Exhibitions Newsfeed

How Was Your Dream? is a documentary project by Thadde Comar, a Franco-Swiss photographer, created during the extradition bill protests in Hong Kong between June and October 2019. His work is displayed as part of the Belfast photo festival, which runs until 30 June at venues across the city

Modern Art, London
The mathematically named new works of Along the River are disorienting, illusive and seem to offer a flash of the secret sequences that underpin the physical world

Why do we find things beautiful? More precisely, why do some paintings of coloured dots in rippling patterns inspire in me something like revelation? The idea that beauty is the feeling you get when encountering truth is unfashionable in the arts, but lingers in the sciences. The physicist Paul Dirac once proposed that it is more important that a formula is beautiful than that it can be proven: when a perfectly beautiful theory produces results that cannot be real, he argued, then we should not discard the theory but reconsider what is real.

Since the 1970s, Terry Winters has been rebuilding that bridge between art and science. Taking inspiration from disciplines including botany – his early paintings, particularly, evoke sprouting pods and tangled roots – engineering, computer modelling and cybernetics, his paintings might be understood as diagrammatic approximations of the patterns that govern everything from the division of cells to the constellation of stars. If every era has to renew its standards of beauty to reflect new understandings of how the world is constructed, then Winters comes as close to providing that model as any living painter.

Readers respond to an article in which Isabel Brooks described feeling overwhelmed by the number of artworks on display

Of course Isabel Brooks is right, and it is very easy to get indigestion when visiting a large gallery (The hill I will die on: Let me tell you the one big problem with art galleries. There’s too much art, 30 May). No one attending a banquet of hundreds of delicious dishes would attempt to sample them all. Self-discipline is needed in both cases. In Britain we must count ourselves lucky that access to our major galleries is free, so there is no discouragement to going often, but for a shorter time. Special exhibitions of a particular artist or group, where works are brought together from around the world, are of course different – there the comparison of an artist’s development through his or her life justifies a longer focus on all the works.

Having said that, I would agree that the most satisfying galleries are the smaller ones – for example the Frick Collection in New York or the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. But even at the latter, when we took our nine-year-old granddaughter there, we invited her to look at just one painting, Rembrandt’s Girl at a Window. She subsequently drew her version of it and there is no doubt that that wonderful little painting will now be in her visual memory for life.
Peregrine Bryant
London

Paths You Walk is a show that finds beauty in images of alienation as Billy Dosanjh turns his lens on race, identity, empire – and the men who kept the furnaces glowing

It was bitter in Walsall that winter of 1962-3 when snow turned the Black Country white. In After the Storm, Billy Dosanjh’s epic photographic reconstruction of one especially chilly night back then, an elderly Sikh man, recently arrived from the Punjab, stands under an old carriage lamp. He is, the shot suggests, seeing snow for the first time.

“I thought it was quite a fitting note to get him gazing at the snow, looking a little bewildered,” says Dosanjh as we stroll around Paths You Walk, his gripping exhibition of photographs, films and installations at the New Art Gallery Walsall. At the back of the image, three furnace smoke stacks rise up in ghostly fashion, almost like the three crosses on Calvary have been relocated to Mordor.

John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
Farewell Sweet Innocence references cinema, football, music and Windrush – it’s about trying to fit in, but always falling short, even as a Turner-nominated artist

There’s that old Marxist (Groucho, not Karl) saying about refusing to join any club that would have you as a member. Simeon Barclay takes that idea one step further in his work, because he knows that even if the club would have him, he’d never be truly accepted anyway. He calls his show in Southampton “a lament of sorts, to access and loss”. It comes just a few weeks after he got nominated for the Turner prize, and it’s a damn fine argument for why he should probably win it.

This is an exhibition all about exclusion, about trying to fit in but never quite managing. It’s razor-sharp, funny, pop-cultural, obtuse conceptual art about growing up black in Britain, about trying to make it and knowing you’re bound to fail, because the system is geared towards failure.

