Check out our round up of must-see exhibitions in March 2020.
This month includes an exploration of our relationship with trees, the ‘Bright Young Things’ and portraits of rock stars.
Friends Of Derek (FOD)
This exhibition features predominantly unseen images by Derek Jarman’s local friends and fellow film-makers.
The images often employ Prospect Cottage and Dungeness as a backdrop.
They are by Derek Brown, Richard Heslop, Mark French, Steve Pyke MBE, Ed Sykes, Andrew Catlin, Liam Daniel, Jan Baldwin and Debi Angel.
Soundscape by Simon Fisher-Turner, curated by Derek Brown.
Jarman is known as a poetic and anarchic film-maker and artist, as well as a prominent gay rights activist.
He started his career as a stage designer, working as Ken Russell’s production designer for The Devils in 1971.
Jarman’s early films were experimental Super 8mm shorts – a form he never entirely abandoned.
The exhibition is in support of Art Fund’s campaign to save Prospect Cottage. Twenty five per cent of the sales will go to the fund.
The fund needs to raise £3.5m by March 31 to purchase the cottage and establish a permanently-funded programme of conservation and maintenance.
To find out more visit www.artfund.org/prospect.
Friends of Derek (FOD), Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards On Sea, until March 31.
Among the Trees
By turns poetic, adventurous and thought-provoking, this group exhibition explores our relationship with trees and forests.
Among the Trees transports us around the world – from Colombian rainforests and remote Japanese islands to olive orchards in Israel and a 9,550-year-old spruce in Sweden.
By drawing attention to the beauty, scale and complexity of trees and forests, the 38 artists turn our vision of the natural world on its head, inviting us to see it with new eyes.
Alongside sculptures and installations, drawings, paintings and photographs, there are artworks celebrating the soaring scale of trees.
These include a monumental sculpture cast from a 2,000-year-old olive tree by Ugo Rondinone.
At a time when the destruction of the world’s forests is accelerating at a record pace, this exhibition vividly highlights the indispensable role trees play in our lives and imaginations.
Among the Trees, Southbank Centre, London, March 4 to May 17.
Bright Young Things
This major new exhibition explores the extravagant world of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s and 30s as seen through the eyes of Cecil Beaton.
It brings to life a deliriously eccentric, glamorous and creative era of British cultural life.
Featuring the leading cast of the ‘Bright Young Things’, many of whom Beaton would call friends, this show charts his transformation from middle-class suburban schoolboy to glittering society figure and the unrivalled star of Vogue.
In addition to Beaton’s own portraits, the exhibition also features paintings by friends and artists including Rex Whistler, Henry Lamb, and Augustus John.
Bright Young Things, National Portrait Gallery, March 12 to June 7.
Rock Stars – Photographic Portraits
They seem to inhabit another world that most of us look on with a mixture of admiration, jealousy and sometimes horror.
This exhibition features a series of portraits of some of the greats from the world of rock and roll; Blondie, Bowie, Kate Bush, The Stones and Queen to name but a few.
It is a series of stunning portraits from those who had access – sometimes briefly, sometimes over a period of years and sometimes as long-trusted friends.
Much of the work has never been seen in Scotland before.
Rock Stars – Photographic Portraits, Gallery Close, Edinburgh, March 21 to April 11.