Norwich has always been an exciting cultural city and 2017 is no exception with a host of fantastic exhibitions, festivals, performances and special events, ranging from a newly restored Baby House at Strangers' Hall - part of the V&A Small Stories exhibition at Norwich Castle - and a quarter of a lost Magritte canvas found late 2016 to a new exhibition - Rembrandt: Lightening in the Dark - featuring the nationally important collection of 93 Rembrandt etchings held by Norfolk Museums Service and The Russian Season at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, revealing how the creativity of Fabergé came to extend from St. Petersburg and the court of the Romanovs, to a dairy on Norfolk's Sandringham Estate.

Paul Nash is among the most important British artists of the first half of the 20th century and a key figure of Modern Art in Britain – he will be exhibiting at the world-class Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts between April and August. A lecture by Dr Giorgia Bottinelli, Curator of Historic Art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, with freelance conservator Alice Tavares da Silva and MoMA's Michael Duffy, will take place in July following the amazing story that the third quarter of René Magritte's lost painting of two nudes, La Pose enchantée, was re-discovered at Norwich Castle Museum in 2016. La Condition humaine was painted over a quarter of an earlier painting by Magritte entitled La Pose enchantée (The enchanted Pose), which was first exhibited in 1927 and is only known from an old black and white photograph.   

Performance will be extraordinary as the Norfolk & Norwich Festival bursts with energy, colour and fabulousness for 17 days in May. Headlining the iconic Adnams Spiegeltent is the latest show Driftwood from Casus - one of Australia's most exciting contemporary circus companies. Driftwood is a colourful concoction of explosive encounters, hidden looks, and humorous discoveries featuring incredible aerial hoop, rope and swings and impressive acrobalance. The riotous Race Horse Company returns to Norwich with Super Sunday, the newest super-fun show from the acclaimed Finnish circus troupe with a reputation for madcap brilliance. Big on flying, big on thrills and big on mind blowing skills, Super Sunday contains enough fear-inducing circus stunts to stop audiences looking away, even for a second. Six shows are on early release with the rest of the programme being announced in spring.

Nelson and Norfolk will gather together some of the most extraordinary and potent objects connected to Admiral Lord Nelson, reflecting his naval victories, his relationships and above all his affection for his native county of Norfolk at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery. Among the important objects on display will be the black velvet drape from his funeral car, a uniform worn by a Greenwich Volunteer who guarded Nelson's coffin during his two day lying-in-state, a model of the funeral barge made by a French prisoner of war at Norman Cross and extensive Nelson funeral memorabilia.

And from October 2017, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the Sainsbury Centre will stage two major exhibitions that will contrast art, life and culture in Russia before and after the Revolution. The first will be Fabergé: From St. Petersburg to Sandringham. This exhibition will trace the story of one of the world's most exquisite jewellery workshops and reveal how the creativity of Fabergé came to extend from St. Petersburg and the court of the Romanovs to a dairy on Norfolk's Sandringham Estate. The second is Avant-Garde Russia - at the same time as Fabergé was producing his jewellery, a very different artistic movement was taking shape in Russia. This exhibition will include pieces produced in the period before 1917, showing the way in which Russian abstraction included specific Russian themes - especially relating to the Russian peasantry.

Event details

MARCH

Small Stories: At Home in a Dolls' House
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Castle Meadow, Norwich, NR1 3JU
4 March – 25 June 2017
01603 493625
www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/ 

This V&A touring  exhibition is complemented by special displays and events at Norwich Castle's sister museum, Strangers' Hall, a stunning medieval merchant's house in the heart of Norwich – bringing something different to the exhibition compared to other destinations. Strangers' Hall is one of the oldest and most fascinating buildings in Norwich.  Home to wealthy merchants and Mayors when Norwich was in its heyday, this beautifully preserved building dates back to 1320. Today we liken it to a giant dolls house as its series of inter-linked rooms are all dressed in period settings. See the newly conserved Norwich Baby House in the Strangers' Hall Toy Room, alongside delightful examples of dolls' houses, dolls' furniture and miniatures from their extensive collections, arranged for the duration of the show only throughout the period room settings. Follow the special trail to discover them all!

