Past exhibitions

Whilst several major exhibitions have explored the propaganda imagery of Fascist Italy, art produced by those opposed to Mussolini and his regime has received surprisingly little attention. Against Mussolini brought together works produced in Italy and abroad throughout the Fascist era (1922- 43), but focused particularly on the period immediately after the dictator's fall from power following Italy's disastrous Second World War campaign. These last tragic years saw the re-emergence of Mussolini as the puppet leader of a Fascist administration in the north of the country and the onset of a bitter civil war, as the Resistance fought alongside the Allies to restore democracy and liberate Italy from tyranny.

Johnnie Shand Kydd is an acclaimed documentary photographer perhaps best known for his portraits of artist friends such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst. In 2000 he embarked on a longterm project to capture the dramatic and chaotic world of Naples. Having never visited the city before, he soon developed a relationship with it that he described as 'akin to a drug habit', returning again and again over the next eight years.

Another Country brought together ten highly respected contemporary painters: Tony Bevan, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci and Thomas Newbolt.

Although the problem of depicting movement in painting and sculpture had concerned artists for many centuries, the birth of the Futurist movement in 1909 signalled a renewed interest in the subject. Taking as its starting point the Estorick's own collection of Futurist masterpieces, On the Move drew on a wide range of material in many different media to provide an in-depth examination of this complex and fascinating theme.

Contemporary Italian artist Flavio de Marco is best known for his works based on the landscape of the computer screen. In a series of paintings created specifically for this project, the worlds of the computer and twentieth-century Italian art elided to create extraordinary works.

Terra Incognita: Italy's Ceramic Revival presented an extraordinary selection of fifty key works drawn from the Bernd and Eva Hockemeyer Collection of twentieth-century Italian ceramic art.

Missoni is one of the leading and most distinctive fashion houses in the world. The Missoni style has evolved out of a long-standing collaboration between the husband and wife team of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni. In the late 1940s, Ottavio Missoni established a workshop producing jersey tracksuits that were sported by the Italian Athletic Team at the 1948 London Olympics, where Ottavio himself qualified for the final of the 400m hurdle race.

An exhibition of period photographs from the British Architectural Library Photographs Collection. Ever since its inception, photography has profoundly influenced the practice and study of architecture. This was especially true with the advent of Modernism which, during the 1920s, brought architecture and photography into closer alliance than ever before.

20 February 2009 marked the centenary of the publication of F.T. Marinetti's Futurist manifesto in the popular Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Although Marinetti himself was a poet, his ideas swiftly attracted artists from other disciplines.

The manipulation of photographic imagery is as old as photography itself, but the modernist conception of photomontage was a radical extension of techniques and creative attitudes that first emerged in Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragments of newsprint from illustrated journals were pasted into drawings and paintings.