A selection of ten exhibitions to visit in London that are free because you’ve just spent all your money on a gym subscription that you won’t use.
The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea
Queen’s House, Greenwich
(Note, finishes on 14th Jan)
This exhibition celebrates these forgotten masters and their practice, marking 350 years since they arrived in England. It also reveals how the family’s legacy as renowned émigré artists transformed British visual culture and inspired future generations of artists including J.M.W. Turner.
Valentin Goppel: Between the Years
Leica Gallery, Mayfair
(Note, finishes on 22nd Jan)
This up-close-and-personal project, which later became part of a much bigger commission at the request of the German newspaper Die Zeit, documents how for Goppel, along with many of his friends, the initial euphoria surrounding Covid was replaced by disorientation, isolation, and uncertainty. Through both staged and observed imagery, Goppel strives to relay the emotions experienced during this strange time. Ironically, for the photographer the pursuit of image led him briefly out of his own isolation.
Heritage Gallery Exhibition – Shakespeare
Guildhall Heritage Gallery, City of London
A display celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of William Shakespeare’s First Folio.
The Heritage gallery is just three display cases, but the rest of the art gallery is also free to visit if you’ve never been before.
The genius of nature botanical drawings by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues
British Museum, Bloomsbury
French by birth but British by adoption, Le Moyne (about 1553–88) created remarkable watercolours of plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables which captivate the eye with their extraordinary naturalism and the striking simplicity of their presentation.
Martin Church – Tube Picture
Barbican Library, City of London
A comprehensive show of over one hundred new works, including original collages, paintings, reproductions and digital composites. Images are made in public by sketching on the Metropolitan Line tube trains. Since the materials employed are ephemeral, the better images are scanned and printed to record the efforts.
Genetic Automata
Wellcome Collection, Euston
‘Genetic Automata’ is an ongoing body of video works by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, videogames and DNA ancestry. The series investigates where deeply ingrained ideas about race come from and the role that science has played in shaping these perceptions.
Artificial Silk: From Kew to the World
Richmond Museum, Richmond
A special exhibition about a little-known local scientific invention with a huge global impact: the development of artificial silk. Invented in Kew in the early 1900s, viscose rayon is a soft, silky textile made from wood pulp which is still one of the most widely produced fibres in the world today.
Discover Liotard and the Lavergne Family Breakfast
National Gallery, Trafalgar Square
For the first time in 250 years, this exhibition reunites the pastel masterpiece by Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard, painted in Lyon in 1754, with the painted version in oil he completed in London almost 20 years later.
Shakespeare and War
National Army Museum, Chelsea
This exhibition explores some of the ways in which Shakespeare has shaped how we think about soldiers and the Army, and how we imagine war and its consequences today.
Set to Stun: Designing & Filming Sci-Fi in West London
Gunnersbury Park Museum, Ealing
This exhibition ‘Set to Stun’ celebrates sci-fi film and television from the 1960s through to today, turning the camera onto the west London artisans, artists and crafts people who brought it all to life.
New to me. Let’s see. I am a pensioner and a very new watercolour…. artist in the learning process.