Murmuration (Landscape) installation, part of the Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality | Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape at the National Gallery of Victoria. Photo / Getty Images
Murmuration (Landscape) installation, part of the Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality | Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape at the National Gallery of Victoria. Photo / Getty Images
From space-inspired art to cinematic history, Kate Ford explores some of the year's exhibitions worth travelling for.
STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION Design Museum, London
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition is a step inside the movie maverick's mind. From The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut to A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, this display is a collection of letters, props, costumes and ideas that peel back the inner workings of a man with obsessive attention to detail.
As the Guardian describes it, "Kubrick's 13-film oeuvre is a succession of minutely choreographed worlds-within-worlds, each laboriously realised from scratch". With quotes, notes and ideas from Kubrick, including his scrawlings on different mock-ups of film posters, you get a sense of how he created these worlds for his films.
Scene from 2001 - A Space Odyssey, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Photo / Getty Images
Get up close with the masks worn in Eyes Wide Shut, the axe and the twins' costumes from The Shining, and the monkey costume from 2001. This journey through some of the most iconic moments in cinematic history is certainly worth visiting.
Saturn V at Rocket Park in the Johnson Space Center. Photo / Space Center Houston
Apollo Art: 50 Year Retrospective Space Center, Houston, USA
Visit the Space Center in Houston this year to see art that's out of this world. In 1962 Nasa administrator James E. Webb asked artists to create work inspired by space missions. The exhibition on display in Houston celebrates this art, with pieces from Andy Warhol through to contemporary artists who continue to create works inspired by the Apollo programme. The exhibit will also feature artefacts from the Apollo era not normally on public display.
If you've come all this way, it's worth taking part in the Level 9 Tour, described as the ultimate VIP experience "giving unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the real world of Nasa". This guided tour reveals where and how astronauts train, shows how Nasa Mission Control Center communicates with the International Space Station and explores Rocket Park, home to the Saturn V rocket, the most powerful rocket ever flown. Tickets for this tour are an extra US$179.95 ($275) each (on top of the regular admission of US$29.95 for adults) but how often can you step inside Mission Control?
When: Apollo Art: 50 Year Retrospective, until October 31 (tours run year-round) More information: spacecenter.org
Lorenzo Quinn's Building Bridges by Halcyon Gallery during Venice Biennale 2019. Photo / Getty Images
Venice Art Biennale Venice, Italy
The Venice Art Biennale, which launched in 1895, is a giant in the art world. This year the 58th international art exhibition is titled May You Live in Interesting Times. Event president Paolo Baratta says the title represents an ambiguity seen as a "challenging or even menacing time" or as a way of seeing "the course of human events in their complexity".
At each biennale, esteemed artists from around the world exhibit their work in garden pavilions. Artists who have exhibited include Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-August Renoir and Francis Bacon.
This year 79 international artists are exhibiting, with Dane Mitchell presenting his piece entitled Post Hoc at the New Zealand pavilion.
If you missed seeing the Terracotta Warriors at Te Papa, here's another chance to see them on this side of the world.
Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria is showcasing them for their Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality exhibition, a large-scale presentation of the warriors discovered in China's Shaanxi province in 1974. Widely regarded as the eighth wonder of the world, the warriors will be shown alongside more than 150 treasures of historic Chinese art and design.
In a dual presentation, where China's past and present collide, the warriors will be displayed at NGV alongside an exhibition of works by contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. His exhibition, The Transient Landscape, showcases all new art works, inspired by Chinese culture and traditions.
One striking piece features an impressive installation of 10,000 suspended porcelain birds hovering over visitors' heads. This is based on a drawing of Mount Li, the site of the ancient tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet. Photo / Getty Images
Manet and Modern Beauty Art Institute Chicago, USA
Nineteenth Century French artist Edouard Manet is commonly described as the greatest portraitist of his time. While his most famous works, Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass (Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe) came early on in Manet's career, this exhibition focuses on the final two decades of his life, exploring his later style that became such great inspiration.
Manet and Modern Beauty showcases 54 paintings and 90 works in total, plus letters he sent to friends containing illustrations of fruit and flowers. This is the first exhibition to concentrate on this period of Manet's career and it brings together his revered portraits of fashionable women, actors, models and his wife.
When: Until September 8 More information: artic.edu
