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Viewing Gardening Bohemia at The Garden Museum

The four women at the centre of the Garden Museum’s current exhibition need little introduction: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Vita Sackville-West were all remarkable contributors to the Bloomsbury Group. Yet while the famous adage of Woolf’s expounded the importance of a room of one’s own – less familiar is the relationship these women had with their carefully cultivated gardens.

Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, takes you from Virgina Woolf’s garden at Monk’s House, to her sister, artist Vanessa Bell’s garden and studio at Charleston, patron and photographer Lady Ottoline Morrell’s outdoor space at Garsington Manor and garden designer and writer Vita Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst Castle.

Through photographs, paintings, textiles, letters – and even garden tools – this glorious show reveals how important these gardens were to the lives and creativity of each woman, places of personal sanctuary and reprieve, as well as to experiment and nuture – often against a backdrop of politcal and personal turbulence.

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Dates
15 May 2024 — 29 September 2024

Viewing Matthew Smith and Patrick Heron at Charleston House

Matthew Smith, the post-modernist painter who was taught by Henri Matisse, was described by the painter Patrick Heron as ‘easily the most important English painter of his generation.’ Smith’s influence on Heron was profound – traceable today in still lifes as much as in Heron’s later abstract paintings.

This jaw-dropping display at Charleston tracks a scintillating dialogue between the two English painters of two different generatons, revisiting Smith through the eyes and appreciation of Heron. Both were trailblazers who were obsessed with colour, and used in in expressive and dynamic new ways on canvas. Heron would become a key contributor to the post-war art scene in Britain, as a critic as well as an artist, a prominent figure in modernist painting who pushed ideas of making use of the entire canvas.

Presenting works by each side by side, the connections are dazzling: both, for example, painted Cornish landscapes – Heron lived in Cornwall all of his life – and both were influenced by Fauvism, but suffused it with their own uplifting and refreshing style and palettes. A joyous celebration of two artists who are widely considered two of the most important colourists of the 20th century.

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Dates
01 May 2024 — 12 October 2024
There Is Light Somewhere Bahamian-born conceptual artist Tavares Strachan’s radiant first institutional exhibition explores light, knowledge and human resilience through an array of captivating multimedia installations. Playing with light and shadow, neon sculptures that pulse with energy, intricate glassworks that capture the ephemeral beauty of light – it’s all meticulously crafted to play with the senses and challenge the stability of perception, asking poignant questions of the viewer.

There’s a vast new piece, Intergalactic Palace, which houses the sound and light installation, Sonic Encyclopaedia. It teems with cross-cultural energy: materially, it makes allusions to East African minerals and the surface of Mars, to traditional thatched structures found in Uganda. This exhibition demonstrates Strachan’s expressive and inexhaustive use of materials, often using them to blur borders and draw metaphors.

Drawing on the artist’s ongoing research into the intersections of art, science, and history. One of the highlights of the exhibition is the immersive installation Encyclopedia of Invisibility, an ambitious project that catalogues 17,000 entries of forgotten figures of history, shining a light on the invisible and the marginalized. Another standout piece is The Astronaut’s Diary, a tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut. The installation’s luminous quality evokes a sense of wonder, paying homage to the spirit of human endeavor. Strachan shines light where it’s most needed.

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Dates
18 June 2024 — 01 September 2024
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