Escher’s eye-popping visions enter the video dimension, Pan-Africanism pulls in the big names and agent provocateur Julio Le Parc hits the UK – all in your weekly dispatch

MC Escher
The great Dutch artist of eye-popping, brain-melting visual paradox gets a rich retrospective of his prints, with video, music and installations adding to the fun.
• Somerset House, London, until 6 September

At least 3,000 Herero and Nama people died in a German concentration camp at Shark Island, Namibia. A new forensic exhibition in Berlin is using digital technology to unearth how colonisers scarred a landscape, and a community

Visiting the Namibian port town of Lüderitz in late 2024, I came across a small museum run by descendants of German settlers. Alongside imperial German flags and memorabilia, it displayed artefacts of the Herero tribe that had been recovered from nearby Shark Island. What went unmentioned is that, from 1905 to 1907, Shark Island was the site of a concentration camp where Herero and Nama prisoners were subjected to forced labour, starvation and systematic abuse. At least 3,000 people are estimated to have died there.

Shark Island was used as a tourist campsite when I visited. Monuments on the island honoured Adolf Lüderitz and Heinrich Vogelsang, the German merchants who helped establish the colony known as German South West Africa. Today, it is widely reported that Namibia’s white minority – less than 2% of the population – owns roughly 70% of commercial farmland.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (in Kingston, New York) recently opened the first-ever New York Upstate Photography Biennial, featuring the work of 39 artists who live and work across the Hudson valley and beyond. The show, co-curated by Marina Chao and Adam Giles Ryan, highlights the diverse work of photographers in the upstate region. Their images will be on view until 6 September 2026

As the largest display of Native North American art ever seen in Britain arrives in Yorkshire, its artists are asking timely questions about their history, our planet, and humanity’s place within it

Hold to This Earth, the largest exhibition of contemporary Native North American art to be shown in Britain, arrives as the United States gears up to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Selected from Santa Fe’s Tia Collection, its artists represent more than 35 tribal nations, offering a counterpoint to that colonialist history. Their work explores a continent whose beliefs and traditions date back not centuries but millennia, and whose more recent past is marked by its original people’s exploitation, their experiences too often buried or ignored. Perhaps above all, though, “the work is incredibly timely”, as the show’s curator, Sarah Coulson, points out. “These artists are dealing with pertinent issues now.”

Many artists tackle present-day concerns head-on. Yatika Starr Fields’s sculptures, for instance, use tents salvaged from an encampment of thousands of demonstrators fighting the Dakota access pipeline that threatened the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux. Politics mixes with pop culture and global tradition in another new commission, a huge vessel by the ceramicist Diego Romero. It has a palette that recalls ancient Greek pottery, but its celebratory comic book-style characters are drawn from an old sci-fi movie about Mayans going to space.

In a new exhibition, work from artists including Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam offer different ways to see what a portrait can represent

What exactly is a portrait? At its simplest, it might be an attempt to depict oneself or someone else via a painting. But then consider German expressionist Max Beckmann’s masterpiece The Beginning, a triptych of scenes from his childhood, or Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s Ídolo, a melange of forms based around the goddess Oyá. Rooted more in memory and myth than a mere physical likeness, these pieces stretch just what we might decide counts as a portrait.

Works such as the Beckmann and the Lam – as well as cubist abstractions, an ornate hand mirror, and one of Joan Miró’s pieces of “painting-poetry”, — are all portraits as defined by The Met’s new show The Face of Modern Life, which gathers close to 80 works from the museum’s permanent collection. A boisterous and effusive selection of work from one of the nation’s most storied museums, this show gives audiences a peek into the museum’s estimable archives and a chance to wonder just what defines this seemingly simple but truly elusive form.

It could be the puff of steam from a manhole or a horse wandering into view – whatever the ‘moment’, the iconic US photographer has always had a camera in hand to capture it

Early works show a less familiar side to the Scottish artist celebrated for her flower and cat paintings

She may be best known for accessible paintings of flowers and cats but a new exhibition of Elizabeth Blackadder’s work focuses instead on chilly landscapes and pared-back still life compositions.

The show in Hampshire, far from Blackadder’s Scottish home, presents a less familiar side of the artist, with most of the pieces exhibited for the first time.

The new exhibition at LA’s Academy museum features some of the star’s most intimate belongings that have never been available for public viewing

There’s an unsettling moment in Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, a new exhibition opening in Los Angeles this weekend, where some of the star’s last recorded words emanate from the gallery walls.

Her voice, gentle and unassuming, is taken from a restored audio recording of her final interview, published in Life magazine the day before she died.

