Coinciding with the release of his first single and album in a decade, the David Bowie is exhibition will be open to V&A members from Friday 22 March and to the general public from Saturday 23 March.

The exhibition will explore how David Bowie’s music has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design and contemporary culture.

Items on display include more than 60 stage costumes, including the Ziggy Stardust bodysuits designed by Freddie Burretti in 1972, Kansai Yamamoto’s creations for the 1973 Aladdin Sane tour and a Union Jack coat designed by Alexander McQueen for the cover of the 1997 album Earthling.

Photography, handwritten lyrics, album sleeve artwork, music videos and excerpts from films and live performances will also be on show.

The V&A announced that the retrospective had broken its record for the fastest selling exhibition, with over 42,000 advance tickets already sold, and has extended the show until 11 August.

For the covers of Bowie's latest album and single, graphic design studio Barnbrook defaced an image from one of his classic albums and upturned a 1970s photograph of the musician.

The V&A recently opened its new permanent gallery for furniture, displaying objects from the middle ages to the present day by designers including Charles and Ray Eames and Ron Arad.

All images of the David Bowie is exhibition are courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Above: striped bodysuit for Aladdin Sane tour designed by Kansai Yamamoto (1973), photograph by Masayoshi Sukita from The David Bowie Archive
Top image: The Archer Station to Station tour (1976), photograph by John Rowlands

The V&A's Theatre and Performance curators have selected over 300 objects for the exhibition, titled David Bowie is, which will be the first international retrospective of the singer's career.

Above: album cover shoot for Aladdin Sane (1973) courtesy of Duffy Archive

The exhibition will explore how David Bowie’s music has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design and contemporary culture.

Above: original photography for Earthling album cover (1997) by Frank W Ockenfels 3

On display will be more than 60 stage costumes, including the Ziggy Stardust bodysuits designed by Freddie Burretti in 1972, Kansai Yamamoto’s creations for the 1973 Aladdin Sane tour and a Union Jack coat designed by Alexander McQueen for the cover of the 1997 album Earthling.

Above: photo collage of manipulated film stills from The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975-6) courtesy of The David Bowie Archive and Studiocanal Films Ltd

Also on show will be photography, handwritten lyrics, album sleeve artwork, music videos and excerpts from films and live performances.

Above: David Bowie and William Burroughs, photographed by Terry O'Neill and hand coloured by Bowie (1974) from The David Bowie Archive, courtesy of V&A Images

The exhibition opens on 23 March and continues until 28 July.

Above: promotional shoot for The Kon-rads photographed by Roy Ainsworth (1963) from The David Bowie Archive, courtesy of V&A Images

Yesterday we reported that graphic design studio Barnbrook defaced a classic Bowie album to create the cover for his forthcoming album, The Next Day.

Above: cut up lyrics for ‘Blackout’ from “Heroes” (1977) from The David Bowie Archive, courtesy of V&A Images

The V&A recently opened its new permanent gallery for furniture, displaying objects from the middle ages to the present day by designers including Charles and Ray Eames and Ron Arad.

Above: self-portrait in pose also adopted for the album cover of “Heroes” (1978) from The David Bowie Archive, courtesy of V&A Images

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Here's the full press release from the V&A:

David Bowie is

In partnership with Gucci. Sound experience by Sennheiser. 23 March – 28 July 2013

The V&A has been given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the first international retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie - one of the most pioneering and influential performers of modern times. David Bowie is (opening next spring), will explore the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades.

The V&A’s Theatre and Performance curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, have selected more than 300 objects that will be brought together for the very first time. They include handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork. The V&A will take an in-depth look at how David Bowie’s music and radical individualism has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design and contemporary culture. The exhibition will also demonstrate how he has inspired others to challenge convention and pursue freedom of expression.

The exhibition will explore the broad range of Bowie’s collaborations with artists and designers in the fields of fashion, sound, graphics, theatre, art and film. On display will be more than 60 stage-costumes including Ziggy Stardust bodysuits (1972) designed by Freddie Burretti, Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973) and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover (1997). Also on show will be photography by Brian Duffy, Terry O’Neill and Masayoshi Sukita; album sleeve artwork by Guy Peellaert and Edward Bell; visual excerpts from films and live performances including The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Saturday Night Live (1979); music videos such as Boys Keep Swinging (1979) and Let’s Dance (1983) and set designs created for the Diamond Dogs tour (1974).

Alongside these will be more personal items such as never-before-seen storyboards, handwritten set lists and lyrics as well as some of Bowie’s own sketches, musical scores and diary entries, revealing the evolution of his creative ideas.

