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Director of the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire on the art, design and architecture events not to miss

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Serpentine Pavilion 2014 by Smiljan Radic

Hyde Park, London

Until 19 October

Responding to what she calls 'an architectural explosion in Chile', co-director Serpentine Galleries Julia Peyton-Jones invited Chilean architect Radic to design the 14th Serpentine Pavilion. Resembling an object from outer space that has landed in the park, the pavilion houses a flexible, open area with a cafe. Radic describes it as 'a fragile shell... suspended on large quarry stones. At night, the amber-tinted light will attract the attention of passers-by, like lamps attracting moths'.
serpentinegalleries.org

Antony Gormley room 2014

The Beaumont,

Brown Hart Gardens, Mayfair

for their first luxury hotel, restaurateurs Jeremy King and Chris Corbin commissioned Gormley to extend the exterior of the 1920s building in mayfair with a massive, 10-metre high sculpture of a crouching figure. made from stainless steel blocks, Room is no ordinary public sculpture. inside its outer skin is a bed. Gormley wants hotel guests to find 'a safe haven, a retreat, a place of peace'. Light can be totally excluded: 'it's the first time that i have attempted to sculpt darkness itself'.
thebeaumont.com

Martyrs (earth, air, fire, water) by Bill Viola

ST PauL'S Cathedral, London

Permanent installation (from May 2014)

Conceived eleven years ago, Bill Viola's soundless, four-screen video on the subject of martyrdom has proved to be well worth the wait. installed at the east end of St Paul's, this contemporary altarpiece invites people to reflect on the meaning of self-sacrifice, with each of the four humans portrayed moving from intense physical suffering to a state of spiritual transcendence or enlightenment. for access check the cathedral's website.
stpauls.co.uk

Germany divided: Baselitz and his generation

British Museum, London

Until 31 August

No-one interested in the history of postwar Germany should miss this show. All 90 drawings and prints are from the collection of Count Christian Duerckheim, one of the foremost champions of German artists of his own generation (Baselitz, Lüpertz, Palermo, Penck, Titel (below) and Richter). Duerckheim has so far given 34 of the works on show to the museum. Given Britain's ambivalent attitude to collecting modern German art after two world wars, this is extraordinary generosity.
britishmuseum.org

Body and void: Echoes of Moore in contemporary art

Henry Moore Foundation, Perry green

Until 26 October

This is the first time that Henry Moore's sculptures have been contrasted with those of living artists at Perry Green, his former home and studios. From Bruce Nauman, Bruce McLean and Richard Long to a younger generation including Anish Kapoor (right), Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst (Mother and Child Divided) and Simon Starling, the exhibition looks at the ways in which Moore's sculptural language of the body has been reinterpreted by subsequent sculptors.
henry-moore.org/pg/exhibitions/body-void

Mapplethorpe Rodin

Musee Rodin, Paris

Until 21 September

The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once said: 'i see things like they were sculptures'. His classical, symmetrical approach to the human form could not have been more different from Rodin's abiding concern with movement and vitality, even in the inanimate. And yet, as this revealing exhibition of 50 sculptures by Rodin juxtaposed with over 100 of Mapplethorpe's photographs demonstrates, there were themes common to both: black and white/light and shadow; eroticism and damnation and, of course, sex.
musee-rodin.fr

 

Richard Calvocoressi

Richard Calvocoressi is director of The Henry Moore Foundation. He recently co-curated the exhibition Bacon Moore: Flesh and Bone at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. From 1987 to 2007 he was director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh where he built up a world-class collection of surrealist art; he was also instrumental in attracting the Anthony d'Offay gift of contemporary art to Edinburgh and London.