Top 3 Exhibitions Opening September 2015

The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern
The EY Exhibition
opening 17th September

Ushio Shinohara Doll Festival 1966,
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan © Ushio Shinohara

The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop will be a groundbreaking exhibition revealing how artists around the world have engaged with the spirit of Pop, from Latin America to Asia, and from Europe to the Middle East. Opening at Tate Modern on 17th September, the show promises to explode the traditional story of Pop art and show how different cultures contributed, re-thought and responded to the movement. Around 160 works from the 1960s and 1970s will be brought together, including many which have never been exhibited in the UK before. I like the look of this one, there’s going to be a lot of retina-blasting colour.

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Celts: Art and Identity at The British Museum
opening 24th September

This looks likely to be a massively popular show for Autumn 2015. The British Museum, in partnership with National Museums Scotland, will stage the first British exhibition in 40 years on the Celts. Celts: Art and Identity opens at the British Museum on 24 September and will draw on the latest research from Britain, Ireland and Western Europe. The exhibition will tell the story of the different peoples who have used or been given the name ‘Celts’ through the amazing art objects that they made, including intricately decorated jewellery, highly stylised objects of religious devotion, and the decorative arts of the late 19th century which were inspired by the past. Can’t wait for this one.

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The Fallen Woman at The Foundling Museum
opening 25th September

The Fallen Woman is a really exciting exhibition not just because of its fascinating subject matter but also because The Foundling Museum partially funded the show through The Art Fund’s Art Happens crowdfunder. Over £25,000 was raised to help the museum tell the stories of both the myth and reality of the ‘fallen woman’ in Victorian Britain. In an age when sexual innocence was highly valued and sex for a respectable woman was deemed appropriate only within marriage, the loss of chastity for an unwed woman had multiple repercussions. The figure of the ‘fallen’ woman was popularly portrayed in art, literature and the media as Victorian moralists warned against the consequences of losing one’s virtue.

This exhibition will draw together the work of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Redgrave, George Frederic Watts and Thomas Faed, who considered the subject of the fallen woman in their work and helped propel the myth. The exhibition will also explore the written petitions of women applying to the Foundling Hospital at the time. The Fallen Women promises to be very moving, as is often the case with the lovely Foundling Museum’s exhibitions.

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