The exhibition finale is a specially commissioned Dream House, featuring magical miniature rooms created by Norfolk artists and makers. 

Take a peek behind closed doors and discover the Small Stories of the tiny inhabitants of twelve of the V&A Museum of Childhood's most treasured dolls' houses.  Journey through 300 years of the history of the home - listen to tales of marriages and parties, politics and crime. Visit a country mansion, a Victorian town house, a suburban semi and a high-rise apartment.

APRIL

Paul Nash
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
University of East Anglia, Earlham Road, Norwich, NR4 7TJ

8 April – 20 August 2017
http://scva.ac.uk 

Paul Nash (1889 –1946) is among the most important British artists of the first half of the 20th century and a key figure of Modern Art in Britain. Renowned as an official war artist in both the First and Second World Wars, Nash was fascinated with Britain's landscapes and ancient history. Inspired by these influences, he interpreted his environment in a very unique and personal way that evolved throughout his career.

Spanning a lifetime's work from his earliest drawings to his iconic war time paintings, the exhibition will explore Nash's central role in the development of modern British art. His progressive style provided a basis for his involvement with international modern art movements such as Surrealism.

He was a founding member of the British modernist group Unit One which included painters, sculptors and architects such as John Armstrong, Barbara Hepworth, Tristram Hillier, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Edward Wadsworth. The exhibition will show works by Nash alongside his fellow Unit One members, revealing the debates about abstraction and surrealism in which Nash participated during this time. It will explore his contributions to major exhibitions of the 1930s, including the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and the Unit One exhibition which toured across the UK in 1934-5.

The display will consist of paintings by Nash from the Great War, such as the remarkable We are Making a New World, 1918, early abstractions such as Kinetic Feature, 1931, Surrealism and ancient landscapes such as Druid Landscape, circa 1938, Landscape of the Megaliths, 1934 and Equivalents for the Megaliths, 1935, amongst others. His illustrations for an edition of Urne Burial, the treatise by Norwich polymath Thomas Browne which was re-published in 1931, will also be included.

The exhibition is organised by Tate Britain and will be traveling to Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne after its run at the Sainsbury Centre.

MAY

Norfolk & Norwich Festival 
Various locations 
12 – 28 May 2017
www.nnfestival.org.uk 

The Norfolk and Norwich Festival is held each year in May - internationally renowned it has become a highlight of the region's cultural calendar. Over seventeen packed days the Festival presents more than 100 performances featuring a superb line-up of companies and ensembles from all over the world. The Norfolk & Norwich Festival programme takes in music, theatre, dance, circus and visual arts as well as a host of spectacular free outdoor events. And if you're feeling particularly energetic there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in a range of Festival workshops and events. Suitable for adults and families!  Ticket s from £ FREE!

City of Literature Programme by Writers' Centre Norwich at NNF17
2016 saw the biggest programme to date from England's first UNESCO City of Literature, with Writers' Centre Norwich transformed into a Story Machine, Live Literature from some of the UK's foremost performance artists and a weekend of ideas and debate from some of the most original thinkers, activists and writers of our time. Watch this space 2017 announcements soon…

Early release dates see below shows. Full programme release spring 2017.

Casus
DRIFTWOOD
Adnams Spiegletent
Wednesday 17 - Saturday 27 May (except Thursday 18 & Tuesday 23 May), 7.30pm

Sunday 28 May, 5pm
www.nnfestival.org.uk/festival/all-events/driftwood 

As we drift along the current of life we are shaped by the humans we encounter. Headlining the iconic Adnams Spiegeltent is the latest show from Casus - one of Australia's most exciting contemporary circus companies. Driftwood is a colourful concoction of explosive encounters, hidden looks, and humorous discoveries featuring incredible aerial hoop, rope and swings and impressive acrobalance.

