Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.


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Viewing Lakwena Maciver: A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

Lakwena Maciver has had a bumper couple of years. She has made her name creating electrifying, joyful installations — spanning public murals, panel paintings and banners — with messages of ‘hope, redemption, decolonisation and paradise’. Referencing everyday shared experiences as well as pop culture, fashion and basketball, they have emboldened cities around the world, from London and Paris to Munich and Miami.

In 2021 she launched her much-hyped capsule collection with Fiorucci, transformed the roof of Temple tube station into a kaleidoscopic ‘vision of paradise’, and installed a series of large-scale basketball paintings in the courtyard of Somerset House during 1:54. Now she’s presenting a major solo show of new paintings and textile works at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

For this body of new work, Maciver has drawn inspiration from YSP’s landscape and the 18th-century ha-ha, concealed walled ditches that were built to stop livestock straying into gardens without the need for visible fences. Full of colour and sparkling words, the resulting works explore notions of power, ownership, access, control, boundaries and division. They also examine hierarchies of liberty and space. Like much of her work, these new paintings tackle punchy themes in digestible ways. Get thee to Yorkshire sharpish.

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Dates
12 November 2022 — 19 March 2023

Viewing Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope

Magdalena Abakanowicz’s bold experimentations with space, form and organic materials reframed the possibilities of sculpture for good. This exhibition brings together 26 of her radical three-dimensional works, otherwise known as Abakans, in a forest-like display alongside early textiles pieces and little-known drawings.

Honouring the artist’s wish for them to be seen and experienced as living works, visitors will weave through a fibrous sculptural landscape. As you meander through the forest of towering forms, you’ll encounter some of her most ambitious pieces from the 1960s and 70s, including the monumental Abakan Red (1969) and Abakan – Situation Variable II from 1971, which incorporates rope, spilling from the sculpture onto the floor.

It’s a rare opportunity to appreciate Abakanowicz’s pioneering vision as well as the close connection between these raw forms and both the human body and earth around us. ‘It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves,’ Abakanowicz once said. ‘Our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles. We are fibrous structures.’

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Dates
17 November 2022 — 21 May 2023

Viewing Making Modernism 

Landing at the Royal Academy this November is ‘Making Modernism’, the first major UK exhibition dedicated to a group of trailblazing women artists working in Germany in the early 1900s. These include Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kӓthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. Also featured are key pictures by Erma Bossi, Ottilie Reylaender and Jacoba van Heemskerck.

Although less familiar than their male counterparts like Wassily Kandinsky, these women were no less central to the development of Modernism in Europe. In celebration of their vital contribution to the movement, this long-overdue exhibition brings together 65 works, many never seen in the UK before.

Expect bold, brilliant colours and pictures that take as their themes the changing role of women, modernity, identity, belonging and urban life. Highlights include Bossi’s Portrait of Marianne Werefkin from 1910 and Modersohn- Becker’s 1906 Mother with Child on her Arm, Nude II. Of the still lifes on display in the final section, our favourite is Münter’s Apples on the Wall from 1908.

It’s a great opportunity to discover the individuality of each artist as well as the strong affinities between them. Finally, they’re getting their time in the spotlight. Don’t miss it!

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Dates
12 November 2022 — 12 February 2023
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