Amazing Art Adventures

Around the world in 400 immersive experiences

Yolanda Zappaterra

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780711253728
• eBook ISBN: 9780711253735
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Discover hundreds of the most interesting and memorable art experiences from around the world in this stunningly immersive and beautifully illustrated title!

Amazing Art Adventures offers us art and culture as an experience both within and beyond the gallery, opening a door to unexpected adventures
- art fairs, festivals, installations, art trails, galleries, art islands, monuments, sculpture parks and museums.
 
Aimed at all of us who travel to learn about new places and cultures, the book gathers together hundreds of unforgettable art experiences around the world, acting as an inspirational travel guide for anyone interested in art. From the Lightning Field in New Mexico to an art island in Japan, expert guide Yolanda Zappaterra leads us on a comprehensive, worldwide tour of bucket list destinations for every season. 

Divided into sections by continent, the book is a thrilling cultural journey, an insider’s guide to the visual arts that suggests different ways to experience art beyond the usual galleries and institutions, leads readers to art in unusual places, creates trails that will give insights into the lives of famous artists as well as putting the spotlight on more interesting and unknown works in well known museums.

Through more than 400 entries, plus photographs and maps, the book expands our understanding and appreciation of the world’s art in exciting new ways. 

• Uncover a Chagall masterpiece in a tiny Kentish church
• Follow a land art map of North America from the Spiral Jetty and Lightning Fields to Seven Magic Mountains and the Star Axis
• Trip the light fantastic at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris
• Delight in the sinuous curves of Oscar Niemeyer’s MAC in Rio de Janeiro
• Lay your head in a very arty bed at the aha Shakaland Hotel & Zulu Cultural Village
• Be dazzled by recycled ceramics at the Rock Garden of Chandigarh in northern India
• Exercise body and mind with a walk along London’s Art Line
• Be blown away by Tacoma’s Museum of Glass
• Trek into the Brazilian rainforest for art in the jungle at the Inhotim Art Museum
• Sample big cheeses in Switzerland at Art Basel
• Cross the Seto Inland Sea to land at the art island of Naoshima in Japan
• Walk among the gods and monsters of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tuscan Tarot Garden
• Commune with a unicorn at the Met Cloisters in New York
• See the seeds of Africa’s future art scene in a former grain silo at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town
• Enter a field of light in Uluru, Australia

CHAPTER 3

Europe

Drink in Roni Horn’s Library of Water

Library of Water

Bókhlöðustígur 19, 340 Stykkishólmur, Iceland

artangel.org.uk/project/library-of-water

American minimalist artist Roni Horn tapped into something universal and elemental when she realized her Library of Water (Vatnasafn), on Iceland’s southwest coast. At the heart of the former library, Horn’s Water, Selected takes the form of a beguiling long-term installation (begun in 2007), comprising twenty-four identical floor-to-ceiling glass columns containing water gathered as ice from twenty-four glaciers across the country. As with most Icelandic towns, the sea and the land are ever-present beyond the walls of the little library, and Horn’s columns beautifully connect the inside space with the landscape, literally bringing the latter into the former as they refract and reflect the light on to a rubber floor embedded with weather-related words in Icelandic and English. Elsewhere, books and spoken testimonies gather together people’s thoughts about the subject, but it is the purity of the columns that remains with you.

Bring home the Bacon

Dublin City Gallery

The Hugh Lane, Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Rotunda, Dublin D01 F2X9, Ireland

hughlane.ie

By the time the painter Francis Bacon died in 1992, the chaotic studio in west London where he produced some of his most famous works contained over 7,000 items, including hundreds of books, thousands of photos (he never painted from life), slashed canvases, seventy drawings, paint tubes, magazines, newspapers and vinyl records. Bacon’s heir, John Edwards, donated the entire contents (including the ‘curated’ dust!) to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin, Bacon’s city of birth. A team of archaeologists and curators relocated the entire studio at a cost of £3 million – not bad value when you consider a museum offered $3m just for the studio door. It is a fascinating insight into the artist who once said (about this studio): ‘This mess here around us is rather like my mind.’

Reconstructed studio of Francis Bacon in Dublin City Gallery.

See inside-out at the Irish Sky Garden

Liss Ard Estate

Castletownshend Road, Skibbereen, County Cork P81 NP44, Ireland

lissardestate.ie/skygarden

James Turrell’s Sky Garden (1992) is less about ‘seeing’ than it is about ‘feeling’, a space in which natural light is experienced as a tangible material as we become aware of the limits of human perception – a state Turrell calls ‘seeing yourself seeing’. Located near the town of Skibbereen in west Cork, the installation takes the form of an immense artificial crater, accessed through a stone arch. In an experience designed to resemble a birthing scenario, visitors enter and make their way along a long dark passageway before climbing some steps to enter a crater 25 m/82 ft in length and 13 m/43 ft deep. Designed to block all outside sound, the middle of the crater features the ‘Vault Purchase’, a stone plinth where you can lie down and contemplate the framing of the Irish sky in sublime silence. The installation gives an unparalleled view of what Turrell calls the ‘celestial vault’ of the sky above.

Sky Garden (1992) by James Turrell at Liss Ard Estate.

Follow the poetry of the human figure in Edinburgh and Liverpool

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

75 Belford Rd, Edinburgh EH4 3DR, UK

nationalgalleries.org

Crosby Beach

Merseyside, UK

visitliverpool.com

Edinburgh’s river the Water of Leith is mostly hidden from view, offering, instead of water, a meandering walk down to the sea. It is here between the sea and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art that we find Antony Gormley’s 6 Times (2010), six life-size figures which mark out a walk to the sea through the undergrowth. Dwarfed by their surroundings, the eroding statues question how the human form fits in to the environment, making for a vulnerable and meditative work. In Liverpool, Gormley’s Another Place (1997) – one hundred similar figures looking out to sea from Crosby Beach – is equally inquisitorial; as the isolated statues corrode in the salty air, some half-submerged and encrusted with barnacles, you can’t help but wonder what they might be waiting for.

Climb a stairway to heaven

The Fruitmarket Gallery

45 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DF, UK

fruitmarket.co.uk/scotsman-steps

Medieval Edinburgh perched on top of an extinct volcano is linked to the new town (eighteenth-century ‘new’) below by a series of steep roads, walkways and steps, among them the Scotsman Steps, which have connected North Bridge and Waverley Station since 1899. A century on, the steps had become the ‘pishy steps’ due to the stench of urine, which is where Martin Creed stepped in (excuse the pun) with a commission to overhaul the Grade I listed monument. Work No. 1059 (2011) took a team of engineers, stonecutters and builders over two years to resurface the steps with 104 different and contrasting types of marble from around the globe. Creed, also a musician, has long been interested in how art is interpreted or re-interpreted, and with this perfectly integrated and pragmatic work of art, the viewer – or traveller – ‘recomposes’ the work every time they walk up and down the steps. Brilliant.

The colourful steps of Work No. 1059 (2011) by Martin Creed.

Enter this woman-made grott...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• North America
• South America
• Europe
• Africa
• Asia
• Oceania
• Index
• Picture Credits
• Author Biography
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright