Press room

Barbican Visual Arts Exhibition Programme 2022

The Barbican is pleased to announce new exhibitions as part of the 2022 programme;

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 – 1965
(3 March – 26 June 2022)

Our Time on Earth
(5 May – 29 August 2022)

Out and About!: Archiving LGBTQ+ history at Bishopsgate Institute
(28 February – 21 March 2022)

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics
(8 September 2022 – 8 January 2023)

Additionally, our hugely successful exhibition Noguchi will be extended by two additional weeks, closing on 23 January 2022.

Please see full details below. 

Noguchi
Barbican Art Gallery
Now open until 23 January 2022   
#Noguchi @barbicancentre  
www.barbican.org.uk/noguchi
This exhibition is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

This major exhibition focuses on the work of Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904 – 1988), one of the most experimental and important artists of the 20th century. Barbican Art Gallery is pleased to stage the first European touring retrospective of his work in 20 years. This exhibition is jointly organised and curated by Barbican Centre (London), Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern), in partnership with LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut.

Retracing the evolution of Noguchi’s kaleidoscopic career over six decades across sculpture, architecture, dance and design, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s inventive and risk-taking approach to sculpture as a living environment. Drawing from The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York, as well as private and public collections, the exhibition brings together over 150 works, including an extraordinary range of sculptures – created in stone, bronze, ceramics, wood, aluminium and galvanised steel – as well as theatre set designs, architectural and playground models, lighting and furniture design.

For information and images please visit: www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/isamu-noguchi

New programme announcements

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965
Barbican Art Gallery
3 March – 26 June 2022
Media View: 2 March 2022, 10am-1pm
www.barbican.org.uk/postwarmodern
#postwarmodern @barbicancentre
The exhibition is generously supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The London Community Foundation, The Clare McKeon Charitable Trust, and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965 is an ambitious and timely reassessment of art produced in Britain during the twenty years after the Second World War. This major exhibition brings together around 200 works of painting, sculpture and photography by 48 artists. Postwar Modern focuses on the ‘new’ in this period: work created by artists who were shaped by their direct experiences of the war, its global impact and aftershocks, at a formative stage in their development. These very conditions – of past horror, continued anxiety and future promise – gave rise to an incredible richness of new imagery, forms and materials as artists in Britain sought to establish meaning and purpose and to reimagine the world around them.

Divided into fourteen thematic sections, the exhibition draws out the particular subjects that preoccupied artists in the postwar period, including the body, the post-atomic condition, the Blitzed streetscape, private relationships and imagined future horizons.  Works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Eduardo Paolozzi and David Hockney will be shown alongside artists who came to Britain fleeing Nazism, such as Frank Auerbach, Franciszka Themerson and Gustav Metzger, as well as artists who migrated from Britain’s crumbling empire, among them Francis Newton Souza, Frank Bowling, Avinash Chandra and Aubrey Williams – each of whom contributed powerfully to forging a distinctive postwar sensibility. The exhibition also foregrounds the work of women artists such as Jean Cooke, Eva Frankfurther, Gillian Ayres, Kim Lim, Sylvia Sleigh and Magda Cordell, who have been marginalised in previous histories of this period.

For information and images visit: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/postwar-modern


Out and About!: Archiving LGBTQ+ history at Bishopsgate Institute
The Curve, Barbican Centre
28 February – 21 March 2022

Bishopsgate Institute will be staging a take-over of The Curve with an archive installation of objects, ephemera and media highlighting 40 moments and stories in London’s LGBTQ+ history.

Bishopsgate Institute has been collecting the lived experiences of everyday people for over a century, and their unique special collections and archives present the stories of individuals, collectives and organisations who fought for social, political, and cultural change.

The archive installation includes items documenting areas of pride, protest, performance and art; from the gay rights movement to the everyday celebrations and struggles of LGBTQ+ Londoners.

The installation will be accompanied by a programme of informal talks and conversations hosted inside the gallery by the individuals whose stories are on display.

More information about the show will be released in January 2022.


Our Time on Earth
The Curve, Barbican Centre
5 May – 29 August 2022
Media View: 4 May 2022, 10am –1pm
www.barbican.org.uk/ourtimeonearth
#ourtimeonearth @barbicancentre

An exhibition conceived and curated by Barbican International Enterprises

Co-produced by Musée de la civilisation, Québec City, Canada

Opening in May 2022, the Barbican presents Our Time on Earth – a major exhibition celebrating the power of global creativity to transform the conversation around the climate emergency. Through art, design, science, music and philosophy, the exhibition presents a range of radical visions for the future of all species.

A journey through immersive, interactive installations and digital works, the exhibition invites visitors to experience a range of perspectives of our shared planet, exploring Earth as a community to which we all belong – humans as just one species among millions.

Through reigniting respect for our beautiful and complex biosphere, the exhibition explores different ways of existing on earth and finding ways to reconnect with them, while also looking at the role technology has to play in deepening our understanding and connection to the natural world. Our Time on Earth looks at the positive possibilities of an alternative future and encourages visitors to take an active role and leave feeling empowered to make positive change.

Our Time on Earth presents 18 works, including 12 new commissions, from 12 countries around the world to create a series of innovative new collaborations, including indigenous-led collectives Choose Earth and Selvagem, author, journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot’s collaboration with Holition on the wonder of soil and Colombian biologist Brigitte Baptiste and IoDF (Institute of Digital Fashion) shared experience, Queer Ecology.  Bringing together academics, architects, artists, activists, designers, ecologists, engineers, environmental campaigners, researchers, scientists, technologists and writers, the exhibition highlights the need to work together across disciplines to tackle climate change together.
 

For information and images visit: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/our-time-on-earth

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics
Barbican Art Gallery
8 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
Media View: 7 September 2022
www.barbican.org.uk/caroleeschneemann
#caroleeschneemann @barbicancentre
This exhibition has been generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and members of the Carolee Schneemann Exhibition Circle.

Opening in autumn 2022, this will be the first survey of American artist Carolee Schneemann’s (1939-2019) work in the UK and the first major exhibition since her death in 2019. Tracing the diverse, transgressive and interdisciplinary expression of Schneemann over six decades, the show celebrates a radical artist who remains a feminist icon and point of reference for numerous contemporary artists.  

Addressing urgent topics from sexual expression and the objectification of women to human suffering and the violence of war, Schneemann’s work is concerned with lived experience. The exhibition will feature the artist’s early paintings; her experimental sculptural assemblages and kinetic works; her pioneering performance work in which she used her own body as a medium; her ground-breaking group performances; as well as her lyrical films and immersive multi-media installations. With over 200 objects and rarely seen archival material, this exhibition positions Schneemann as one of the most relevant, provocative and inspiring artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

For information and images visit: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/carolee-schneemann-body-politics