Our pick of this week’s art events: 19 - 25 January

RA Recommends

Published 16 January 2015

Walk the RA Recommends tour or visit the one-stop-shop that is the London Art Fair.

  • London’s Guildhall Art Gallery reopens

    Guildhall Art Gallery, from 16 January 2015
    One of the capital’s hidden gems, the Guildhall Art Gallery, has been given some extra sparkle. A refurbishment and rehang is complete, with highlights including Pre-Raphaelite works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais PRA. Anyone who likes Victorian art should make their acquaintance with the gallery, which draws its displays from the City of London’s art collection.

  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata, 1873.

    Oil on canvas. Courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation.

  • Adam Dant: The Budge Row Bibliotheque

    Bloomberg Space, London 16 January–15 March 2015
    After visiting the Guildhall, walk up Moorgate to Finsbury Square to one of the City’s galleries dedicated to contemporary art, Bloomberg Space. Their rotating programme of (normally solo) exhibitions alights this week on Adam Dant, an artist whose idiosyncratic drawings map connections between people and places. His attention here shifts to Budge Row, a once bustling City street that no longer exists: a huge sepia ink drawing draws together in one image the thoroughfare’s historical and contemporary threads.

  • Adam Dant, The Budge Row Bibliotheque (detail i)

    Adam Dant, The Budge Row Bibliotheque (detail i), 2014.

    ink on paper. 234 x 366 cm. Photograph by Charles Robinson, © Adam Dant, Courtesy of Adam Dant and Hales Gallery London.

  • Promise of Palm Trees

    Breese Little, London, 16 January–21 February 2015
    And after the Bloomberg Space, one can walk 15 minutes west to Clerkenwell’s Breese Little gallery, which is presenting a group exhibition that includes works by RA Schools alumni Charlie Billingham and Aimée Parrott. The show’s title ‘Promise of Palm Trees’ is appropriate for the alluring but ultimately elusive nature of the paintings on view.

  • Charlie Billingham, Bum 14

    Charlie Billingham, Bum 14, 2014.

    Oil and acrylic on linen. 100x80cm. BREESE LITTLE.

  • Virginia Overton

    White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London, 16 January–14 March 2015
    From palm trees in Clerkenwell to spruces in St James’s, in the form Virginia Overton’s installation of whitewood at White Cube. In the gallery’s ground floor gallery, huge planks of timber are held in tension while curving between floor and ceiling. The exhibition is Overton’s first solo show in the UK, and this installation, together with other site-specific sculptures on view, form a perfect introduction to the American artist’s playfulness with material, architecture and physical force.

  • Virginia Overton, Untitled

    Virginia Overton, Untitled, 2015.

    Whitewood. Dimensions variable. © the artist Photo: George Darrell Courtesy White Cube.

  • London Art Fair

    Business Design Centre, London, 21–25 January 2015
    But if going from gallery to gallery this week seems too tough, then visit 128 galleries under one roof at the Business Design Centre, which hosts the London Art Fair once again. The fair’s has a strong reputation when it comes to Modern British art (both pre- and post-war), so this year it has invited Chichester’s Pallant House gallery to show its superb collection of works by figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Lucian Freud and Patrick Caulfield RA.

  • Lucian Freud, Self Portrait with Hyacinth in PoT

    Lucian Freud, Self Portrait with Hyacinth in PoT, 1947-1948.

    crayon on paper. Courtsey of The Lucian Freud Archive and Pallant House Gallery.