/

Smelly shows, fast cars and a swamp in a nightclub:the strangest art exhibitions coming up in 2021

28th January 2021 11:54 GMT

PREVIEW THE YEAR AHEAD 2021

Other highlights include a show on famous animals and the mostlavish banquets in art history

JOSÉ DA SILVA

The Art Newspaper recently published a selection of major blockbuster exhibitions plannedfor 2021 as part of its The Year Ahead supplement. During the research, sifting throughhundreds of exhibitions, there were several shows that grabbed our attention for theircurious topics, unusual content or novel take on traditional exhibiting practise. Below are afew of our favourite weird and wonderful shows coming up in 2021.

*Many exhibitions will be subject to Covid-19 restrictions—please check on the respectivemuseum website before visiting

Some of the weird and wonderful exhibitions taking place in 2021

You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Patricia Piccinini: the Instruments of Life

Kai Art Center, Tallinn, until 25 April

The uncanny creatures, part-human, part-animal, that the Australian artist PatriciaPiccinini creates in lifelike detail proved to be a monster hit with the Brazilian public fiveyears ago, when her exhibition in Rio de Janeiro topped The Art Newspaper's list of mostvisited contemporary art exhibitions in 2016 . For her latest exhibition, which opened lastweek in Tallinn, the artist has brought together works made over the past two decades, fromthe apelike Big Mother (2005) to the humanoid turtle with a futuristic shell titled Cleaner(2019). Each hyper-realistic sculpture takes around a year to manufacture and is made usingsilicone and fibreglass along with real human hair. The artist hopes that her otherworldlycreatures help us question where we are heading in the worlds of genetic modification andbiotechnology, which are fast approaching the realms of science fiction. “I hope that lots ofgreat discussions and experiences result out of the exhibition,” she says in a statement.

Patricia Piccinini's Cleaner (2019) © Patricia Piccinini; Photo: Mari Volens

You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Fleeting: Scents in Colour

Mauritshuis, The Hague, 11 February - 6 June 2021

Ever wondered what a still life smells like? Or whether a beautiful pastoral landscapeactually smelt of manure? Well, the Mauritshuis in The Hague will be bringing 17th-centuryDutch paintings to life with scent dispensers (which will apparently be “coronavirus-proof”)for its exhibition Fleeting: Scents in Colour. These will range from the “phenomenal stink of[Amsterdam's] canals” in works such as Jan van der Heyden’s View of the OudezijdsVoorburgwal with the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam (around 1670), to the scent of powderyflowers and overripe fruit in Abraham Mignon’s Still Life of Flowers and Fruit (1670). The 17thcentury was a time when new exotic smells were making their way to Europe from acrossthe world as trade routes became evermore developed and wide-ranging. Spices like pepper,clove, cinnamon and nutmeg were imported from Asia and the Middle East, while tobaccogrew in popularity as it was brought from the Americas. Works such as Willem van Mieris’s

Michiel and Pieter van Mierevelt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem van der Meer (1617) includes a man holding a pomander toward off bad smells

Museum Prinsenhof,Delft

You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

A Grocer’s Shop (1717) show the array of products available and also invite viewers to imaginebeing in the scent filled shop. Unpleasant smells, such as those produced by a corpse beingdissected in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem van der Meer (1617) by Michiel and Pieter vanMierevelt, would often be masked through the use of pomanders, filled with perfume—examples of intricately worked silver ones will also be in the show.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the Kunsthalle Bremen will also be presenting an exhibition ofhistorical depictions of scent, including Richard Earlom’s 18th-century fish market print,replete with hungry sea lion, and intricate flower still lifes by Barbara Regina Dietzsch,alongside an olfactory installation by the contemporary Columbian artist Oswaldo Maciá.The exhibition To Smell with the Eyes: Images of Scent since the Renaissance (8 May-15August) is part of Smell it! The Fragrance of Art project involving several museumsthroughout Bremen.

The Five Senses: Taste (after 1635) after Abraham Bosse © RMN-Grand Palais / image RMN-GPYou have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Tables of Power: a History of Prestigious Meals

Louvre-Lens, Len, 31 March-26 July

Sure to be a show bacchanalian delights, the Louvre-Lens’s spring exhibition Tables of Powerwill chart 5,000 years of dining and how it often provided “an opportunity to showcasepower, hierarchy and the art of protocol”, according to a press statement. The exhibition willinclude almost 400 objects, ranging from luxurious tableware and objets d’art to paintingsand sculptures depicting lavish acts of feasting. Among the pieves on show will be anancient Egyptian rhyton in the form of a lion, ancient Greek vases and kraters portrayingextravagant meals, and a Renaissance ship-shaped food vessel made from a nautilus shelland gilded silver. Depictions of banqueting will include a Mesopotamian limestone bas-reliefof a meal attended by a musician playing a harp alongside a goat and cow (potential food); a1905 photograph of King Edward VII at a Élysée Palace banquet; and a menu for PresidentGeorge W. Bush’s Parisian visit in 2008. Plenty of food for thought in this veritable feast of ashow.

