Join speakers including Darren Almond, Simon Lee, Lynda Nead, Christopher Riopelle and  the OU’s Emma Barker and Gill Perry at this study day.

“Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing” wrote the French poet Charles Baudelaire in 1846.

This study day, held in collaboration with the Open University, explores the diverse subjects and varied styles of Romantic painting with its ‘intimacy, spirituality, colour’ and ‘yearning for the infinite.’ Curators, art historians and artists discuss Delacroix, Romanticism, and the rise of modern art.

Join speakers including Yinka Shonibare, Xavier Bray, Juliet Wilson Bareau, Emma Barker, and Gill Perry to explore Goya's portraits.

Goya took the genre of portraiture to new heights. His technical and stylistic innovations enabled him to portray his sitters with extraordinary vividness and insight.

Cave is a permanent artwork in Belvedere Park in Milton Keynes, made by the artists Heather and Ivan Morison. It is a simple platform and shelter of heavy grey leaning concrete faces, which incorporates a cast iron bench and cast fire bowl. It is set into a steep slope, setting its back to the centre of the city, and looking out over the park, the outskirts of Milton Keynes, and the countryside beyond.

Houses, homes, huts and domestic themes have become ubiquitous in installation art over the last few decades. Gill Perry explores some of the mythical, metaphorical, aesthetic and social concerns that have inspired artists to engage with these everyday themes. She focuses on the work of three contemporary artists (Agnès Varda, Tracey Emin and Michael Landy) for whom (as she argues) ‘home’ is rich in contradictory, playful and nomadic meanings, evoking both local and transnational associations.

Leon Wainwright, Art and ‘exchange’ between Suriname

This paper is drawn from research in Paramaribo (Suriname) and Rotterdam, in the context of the Dutch and Surinamese official sponsorship which shaped two art exhibitions in 2010.

Closing remarks, Leon Wainwright