Martin Roth, Director of the V&A, said: "David Bowie is a true icon, more relevant to popular culture now than ever. His radical innovations across music, theatre, fashion and style still resound today in design and visual culture and he continues to inspire artists and designers throughout the world. We are thrilled to be presenting the first ever exhibition drawn from the David Bowie Archive."

Frida Giannini, Gucci Creative Director, said: "David Bowie is... one of my greatest inspirations. His individuality, originality and authenticity have been defining. Through his creative genius his influence on music, fashion, art and popular culture over decades has been immeasurable and will continue to be for decades to come."

Exhibition Overview

The exhibition will offer insight into Bowie’s early years and his first steps towards musical success. Tracing the creative aspirations of the young David Robert Jones (born 1947 in Brixton, London), it will show how he was inspired by innovations in art, theatre, music, technology and youth culture in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Pursuing a professional career in music and acting, he officially adopted the stage name ‘David Bowie’ in 1965 and went through a series of self-styled changes from Mod to mime artist and folk singer to R&B musician in anticipation of the shifting nature of his later career. On display will be early photographs, LPs from his musical heroes such as Little Richard, and Bowie’s sketches for stage sets and costumes created for his bands The Kon-rads and The King Bees in the 1960s. This opening section will conclude with a focus on Bowie’s first major hit Space Oddity (1969) and the introduction of the fictional character Major Tom, who would be revisited by Bowie in both Ashes to Ashes (1980) and Hallo Spaceboy (1995). Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the single was released to coincide with the first moon landing and was Bowie’s breakthrough moment, granting him critical and commercial success as an established solo artist.

The exhibition will move on to examine David Bowie’s creative processes from song writing, recording and producing to designing costumes, stage sets and album artwork. Working within both established art forms and new artistic movements, this section will reveal the scope of his inspirations and cultural references from Surrealism, Brechtian theatre and avant-garde mime to West End musicals, German Expressionism and Japanese Kabuki performance. On show will be some of Bowie’s own musical instruments, footage and photography of recording sessions for Outside (1995) and ‘Hours...’ (1999) as well as handwritten lyrics and word collages inspired by William Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ method of writing that have never previously been publicly displayed.

David Bowie is will chronicle his innovative approach to creating albums and touring shows around fictionalised stage personas and narratives. 1972 marked the birth of his most famous creation; Ziggy Stardust, a human manifestation of an alien being. Ziggy’s daringly androgynous and otherworldly appearance has had a powerful and continuous influence on pop culture, signalling a challenge of social traditions and inspiring people to shape their own identities. On display will be the original multi-coloured suit worn for the pivotal performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in July 1972, as well as outfits designed for stage characters Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke. Costumes from The 1980 Floor Show (1973), album cover sleeves for The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1971), alongside press cuttings and fan material, will highlight Bowie’s fluid stylistic transformations and his impact on social mobility and gay liberation.

The final section will celebrate David Bowie as a pioneering performer both on stage and in film, concentrating on key performances throughout his career. An immersive audio-visual space will present dramatic projections of some of Bowie’s most ambitious music videos including DJ (1979) and The Hearts Filthy Lesson (1995), as well as recently uncovered footage of Bowie performing Jean Genie on Top of the Pops in 1973 and D.A. Pennebaker’s film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture (1973). A separate screening room will show excerpts and props from Bowie’s feature films such as Labyrinth (1986) and Basquiat (1996).

In addition, this gallery will trace the evolution of the lavishly produced Diamond Dogs tour (1974), the design of which was inspired by Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) and George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The tour combined exuberant choreography and a colossal set design, taking the combination of rock music and theatre to new heights. On display will be previously unseen tour footage and storyboards for the proposed musical that Bowie would eventually transform into the Diamond Dogs album and touring show. An area will also be dedicated to the monochrome theatricality of Bowie’s Berlin period and the creation of the stylish Thin White Duke persona identified with the Station to Station album and tour (1976). It will also investigate the series of experimental and pioneering records he produced between 1977 and 1979 whilst living in Germany, known as the Berlin Trilogy.
David Bowie is will conclude with a display of striking performance and fashion photography taken by photographers including Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and John Rowlands. These professional portraits will be juxtaposed with a collage of visual projections illustrating Bowie’s immense creative influence and ubiquitous presence in music, fashion and contemporary visual and virtual culture.

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News: this Saturday the V&A museum opens its new permanent gallery for furniture, displaying objects from the middle ages to the present day by designers including Thomas Chippendale, Charles and Ray Eames and Ron Arad.

