SOON TO CLOSE

Closing in February or March

Closing in February

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009. This amazing open competition has attracted more than 6,300 submissions from 2,452 photographers of many nationalities – professionals, students and amateurs. Working from original prints the judges have selected 60 portraits for exhibition and chosen four photographers to be shortlisted for the £12,000 Taylor Wessing Prize: Paul Floyd Blake, Michal Chelbin, Mirjana Vrbaski and Vanessa Winsip. The Godfrey Argent Award worth £2,500 is for the best photographer aged between 18 and 25. In addition, this year ELLE magazine will commission one of the photographers selected for the exhibition to shoot a feature story.
National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE. Tel. +44 (0)20 7306 0055. (Open daily; late Thur & Fri) www.npg.org.uk 5 November 2009 – 14 February.
The exhibition will tour to The Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead from 27 March – 6 June 2010; and then to The New Art Gallery, Walsall from July – September 2010.

On Horseback! The World of Philips Wouwerman. More famous and sought after in his lifetime than Rembrandt and Vermeer, Philips Wouverman (1619 – 1668) although now relatively unknown was an especially successful painter of horses. This loan exhibition of 33 paintings and ten of his very rare drawings includes a number of these works as well as examples of his landscapes and other subjects.
Sponsored by the Friends of the Mauritshuis and the Johan Maurits Compagnie Foundation.
Mauritshuis, Buitenhof 35, The Hague, The Netherlands. Tel. +31 70 302 34 35. (Open Tues – Sun) www.mauritshuis.nl 12 November 2009 – 28 February.

Henry Moore Textiles. Important exhibition devoted to a little remembered aspect of the work of great British sculptor Henry Moore: his designs for textiles and fabrics made in the 1940s for the emigré Czech textile manufacturer Zika Ascher. This exhibition comes from the collections at Moore's former home in Perry Green.
Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1TJ. Tel. +44 (0)1243 774557. (Open Tues - Sun; late Thurs) www.pallant.org.uk 14 November 2009 – 21 February.

Kienholz: The Hoerengracht. Prostitution is the theme of this installation and assemblage by American artists Ed Kienholz (1927 – 1944) and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz (born 1943) based on Amsterdam's Red Light District. An historical perspective will be seen nearby in Dutch 17^th century works by artists such as Jan Steen and Peter de Hooch.
Supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. Tel. +44 (0)20 7747 2885. (Open daily; late Fri) www.nationalgallery.org.uk 18 November 2009 - 21 February.

Hendrick Avercamp: The Little Ice Age. International loan exhibition of paintings and drawings by Hendrick Avercamp 1585 – 1634 devoted to his panoramic winter landscapes where a multitude of small and varied figures enjoy the pleasures and perils of negotiating the ice on frozen Dutch rivers and canals. Known in his lifetime as “The Mute,” because of his inability to speak, Avercamp was probably profoundly deaf and this exhibition provides the Rijksmuseum with the opportunity to launch a programme for deaf and hearing-impaired visitors.
Rijksmuseum, The Philips Wing, Jan Luijkenstraat 1, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel. +31 20 6 74 70 47 (Open daily) www.ruksmuseum.nl 20 November 2009 – 15 February.

Design Real. Curated by Konstantin Grcic, the German-born industrial designer, this is the first-ever exhibition of contemporary design to be held at the Serpentine Gallery. It is devoted to mass-produced items including household products and technical innovations – all seen for the first time on the market in the past ten years. A dedicated website www.design-real.com forms the exhibition's central resource.
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA. Tel. +44 (0)20 7402 6075. (Open daily) 26 November 2009 – 7 February.

Craftivism. Series of contemporary art projects “developed by artists and collectives that work with craft-based traditions and activist practices, and who employ the tactics of 'craftivism' (combining crafting + activism) to question and disrupt the prevailing codes of mass consumerism.” An interesting idea especially if seen in practice.
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA. Tel. +44 (0) 117 917 2300. (Open Tues - Sun) 12 December 2009 – 14 February.

