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A look ahead to 2008

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

Dates for your diary

The highlight of the year at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a retrospective of Nigel Hall’s work (9 March to 8 June). Hall (born 1943) is one of our finest sculptors with an international reputation which far exceeds his standing in his native country. Why does this happen again and again? We are so often slow to recognise the talents of our own artists, preferring to accept the readymade fame of Americans or (increasingly) Europeans. Hall is an abstract sculptor whose work is a meditation on landscape and our relationship to the environment. This carefully selected show should help to make him better-appreciated in Britain.

The excellent Pallant House Gallery in Chichester pays tribute to its principal recent benefactor, Colin St John Wilson, who died earlier this year, with an exhibition examining his career as both architect and collector (9 February to 8 June). The summer show will be devoted to that underrated Pop artist Colin Self and is challengingly titled Art in the Nuclear Age (21 June to 12 October), while the main winter exhibition examines the paintings and collages of Eileen Agar, often thought of as a Surrealist but far more independent-minded than that categorisation suggests.

China is currently at the height of fashion, so it’s no surprise to find the V&A devoting its major spring show to China Design Now (15 March to 13 July). Much more rewarding will be Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book (15 April to 29 June), a welcome survey of artists’ books. The autumn exhibition is Cold War Modern: Design 1945–75

(27 September to 11 January 2009), examining popular culture against the backdrop of the space race: Stanley Kubrick meets James Bond. At Dulwich Picture Gallery, another tribute to American art, Coming of Age: American Art 1850s–1950s (14 March to 8 June), with the usual suspects — Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Whistler, Pollock et al. The following show sounds more original. Painting Family: The De Brays, Master Painters of 17th-Century Holland (9 July to 5 October) deals with a now virtually forgotten artist clan. Could be a quiet revelation, or just more Golden Age treacle. To finish the year on a high note, Dulwich is mounting a Saul Steinberg retrospective (26 November to 15 February 2009). Is this comic genius of New Yorker fame an artist or an illustrator? And what’s the difference? See the show and decide for yourself...

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