Re-Openings London

Tracy Emin/Edvard Munch, Royal Academy of Art, from 18 May - 1 August, 2021

Edvard Munch’s Crouching Nude, 1917-19 and Tracey Emin’s You Kept it Coming, 2019. Composite: Munchmuseet; © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2020

Tracey Emin has long had a fascination with the Norwegian expressionist and painter of The Scream, Edvard Munch: in her words, “I’ve been in love with this man since I was eighteen”. The exhibition features more than 25 of Emin’s works including paintings, some of which will be on display for the first time, as well neons and sculpture. These works, which explore the loneliness of the soul, have been chosen by Emin to sit alongside a carefully considered selection of 18 oils and watercolours drawn from Munch’s rich collection and archives in Oslo, Norway.

Turner’s Modern World, TATE Britain, 17 May - 12 September, 2021

JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London, © The National Gallery, London

JMW Turner lived and worked at the peak of the industrial revolution, a time when steam replaced sail, machine-power replaced manpower and political and social reforms transformed society. Many of his contemporaries ignored these advances but Turner faced up to the new challenges. Turner’s Modern World is about how he transformed the way he painted to better capture this new world. Beginning in the 1790s, when Turner first observed the effects of modern life, the exhibition follows his fascination for new industry and technology through to his famous paintings of steam boats and railway engines including The Fighting Temeraire (1839) and Rail, Steam and Speed (1844), and show how he updated the language of art to produce revelatory interpretations of modern subjects.