Race Horse Company
SUPER SUNDAY
NORWICH THEATRE ROYAL
Monday 15 & Tuesday 16 May 8pm 
www.nnfestival.org.uk/festival/all-events/super-sunday 

After the success of White Nights at the Festival 2016, the riotous Race Horse Company returns to Norwich with Super Sunday, the newest super-fun show from the acclaimed Finnish circus troupe with a reputation for madcap brilliance. Big on flying, big on thrills and big on mind blowing skills, Super Sunday contains enough fear inducing circus stunts to stop audiences looking away even for a second.

Akram Khan Company
CHOTTO DESH
NORWICH THEATRE ROYAL
Thursday 18 May 7.30pm
Tickets £7 - £20
http://www.nnfestival.org.uk/festival/all-events/chotto-desh 

Fusing dance, storytelling, interactive animation and specially composed music, Chotto Desh is a bewitching, thrilling and poignant tale of a young man's dreams and memories from Britain to Bangladesh. Chotto Desh, Bengali for 'small homeland', draws on Khan's unique quality of cross-cultural storytelling weaving together a playful story of a boy who dreams of becoming a dancer, and of a mythical child who angers the forest gods by collecting their forbidden honey. Akram Khan is one of the UK's most celebrated and influential choreographers, admired for his unique style of intimate yet epic storytelling. Chotto Desh is reworked from his Olivier Award-winning autobiographical show DESH and adapted by director Sue Buckmaster of Theatre-Rites to create a show that can be enjoyed by everyone aged 7+.
 

DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER
NORWICH THEATRE ROYAL
Saturday 20 May 8pm
Tickets £8 - £28
www.nnfestival.org.uk/festival/all-events/dee-dee-bridgewater 

Dee Dee Bridgewater is one of today's leading female jazz vocal stars. Putting her own unique spin on standards as well as taking intrepid leaps of faith in re-envisioning jazz classics, Dee Dee Bridgewater has had a multifaceted career that has spanned over four decades.

A Grammy and Tony Award-winning artist, producer and UN Ambassador, Dee Dee Bridgewater is one of the most electrifying performers in vocal jazz today, and counts Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie and Dexter Gordon among her list of past collaborators.

Quarantine
THE SPACE, NORWICH
SUMMER. AUTUMN. WINTER. SPRING
Saturday 13 & Sunday 14 May 2pm - 9pm
Tickets £25

There are things in life you can't rehearse for...

Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. is a quartet about the human life cycle, living, dying, and our relationship with time from internationally renowned theatre company Quarantine.

Comprising three live performances and a film, this piece of mass portraiture is epic in scale, ambition and subject.

Each piece has a distinct focus: Summer. sees dozens of people on stage responding to this very day; Autumn. unfolds as a two hour interval in history, full of food, conversation and clairvoyance; Winter. meets a woman preparing for death and Spring. is performed by pregnant women and imagines lives as yet unlived.

Britten Sinfonia
BEETHOVEN WITH THOMAS ADÈS
ST ANDREW'S HALL NORWICH

FRIDAY 26 MAY, 7.30pm
Tickets  £8 - £30
www.nnfestival.org.uk/festival/all-events/britten-sinfonia-beethoven-with-thomas-ades 

Britten Sinfonia Thomas Adès conductor Mark Stone baritone

Gerald Barry Beethoven Beethoven Symphony No. 1 Beethoven Symphony No. 2

In this concert, which is centred on the work and influence of Beethoven, we hear his witty first symphony paired with the virtuosic second. These are complemented by Gerald Barry's powerful setting of Beethoven's famous love letter to his “immortal beloved”.

Hearing how one of the most celebrated composer/conductors working today will interpret and illuminate these iconic works is sure to be a major event in the classical music calendar.

Rana Begum
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Friday 12 May – Sunday 1 October
http://scva.ac.uk

This will be the first exhibition by Rana Begum at the Sainsbury Centre. Rana Begum received her Fine Art Degree in painting from the Chelsea College of Art and Design and her MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, both in London.

