Latest art reviews

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy.

There was a sense that anything could happen in turn-of-the-century Germany: a fizzing, crackling energy of potential. When it did finally burst into life, it was in the form of brutal, global warfare. But on the walls of Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is another kind of potential: radical, beautiful artistic expression.

Hidden somewhere in the endless maze of symbols and art historical allusions of Antwerp-based painter Kati Heck’s new show is a very simple, comprehensible point. I just haven’t figured it out yet. 

It’s all getting a bit nihilistic for Barbara Kruger. The American art icon’s show of new work at Sprüth Magers is full of existential dread, hefty pessimism and grim monochrome. 

The arrow has only just pierced her heart, but the blood has already drained from Ursula’s fragile body. She is pallid, ashen, aghast at the mortal wound in her chest. All around her mouths are agape in shock, men grasp to hold her up, a hand tries – too late – to stop the arrow. This miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Like a weed growing through a crack in concrete, Anne Hardy is finding ways to survive in this hard, inhospitable world. The British artist’s latest show is based on time spent on a residency in the Texan desert, where the weather-worn detritus of humanity litters the rubble and sand.

Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation; not hidden away shamefully, but raised up, celebrated and gloried. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there. 

In case you weren’t already aware, you are small, pitiful and insignificant. And if you should ever forget that, all you need to do is go find one of Richard Serra’s vast, deep-black, monumental drawings.

It’s a nice day for a white wedding on the Cambridge Heath Road. In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms.

Unholy desecration, heathenistic violence, sacrilegious iconoclasm; the very flames of hell are licking the walls and ancient wooden beams of this church in Islington (the new home of Castor Gallery), and it’s all because of Fabian Ramirez. This is the Mexican painter’s act of revenge, this is how he gets back at the colonisers for using Christianity as a weapon of conquest and oppression.

Albert Oehlen lets it all hang out. The heftily post-modern contemporary German artist’s approach to painting has always been to strip it back, expose it, lay it bare. What's left, whether good or bad (and ‘bad’ is something he’s always been a big exponent of), is painting at its basest, most obvious. 

Success isn’t always enough. Betty Parsons (1900-1982) was a success and a leader in her field, it just wasn't the right field. Her eponymous New York gallery was one of the most important galleries in the world. She championed Rothko and Pollock, and gave Robert Rauschenberg and Clyfford Still their first solo shows. She mattered, she changed art history. But despite all that, she still said ‘I would give up my gallery in a second if the world would accept me as an artist.’

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived. Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him.

Two artists, separated by a century and an ocean, laid out a framework for how the camera could construct feminine identity. In 1800s England, Julia Margaret Cameron took pictures of garlanded Victorian beauties dressed as mythological figures, lying wantonly and forlornly on divans. In 1970s America, Francesca Woodman created a world of blurry nude art students thrashing about in warehouses. Despite the vast chasms of time, aesthetics and subject matter that separated the two, the National Portrait Gallery argues that they shared so much as to be almost inseparable. It’s not hugely convincing. 

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness.

History is unkind to women, and art history in particular. Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman was a hugely popular eighteenth century painter and one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy, but she’s been largely forgotten. This show is an attempt to correct that oversight. 

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise.

The Barbican’s Curve is a tricky gallery to show art in. So for their latest installation – a series of paintings by Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri – they’ve just not really bothered using it.

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980.

Death, pain and injustice course through this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. It’s in the mass graves of Hrair Sarkissian, the feminist ire of Valie Export, the indigenous erasure of Rajesh Vangad and Gauri Gill, and the historical trauma of Lebohang Kganye. 

At some point in the past, this show might have been a shock, it might have caused uproar. But this isn’t the past, this is 2024, so seeing room after room of paintings of Black figures by Black artists in the National Portrait Gallery isn’t shocking: instead, it’s just totally normal.

Take a seat at the bar, or find your marker on the dancefloor – the lights have dimmed, playback has started, and someone is about to shout ‘action!’ You are now an actor in British Franco-Algerian artist Zenib Sedira’s movie.

The guts of society are hidden away, but Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent his long career eviscerating them and putting them on display.

It’s all in your mind, a figment of your imagination, and that’s how Yoko Ono wants it. The pioneering nonagenarian conceptualist – whose life’s work has been unfairly eclipsed by her Beatles-adjacent fame – wants to plant a seed in your brain, and that’s it. That’s the art.

When is a sweater not a sweater? When it’s a tool of active resistance and revolution, according to the Barbican, because its new show is all about textiles and fabric, and how artists have used them to fight against injustice. 

Civil society – according to French philosopher Georges Bataille, as quoted in American artist Aria Dean’s ICA show – can only be maintained if we ignore the existence of abattoirs. Dean, though, has no intention of ignoring them. In fact, she wants to drag viewers, kicking and screaming, through a slaughterhouse’s blood-slicked walls. 

Heads hang heavy, bodies sink into the shadowy corners of the room. Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits are dismal, dour things, heaving with hurt and pain, but they’re also brutally, shockingly beautiful.

Can stone flow? Can metal ooze? Can hardness be rendered soft? I mean, generally, no. But artists are alchemists at heart, always trying to enact some kind of magical transformation, so they’re not going to let something like solidity stand in their way. 

Life in the Roman empire was as mundane as life in 2024. ‘Legion’ tells the story of a single Roman soldier, recounting a life of hard work, ambition, disappointment and unreachable goals. Take out all the blood and swords, swap the marching for a commute from Stevenage, and it could be the life of any present day office worker. 

Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it. 

The most surreal thing about Shuvinai Ashoona’s world of half-human hybrid sea creatures, ice and writhing tentacles is how un-surreal it all is. This is normality for the Inuit artist. 

Beauty’s a pretty big topic. Almost all of art history, up until postmodernism, dealt with it in some way, whether that’s the divine kind, the physical kind or the ooh-isn’t-that-poppy-field nice kind. But with its usual combination of art, artefact and science, the Wellcome Collection is looking at the physical kind, with diversions into gender binaries, issues of race, the cosmetics industry and what that means for beauty standards.

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.