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Viewing The first UK retrospective of Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama

The Wick Culture - Installation view, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, at The Photographers' Gallery

Above Installation view, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, at The Photographers’ Gallery

Daidō Moriyama: A Retrospective
The Photographers’ Gallery, Ramillies St, W1

6 October 2023 – 11 February 2024

The man who took some of the most compelling images of the 20th century gets his first retrospective in the UK. And it’s long overdue. Octogenarian Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama has probed the very essence of the medium and how an image is experienced, while blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.

The show encompasses the vast breadth of the prolific artist’s career, from his early work for Japanese magazines and his engagement with photorealism to his more self-reflective period in the 1980s and 90s and beyond. Catch the show while you still can.

Viewing Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The Wick Culture - © Jonty Wilde WurmPortraits 9.6.23

Above © Jonty Wilde WurmPortraits 9.6.23

The Wick Culture - ©Jonty Wilde YSP Akeela Bertram 18.9.23

Above ©Jonty Wilde YSP Akeela Bertram 18.9.23

The Wick Culture - Erwin Wurm, Big Mutter, 2015. Courtesy Studio Erwin Wurm and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Photo ©Jonty Wilde

Above Erwin Wurm, Big Mutter, 2015. Courtesy Studio Erwin Wurm and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Photo ©Jonty Wilde

Above © Jonty Wilde WurmPortraits 9.6.23

Above ©Jonty Wilde YSP Akeela Bertram 18.9.23

Above Erwin Wurm, Big Mutter, 2015. Courtesy Studio Erwin Wurm and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Photo ©Jonty Wilde

Above © Jonty Wilde WurmPortraits 9.6.23

Fire and Light: Winter Walking Route
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Yorkshire

As we disperse around the country for the Christmas holidays, The Wick brings you cultural highlights to catch in different corners of the nation. No trip north is complete without a ramble around the grounds of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, filled with pieces by artworld greats. This season, wrap up warm to enjoy its 1.85-mile Fire and Light walking route. It begins at the Chapel, where you can experience the multi-sensory Light Organ, before ending at James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace at sunset.

Along the way you’ll take in Marialuisa Tadei’s mosaic work Night and Day, which uses the colours of dusk and dawn to create a portal into a more ethereal world, and Big Mutter, a giant hot water bottle with human feet by Erwin Wurm, whose solo exhibition Trap of the Truth (until 28 April 2024) charges the Underground Gallery with his characteristic wit. Be sure to catch Jonathan Baldock’s Touch Wood (until 7 July) exhibition in The Weston Gallery too. He takes inspiration from the seasons, paganism, myth and folklore to take you on a mystical journey that asserts our deep connection to nature. It’s quite the trip.

https://ysp.org.uk/winter-of-light-and-fire

Viewing Albert Paley at Messums West

The Wick Culture - Courtesy of Messums West

Above Courtesy of Messums West

Albert Paley: Heavy Metal and the Art Nouveau
Messums Wiltshire, Place Farm, Court St, Tisbury

14 October 2023 – 14 January 2024

Those headed to Wiltshire this festive season should make a bee-line for Messums to see American modernist sculptor Albert Paley’s rhapsodies in metal. “Using metal is like drawing in space,” the artist once said, and his sinuous sketches in the air give the gallery’s vast tithe barn a magnetic charge. From the Victoria and Albert Gate, commissioned by the V&A in 1982, to the Fence of the Hunter Museum, Paley has pushed his medium in ever more inventive directions. On show are works from the past 35 years, alongside a collection of his drawings. Catch the exhibition before it closes on 14 January.

https://www.messums.org/exhibitions/albert-paley/