Art in Manchester

9.00am from Northwich Memorial Hall - Other pick-up points available here.

We spend the day in Manchester exploring 3 galleries.

The Whitworth Art Gallery opens on 14 February following a £15m refurbishment. The gallery has been extended into the park, with new exhibition spaces and greatly enhanced visitor facilities. The extended display areas reach into the landscape, with new and recently acquired sculpture on display in the gallery grounds and in a new art garden and orchard designed by painterly garden designer Sarah Price.

The Whitworth programme will open with a major solo exhibition from one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker whose work invites viewers to witness the transformation of ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. This extensive presentation will feature a wide range of work made during Parker’s career, including her signature piece Cold Dark Matter; An Exploded View (1991), a garden shed blown up and then displayed around a light bulb.

Also on display will be work by Cai Guo-Qiang, a leading Chinese-born contemporary artist, known for his remarkable projects using gunpowder, including the firework displays for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His installation Unmanned Nature (2008), a forty-five metre long, four metre high gunpowder drawing, will be the first exhibition in the Whitworth’s new Landscape Gallery.

Celebrating the recent major gift by The Karpidas Foundation of 90 contemporary works of art to the Whitworth, this exhibition features a selection of those works, indicating the artistic vision and breadth of the Foundation. British and North American artists are featured, with many highly regarded names - Laure Prouvost, Dorothy Cross, Nathan Coley, Anna Barriball and Gillian Wearing, as well as Keith Coventry, Gary Hume, Dexter Dalwood and Michael Craig Martin.

At the Manchester Museum Siberia - At the Edge of the World explores the natural history and culture of this immense territory that is one and a half times bigger than Europe. Combining stunning photographic images of its vast landscapes and diverse people with a selection of natural history specimens and cultural objects, the exhibition will examine different aspects of Siberia’s environment and culture, dispelling some of the misconceptions surrounding the land and its people. Items from British and Russian museums will be brought together for the first exhibition of its kind in the UK.

The Manchester City Art Gallery has 3 special exhibitions in addition to the permanent collection.

The Sensory War 1914 - 2014 exhibition marks the Centenary of the First World War and explores how artists have communicated the impact of military conflict on the body, mind, environment and human senses between 1914 and 2014. The show examines how artists from 1914 onwards depicted the devastating impact of new military technologies utilised in a century of conflict beginning with the First World War. It brings together work from a range of leading artists including Henry Lamb, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash, Otto Dix, Nancy Spero, Richard Mosse, Omer Fast and features works by the hibakusha; survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima which were created in the 1970s and are being shown in the UK for the first time.

Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War is an exhibition of work by acclaimed British painter, Stanley Spencer, on loan from the National Trust's Sandham Memorial Chapel. This exhibition features a series of large-scale arched canvases and side panels detailing scenes of the artist's own wartime experiences. Working as a soldier within a hospital, his recollections focus on the domestic rather than the combative and evoke everyday experience in which he found spiritual resonance and sustenance.

Captured around the world, fashioned in Manchester: internationally renowned and Manchester-based media and textile artist Andrea Zapp reveals her first luxury womenswear collection. Working with scenes and photography from her global travels, Zapp has used urban views, rural panoramas, miniature scenarios and objects of culture and curiosity to create a visual portfolio which forms the essence of each stunning hand-made silk dress.

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