Top image: storage unit by Charles and Ray Eames, USA, 1949-50

The Dr Susan Weber Gallery, named after the founder of the Bard Graduate Center in New York, is the first ever V&A gallery dedicated to furniture and contains over 200 pieces demonstrating a range of materials and techniques, from joinery and gilding to upholstery and digital manufacturing.

Designed by Glasgow firm NORD Architecture, the gallery will enable the museum to display pieces that have not been shown to the public for more than 30 years.

In a change from the museum's usual curatorial approach, the objects are arranged thematically rather than by period or place – for instance, an Art Deco lacquer screen is presented alongside an example of the 16th century Japanese lacquer work that inspired it.

Above: Chair for the Ward Willets House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1902; ©ARS, NY and DACS

The architects chose not to provide explanatory captions for each piece in order to bring viewers closer to the objects. Instead, touch screen panels have been placed around the gallery to provide information.

Above: Tristan and Isolde casket, Northern Europe c. 1350-70

One of the newest pieces on display is Wooden Heap, a drawer unit designed by Boris Dennler and acquired as part of this year’s Design Fund to Benefit the V&A.

Above: cradle designed by Richard Norman Shaw, England c. 1861

We recently reported on the appointment of journalist Kieran Long as senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A.

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Photographs are courtesy of the V&A, except where stated.

Here's the full press release from the V&A:

The V&A will open its new Dr Susan Weber Gallery in December, providing a permanent home for the Museum’s internationally renowned furniture collection. The Museum has always displayed furniture in other galleries, but this will be the first ever V&A gallery dedicated to furniture. It is also the only gallery worldwide to tell the story of furniture production through the way each piece was made and the people who made it.

Designed by NORD Architecture, the gallery will display more than 200 outstanding pieces of British and European furniture, from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as examples of American and Asian furniture and will examine in detail the range of materials and techniques employed for each piece.

The gallery will enable the V&A to show some objects that have not been on display for more than 30 years, with pieces ranging from chairs, stools, tables, bureaux, chests, cabinets and wardrobes, to clocks, mirrors and screens. Well-known designers such as Thomas Chippendale, David Roentgen, Grinling Gibbons, George Bullock, Robert Adam, Eileen Gray, Michael Thonet, Charles and Ray Eames, Ron Arad and Tom Dixon will be represented alongside lesser-known names selected for their superior techniques.

The gallery will tell the story of how furniture was made and decorated over 600 years, exploring a thematic range of materials and techniques ranging from joinery, moulding, upholstery and digital manufacture, to carving, marquetry, gilding and lacquer. It will focus on techniques of construction and decoration and will include numerous examples of how conservation and analysis have revealed previously unknown information about the way in which the objects were made. On display will be a 15th-century medieval desk cupboard which reveals how English furniture makers of the time used oak sourced from 1500 miles away, and a bureau (1780-1820) from Mexico, veneered with mother-of-pearl which would have required craftsmen to saw shells for 5000 hours.

Highlights will include a dining chair designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1949), a gilded cassone made for the Duke of Urbino (about 1509) and a scagliola decorated table formerly at Warwick Castle (1675). A central chronological display will highlight 25 key pieces from the collection ranging from a storage unit by Charles and Ray Eames (1949-50), a Gothic revival cradle designed by Richard Norman Shaw (1861) to one of the newest pieces in the collection, the ‘Branca’ chair, designed by Industrial Facility (2011) and Wooden Heap, a drawer unit designed by Boris Dennler, which was acquired as part of this year’s Design Fund to Benefit the V&A. There will also be a newly-commissioned seating installation by contemporary designer Gitta Gschwendtner, inspired by historic pieces in the collection.

The gallery will incorporate innovative and interactive technologies such as digital labels with a touch-screen interface to provide additional content and context for each object, a first for the V&A. Films in the gallery will explore key techniques including joinery, boulle marquetry and digital manufacturing. 14 specially-commissioned audio recordings will record the responses of contemporary experts, including David Adjaye and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, to the work of historic designers.

The gallery has been designed as part of the V&A’s FuturePlan to transform the Museum through new galleries and redisplays of its collections. FuturePlan aims to create beautiful and contemporary new settings for the V&A’s outstanding collections while restoring much of the building’s original architecture and improving visitors’ experience of the Museum.

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News: journalist Kieran Long has been appointed senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London.

Long, who is the architecture critic for UK newspaper the Evening Standard and was also assistant director to David Chipperfield at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, will take up the post at the V&A museum in the new year.

The role is one four new positions at the world's largest museum of art and design and was created as part of a move to bring together the fields of architecture, design and digital within the existing department of furniture, fashion and textiles, currently led by Christopher Wilk.

"I want to make exhibitions that take seriously popular engagement with the three fields, as well as making the V&A a place of discourse," said Long on Twitter this morning.

