12 Days: Highlights of 2015

Over the 12 days of Christmas, Apollo contributors and invited guests select their anticipated highlights of 2015

View the 12 Days series here

I am – not surprisingly – particularly looking forward to what is happening at the RA in 2015. First of all, we’ve got our big Rubens show which opens in January, with the added benefit of a last room curated by Jenny Saville showing Rubens’s influence today. Then, we’ve got Diebenkorn and Joseph Cornell. In the autumn, we’re doing Ai Weiwei. We are also breaking ground on David Chipperfield’s grand building project connecting Burlington House to Burlington Gardens.

Dress of dyed ostrich feathers and hand-painted microscopic slides, Voss, S/S (2001), Alexander McQueen Model: Erin O’Connor. Image: REX

At the National Gallery, I’m hugely looking forward to the exhibition of Goya Portraits, which has been a long time in the making. At Tate Britain, I can see the exhibition of Victorian sculpture which I missed at Yale. I’m also pleased to see they’re doing an exhibition on early salted prints. There’s Alexander McQueen opening at the V&A, and the Barbican also looks as if it has got good things coming up – artists as collectors in the spring and Charles and Ray Eames in autumn.

Internationally, I’m particularly looking forward to the Palazzo Strozzi’s exhibition of Hellenistic Bronzes, the reopening of the Whitney downtown, the opening of the National Gallery Singapore and, I hope, visiting Basel for the first time. Not to forget Grayson Perry’s project in Essex.

Event Details

At the Royal Academy:

‘Rubens and his Legacy’ runs from 24 January–10 April.
‘Richard Diebenkorn’ runs from 14 March–7 June.
‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’ runs from 4 July–27 September.
‘Ai Weiwei’ runs from 19 September–13 December.

Elsewhere:

‘Goya: The Portraits’ is at the National Gallery, London, from 7 October 2015–10 January 2016.

‘Sculpture Victorious’ is at Tate Britain, London, from 25 February–25 May.
‘Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840–1860’ is at Tate Britain, London, from 25 February–7 June.

‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 14 March–19 July.

‘Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector’ is at the Barbican, London, from 12 February–25 May 2015.
‘The World of Charles and Ray Eames’ is at the Barbican, London, from 21 October–14 February 2016.

‘Power and Pathos. Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World’ is at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 14 March–21 June.

The Whitney Museum of American Art reopens on 1 May.

The National Gallery Singapore is scheduled to open in 2015.

Grayson Perry’s ‘A House for Essex’ is scheduled to open for bookings in spring 2015.

View the rest of the 12 Days series here.