*The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life. This exhibition is a real delight. As the title suggests, the pictures are concerned with informal gatherings of families or friends – all arranged here so as to give the viewer the opportunity of savouring their contents in detail as well as marvelling at the technical skills they present, whether this be the limpid mastery apparent in Gainsborough's portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell, or the incredible detail and formal complexity of Zoffany's great Tribuna of the Uffizi. The idea of the 'conversation piece' is extended here to include several of Stubbs's marvellous horse paintings as well as a number of other works from the Royal Collection illustrating how the genre originated in the 17th century Netherlands. Also on show are Landseer's masterpiece of Royal domesticity Windsor Castle in Modern Times showing Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Princess Royal their eldest daughter painted in the early 1840s, and from the 1630s a tiny and enchanting composition by Hendrick Pot showing Charles I, Henrietta Maria and the infant Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. The illustrated catalogue by the exhibition's curator Desmond Shawe-Taylor provides much detail about each of the pictures as well as a fresh and discursive historical introduction to the whole idea.
The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1. Tickets and information Tel. +44 (0)20 7766 7301. (Open daily) www.royalcollection.org.uk 30 October 2009 - 14 February.

Closing in March

Krystof Wodiczko: The Veterans Project. Large-scale video installation concerned with the experience of war in Iraq through the memories of soldiers and civilians, reliving the chaos and confusion both endured.
Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute, New York.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210, USA. Tel. +1 617 478 3100. (Open Tues – Sun) 4 November 2009 – 28 March 2010.

Duncan Phyfe, America's Legendary Cabinetmaker. This major exhibition is devoted to showing the full range of furniture made by Duncan Phyffe (1768 - 1854) beginning with his earliest and best-known examples based on the designs of Thomas Sheraton, up to the Antique and Grecian styles he adopted in later years.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028. Tel. +1 212 535 7710. (Open Tues - Sun; late Fri & Sat) 30 November 2009 - 7 March 2010.

Enamels of the World 1700 – 2000 from the Khalili Collections. The constantly amazing Professor Nasser D. Khalili has developed his interests beyond Islamic and Japanese art to make a collection of enamel work – unrestricted by national or regional boundaries or that of individual masters. His new collection which already comprises more than 1,000 items includes objects made over the past three centuries from Europe, Russia, America, the Islamic lands, China and Japan; from these a selection of more than 300 items has been made to be exhibited in The Hermitage – for the first time anywhere.
The State Hermitage Museum, 2 Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, 190000, St Petersburg, Russia. Tel. +7 (812) 710 90 79. (Open Tues – Sun) www.hermitagemuseum.org 8 December 2009 – 14 March 2010.

Objects of Contemplation: Natural sculptures from the Qing Dynasty. In 17^th century China small and fascinating rocks became collected – ancient and natural objects described, perhaps mistakenly in recent times, as 'scholars' rocks. This is one of the questions addressed by this small exhibition, together with others such as the relationship of the rocks to their later carved plinths (which can be changed) and not least: what is it that make an individual rock an item of sculpture to be cleaned, polished and cherished.
Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH. Tel. +44 (0)113 246 7467. (Open daily; late Wed) 12 December 2009 – 7 March 2010.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Exhibition of works by the important, and controversial, 20^th century photographer Robert Mapplethorpe forming part of ARTISTS ROOMS On Tour with The Art Fund. The Artists Rooms collection was established by the dealer and collector Anthony d'Offay who, concidentally was born in Sheffield, and is now owned on behalf of the nation by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.
The Graves Art Gallery, Surrey Street, Sheffield S1 1XZ. Tel. +44 (0)114 278 2600. (Open Mon – Sat) www.museums-sheffield.org.uk 19 December 2009 – 27 March 2010.

Points of View: Capturing the 19^th Century in Photographs. The British Library's first-ever major photographic exhibition traces the development of photography from its invention in 1839 to the turn of the century. Some 150 images illustrate how and why it came to be used – for portraiture, travel, war, science and industry. Among the earlier photographs are a view in the Himalayas by Samuel Bourne, 1864; another of Hastings from the Beach by Francis Frith, c. 1864; a photogenic drawing of flowers by William Henry Fox Talbot, c. 1839; and a dozing hippopotamus Obaysch taken in the London Zoo by Don Juan Carlos, Duke of Montizon in 1852.
British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB. Tel. +44 (0)20 7412 7332. (Open daily; late Tues) www.bl.uk 30 October 2009 – 7 March 2010.

The Arts of Islam. Masterpieces from the Khalili Collection. Some 500 items from the unrivalled Khalili Collection of Islamic Art ranging in date from the 7^th century to the early 20^th century, and geographically from the Far East, Middle East, Northern Africa and Southern Europe, including manuscripts, pottery, metalwork and jewellery.
Institut du Monde Arabe, 1 rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, Place Mohammed-V, 75236 Paris, France. Tel. +33 (0)1 40 51 38 38. (Open Tues – Sun) www.imarabe.org 6 October 2009 – 14 March 2010.

*especially recommended

Please check opening times and days before travelling any distance.