered in the so-called classical rooms. A new exhibition space in the museum, adjacent to the rooms dedicated to this same school, thus offers a more complete view of that extraordinary and fruitful century.
Covering a chronological span from 1615 to 1705, among the paintings from the Mauritshuis are works by Pieter de Hooch, Hendrick Avercamp, Jan Steen or Jacob van Ruisdael. But also, on its own, one of the great landscape paintings of all time will be shown: The View of Delft by Vermeer. This artistic exchange will be complemented by the publication of a book that brings together ten Spanish writers and ten Dutch writers, who, starting from the works of the exhibitions, play with a painting and the idea of love in any of its manifestations.
Autorretrato con sombrero de ala ancha. 1905-1906 by Edvard Munch.
Munch and Picasso. Picasso Málaga.
The Málaga art museum proposes, with this show that will be on view from October 30 to February 28, a dialogue between the Norwegian artist and the Malaga-born one, fundamental to understanding the birth of modernity. More than a hundred paintings, drawings and prints explore the affinities that cross their respective trajectories and reveal how both transformed the language of art by turning emotional experience into one of the main engines of creation.
Beyond any direct influence, the exhibition charts the shared themes and concerns that structured the artists’ work: love and desire, illness, death, loneliness or existential angst. Moreover, the female figure occupies a central place in that symbolic universe; admired and desired, women also appear as complex and ambiguous presences, reflecting the emotional and psychological tensions that marked the artists’ imaginaries.
Poster for the exhibition by the MOP Foundation and David Sims.
The Hamster Becomes The Problem. Fundación MOP. A Coruña.
David Sims’s photography, the most influential visual storyteller of his generation, has meant a continual reinvention of the fashion industry’s visual language. Throughout his career, the Sheffield-born photographer has shown a remarkable sensitivity in interpreting changes in contemporary culture. From editorial to advertising, through to his most personal work, Sims repeatedly challenges the conventions of fashion photography.
From November 21 to May 2027, the MOP Foundation in A Coruña invites us to explore its archive to connect the dots that form an immeasurable body of work that has had a key influence on the visual language of contemporary culture. Between fashion and documentary, the intimate and performative, the rebellious and the tender, the exhibition reveals an artist always attentive to the changing notions of identity, beauty, and representation, endowed with an instinctive understanding of his role as a creator of images and a refined perception of the sensibilities of his audiences.
