Best of 2019: Exhibitions
Mother, Joaquín Sorolla (1895)
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Pi Culture’s ‘Best of 2019’ series highlights the favourite things we’ve seen, heard and read this year. In this article, our writers share the best exhibitions of 2019.
Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light - National Gallery
Iridescent, vivacious, dazzling, exquisite. The first UK exhibition of Joaquín Sorolla’s impressionist, Velázquez and El Greco inflected, but ultimately idiosyncratic paintings since 1908 was a visual tour-de-force. From the spellbindingly beautiful, sunset drenched canvass of Running along the Beach, Valencia, to the lachrymose Sad Inheritance, to the almost palpable maternal softness of Mother, Sorolla succeeded in stirring the entire gamut of my emotions. Light and water are his two fortes. Through his consummate depiction of them in this wonderfully curated exhibition, I felt as though he enveloped me in a pictorial reverie so sublimely arresting that I couldn’t help but wish that its spell was never lifted.
Roma Rodriguez
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams - V&A
The Victoria and Albert Museum held the Dior Retrospective: Designer of Dreams exhibition from February to September and left audiences in awe. Mapping the House of Dior from 1947-present day, audiences indulged in exploring the “New Look” that influenced western standards of beauty in the post-war period, and received access to the intimate details of Christian Dior himself. The exhibition explored Dior’s love for the United Kingdom, featuring personal mementos, photographs, and letters giving exclusive access to Dior’s life as a designer. Carefully curated, and meticulously detailed, museum-goers left the V&A with a renewed sense of adoration for the House of Dior.
Grace Kuperman
The Renaissance Nude - The Royal Academy of Arts
Titian painted his Venus Rising from the Sea at a critical moment in his career. In 1516, Giovanni Bellini died, and Titian became the most esteemed painter in Venice. Between 1516 and 1523, he produced a series of works for the court of Ferrara; and from that point on, his career was marked by continuous success. Dating from 1520, in the middle of this period, his depiction of the goddess Venus’s arrival on land is markedly different from Botticelli’s more famous portrayal. The shell which, according to the mythology, carried Venus to shore, is easily missed, afloat in the bottom right-hand side of the painting. Venus wrings her hair as she wades out of the water. She is radiant, but earthly — lapped at by the sea . In Botticelli’s Birth, by contrast, the resplendent Venus floats towards the shore in her shell, propelled by Zephyr, the god of the west wind, and met by a woman holding out an embroidered robe. Her expression is self-contained, dreamy, and even bored. Titian’s Venus, meanwhile, glances sharply out to the right. She is poised, and self-aware. At this particular moment something of Titian’s brilliance emerges, too, from the steely-blue ocean. It is a bold, and beautiful picture — worth the ticket alone.
Joe Kenelm
Food: Bigger than the Plate - V&A
2019 was all about sustainability and this exhibition that ran from May 18th to October 20th at the V&A was no exception. It sought to feature innovative composting technologies — such as ceramic-like furniture made with dried cow dung — and shed light on the process that food goes through before being served on the plate. There was also a mini gastronomic experience in the form of a “snack lab”, where visitors were able to enjoy a personalised snack based on their priorities in consumption. Going into 2020, let’s continue to honour this sustainability spirit and remember that while consumption is undeniably central to our living, it is the choices we make that will determine an equally healthy, tasty, and more sustainable food future.
Elly Chaw
olafur eliasson: In real life - tate Modern
In a year of block buster exhibitions, Olafur Eliasson’s In Real Life was a particular highlight. A hit with children and social influencers alike, this exhibition cited a shift towards more interactive exhibitions. At once playful, engaging and thought-provoking, Eliasson’s work stretched the possibilities of what could be shown within the gallery space. Attendees were transported through smoky corridors, transfixed by water fountains and grounded by their interactions with a wall of moss, making each one of us consider the losses caused by a changing climate and a breaking world.
Laura Toms
don mccullin - tate britain
Don McCullin has taken some of the most iconic photographs of the last half of the twentieth-century. From a stony, shell-shocked American soldier, to the nine-year-old albino child starving to death in Biafra, his photographs are emblazoned on the media universe of at least the last fifty years. With light-touch curation, Tate Britain paid its due to the photographic legend, tracing his career from its Finsbury Park birthplace out to Africa, and to Vietnam and beyond. Resisting selectivity, the gallery was right to throw up the trove of McCullin’s work, paying homage to a legend whose work will haunt the foreseeable future.
Jamie Singleton
Mantegna and Bellini - The National Gallery
The National Gallery welcomed 2019 with an exquisite exhibition comparing the work of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Giovanni Bellini (1435-1516). The two Renaissance giants were bound by kinship when Mantegna, an aspirational carpenter’s son from Padua, married into the Bellini family of revered Venetian artists. Throughout his life, Bellini often drew inspiration from Mantegna’s highly innovative paintings, although Bellini’s mastery of light, shadow and colour ensured his works were strikingly original. An entire generation of artists were influenced by Bellini, including Giorgione and Titian. The beautifully curated exhibition served as a reminder of the human relationships and rivalries that spurred Renaissance artists on to greater heights.
Olivia Ward-Jackson
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency - Tate Modern
Intimate and uncompromising, Goldin’s depictions of the friends and lovers who shaped, and perhaps saved, her life during the 1970s and ‘80s are starkly personal. Goldin’s evident connection to her subjects enables her to craft a careful record of life in the post-Stonewall LGBT circle, a community richly evoked by both her photographs and the music to which the Ballad is set . With subject matter ranging from the joyous — partying in clubs, domestic life with a lover — to the extremely difficult — her own domestic abuse and the ravages of the AIDS crisis — the central theme remains that of the inherently human need for connection.
Emily Hufton