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Free

21 Jun – 14 Sep 2025

Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley

Ice Age Art Now

British Museum

We travelled back in time with this British Museum Partnership Exhibition.

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We travelled back in time with this British Museum Partnership Exhibition and encountered works of art dating back thousands of years.

This visually stunning exhibition showed how artistic creativity existed thousands of years before traditional art histories suggest – as an essential part of human life.

Ice Age Art Now presented work by people living in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, some as much as 24,000 years old. These astounding works reveal the deep roots of drawing, sculpture, realism, abstraction, signs, symbols and more – and the extraordinary skill and imagination of these early image makers find echoes in modern and contemporary art.

This family-friendly exhibition featured a wealth of rare items from the British Museum and local treasures from the collections of Bradford District Museums & Galleries, arranged into such themes as decorating the body, drawing animals and abstracting the female form. The exhibition also featured an installation reimagining cave art and other imagery from thousands of years ago for the 21st century.

The exhibition was supplemented with a programme of talks, family activities and other special events.

360 tour

See the artworks up close in this interactive 360 tour of the exhibition.

Explore the 360 tour ↗
Credits
A British Museum Partnership Project with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and Bradford District Museums & Galleries.

Lead image: Mammoth spear thrower © The Trustees of the British Museum
A woman looks into a case of objects.
Display case with pigments at Ice Age Art Now © David Lindsay
A carved animal mounted on a plinth
Mammoth spear thrower, about 13,500 years old, at Ice Age Art Now © David Lindsay
A projection of an animal against a cave wall.
Cave wall projection at Ice Age Art Now © David Lindsay
A fake carving of a bison in pale yellow stone.
Replica of two bison modelled in clay circa 1923 Phillipe Lacomme at Ice Age Art Now © David Lindsay
An external shot of Cliffe Castle Museum
Cliffe Castle Museum
A carved piece of bone, showing a wolverine walking
Wolverine pendant © 2024 The Trustees of the British Museum
A fragment of a carved antler baton with an animal on the left.
Antler baton fragment © 2024 The Trustees of the British Museum
A piece of reindeer metatarsal engraved with a cow looking animal
Engraved reindeer metatarsal © 2024 The Trustees of the British Museum

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