Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition
26 April 2019 – 15 September 2019

The Design Museum
224 – 238 Kensington High Street
London W8 6AG
+44 20 3862 5900

No other filmmaker but Stanley Kubrick has produced masterpieces in a wider variety of genres such as war movies, political satire, sci-fiction, literary adaptation and horror.

This is a new blockbuster exhibition on Stanley Kubrick’s life and work featuring over 700 objects – from Ken Adam’s sketches for the War Room in Dr. Strangelove, to erotic furniture from the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange and a gigantic archive on Napoleon, a biopic that never came to fruition.

The most fascinating to us and true cinematographers is the archival character of the exhibition depicting how meticulously Kubrick constructed entire worlds from zero to maximum in order tell his stories. Every aspect of his films were thought through thoroughly.

He made all these films in a pre-digital era, using analogue techniques and putting them to amazing effect. He used sound, music, acting, architecture and design to create extraordinarily real worlds.
— Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and curator

For the first time, the internationally acclaimed touring exhibition about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick is coming to Britain, Kubrick’s home and workplace for over 40 years – what a coincidence? It was in the UK where Kubrick created the battlefields of Vietnam for Full Metal Jacket (1987), an orbiting space station for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr Strangelove’s War Room (1964).

This exhibition tells the story of Stanley Kubrick the obsessive genius madness! It shows step by step how he created genre defining worlds for his films and how London was his endlessly inventive canvas.

The exhibition features several themed rooms, each shaped around a separate film, including Barry Lyndon, 2001: Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut, and Dr Strangelove. Visitors will enter the exhibition whilst walking on a replica carpet from the iconic scene in The Shining, before entering a ‘one-point perspective’ corridor mirroring Kubrick’s famous camera technique.

The exhibition includes important works by designers Hardy Amies, Saul Bass, Milena Canonero and Ken Adam, art and photography from Diane Arbus, Allen Jones and Don McCullin, designs from Saul Bass, Elliot Noyes and Pascall Morgue alongside contributions from renowned directors.

Very few filmmakers in the 20th century have had the range and the credibility of Stanley Kubrick. Each film was entirely different, each film was an imagined world, every aspect of which came from Kubrick’s creative control. That’s extraordinary, that’s very special.
— Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and curator

If you want to step inside the mind of one of the greatest film directors of all time, this exhibition will take you there. Stanley Kubrick’s imagination was boundless and his mastery of every aspect of filmmaking will be on display here at the Design Museum.
— Alan Yentob,  Special Advisor