RA Magazine Blog Listing

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) loved to paint the landscape: he would sketch the Suffolk countryside, the skies with their fluffy white cumulous clouds, and the cattle and farmhands in the fields.

'Out of Focus' is the first survey exhibition of photography that the Saatchi Gallery has presented since 'I Am a Camera' (2001), a show that was well-received by critics but caused distracting headlines for its presentation of pictures by Tierney Gearon featuring her two young children in the nude (public complaints caused the police to visit the gallery).

'Masterworks: Architecture at the Royal Academy' is on until 13 March in the John Madejski Fine Rooms. In the video below, curator Neil Bingham introduces the exhibition and covers some of the highlights of this survey of the Royal Academy's collection of drawings and models by celebrated British architects.

In the film below, the curators of 'Watteau: The Drawings', Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, describe Watteau's masterful 'trois crayons' drawing technique that characterises many of the works in the exhibition.

In the latest issue of the RA Magazine, Edmund Fawcett takes us on a tour around Southern California to discover the highlights of 'Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980'. The map below guides you around his picks of the participating venues.

Browse and Darby, just around the corner from the Royal Academy, has put on an exhibition of Degas drawings and bronzes to coincide with 'Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement'. We visited with the RA's Degas curator, Ann Dumas, who selected some of her favourite works in the show.

This exhibition at Pallant House, the first for nearly 25 years, is a timely reminder of the extraordinary nature of Edward Burra’s art.

Transatlantic dealers and gallerists Eykyn Maclean have launched their new London space with an exhibition of Cy Twombly works from the collection of Ileana Sonnabend.

Four recent works by the Melbourne-born, British-based artist Ron Mueck (pronounced ‘Mew-eck’) are on view for a month at Hauser & Wirth on Saville Row.

Edmund de Waal's bestselling family memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes told the story of the Ephrussi banking dynasty's fortunes throughout 19th and 20th century Europe, from fabulous wealth and cultural prestige to Nazi persecution and the dispersal of the family across three continents. It is a book in which family, belonging and the meaning of collecting are all central themes; inspired by De...

The American glass artist Dale Chihuly is well known in the UK, not least for his spectacular 27-foot chandelier that graces the front hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was created on the occasion of his 2001 exhibition 'Chihuly at the V&A', which was followed in 2005 by a large site-specific installation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Howard Hodgkin’s obsession with Indian art of the Mughal period (c.1560–1858) predates his career as a painter – he acquired his first Mughal work while still in short trousers, aged fourteen. Today his collection of approximately 115 paintings is considered one of the finest of its kind in private hands. This Sunday is the last opportunity to see the collection in its entirety, when its presentation...

The representations in 'Galápagos', a new group exhibition at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, presents a more complex picture of the archipelago than the images we are most familiar with.

The V&A has just opened a mid-career retrospective of the work of Thomas Heatherwick, whose studio has emerged over the last two decades as one of the country’s most experimental design practices.

Saturday saw the start of Tate Blackouts, a showcase for Olafur Eliasson's 'Little Sun' project in which visitors can explore the darkened surrealism galleries in Tate Modern after closing time using the lamp that Eliasson has developed with engineer Frederik Ottesen.

Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum) has loaned Pablo Picasso’s watercolour 'Mother and Child' (1905) and Artemisia Gentileschi’s oil 'Jael and Sisera' (1620) to Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery until February 2013. The gallery’s Curator of European Fine Art, Xanthe Brooke, tells Sam Phillips why the two works fascinate her.

From the Royal Academy's own 'Manet: Portraying Life' to the long-awaited reopening of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, here's the RA Magazine team's pick of 10 art world events and exhibitions to get excited about in the opening months of 2013.

To walk around 'Model' with Antony Gormley was by turns inspiring and daunting, even a bit frightening given how dark the space is inside his monumental sculpture and how uncanny and unexpected it is to be part of this vast, dark space – one he says has 'the darkness of the imagination rather than of nightmares'.

French artist Edouard Manet and American artist George Bellows were both painters of modern life; one capturing the world of nineteenth century Paris, the other forging a career in early twentieth century New York. But the similarities between these two virtuoso painters extend even further than this, as 'George Bellows' co-curator Ann Dumas explains in this video.

Our fascination with the Roman ruins of Pompeii is fuelled by both our interest in remnants of an antique era and our awe at how such a vibrant city – in just a matter of hours – could be entombed by a natural disaster and lost for centuries. The British Museum’s new blockbuster exhibition does a balancing act by focusing squarely on the eruption of Vesuvius in its first and last sections, while...

A truly cinematic art experience is on offer tonight at both multiplexes and art-house establishments across the country. As part of ‘Exhibition’, a series of films on great gallery shows, a feature-length documentary takes viewers behind-the-scenes of the Royal Academy’s ‘Manet: Portraying Life’.

Sydney Lee was a highly accomplished and experimental printmaker, as curator Robert Meyrick demonstrates in these videos. His search for subjects took him from the waterways of Kent to the mountains of Switzerland, while his influences ranged from Whistler's etchings of the Thames to Japanese colour woodblock prints.

Although best known for his paintings of gritty urban life in early twentieth-century New York, George Bellows painted a range of subjects throughout his career, which was cut short by his death at the age of 42. In these videos, the co-curators of the RA exhibition introduce four very different works by the artist, from the violence of the boxing ring to a family portrait.

Leon Kossoff has been drawings and painting scenes of London in the same frenetic, expressionistic style for more than six decades. But looking at his latest works in the catalogue for his new show at Annely Juda Fine Art, there is no sense that his recent pieces are in any way anachronistic.

The poetic paintings of Per Kirkeby play out in a no man’s land between abstraction and figuration – a territory that the viewer finds hard to map.