JULY

Exhibit of La Condition humaine and lecture by Dr Giorgia Bottinelli, Curator of Historic Art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, with freelance conservator Alice Tavares da Silva and MoMA's Michael Duffy
The third quarter of René Magritte's lost painting of two nudes La Pose enchantée is re-discovered! 
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Early July
http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Visit_Us/Norwich_Castle/index.htm 

La Condition humaine by René Magritte in Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery will be available to view following a Magritte retrospective in Frankfurt. The third quarter of René Magritte's lost painting of two nudes La Pose enchantée was re-discovered at Norwich Castle Museum in 2016. La Condition humaine was painted over a quarter of an earlier painting by Magritte entitled La Pose enchantée (The enchanted Pose), which was first exhibited in 1927 and is only known from an old black and white photograph. The last reference to La Pose enchantée, a large painting of two female nudes, was in 1932, after which it completely disappeared.  Even Magritte's Catalogue Raisonné lists its whereabouts as unknown.

The explanation for the disappearance of La Pose enchantée came to light in 2013 when, to the amazement of the art world, two paintings were discovered to have been part of the missing canvas, one in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the other in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Two, however, still remained lost. That is until now when the third, the lower-right quarter, emerged in Norwich.

Along with the exhibit of La Condition humaine at Norwich Castle there will be a lecture about these important Magritte discoveries by Dr Giorgia Bottinelli, Curator of Historic Art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, together with freelance conservator Alice Tavares da Silva and MoMA's Michael Duffy is planned for July 2017.

Nelson and Norfolk
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Castle Meadow, Norwich, NR1 3JU
29 July – September 2017
01603 493625
www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/ 

This major exhibition will gather together some of the most extraordinary and potent objects connected to Admiral Lord Nelson, reflecting his naval victories, his relationships and above all his affection for his native county of Norfolk.

It will examine Nelson's reputation and the extraordinary way in which his life and achievements were commemorated at the time of his death and have continued to exert a powerful fascination in the two hundred years since. His symbolic importance to the country and the nature of his 'Immortal' memory will be a central theme. Among the important objects on display will be the black velvet drape

from his funeral car, a uniform worn by a Greenwich Volunteer who guarded Nelson's coffin during his two day lying-in-state, a model of the funeral barge made by a French prisoner of war at Norman Cross and extensive Nelson funeral memorabilia.

Alongside these important artefacts from the Norfolk Museums Service collections – which have not been displayed together before – will be significant loans from other museums.

SEPTEMBER

Noirwich – Crime Writing Festival
From Writers' Centre Norwich & UEA
14 – 17 September
http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/ 
 
Britain's boldest, bloodiest crime writing festival returns to the medieval lanes of Norwich. Noirwich is an annual crime fiction festival featuring the best crime authors, writing workshops and social events. The festival mixes together author talks and Q&As with workshops for aspiring writers. Whether you're a reader, a writer or a bit of both you'll find something at Noirwich. Each year the Fringe introduces visitors to Norwich as bars, restaurants, castles and other local establishments embrace the lure of noir. 

Heritage Open Days

Around Norwich & Norfolk

7 – 10 September 2017
http://www.heritagecity.org/ 

Offers the chance to delve into Norwich and Norfolk's fascinating and sometimes hidden heritage with free events - including open buildings, guided tours and walks, heritage literary events, exhibitions and performances - across Norwich, Thetford, South Norfolk, Broadland, Great Yarmouth, North Norfolk and further afield, there will be plenty to see and do across the long heritage weekend.

Heritage Open Days Norfolk is the largest free programme outside London.

OCTOBER

The Russian Season

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
University of East Anglia, Earlham Road, Norwich, NR4 7TJ

14 October 2017 – 11 February 2018 (precise dates to be confirmed soon)

http://scva.ac.uk 

In October 2017, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the Sainsbury Centre will stage two major exhibitions that will contrast art, life and culture in Russia before and after the Revolution.

