Aspiring art connoisseur? Feed your creative side with our picks of some of the best exhibitions taking place right across the North West over the coming weeks and months.
From now until the end of May, Whitworth’s brand new School of Creativity is home to the Unity Arts 20M21, a culmination of a two-year project led by Unity Arts, a youth and community arts organisation using creativity to challenge inequality and remove barriers.
At once playful and thought-provoking, the work on show celebrates local creative partnerships and features pieces by members of Manchester community groups and schools.
In CONSCIOUS, critically-acclaimed artist and filmmaker Suki Chan brings together moving image, virtual reality, photography, sculpture and sound to explore our perception of reality.
The exhibition includes three films: Memory (2019), Hallucinations (2020) and Fog In My Head (2022), a major commission by Film London.
Suki Chan is a Bluecoat artistic alumni, first commissioned in 2002 as part of Liverpool Live. This is the largest overview of her multi-platform project to date.
Since her first solo exhibition at Manchester’s Pankhurst Centre in 1995, artist Suzanne Bethell has been creating a diverse body of expressive, intuitive and process-led art that is infused with movement.
Lucky Dip brings together paintings, unique screen prints and assemblages bound by lively palettes to celebrate the power of colour to excite the eye and engage the soul.
Created on the day the UK went into the first lockdown in March 2020, Lucky Dip encourages us to reflect on the balance of chance and choice that shapes our lives.
Presenting a bold new look at the British landscape and the art it inspires, Radical Landscapes engages with themes of activism, trespass and climate change.
The exhibition features over 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and films that reflect the diversity of the British landscape and the communities that inhabit it.
Enjoy work by artists including Jeremy Deller, Ingrid Pollard, Derek Jarman, Alan Lodge, Tanoa Sasraku, and many more.
FACT’s exhibition of new immersive artworks explores how music and song shape our identity, bring together family, and filter through the collective histories we inherit.
Reaching between generations and across geographic boundaries, the immersive artworks featured in Let the Song Hold Us consider how we might shape our own identities from lost memories and centre around song and music as a way to communicate ideas of family, hope, and belonging.
The exhibition has already received rave reviews from the likes of The Guardian and The i, and features works by internationally renowned artist Korakrit Arunanondchai (USA/Thailand) alongside new commissions by UK-based Zinzi Minott, Tessa Norton, Larissa Sansour with Søren Lind, Ebun Sodipo, and Rae-Yen Song.
Artists throughout history have been fascinated by trees—whether for their potential for symbolic meaning or simply their aesthetic appeal—and artists and writers were campaigning for the renewal of our forests as early as the seventeenth century.
The Poetry of Trees brings together a wide range of artistic perspectives to help us reconnect with the natural world and explore the part that trees play in our individual wellbeing and the future of our planet.
- Words:
- Rachel Kevern
- Published on:
- Wed 18 May 2022
Organised every five years by Hayward Gallery Touring, the UK’s largest contemporary art organisation producing exhibitions that tour the UK, the British Art Show is a landmark touring exhibition that celebrates the best of recent art made in Britain.
British Art Show 9 will bring together some of the most exciting artists currently working in the UK to explore themes of politics of identity and nation, concerns of social, racial and environmental justice, and questions of agency.
Together, these artists respond to local contexts to imagine more hopeful futures and explore new modes of resistance, presenting their work in collaboration with the cities of Manchester, Aberdeen, Wolverhampton and Plymouth.
Head to Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth throughout for four engaging exhibitions, as well as a curated film programme.