First on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last autumn, the exhibition surveys 1991 Turner Prize winner Anish Kapoor’s career to date showcasing a number of new and previously unseen works, including a select group Kapoor’s early pigment sculptures, mirror-polished stainless-steel sculptures and cement sculptures on display for the first time.

The exhibition also includes highlights such as the monumental work Svayambh, the title of which comes from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘self-generated’. Emblematic of Kapoor’s interest in works of sculpture that actively participate in their own creation, Svayambh moves slowly through the galleries across the entire breadth of Burlington House.

Based in Santa Monica, California since the 1960s, John Baldessari (b. 1931) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Making his name as a pioneer of conceptual art in the 1960s with his text and image paintings, he shocked the art world when he announced in a newspaper that he was cremating all the artworks he had produced between 1953 and 1966. He then turned his attention to photographic works often incorporating found film stills, trawling dumpsters for discarded material from which he created his famous photo-compositions

Over 130 works, some of them little known, review the main concerns of John Baldessari who has recently been awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2009). With humour and irony, his work dissects the ideas behind artistic practice and questions the accepted historical rules for making art. Fascinated by language and its meaning, he has never lost his interest in the relation between the visual and words. The combination of film, photography and painting is also a key element in his art. The exhibition opens with the early paintings that survived the Cremation Project (in 1970 he burnt all his work earlier than 1966, an action with which he wanted to celebrate his death as a painter, and from the ashes, kept in an urn in the form of a book, the Cremation Project emerged, a symbol of his artistic rebirth), followed by his photography-and-text works, including the combined photographs he took in the eighties from the extensive use of archive images from old films, the irregular, painted over works of the nineties and video. The exhibition concludes with his most recent works.

After Barcelona, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

The exhibition Dutch Painters in the Prado has been organised in conjunction with the publication of the fi rst catalogue of the collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings in the Museo del Prado. The exhibition brings together a sizeable group of works from this practically unknown collection, which has barely been displayed in the galleries of the Museum since the 1940s.  

The term Dutch Painting refers to the works produced in the Northern United Provinces, which became an independent nation following the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1579, while the Southern United Provinces (Flanders) remained under Spanish rule. The Northern Provinces numbered even, of which Holland was the largest. Its capital, Amsterdam, was the economic engine behind this new nation, which became one of the leading European powers over the course of the 17th century. Its powerful mercantile, middle class promoted a highly active process of cultural development and used painting as the primary vehicle for an affi rmation of this new national identity.

The exhibition is a meeting place for mural artists from around the world – from West Africa to Europe, via Mexico and the United States – who have been invited to work on the walls of eleven temporary exhibition spaces.

The show starts with the most traditional, and anonymous, exponents of mural art – the women from the Coopérative Féminine de Djajibiné Gandega "Djida" (Mauritania), whose work contrasts strongly with the geometrical colour planes of the German artist Lothar Götz. The Olive Tree Patio houses Jerónimo Hagerman's ivy mural, which can be viewed from inside the building; this is offset by the street art or graffiti by two representatives of UTR Crew, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by Scope One from Singapore.

Sakarin Krue-On is showing Temple, a mural created with spots of white clay on a red ground, which also establishes a counterpoint to Hagerman's work in the sense that both artists update long-established mural traditions from their respective countries, Thailand and Mexico.

NOW 2010 presents three days of talks, debates, workshops and documentaries about the three key themes in the far-reaching changes we are witnessing in the first decade of the 21st century.

With: Philip Ball, Ricard Solé, Iñaki Amate, Invasive Code, Genís Roca, Kònic Thtr, Rudy De Waele, Zzzinc Fabien Girardin, Dolo Beltrán, Mobile Cells

The Palacio de Cristal was inaugurated in 1887 with an exhibition of the flora of the Philippines, Spain’s pre-eminent colony at that time. Conceived specifically for the crystal palace  (now dedicated to art projects commissioned by the Museo Reina Sofia), Pierre Huyghe’s La saison des fêtes, is loosely framed by the site’s history and former functions. Whereas the impulses behind the original displays of luxuriant tropical plants were informed by a colonialist ideology Huyghe’s work, by contrast, attempts to stand outside a strictly Eurocentric position. The visionary landscape which occupies the center of the luminous pavilion has a circular footprint, perhaps in reference to the Earth’s spherical profile, perhaps an allusion to a time piece - like a clock face - marking the cyclical flow of days, months and seasons. The plants that comprise this landscape are those associated with festivals and celebrations familiar across the world – red roses for Valentine’s day, pumpkins for Halloween, cherry blossom marking the arrival of spring. Huyghe hopes that in this utopian cosmos they might all come into flower at the same moment (sometime during the course of the exhibition); as they amalgamate disparate dates strewn intermittently across the annual calendar into one composite festival – “a bouquet of anniversaries” – people from all parts of the world might gather together to make common cause.