Fabergé: From St. Petersburg to Sandringham

This exhibition will trace the story of one of the world's most exquisite jewellery workshops and reveal how the creativity of Fabergé came to extend from St. Petersburg and the court of the Romanovs to a dairy on Norfolk's Sandringham Estate. In 1907, Edward VII commissioned Peter Carl Fabergé to produce portrait sculptures of dogs and horses at Sandringham as a gift for Queen Alexandra. The project was soon extended to cover all the Norfolk estate's wild farm and pet animals. The best sculptors were sent from St. Petersburg to Sandringham to make wax models of the animals which were taken to Russia to be rendered in hardstones, gemstones, gold, silver and platinum as directed by Fabergé himself. More than 100 sculptures are known, most now in the Royal Collection.

The loans from the Royal Collection will be the centrepiece of the exhibition but the wider story of Fabergé will be told with major loans from private and public collections in Britain, Russia and America. Over 150 works, including vintage films and photographs, will illuminate the extraordinary skills of the Fabergé craftsmen who created glorious enamelled and bejewelled plants set in rock crystal vases as well as the famous Fabergé eggs and other royal gifts.

Avant-Garde Russia

At the same time as Fabergé was producing his jewellery, a very different artistic movement was taking shape in Russia. Prompted both by the conservatism of the Russian social and political establishment and by the emergence of new radical artistic movements across Europe, Russia developed its own unique version of the avant-garde. The revolutionary year of 1917 gave a dramatic impetus to the Russian avant-garde, providing a radical political dimension to the way in which Russian culture developed.

The exhibition will include pieces produced in the period before 1917, showing the way in which Russian abstraction included specific Russian themes - especially relating to the Russian peasantry. The avant-garde operated across the whole artistic spectrum, from poetry to urban planning, and the exhibition will demonstrate their vitality and creativity at a time of intense social and political transformation. It will focus on the varied ways in which the avant-garde sought to use revolutionary forms and themes in the everyday world. Ceramics, book designs, furniture, costume and urban planning all attracted the attentions of the Russian avant-garde as they attempted to 'live the revolution'. The exhibition will include a wide variety of object, ranging from Suetin's Suprematist ceramics that utilised revolutionary symbolism, to 1920s covers for books by the poets Mayakovsky and designs for a revolutionary urban environment. Alongside this, the exhibition will contain some of the purely artistic pieces produced by the avant-garde, showing how their ideas for reimagining the actual lived experience of revolutionary Russia were founded in the abstraction produced in the years before 1917.

The avant-garde will be placed in their social and historical context by utilising the contemporary photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii that portray pre-revolutionary Russian society, alongside film excerpts from the period that show how the revolution erupted and display the often chaotic and tumultuous environment in which the Russian avant-garde were creating their works.

Rembrandt: Lightening the Dark

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Castle Meadow, Norwich, NR1 3JU
21 Oct 2017 – 7 Jan 2018
01603 493625
www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/

A new exhibition opens in 2017 featuring the nationally important collection of Rembrandt etchings held by Norfolk Museums Service.  This exhibition will showcase Rembrandt's explorations of light and darkness, through selected loans from the National Gallery, the Royal Collection, the British Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland, together with the Castle's extraordinary collection of 93 etchings by the great artist.

One of the world's most renowned and innovative printmakers, Rembrandt's handling of light and shadow expressed purely through the medium of lines and the space around them, was unsurpassed. During his lifetime, Rembrandt was as famed for his prints as for his oil paintings, being better known in Britain as a printmaker.

This exhibition will highlight this less well known aspect of his output, comparing prints with a selected group of paintings and drawings, to show how physical and metaphorical light and darkness meet and combine in Rembrandt's work in all media.

Notes to editors

For images and further information please contact Melanie Cook PR manager, 01603 727939 melanie.cook@visitnorwich.co.uk.  

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