Gigantic spiders, huge eyes, aluminium spirals in a majestic wingnut tree: this spring the Rijksmuseum presents Louise Bourgeois in the Rijksmuseum Gardens, an outdoor exhibition of twelve sculptures spanning half a century of the artist’s oeuvre – from The Blind Leading the Blind in the late 1940s to 2003’s Crouching Spider. Many of the works have never before been shown in the Netherlands, and this is the first exhibition to focus on Bourgeois’s outdoor sculptures. Internationally, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is one of the most renowned and important woman artists of the 20th century. She became famous all the world over for her monumental sculptures of spiders. Louise Bourgeois in the Rijksmuseum Gardens came about in close cooperation with Easton Foundation in New York, and is guest curated by Alfred Pacquement, former director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Admission is free to the exhibition, which runs fr

The British Museum is presenting the largest exhibition of manga ever held outside of Japan. Manga are Japanese comic books or graphic novels with a twist, serialised in magazines and read by a global audience. A multi-billion-pound business that embraces anime and gaming, manga are a global phenomenon and have forged a new international visual language. The original translation of the characters for manga was ‘pictures run riot’, associated with the great 19th-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai whose miscellaneous drawings of people, animals and nature were published as ‘Hokusai Manga’. Since then, however, the medium has evolved to become a form of immersive story telling with unique characters and embracing universal issues. The Citi exhibition Manga brings to life the art of manga, looking at how it emerged in Japan and grew to be a worldwide cultural phenomenon. It explores manga’s enduring appeal and cultural cro

Israeli researchers said Wednesday they had managed to extract yeast from ancient jars and produced a head-spinning concoction with it: beer similar to what the pharaohs would have imbibed. Beer with a six-percent alcoholic strength and similar in taste to a wheat ale was presented to journalists, as was mead at 14-percent strength. Researchers from Israel’s Antiquities Authority as well as three Israeli universities gathered at a Jerusalem pub to announce their findings and called the project a first. “I remember that when we first brought out the beer that we sat around the table and drank, we raised a cup to say l’chaim (a Hebrew toast meaning ‘to life’),” said Aren Maeir, an archaeologist with Bar-Ilan University. “And I said either we’ll be good

Marking the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the exhibition brings together more than 200 of the Renaissance master’s greatest drawings in the Royal Collection, forming the largest exhibition of Leonardo’s work in over 65 years. Drawing served as Leonardo’s laboratory, allowing him to work out his ideas on paper and search for the universal laws that he believed underpinned all of creation. The drawings by Leonardo in the Royal Collection have been together as a group since the artist’s death in 1519. Acquired during the reign of Charles II, they provide an unparalleled insight into the workings of Leonardo’s mind and reflect the full range of his interests, including painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology and botany.