American photographer Irving Penn (1917 – 2009) is widely known for his fashion, portrait, and still life images, but he also pursued numerous opportunities to photograph the indigenous people of Africa, Latin America and Melanesia. It is the latter that will be shown.

This major exhibition on the art of Surrealism will provide insights into one of the most influential artistic and literary movements of the twentieth century. Born in the avant-garde metropolis of Paris, Surrealism was represented by such outstanding artist personalities as Dalí, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Miró, Oppenheim and Picasso.

Usually classed as a realist painter, Antonio López (born in Tomelloso in 1936) is one of the most idiosyncratic artists at work in Spain after the Civil War. From the 1950s, he has produced drawings, engravings, paintings and sculptures, fashioning an oeuvre of a remarkable technical virtuosity that somehow seems outside time, despite focusing on the realistic representation of living beings and objects.

The Musée de l'Elysée offers an original exhibition on the theme of the counter-culture in Switzerland, expressed through photography and the visual arts from 1950 to the present day. The exhibition is a contextualization of the work of twenty-five photographers, artists, film and video makers. It shows the various aspects of the counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and the photography critique that succeeded it.

The circus is one of Chagall’s favourite subjects and one he cultivated throughout his career. The work presented for the exhibition brings together thirty-eight gouaches painted by the artist in 1955 and then used as models for the lithographs which appeared as illustrations in the book published by Tériade in 1967. The texts in the book are also by Chagall and are written in a poetic style with a whole host of verbal images.

It began twenty years ago and became a one of a kind undertaking, which turned into an unusual hommage to his home country. The Latin title BELGICUM means “Belgian” and is the all-encompassing tag line to what Stephan Vanfleteren discovered during his many travels deep into his home country. Belgium was carved out of the southern provinces of the so-called Low Countries in 1830 in spite of the fact that the area had to merge two different cultural identities. One is french-speaking and Catholic, influenced by the southern neighbor country France. The other one is Flamish-speaking and Protestant adjacent to the Netherlands.

Galerie Priska Pasquer is delighted to be presenting an exhibition of the work of Japanese artist Leiko Ikemura. The title of the exhibition, 'Flame & Fire', refers to both the sculptural production process as well as the content of the photo series, 'sh-h', featured in the exhibition.

“Memory and Fiction” will feature Wong Wo Bik, one of Hong Kong’s most accomplished photographers, as well as one of a small number of female photographers active in the territory. The retrospective exhibition will showcase selected works of Wong dated from the 1980s, including photographs of Hong Kong historical and notable landmarks, such as Lai Yuen Amusement Park and the Eu family mansions that were now demolished, and the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong. Wong’s photographs of these architectures are not merely documentary of history; they are also the artist’s subjective narrative of her personal experiences at these sites, as well as depiction of traces left behind by others.

‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ is the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held. This unprecedented exhibition – the first of its kind anywhere in the world – brings together sensational international loans never before seen in the UK.

This autumn, more than one hundred works from the period 1900-1950 from the Moderna Museet collection will be shown. This is the most comprehensive presentation of the collection at Moderna Museet Malmö to date, filling both the Turbine Hall and the Upper Gallery. Two obvious highlights are Apollo by Henri Matisse and The Dying Dandy by Nils Dardel. The presentation features many fabulous works by seminal artists, including Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Siri Derkert, Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

In the photograph Self-Portrait (1993/2011), Cecilia Edefalk is holding a revolver in one hand, aiming it at me as a viewer. Her other hand is holding a camera trigger. However, the moment the picture was taken the revolver was pointing at a camera. As she aims at the camera lens she takes a self-portrait.

From the 1920s through the ‘60s, Manhattan’s artistic and social circles embraced British-born photographer and designer Cecil Beaton (1904-80). Cecil Beaton: The New York Years brings together extraordinary photographs, drawings, and costumes by Beaton to chronicle his impact on the city’s cultural life.

Sabine Hornig, born in 1964, is one of the most internationally celebrated German artists of her generation. Her photographic and sculptural work, created at the crossroads between photography, sculpture and site-specific installation, is both artistically independent and artistically unconventional at once and makes a vital contribution to our understanding of photography as a contemporary art form.

“Plywood,” explained Popular Science in 1948, “is a layercake of lumber and glue.” In the history of design, plywood is also an important modern material that has given 20th-century designers of everyday objects, furniture, and even architecture greater flexibility in shaping modern forms at an industrial scale.

In 1932 Besnyö left Berlin because she felt threatened by National Socialism. She succeeded in further developing her career in Amsterdam, where she survived German occupation and became a much sought-after photo journalist after the war. The modern aesthetics of the 1920s have always remained the yardstick of Eva Besnyö’s photography. This exhibition with 120 vintage prints will be the first retrospective of work by the Dutch Grande Dame of photography in Germany.

In 1930, when Eva Besnyö arrived in Berlin at the age of only twenty, a certificate of successful apprenticeship from a recognised Budapest photographic studio in her bag, she had made two momentous decisions already: to turn photography into her profession and to put fascist Hungary behind her for ever.

Pioneer of color photography in the Netherlands for the first time. The Jewish Historical Museum is presenting a retrospective exhibition of the work of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter (born in 1923). Following a long period of obscurity, Leiter’s work has recently been rediscovered in the United States and Europe. This is the first exhibition of his work in the Netherlands.

Black and white polarize and are seen as radical and particularly expressive. The two colors are shaped by contrasts such as light and darkness or life and death. Common to both is a claim to absoluteness but also the expression of demarcation or distance, as well as protest. The ways in which they are used relate to specific cultural circles and are illustrated in various social phenomena.

Painter, printmaker, and draftsman Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) was one of the first masters appointed to teach at the Bauhaus, the innovative school for art, design, and architecture established by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Like many other figures at the Bauhaus, Feininger turned to photography as a tool for visual exploration. Beginning in 1928 and for the next decade, he used the camera to explore transparency, reflection, night imagery, and the effects of light and shadow.

Fashion is a manifestation of ideals of beauty and social change, an expressive play between belonging and distinction, communication and trend. Its only constant factor is permanent change. In the sphere of beautiful appearances fashion/photography works in a both anticipatory and historicizing way: it reflects the change it creates. As part of the Kunsthalle Wien’s special photography program, the exhibition Vanity, which presents about two
hundred selected works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection (Hamburg).