For the first time since it was created in the 11c, the Bayeux Tapestry is returning to England. One of the most important records of the Middle Ages, it is simultaneously artwork, political propaganda and historical document. At nearly 70 meters (230 feet) long it narrates events leading to the invasion of England by William the Conqueror and culminates in the Battle of Hastings of 1066, one of the defining moments in English history. It provides us with invaluable visual sources for understanding various aspects of life in 11c Europe.
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One of the largest and most important Calder exhibitions ever mounted, nearly 300 works occupy the entire Frank Gehry building and extend onto the museum grounds. The exhibition presents Calder not simply as the inventor of the mobile, but as an artist who fundamentally changed the very nature of sculpture by introducing movement, time, change, and performance into the medium. It demonstrates Calder’s place as one of the most radical sculptors of the 20c., one who transformed sculpture from something fixed into something fluid and alive. Gehry’s building perfectly complements his work.
A landmark exhibition has been curated in three locations in Florence in order fully to explore the deep influence that Italian Renaissance art and architecture had on Rothko (1903-1970). The exhibition traces the arc of Rothko’s career from his earliest figurative and surrealist paintings in the 1930’s to his iconic luminous colour-field ‘abstractions’ of the 1950’s. Rothko himself repeatedly argued that the monumental paintings of his later years were not abstractions, but were expressions of basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, intimations of mortality and transcendence.
The use of colour in Barbara Hepworth’s work is often overlooked, yet color played a subtle but significant role in her career. She skillfully employed it to clarify spatial relationships, to emphasize interior versus exterior forms, and to direct the viewer’s attention to carved surfaces and tensions within the sculpture. Hepworth’s colour is not decorative but phenomenological; it shapes how space is experienced. Colour becomes a means of making the invisible part of the sculpture- be it air, light, distance, sea, embodied experience, or all five.
The largest retrospective (150 works) of the rule-breaking American Anglophile artist JMW in more than 30 years brings together his world-famous paintings alongside rarely or never seen work. A boldly experimental artist he disrupted the conventions of Victorian society in his pursuit of beauty and progress. Rather than telling stories or conveying moral lessons, he pursued what he called arrangements, harmonies, symphonies, and nocturnes emphasizing aesthetic experience over narrative. In transforming atmosphere, colour and mood into worthy subjects he represents a critical bridge between Courbet and Rothko.
Likely to be one of the most discussed sculpture retrospectives in Britain this year, the bold exhibition of work by Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery fills the building with both recent works and major earlier pieces. In his work sculpture becomes environment. Using colour and monumentality to destabilize perception and emotion, Kapoor’s themes continue to be assertions of the possibility of the sublime in sculpture. We ask if his sculpture aspires to the territory once occupied by religious architecture, Romantic landscape painting, and monumental public art.
One of the most significant modernist sculptors of the 20c, the exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield displays the wide range of media explored by Mukherjee (1949-2015) across a remarkable 40-year career, including her monumental fiber works, ceramic and bronze sculpture, etchings and watercolour. Fusing abstraction with sensuous figuration, drawing on nature and ancient sculptural techniques, she exemplifies freedom from convention in modernist experimentation. Mukerjee transcends ethnic categorization through her sculptural language, but her imagination remained nourished by cultural and mythological themes rooted in South Asia.
A fearless, revolutionary artist Frida Kahlo was at the same time a dedicated wife, an intellectual, and a political activist. More than 30 works by Kahlo are shown alongside works by artists she influenced and objects from her personal life. We discover the extraordinary story of how she became one of the most influential artists of all time, a cultural phenomenon, and an internationally recognized commercial icon. The emphasis of the exhibition is on legacy and cultural afterlife as much as on artistic achievement.
Costume Art at the Met is one of the most intellectually ambitious fashion exhibitions. The exhibition pairs garments with paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, archaeological objects and other works in order to demonstrate that fashion and art have long addressed many of the same concerns: identity, beauty, power, status, gender, and the human body itself. It proposes that clothing is one of humanity’s most persistent artistic expressions. The exhibition is organized around a series of “body types’ rather than historical periods: the classical body, the nude body, the anatomical body, the aging body, the pregnant body, the disabled body, and the mortal body. It places the body – not clothing itself – as the center of the discussion.
The exhibition at Kew is the largest outdoor presentation of Moore’s sculpture ever staged. Approximately 30 monumental sculptures are distributed across Kew’s extensive gardens with over 90 additional works in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. The exhibition has been built around Moore’s guiding principle that landscape amplified sculptural form through changing light, weather, scale, and horizon. Concerned with how human perception is shaped by the natural environment, his sculptures are often described as abstract, yet they derive from his close observation of bones, pebbles, shells, tree roots, seeds and geological formations.
BOOKING INFORMATION
‘Summer and Autumn Exhibitions’ is a Zoom course (for which we offer support to access) which has been developed, designed and edited by Louise Friend and will be presented by Nicholas Friend. It is held on Tuesdays, beginning on Tuesday 30 June until Tuesday 1 September 2026 at 5pm.
If you book for the course but cannot manage a particular date, then be assured we will be sending recordings of sessions to all registered participants. Each session meets from 15 minutes before the advertised time of the lecture, and each lasts roughly one hour with 15 minutes discussion.
COST:
£500 for members, £600 non-members for ten sessions. Single sessions, £55 for members, £65 non- members. All sessions are limited to 21 participants to permit a vibrant after-lecture discussion session.
Please make your payment to Friend&Friend Ltd by bank transfer to our account with Metrobank, bank sort code 23-05-80, account number 13291721 or via PayPal to nicholas@inscapetours.co.uk, or credit/debit card by phone to Henrietta on 07940 719 397. She is available on Tuesdays or Thursdays between 2-5 pm.
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