Born in Paris in 1962, Huyghe graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris in 1985. He has had major solo shows in a number of institutions including the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, París, 2000; Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2002, Austria, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2003; Dia:Chelsea, New York, 2003; MUSAC, León, Spain, 2007. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Under the title Pre-Columbian Funerary Art, the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona exhibits a series of pieces that are representative of the main cultures present in the areas of Mesoamerica, Centro-America and the Andes, before the arrival of any Europeans and the subsequent as well as abrupt culture upheaval that this entailed.

Most of the objects on show were conceived and used as part of the funerary equipment that accompanied the deceased to their tombs. This protected and privileged space made possible the preservation of very fragile pieces, such as those created in ceramic, that despite the long time passed are still in an impeccable state even nowadays.

At the same time, the exhibition approaches the biographical profile of Carmen Tórtola Valencia, an artist whose creative work as a dancer was inspired by her exotic feeling and by the mystery of ancient civilizations.

As an art collector, Tórtola Valencia gathered a number of Pre-Columbian objects that today form part of the Collection of Pre-Columbian Art of the Clos Archaeological Foundation. All in all, the collection comprises 200 carefully chosen pieces that were compiled over twenty five years.

This is the first exhibition on Wyndham Lewis (Amherst, Nova Scotia, 1882 - London, 1957) to be presented in Spain and the most comprehensive to be organised since the retrospective organised by the Tate Gallery in 1956, one year before his death. More than 150 works of art and 60 of Lewis's publications offer a complete survey of the artistic and literary output of this multi-faceted and controversial artist who was one of the key figures within international modernism of the first half of the 20th century.

In 1914 Lewis founded Vorticism, the only British avant-garde art movement, and was also a pioneer of abstraction, a war painter, a great portraitist (whose sitters included celebrated contemporary authors such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rebecca West, among others), a novelist, essayist, publisher and editor, and a literary and art critic. Lewis founded journals such as Blast and The Enemy and could aptly be described as a "single-handed avant-garde movement", as well as "the most fascinating personality of our times", as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1913. In short, a fascinating artist as yet undiscovered by the general public.The present exhibition has been organised by the Fundación Juan March with the collaboration of Paul Edwards, the invited curator and leading international expert on Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of other specialists on Lewis including Richard Humphreys, Alan Munton and Yolanda Morató, among others. The works in the exhibition have been loaned from museums and galleries in Europe, the USA and Canada, as well as from private collections.

Amadeo Vives: Doña Francisquita
Libro de Federico Romero y Guillermo Fernández-Shaw, basado en la comedia La discreta enamorada de Lope de Vega

Dirección Musical: Miquel Ortega
Dirección de Escena: Luis Olmos
Escenografía: Jon Berrondo
Figurines: María Luisa Engel
Coreografía: Florencio Campo
Iluminación: Juan Gómez-Cornejo

Reparto: Enrique Baquerizo, José Bros, Mariola Cantarero, Carlos Cosías, Amelia Font, Nancy Fabiola Herrera, Ismael Jordi, Milagros Martín, Julio Morales, María José Moreno, Sonia de Munck, Emilio Sánchez y Alex Vicens, entre otros

Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid
Coro del Teatro de la Zarzuela
Director: Antonio Fauró

The first phase of a new state-of-the-art zoo has opened in Spain ’s third largest city.  At the $94 million Bioparc Valencia, visitors can watch antelope, zebras and gazelle gallop over the African savannah and gorillas and leopards roam a lush, bird-filled equatorial forest.  One of the most advanced zoos in Europe , the 25-acre park is home to 4000 animals from 250 species.  Plans call for a second phase to include nearly five more acres to showcase the ecosystems of South-east Asia and Central and South America . 

“Zoo immersion,” the latest in zoological park design, gives new meaning to the phrase “up close and personal.”  By reproducing vegetation, the undulating terrain of a specific ecosystem and the authentic sounds of the wild – while concealing barriers and man-made structures – the architects have replicated the habitats of these wild creatures. 

Open every day of the year from 10 am and closes between 6:00 pm and 9:00 pm depending on the season.

NOW 2010 presents three days of talks, debates, workshops and documentaries about the three key themes in the far-reaching changes we are witnessing in the first decade of the 21st century.

With: Philip Ball, Ricard Solé, Iñaki Amate, Invasive Code, Genís Roca, Kònic Thtr, Rudy De Waele, Zzzinc Fabien Girardin, Dolo Beltrán, Mobile Cells