Groups visiting the Turner Contemporary in Kent can enjoy a new exhibition called Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle, which is running from now until 25th September.
Seeing Round Corners presents work by Leonardo da Vinci alongside Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Rebecca Horn, Carl Andre and Theaster Gates.
The displays explore the significance and symbolism of the circle and sphere in art and culture; architecture and engineering; astronomy and geometry; optics and perception; religion, spirituality and everyday life.
Entry to the exhibition is free.
What can visitors see?
Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle is said to be the first major exhibition to explore the centrality of the circle in art.
Featuring more than 100 works – from 3000BC to the present day – Seeing Round Corners brings together artworks and artefacts that reflect a vast range of themes and ideas from roundness, rotation and visual perception to wonderment and cycles of time.
The exhibition encompasses sculpture, film, painting, design, installation, performance and photography, with works by leading historical and contemporary creative individuals including JMW Turner, David Shrigley and Bridget Riley as well as the aforementioned artists.
Groups visiting the exhibition will be encouraged to consider the ways in which artists have gravitated towards the circular form.
From the globe of the earth and the rotation of the planets, to the shape of the human eye or the smallest atomic particle, the circle - as a form and as an idea - is a recurring form in art.
Some of the works in the exhibition have never been seen before in the UK, including a new film entitled Lids and Straws (One Minute) by Christian Marclay and Tabletop Mobile by Alexander Calder.
Other key works include The Leonardo Notebook - two diagrammatic sketches from the Codex Arundel from The British Library; a view of Stonehenge at sunset by JMW Turner; and three works by landscape painter and pioneer of Modernism in Britain Paul Nash.
For further information visit turnercontemporary.org.
