Frozen, 2011, Sam Tho Dong
Photograph: Petra Jaschke


AUTUMN 2013

Pearls
V&A and Qatar Museums Authority exhibition
21 September 2013 – 19 January 2014
A pearl-drop earring worn by Charles I at his execution in 1649, magnificent pearl tiaras worn by European nobility and a necklace of cultured pearls given to Marilyn Monroe by Joe DiMaggio in 1954 are among the incredible array of jewels and other objects on display. Organised in partnership with the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), the exhibition explores the history of pearls from the early Roman Empire to the present, and is a highlight event of the Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture. On display are over 200 pieces of jewellery and works of art showcasing the extraordinary variety of colour and shape of natural and cultured pearls. The exhibition examines how pearls have been employed over centuries in both East and West as a symbol of status and wealth, how tastes vary in different cultures as well as the changing designs of jewellery with pearls.
Sponsored by Shell
 

'Tomorrow’, 2013, Elmgreen & Dragset
Photography: Anders Sune Berg


'Tomorrow': Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A

In partnership with AlixPartners
1 October 2013 – 2 January 2014
The V&A commissioned leading contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset to create a major site-specific installation in the former Textile Galleries. Throughout their career the artists have redefined the way in which art is presented and experienced, raising issues around social models and spaces, and prompting a re-thinking of the status quo. This ambitious installation is devised as a stage set for an unrealised drama, a highlychoreographed environment of a grand domestic setting belonging to a fictional architect. Objects from the V&A's collection are presented alongside work by the artists, furniture and everyday items sourced from antique markets and shops to create an unexpected encounter for the museum visitor.
 

Detail of Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, 12th Century
Attributed to Emperor Huizong. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900

26 October 2013 – 19 January 2014 (Media preview: 23 October 2013)
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 is the most ambitious survey of one of the world's greatest artistic traditions. It gathers together the finest examples of Chinese painting created over a 1200 year period including some of the earliest surviving Chinese paintings as well as other exceptionally rare works loaned from the greatest international collections. The exhibition examines the recurrent themes and evolving aesthetic characteristics of Chinese paintings and looks at the interplay between tradition and innovation. It considers how paintings were created for a variety of settings from temples and palaces to domestic houses and in a range of formats from small scale intimate works by monks and literati to a 14 metre-long scroll painting. Many of the paintings are shown in Europe for the first time.
Supported by the Friends of the V&A; Restaurant Partner Ping Pong; Travel Partner Viking River Cruises
 

Detail of storage
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


The Clothworkers' Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textile and Fashion

Opens 8 October 2013

The V&A holds one of the most important collections of textiles and fashion in the world, with around 104,000 items ranging from archaeological textiles to contemporary haute couture. The new Clothworkers’ Centre based at Blythe House in Kensington Olympia, provides world-class facilities for the study, care and enjoyment of this outstanding collection and brings the V&A’s extensive textiles and fashion collection together under one roof for the first time. Designed by Haworth Tompkins Architects, there is a spacious new public study room, a seminar room, upgraded conservation studios and modern, custom-built storage offering visitors and researchers increased access and improved facilities to study and enjoy this important collection. The main entrance of Blythe House has also been reinstated to create a more welcoming street presence with a new reception area for all visitors to the V&A archives.

The Clothworkers’ Centre has been made possible thanks to a generous lead grant from The Clothworkers' Foundation with further significant support from many other donors.
 

Kul, 2012, Nasser Al Salem
Courtesy of the artist and Athr Gallery


Jameel Prize 3

In partnership with Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives
11 December 2013 – 21 April 2014
(Media preview and winner announcement: 10 December 2013)

The Jameel Prize is a biennial £25,000 international art prize for contemporary artists and designers inspired by Islamic traditions of craft and design. This exhibition will show work by the 10 artists and designers shortlisted for the Jameel Prize 3. Works on display range from Arabic typography and calligraphy to fashion inspired by the architecture of Istanbul and from social design and video installation to delicate and precise miniature drawings.

 

Roberto Capucci, 1987-88
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


SPRING 2014

The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014
Sponsored by Bulgari
5 April – 27 July 2014 (Media preview: 2 April 2014)
The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 will be the first major exhibition to explore Italy’s rich contribution to modern fashion from the end of the Second World War to the present. It will examine the craftsmanship, luxurious materials and expertise for which Italy has become renowned across couture, fine tailoring, innovative ready-to-wear and accessories. On display will be around 100 ensembles, both menswear and womenswear, by the leading Italian fashion houses including Dolce and Gabbana, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Missoni, Prada, Valentino and Versace alongside the work of forgotten post-war designers such as the Fontana Sisters and Simonetta as well as garments by the emerging Italian fashion talent of today. The clothes will be brought to life with film and fashion photography of the period.
With support from Nespresso, with thanks to the Blavatnik Family Foundation
 

Console table for Chiswick House, ca. 1727–32.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain

22 March – 13 July 2014 (Media preview: 19 March 2014)

William Kent was the most prominent architect and designer in early Georgian Britain; his versatility and artistic inventiveness set the style for his age. This exhibition will bring together over 200 objects including architectural drawings for such prominent buildings as the Treasury and Horse Guards at Whitehall, designs for landscape gardens, sculpture, furniture, silver as well as paintings and illustrated books. It will celebrate Kent’s art over four decades (1709-48) when Britain defined itself as a new nation and developed a new Italian-inspired style. The exhibition will show the breadth and ingenuity of the Kentian style, ranging from spectacular gilt furniture to vivid interiors such as Houghton Hall, Chiswick House and his landscape gardens at Rousham, Holkham Hall and elsewhere. The exhibition has been organised by the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in association with the V&A.

 

Norman Hartnell, 1933
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


SUMMER 2014

Wedding Dress 1775-2014
3 May 2014 – 15 March 2015 (Media preview: 30 April 2014)
This exhibition will trace the development of the fashionable white wedding dress and its treatment by key fashion designers such as Charles Frederick Worth, Norman Hartnell, Charles James, John Galliano, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood and Vera Wang offering a panorama of fashion over the last two centuries. On display will be the most romantic, glamorous and extravagant wedding dresses from the V&A’s superb collection and will include some important new acquisitions as well as loans including the purple dress worn by Dita Von Teese for her marriage to Marilyn Manson and the outfits worn by Gwen Steffani and Gavin Rossdale on their wedding day. The exhibition will highlight the histories of the dresses, revealing fascinating details about the lives of the wearers and offering an intimate insight into their circumstances and fashion choices.
 

Inflatable cobblestone
© Oriana Eliçabe/Enmedio.info


Disobedient Objects

26 July 2014 – 1 February 2015 (Media preview: 24 July 2014)
From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition will be the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It will demonstrate how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design. Disobedient Objects will focus on the period from 1980 to the present, a time that has brought new technologies and political challenges. On display will be arts of rebellion from around the world that illuminate the role of making in grassroots movements for social change: finely woven banners; defaced currency; changing designs for barricades and blockades; political videogames; an inflatable general assembly to facilitate consensus decision-making; experimental activist-bicycles; and textiles bearing witness to political murders.
 

Mainbocher Corset, 1939, Horst P Horst
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


AUTUMN 2014

Horst: Photographer of Style
6 September 2014 – 4 January 2015 (Media preview: 3 September 2014)
This autumn the V&A will present the definitive retrospective of the work of Horst P. Horst (1906-99), one of the 20th century’s master photographers. In a career that spanned six decades, Horst photographed the exquisite creations of couturiers such as Chanel, Schiaparelli and Vionnet in 1930s Paris, and helped to launch the careers of many models. In New York a decade later, he experimented with early colour techniques and his meticulously composed, artfully lit images leapt from the magazine page. The exhibition will display Horst’s best known photographs alongside unpublished and rarely exhibited vintage prints, conveying the diversity of his output, from surreal still lifes to portraits of Hollywood stars, nudes and nature studies to documentary pictures of the Middle East. It will examine his creative process through archive film footage, original contact sheets, sketchbooks and letters and will include a recreation of Horst’s 1940s studio.
 

Full-scale study for Hay Wain, c.1821, John Constable
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


Constable: The Making of a Master

20 September 2014 – 11 January 2015 (Media preview: 17 September 2014)
This exhibition will reveal the hidden stories of how Constable created some of his most loved and well-known paintings. It will present Constable’s work for the first time alongside the old masters of classical landscape such as Ruisdael and Claude whose compositional ideas and formal values he revered and studied in great depth. On display will be such famous works as The Haywain together with the oil sketches he painted outdoors direct from nature which are widely held to be unequalled at capturing transient effects of light and atmosphere. The exhibition will also examine Constable’s collection of over 5000 etchings, a vital resource for his own image making, as well as the mezzotints of his paintings made in the last decade of his life to secure his lasting legacy.
 

Tile panel, c. 1720-30
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London


Europe 1600-1800 Galleries

Opens December 2014
Europe 1600-1800 will see the complete redesign and redisplay of seven galleries containing some of the most magnificent and elaborate works of art and design in the V&A collections. On display will be spectacular examples of textiles and fashion, painting and sculpture, ceramics and glass, furniture and metalwork, prints and books created by Europe’s finest artists and craftsmen of the 17th and 18th centuries for the period’s most important taste makers, including Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great. Some displays will suggest the grandeur of court interiors for which the larger and more elaborate pieces were made, others will recreate surviving period rooms and evoke the more intimate interiors. Around 1,100 objects will explore European art and design between 1600 and 1800, continuing the displays in the V&A’s award-winning Medieval & Renaissance Galleries and completing the restoration of the entire front wing of the Museum.
The Europe 1600-1800 Galleries are being supported with a lead gift from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a number of other generous donors have also committed their support
 
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