Speaking to Dezeen today, Long expanded on this. "The idea is not to be bound by disciplinary boundaries, but reflect people’s engagement with architecture, design and digital through popular culture and their daily lives," he said.

He also described how he wants to use the position to "wage war on parochialism" in design. "There is a tendency in London architecture and design to see London practice as the acme, but there are places in the world where more urgent problems are being tackled in more interesting ways," he said. "I want my work to always have a base here, but reach far beyond in the way a world museum should."

Long is one of several journalists that have moved into curating. This year Domus editor Joseph Grima organised exhibitions at the inaugural Istanbul Design Biennial and the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, while ex-Monocle journalist Dan Hill has recently taken up a position at creative laboratory Fabrica.

Recent exhibitions and installations at the V&A include chairs that mimic their surroundings, a huge prism with data on each of its facets and a series of coloured drips that fall down through six storeys.

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Here's a statement from Long:

In terms of exhibitions, I think the idea is not to be bound by disciplinary boundaries, but reflect people's engagement with architecture, design and digital through popular culture and their daily lives. I'm inspired by themes that resonate with the V&A's collection and with mainstream culture, and I think intellectual rigour is entirely compatible with popular engagement. I think all my work recently has been about dealing with large audiences but trying communicate original ideas in ways that make sense to people's lives.

As for collecting, the V&A already collects huge amounts in contemporary design, architecture and digital right across the museum. Our challenge will be to understand what contemporary objects and projects the V&A should be collecting and how we give the museum strengths in particular fields of contemporary practice. For instance, what are the boundaries of product design today? I think it gets interesting when you look more broadly than just at 'what designers do' and understand design as a field that can be professionalised, but can also be informal, popular, participatory and so on.

I think one certain desire is to wage war on parochialism. There is a tendency in London architecture and design to see London practice as the acme, but there are places in the world where more urgent problems are being tackled in more interesting ways. I want my work to always have a base here, but reach far beyond in the way a world museum should.

I haven't even started yet, so these are first thoughts and I have a lot to learn. The future of the team will also be defined by the other curators who will work for and with me, and I'm very much looking forward to that conversation.

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Each of the one-off benches is made from a different material and produced in collaboration with a company specialising in that material. After being on display for the festival they'll be auctioned off and the money fed back to fund next year's London Design Festival commissions.

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, the designers of the Olympic torch, made a marble bench with holes bored through (above) in collaboration with Italian studio Tor Art. They were inspired by shrapnel marks left in the V&A museum's western facade after the Second World War. "It's something that always fascinated me and Ed on the way from South Kensington tube up to the Royal College when we were students, and so when this project came up we thought it was a nice way to reference that," explained Jay Osgerby at the opening.

AL_A, the architecture practice led by Amanda Levete, worked with Barcelona ceramics company Ceramica Cumella to come up with a bench (above) made of overlapping tiles, glazed with colours inspired by the museum's ceramics collections. AL_A is also designing a new subterranean gallery for the museum.

British designer Alexander Taylor made a bench from mirror-polished stainless steel cylinders (above) with steel specialists Caparo. He explained that making perfect cylinders in steel is tricky because "the material is extruded with an oval profile so it has to be cut and put back together again."

Italian designer Martino Gamper built a wooden bench (above) from slanted planks of thermally modified hardwood, treated to improve its stability and resistance to decay. The angled stripes of red oak, maple, ash, yellow birch and tulipwood provided by the American Hardwood Export Council create an "optical illusion" and "somehow give the impression of animation" said Gamper, adding that the modular system can be extended to any length.

British designer Jasper Morrison collaborated with concrete specialists lowinfo to create a concrete bench (above) with narrow runnels along the seat that allow rain water to drain away despite the seat being curved for comfort, while German designer Konstantin Grcic worked with Italian company Bisazza on a glass mosaic bench (below).

Portugese designer Fernando Brizio created a cork bench in the shape of a pig's foot (below) with Amorim Cork.

British designer Felix de Pass produced a cream-coloured sheet-steel bench (below) with perforations that help water drain away and disperse heat from the sun. It's an adaptation of his bench that's already in production with Established & Sons.

Sam Hecht and Kim Colin from Industrial Facility worked with Corian, a material often used for kitchen worktops, to create two benches (below) that mimic the marble plinths found inside the museum.

Sadly the final bench in the collection, created by Italian designer Luca Nichetto and glass manufacturer Nardo Vetro, was broken in transit.

Other installations at the V&A during the London Design Festival include Keiichi Matsuda's data visualisation and chairs by Nendo scattered around the museum.

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