When in London: Winter 2020/21

Bags: Inside Out

It’s in the bag! V&A rummages deep into fashion’s favourite accessory in the exhibition ‘Bags: Inside Out’.

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge,
London SW7 2RL

Sneaker Story

From function-focused sportswear to urban status symbols, the full gamut of sneakers takes centre stage in the Design Museum’s exhibition. ‘Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street Cult’ presents classic, limited-edition and rare pairs as well as an insight into the innovative processes behind their creation.

Design Museum,
224-238 Kensington High St,
Kensington,
London W8 6AG

Penthouse Pop

A site-specific artwork by celebrated British pop artist Sir Peter Blake CBE hangs on the walls of London’s 45 Park Lane Penthouse Suite. Today an octogenarian, still at work, he continues taking others into new reveries with his pop perspective. His ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album cover for The Beatles, a colourful image depicting the “Fab Four” in front of a collage of celebrities and historical figures, has been widely lauded for expanding the graphic design industry into popular music, making the connections between art and pop explicit.

‘Dancing Girls Over Rotten Row’, a recent work by Sir Peter Blake, expresses style diversions and similarities from his most famous work. The image is vibrant and distinctly, historically London. ‘Rotten Row’ is a broad track running along the south side of Hyde Park; during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a fashionable place for upper-class Londoners to be seen horse riding. It was also the first artificially lit highway in Britain. “When I started to make this print, I did what I always do which is to think of the area, in this case, Hyde Park. I researched vintage postcards of Rotten Row and came up with images upon which I collaged the figures dancing over it. There are various kinds of theatrical characters that I use in my work but, for here, in my mind they are a famous troupe of dancers doing their performance in Hyde Park,” the artist explains.

Sir Peter Blake has generations of perspective on the career of being an artist. “My career is over, and I realise that. But I’m still working; I’m still an artist. I made a sort of ‘conceptual retirement’, which meant that I still work but that I would retire from greed, avarice, ambition, the nasty side of art.” He now cultivates all categories of work, including sculpture, for a career perhaps freer than it has ever been. Sir Peter Blake’s work, at least at 45 Park Lane, dances above Hyde Park and history all at once.

45 Park Lane
London W1K 1PN
T. +44 20 7493 4545

Zanele Muholi

South African visual activist and artist Zanele Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that told the stories black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives in South Africa. Now at the Tate, Muholi has her first major UK exhibition showcasing 260 photographs, from the very first body of work ‘Only Half the Picture’, to the on-going series ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’, continuously challenging dominant ideologies and representations.

Zanele Muholi
Until 7 March 2021,
Tate Modern Bankside,
London SE1 9TG

Renaissance Watercolours

Due to their light-sensitivity, watercolour are rarely displayed. With the  Renaissance Watercolours: from Dürer to Van Dyck’ exhibition at the V&A, visitors get a rare opportunity to see 200 of some of the finest watercolour masterpieces from the Renaissance era. The exhibition features vibrant sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Anthony van Dyck, highly-finished works by Albrecht Dürer and Simon Bening, and life-like portrait miniatures by Hans Holbein and Nicholas Hilliard.

Victoria and Albert Museum,
Cromwell Rd,
Knightsbridge,
SW7 2RL

Eisenhower Suite

The balcony of the Eisenhower Suite at The Dorchester offers privacy, shade and a breath of fresh air in the heart of London, looking out upon Park Lane and beyond, with magnificent plane trees and other urban greenery.

The Dorchester,
Park Lane,
London W1K 1QA
T. +44 20 7629 8888

Dóra Maurer

Movement, displacement, perception and transformation have remained consistent themes for Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer, whose largest UK exhibition brings together some 35 works. The show reveals the diversity of her output, including graphic works, photographs, films and paintings. Trained as a graphic artist in the 1950s, Maurer pushed the medium to its limit throughout her experimental career which spans more than five decades. Maurer was at the centre of an underground independent community of artists outside of the official Hungarian system during the socialist period.

Dóra Maurer,
Until 24 January 2021
Tate Modern,
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

Return to Wonderland

An allegory for the subconscious dream state? An allusion to the use of psychedelics?…or simply a fantastical work of nonsensical folly? Regardless of the many disputing theories as to its meanings, or perhaps thanks to these, one thing is undeniable: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ has captured the imagination and awe of children and adults alike, continuously, for the past 157 years.

Paying tribute to this enduring and elusive tale written by Lewis Carroll, the V&A Museum holds an exhibition exploring its origins, adaptations and reinventions, those which have pervaded every medium of pop culture since, from film, to fashion, to art, to music. Most recently, Lady Gaga featured a song inspired by Alice in her latest album ‘Chromatica’. Among the 300 objects on view are costumes and sketches from Tim Burton’s adaptation on the big screen, Alice in Wonderland (2010), the fifth highest-grossing film of all time during its theatrical run, as well as concept art from Walt Disney’s ever-iconic 1951 animated film of the same name.

Alice in Wonderland’s spirit of wild imagination is infectious: its surrealist world has appealed to artists such as Salvador Dalí and Dorothea Tanning who have created related oeuvres, and its extravagant characters have even inspired high-fashion looks, such as the Mad Hatter appearing on the runway of Viktor & Rolf’s Haute Couture show at Paris Fashion Week. Curious indeed.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser,
Opening 27 March 2021 Victoria and Albert Museum,
Cromwell Rd,
Knightsbridge,
London SW7 2RL

© Yaffa Assouline for Collect magazine N°27