STATE OF THE ART

Spring 2021, Rainmaker Gallery, until 18 June

Rainmaker Gallery is celebrating 30 years of exhibiting contemporary Native American art. Throughout the year, the gallery will be showing artworks selected in accordance with seasonal colour palettes, including as many artists from the three decades as possible. The spring exhibition is filled with joyful spring greens, pinks, yellows.

rainmakerart.co.uk

Image: Wakeah by Cara Romero has recently been acquired by MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, NY) and is also on show in Rainmaker Gallery’s spring 2021 exhibition.

Gallery and Online Exhibition: Safari Paintings from Wild Animal Kingdom of Africa, 5 June –17 July

East Lambrook Manor Gardens is hosting watercolour artist and traveller Moish Sokal for his 26th annual summer exhibition.

Sokal realised a lifelong dream of visiting Africa and found it as exciting as he had expected. His safari trips covered the Kruger National Park (South Africa), Victoria Falls, (Zimbabwe), and Chobe Wildlife Park (Botswana).

Africa’s wildlife has inspired Sokal to make a stunning series of paintings, which form the body of the exhibition. Sokal’s work was set to appear in an exhibition last year but the event was cancelled due to Covid. Now, Sokal has not only added more to this body of African-inspired work but has painted a series inspired by his lockdown walks from winter into spring around his lovely Somerset village.

moishsokal.co.uk Image: Wrestling Practice by MoishSokal

Grey Areas: Jessie Edwards-Thomas, Arnolfini, throughout June

Jessie Edwards-Thomas has co-designed and co-produced Grey Areas, a photographic dialogue with five individuals with complex needs who are currently within or have experienced the ‘homelessness pathway’ in Bristol.

The work was created during the winter of 20/21, the year of the pandemic; when our basic needs for shelter and safety were highlighted across the nation. Our concerns were rooted in the question ‘what does home mean to our sense of wellbeing?’ What is continuing to happen to our city spaces which is pushing people further and further away, physically, mentally and socially? Grey Areas reflects the impact our physical spaces have upon our mental spaces.

arnolfini.org.uk

Image by Jessie Edwards-Thomas

Canaletto: Painting Venice, The Holburne Museum, 17 May –5 September

From 17 May, the Holburne Museum in Bath will present the most important set of paintings of Venice by Canaletto (1697 – 1768), which will leave their home at Woburn Abbey – one of world’s most important private art collections – for the first time in more than 70 years.

This once in a lifetime exhibition will enable art lovers to enjoy and study up-close 23 beautiful paintings, in a fascinating exhibition that also explores Canaletto’s life and work, alongside themes of 18th-century Venice and the Grand Tour. This is one of the rare occasions that any of the successive Dukes of Bedford and Trustees of the Bedford Estates have lent the set of paintings since they arrived in Britain from Canaletto in the 1730s.

Created over a nine-year period, when the artist was at the pinnacle of his career, the Woburn Abbey paintings are the largest set of paintings that Canaletto ever produced, and much the largest that has remained together.

holburne.org

Image: View on the Grand Canal looking north from the Palazzo Contarini dagli Scrigni to the Palazzo Rezzonico

Varekai (Wherever), RWA Pop-up Exhibition, at community venues across Bristol, from 18 June

The RWA is taking a selection of vibrant and colourful artworks from the permanent collection to community venues across Bristol, as a pop-up exhibition, during the time that the RWA building is closed for renovation. The title, Varekai, is a Romani word meaning ‘wherever’. It comes from one of the paintings in the exhibition, which depicts Le Cirque du Soleil performing a show of the same name.

The exhibition comprises eight paintings that all have great energy, vibrancy and a distinct sense of the outdoors about them. They were chosen to inspire and delight, as we all come out of lockdown and reconnect with each other and the places around us.

To accompany the exhibition, free family art workshops with an artist will run at each venue, using the paintings as inspiration. Booking for these workshops is via each individual venue.

rwa.org.uk

Image: June Berry RWA NEAC Hon. RE RWS, Le Cirque du Soleil Performing ‘Varekai’, 2011. RWA Collection © RWA (Royal West of England Academy)

Four by Four, Clifton Contemporary Art, until 3 June

The show at Clifton Contemporary Art brings together four artists whose work is defined, shaped and inspired by nature and its elements. Hannah Woodman's visceral, dynamic paintings use outline, texture, layers, confident mark making and pure accident to evoke the raw Atlantic coast and light dappled farmland close to her studio. Parastoo Ganjei's powerful, emotive acrylics capture the restless wash of sunlight and cloud over her local Wiltshire landscapes. The gently enigmatic abstracts of Masako Tobita are an intensely personal creative response to the wild places she explores and knows. Rosie Musgrave has been mesmerised by the beauty and quiet presence of stone since she was a child, but has more recently explored the charismatic forms and exquisite colours revealed by bronze casting. Four by Four is an exploration of difference: of how artists find the utterly unique and diverse in shared environments and common themes.

cliftoncontemporaryart.co.uk Image: Navy Skies, Cornwall by Hannah Woodman