British landscape painting from Gainsborough to Hepworth, Wendy McMurdo’s uncanny portraits and Jack White’s debut exhibition – all in your weekly dispatch

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place
The romance and mystery of Britain’s green and pleasant land, as captured by artists from Gainsborough to Hepworth.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, from 30 May to 1 November

London exhibition explores how care and protest improved rights and dignity of those living with disease

From photos of a mass “die-in” by Aids activists in Trafalgar Square, London, in the 1990s to plushie breasts, lips and vulvas hand-stitched by HIV-positive women, a new exhibition explores how care and protest have improved the rights and dignity of those living with the disease.

The show, Tenderness and Rage, at the Wellcome Collection, London, reflects how different groups affected by HIV, including gay men, women of colour, and refugees in the UK and around the world have found power, solidarity, comfort and joy in Aids activism and support services.

Exclusive: Villa Pilar, painted in 1940 during the surrealist artist’s stay in a Spanish sanatorium, will be displayed at London’s Freud museum

A recently discovered painting by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, made during her confinement in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during the second world war, will go on public display for the first time in London this summer.

Known as Villa Pilar, the work was painted in 1940 while Carrington was a patient at sanatorium Morales in Santander, after fleeing Nazi-occupied France after the arrest of her partner, the German artist Max Ernst.

Exclusive: Exhibition to include letters, work permits and dry cleaning tickets that reveal little moments of domesticity in rock icon’s life

When Jimi Hendrix lived in a bohemian London flat in the 1960s, he had little need for its kitchen as he had meals sent up from Mr Love, a groovy restaurant on the ground floor of his building.

While celebrities were downstairs, dining at heart-shaped tables and served by waitresses in hot pants, the American rock musician was upstairs, tucking into steaks and hamburgers.

The best of these reject any ‘don’t touch’ attitude in favour of an open invitation to curiosity that might just see your toddler tell you to sit down and read a book

Play cafes are not for me, but that doesn’t make me a monster. I don’t drag my toddler around museums and galleries demanding that we look at art every day of the week (what fresh hell that would be). Instead there is, I’ve discovered, a middle ground. Museums that are family oriented and fun and capable of sparking curiosity in arts and culture while they’re at it. Museums such as the Story Museum in Oxford.

The place is a gem. I love it from the moment we’re given colourful wristbands that will allow us to come and go throughout the day (no pressure to power through when whining turns to wailing). Tucked away from the tourists in a higgledy-piggledy former post office and telephone exchange building on Pembroke Street, it’s full of imaginative galleries that invite you to step inside the pages of great children’s books from across the ages.

Wolterton, Norfolk
From an explosion of plywood chairs to something akin to bubblegum stuck to the walls, this imaginative exhibition reverberates with Barlow’s punk irreverence

Wolterton Hall is folded so deeply into the countryside of the Bure Valley that you can’t even see the grand Palladian mansion when you enter the gates to the estate. This was once one of the four power houses of Norfolk, built by Thomas Ripley for Horatio Walpole. Inside, Wolterton is dripping in 18th-century treasures, furniture, then-fashionable Belgian tapestries, fusty old portraits of important types – but now also, knobbly bodily things, strange almost familiar shapes stuck to walls and chucked down the stairs, as if someone– namely Phyllida Barlow – had come in and trashed the place.

It’s a difficult thing to know what to do with these former country stately homes. Many have adopted a contemporary art programme as a way of challenging their history and bringing in new visitors. Simon Oldfield – Wolterton’s artistic director, brought in by the new owners, the Ellis family, two years ago – has done more than that. He has reinvented the space, making room for new ideas to take over. There’s no better artist for that than Barlow, whose works seem to take on a life of their own wherever they go. Her exhibition begins at the entrance, where the explosive installation Untitled: Stacked Chairs greets you. The cacophony of red plywood chairs feels like a statement about throwing things out and starting again. It’s rebellious, disruptive and direct.

First major retrospective for the wartime PM’s paintings, shadows of Berlin Dada, hopeful science and the outrageous art of Valie Export – all in your weekly dispatch

Winston Churchill: The Painter
Britain’s eloquent war leader kept himself sane by puffing on cigars, swilling brandy – and painting the world around him.
• The Wallace Collection, London, from 23 May to 29 November