LONDON ART WEEK 2020

London Art Week aims to offer the very best paintings, drawings, sculpture and objects dating from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. This summer, London Art Week has launched a new online platform, to augment the experience of in-gallery exhibitions, talks and shared scholarly values.

WEISS GALLERY

Weiss Gallery presents Tender Moments: Children in Old Master Portraits. Child portraiture sometimes runs the risk of being too cloying and sentimental. Yet in old master painting, there is an added poignancy when one considers that all too often these children wouldn’t survive to adulthood. Lineage took on a loaded significance. These child portraits, loaded with parental hopes and dreams, now more than ever have a relevance today as we wonder what lies in store for the next generation.

GALERIE CANESSO

Among the ten pictures presented in the exhibition Caravaggism and Tenebrism in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Galerie Canesso focuses on three highlights: Francesco Rustici’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, the Morra Players by Pietro Ricchi, and the Martyrdom of Saint Euphemia by Francesco Cairo, one of the leading figures of Lombard Seicento art, appreciated for his mordant expressionism. The three works provide formidable examples of Caravaggesque painting in Italy roughly between 1625 and 1635. The adoption of strong chiaroscuro greatly contributes to the theatrical qualities of these original compositions, each conceived as a true performance.

Bottegantica

Bottegantica would like to dedicate the exhibition, From Giovanni Boldini to Giacoma Balla: Travels Between Two Centuries, to the most famous Italian artists in the world who lived and worked around Europe between the end of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Almost twenty artworks are exhibited, some of which for the first time. Among these artists, Giovanni Boldini, Antonio Mancini, Angelo Morbelli, John William Godward, Mariano Fortuny, Paul Cesar Helleu, Giacomo Balla and more.

The project aims to express the particular historical period of 1845-1934, during which Italian art – after years of oblivion – was developed internationally as a promoter of new and original expressive languages capable of influencing successive generations of artists. With this exhibition, the gallery offers opportunity to retrace and relive the Italian art history, born from the comparison and fruitful dialogue between artistic personalities of different cultural tradition.

COLNAGHI

The gallery presents The Golden Age of Spanish Modern Art which offers a re-evaluation of Spanish painting at the turn of the 20th century, presenting exquisite and innovative works by Spanish artists, particularly from Catalan, who trained in the academies of Barcelona and spent most of their working lives in Paris.

BEN ELWES FINE ART

Ben Elwes Fine Art presents a selection of paintings across six centuries that reflect the Anglo-American nature of the gallery. The exhibition focuses the spotlight on women artists often missing from the art-historical canon, as well as on art of the anti-slavery movement, together with a selection of Old and Modern Masters. Five women artists dating from the early 19th century to the 1950s are featured in Ben Elwes Fine Art’s virtual exhibition.

LULLO • PAMPOULIDES

Lullo • Pampoulides presents In Silent Conversation, Portraits from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Portraits represent a significant category within artists’ production and a particularly poignant subject to collect and live with. Portraits, in particular personal, intimate and familiar ones, which are very different from state and official portraits that convey the status of the sitter more than his or her true self, are multilayered conversations, that is, they allow us to establish an eternal dialogue that is constantly renewed between the artist and the sitter; but also between ourselves and the sitter, and even between the different portraits possibly hanging on our walls. Meeting the gaze of these characters from the past, each with their own story and looking into their eyes through the filter of the artist’s style and virtuosity offers, in times like these, a new, meaningful interpretation.

MIREILLE MOSLER LTD.

Mireille Mosler Ltd. is participating in London Art Week with an eclectic mix of European art from the turn of the twentieth century in Fin de siècle: melancholy, hope and nature. The earliest work in the exhibition is Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Fiery Furnac from 1863 by the last artist to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Simeon Solomon (1840-1905). Attracted to men in defiance of the law, at the height of his career, Solomon was arrested for indecent exposure in a public bathroom. After his incarceration, Solomon lost his place amongst the Pre-Raphaelites, eventually dying in destitute. This early watercolour is one of Solomon’s most important contributions to Pre-Raphaelite art. It was last shown in London in 2006 in the exhibition Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites at the Jewish Museum of Art.

KAREN TAYLOR

Karen Taylor presents British Women Artists 1780-1890. The work of women artists provides us with an important counterbalance in art history and its gradual emergence into the mainstream is to be celebrated. Often working privately, female artists drew and painted but much of their work has not received the attention bestowed upon their male counterparts. Women and women artists were an integral part of a period of great historical change and their achievements deserve greater recognition.

SLADMORE GALLERY

Over the last decade the Sladmore Gallery has loaned over a hundred sculptures to important museum exhibitions throughout the world. These artworks were chosen from their own private collection, from within the gallery’s inventory and from supportive collectors. For the first time, during London Art Week, a selection of these major works is shown together with a summary of each museum exhibition they graced. Whilst the sculptures contrast in subject, artist and date, they all have been carefully selected by independent curators outside of the gallery to engage and inspire their viewers.

WALTER PADOVANI’S GALLERY

Walter Padovani’s gallery presents a selection of works that touch on a variety of subjects, but can be defined by the theme of the sacred and the profane. The allegories of Justice and Peace are represented both by a terracotta bozzetto by Canova’s favourite pupil, Rinaldo Rinaldi (1793-1873) and by two figures in bronze by Francesco Righetti (1748-1819), from models by the Genoese sculptor Francesco Maria Ravaschio (1743-1820). In both these cases the sculptors make use of iconographical attributes to identify their personifications, Rinaldi being the more didactic whilst Ravaschio eschews the usual sword and scales to represent Justice preferring to make use of the Lictors’ fasces.

The above descriptions are sourced from the galleries’ press releases.

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London Art Week ends on July 10, 2020.