Lucian Bernhard's Bosch lithograph (1914) © MoMA; The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund

You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Automania

Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 July-2 January 2022

Put your pedal to the metal at New York's Museum of Modern Art for its summer exhibitionAutomania, which will delve into an invention that seems inextricably linked to the veryidea of America. This symbol of freedom and capitalism swept the nation in the 20thcentury, as the US led the car boom with the first mass produced car, the Model T Ford, andmade the car cool in its popular culture. (It was only in 2009 that China—a country with abillion more people—overtook the US as the largest buyer of cars in the world). Theexhibition will look at both the positive and negative effects of cars and not only how theautomobile shaped the American landscape, its towns and cities, but also how it shaped thecountry’s psyche. The show will feature car parts, models and five cars displayed in themuseum’s sculpture garden, including a goggle-eyed Citroën DS 23 sedan, which themuseum recently acquired. Works of art in the exhibition will range from Henri deToulouse-Lautrec’s The Automobile Driver (L'Automobiliste) (1898) and a 1914 sparkpluglithograph by the graphic designer Lucian Bernhard, to Margaret Bourke-White’sphotographs of 1930s car factories and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen print Orange Car CrashFourteen Times (1963). Vroom vroom indeed.

A 3D scan of wetland soil, work in progress, by Jakob Kudsk Steensen © Jakob Kudsk Steensen 2020You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Halle am Berghain, Berlin, July-September

The Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, one of the most exciting young artists working inVirtual Reality (VR) technology, will be recreating a 10,000 year old swamp in Berlin’sinfamous Berghain nightclub. The former power station has been home to the nightclub,described by Rolling Stone magazine as “Techno’s coolest club” and “sex-fuelled”, since 2004.But last year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the building became a venue for exhibitingart . For his new work, commissioned by the non-profit organisation Light Art Space,Steensen will be bringing back to life the swamps and extinct flora and fauna that onceflourished 10,000 years ago on the wetlands where Berlin is now situated. Steensen’smeticulously created installations, employing Mixed Reality (MR) technology, immersevisitors in detailed computer game-like worlds. For his latest project the artist is workingwith the archive of extinct creatures at Berlin’s Natural History Museum, and combiningthis with field recordings made at wetlands south of the German capital.

Miss Clara and the Celebrity Beast in Art, 1500-1860

A Rhinoceros, called Miss Clara (1738-58) attributed to Peter Anton Verschaffelt © The Barber Institute of Fine ArtsYou have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber

/

Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 12 November-27 February 2022

Miss Clara was a great Indian beauty who arrived in Rotterdam in 1741 and toured Europe,feted by kings, queens, and commoners alike—she even had a French Navy ship named afterher. She also had a thick skin, useful to those thrust into the public eye, because she was arhinoceros. A small exhibition at Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts will use themuseum’s bronze sculpture A Rhinoceros, called Miss Clara (1738-58), attributed to PeterAnton Verschaffel, to look at rhinos, elephants and hippopotamuses who gained notoriety inEurope between the 16th and 18th centuries. Among the pachyderms on show will be asculpture of the hippopotamus Obaysch, made from Nile mud shortly after the animal wasshipped to London in 1849 as a gift to Queen Victoria, and elephants including Hansken, whowas sketched by Rembrandt, and Hanno who was a gift from King Manuel I of Portugal toPope Leo X. Manuel I had form on large exotic animals, having also been the recipient fromIndia of perhaps the most recognisable rhinoceros in art history, depicted by Albrecht Dürerin his 1515 print A Rhinoceros. Dürer famously never saw the creature in real life, creatinghis woodcut instead from sketches and a description that he included at the top of the print.Manuel I also sent this rhino as a gift to Pope Leo X, but it drowned when the ship sank in astorm.

More Preview Topics Exhibitions Kai Art Center Patricia Piccinini Mauritshuis

Kunsthalle Bremen Louvre-Lens Museum of Modern Art New York Car design

Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Related content

Van Gogh’s Japanese

l ld f h d

New normal for Old

ll '

You have viewed 1 out of 3 articlesRegister to increase your limit or sign in if you've already registered or are a subscriber