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


All, Art, Auctions, Exhibitions, Travel & Hospitality, Initiatives

Viewing Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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

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Viewing Albert Paley at Messums West

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/

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Viewing The Casablanca Art School at Tate St Ives

If on a festive escape to Cornwall, let Tate St Ives transport you to warmer climes via its exhibition The Casablanca Art School. The show explores the artistic rebirth that followed Morocco’s independence, forged by the experimental teaching methods of the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s and 1970s.

Led by Farid Belkahia alongside Mohammed Chabâa, Mohamed Melehi and others, this pioneering institution spawned a new generation of socially engaged modern artists. Works by 22 of them showcase the Moroccan ‘new wave’, from vibrant abstract paintings and urban murals to graphics and interior design.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/casablanca-art-school

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