Latest art reviews

Impressionism is all about the great outdoors. It’s all fields and waves and flowers and light. That was OK for the blokes of the movement (your Monets, your Renoirs) but it wasn’t so easy for fellow impressionist founder Berthe Morisot. Just as she was kept away from the boy’s club of traditional French art (she was only able to study the subject because her family was rich enough to pay for a private tutor) she was also kept away from nature.

Refusing to conform is meant to be dangerous. But Finnish artist Pilvi Takala shows that nonconformity is something much worse than dangerous: it's uncomfortable. Takala pulls pranks, insinuates herself into everyday situations and tests everyone’s limits. It’s like Trigger Happy TV but art, all the laughs swapped for squirms. 

Some old people tell the same stories over and over again. They probably don’t mean to, they’re just a bit forgetful. And the National Gallery seems to have forgotten that the story of the Euro-centric birth of modernism has been told countless times. It’s the most written about period of art history ever. The narrative of how Monet led to Cezanne who led to Van Gogh who led to Picasso is as overexposed, over-explored and over-baked as it’s possible for art to be. 

You can distract a baby with a rattle, a magpie with a shiny bit of metal and a Londoner with an immersive experience that’ll look great on TikTok. That’s what ‘Thin Air’ is, a vast warehouse in the Docklands filled with intensely immersive laser light shows by various international artists and collectives that will get the likes flooding in for just £25.

You can almost hear Denzil Forrester’s paintings. The Granada-born British artist has been filling his canvases with images of London’s sweat-drenched reggae and dub dancehalls for decades, and now in his 70s, his work is still pulsating with the rhythm and movement of the clubs. 

The American south is a scarred land: scarred physically by farming, violence and war, and scarred emotionally by the brutal legacy of slavery. And out of those scars came some of the twentieth century’s most important cultural movements: blues and jazz. But far less appreciated is the visual art of the American south, a wrong the Royal Academy is trying to right with ‘Souls Grown Deep Like The Rivers’, an exploration of the paintings, sculptures and installations of Alabama, Georgia and their neighbouring states. 

Lee Scratch Perry didn’t just dub music, he dubbed the whole world. The Jamaican sound pioneer took sonic source material and twisted it into untold trippy new shapes. And he did it with his art too. The works in this show are salvaged from his famous Black Ark studio in Jamaica – which he apocryphally burned to the ground in 1979 – and his later Blue Ark in Switzerland.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire Josef Albers’ obsessive dedication to one thing and one thing alone: colour. Across his long career, the hugely influential German modernist experimented endlessly with colour theory, toying with what worked and what didn’t, what melded and what clashed. A lifetime of tinkering led to a whole body of stunning colour studies, and the handful of works on display here are gorgeous.

Ideas of Black identity dominate the annual Deutsche Börse Prize show this year. Three of the four finalists use photography and photographic imagery to interrogate Blackness: its meaning and historical function, its marginalisation and commodification. The fourth sticks a lot of scruffy to-do lists on the wall and a typed letter explaining why the subject of her major photographic portrait series doesn’t want it to be on display anymore.

BOB is a complex character. It’s not just some bloke, it’s an AI lifeform, or a series of AI lifeforms, invented by artist Ian Cheng. BOBs have been generative artworks, films, installations, all with minds of their own. BOB even took over the Serpentine in 2018 as a menagerie of AI animals. Cheng’s work is complex, multi-layered, filled with lore. BOB even has its own wiki. And it appears here in this latest work as a character in an anime about a young girl called Challice, whose scientist father melds her personality with an AI.

Porn is everywhere, just a click away, as freely available as celeb gossip and pictures of your friends’ lunch. But until 1967, any representation of the male nude which even hinted at homosexuality was subject to the Obscene Publications Act. Horniness – and specifically queer horniness – was illegal, so homosexual desire was forced underground. That didn’t stop it from flourishing, obviously, and the results are all over this in-depth exhibition of photos of male bodies from all across London from the 1950s to the 1980s.

You shouldn’t give kids drugs. But if you do, you should film it. That’s what Haroon Mirza did. He arranged a kids’ mushroom tea ceremony (not the psychedelic kind, but dizziness-inducing Fly Agaric), complete with gongs, singing bowls and wafts of smoke. The results are shown here accompanied by self-playing bongos and throbs of synthesiser drones, emitting steady tones at 111khz.

The essential point of street art is that it takes place on the streets. True, 90 percent of the stuff that’s sprayed over subway trains and bridges in any major city is meh, artistically speaking. But I still want to stumble across it in situ, where it has warmth, roughness and energy, not on a pedestal in a white cube. Whether it’s 1960s Philly where Cornbread’s tags invented modern graffiti, or at the birth of hip hop in the Bronx in 1973, street art punches most strongly on location, in a specific time, argot, culture and place. 

There’s one pretty notable difference between ‘David Hockney: Bigger & Closer’ and the other immersive experiences in town: the artist is alive. All the other ones just involve the organisers taking pivotal historic – dead – artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt, wiping their arses with their legacies, and then charging the public to look at the smears. Frida and Gustav didn’t get to have a say in what’s been happening to their art. But David Hockney is fully involved in this shit.

‘Dudus’ is the nickname of Jamaican drug dealer Christopher Coke – a startling example of nominative determinism. Coke trafficked literally tons of marijuana and cocaine to the US before being handed down a 23-year sentence, after the mission to finally arrest him cost the lives of 70 people. During his extradition to the States, many Jamaicans took to the streets with placards supporting Dudus, whom they supposedly saw as more trustworthy than the authorities. This mixture of extremes, unpredictability and weird black comedy is at the heart of RIP Germain’s intriguing ICA installation.

There’s nothing left in Mike Nelson’s art. No life, no soul, no humanity. Only ghosts, dereliction and nothingness. The British artist specialises in narratives of abandonment, creating discomfiting immersive experiences filled with only the remnants of lives once lived. He wants you to untangle the webs he weaves, and they are very, very tangled. 

It would be nice if objects could tell you the stories of their own past, but it would be even better if they could sing them. That’s what Oliver Beer’s managed to do: he’s shoved microphones down a ceramic frog’s throat, a wedgewood vase, a glazed gravy jug and an earthenware pot and he’s made them all sing

As the 1930s were exploding with cubism and abstraction and geometric modernism, Alice Neel was doing something radical of her own: painting people. Sure, artists had painted people for centuries, millennia even, but in a time of wild, gestural, emotional artistic experimentation, Neel’s portraiture dragged the focus back down to earth, back to the homes, the bedrooms and the streets of everyday people.

You’d be pretty miserable too if you'd swapped Trinidad for North London. That’s what Peter Doig did in 2021, leaving behind his life of sun and sand for a life of drizzle and smog. And even though the paintings in this show at the Courtauld are bathed in heat and light, they’re also creaking with longing and aching with sadness.

There’s a lot of drama with Donatello. The master of early Renaissance sculpture made his art to loom and swoop and peer and dance. It’s there as soon as you walk into this show with his slim, lithe David standing over the severed head of Goliath. David’s all long, twisting neck and delicate features, but he’s so stretched-out, so wiry, so damn overbearing that suddenly you – puny little you – are just another Goliath to be slain. 

You wouldn’t think it to look at the history books (or most of the big blockbuster exhibitions) but there were women abstract artists in the twentieth century. There really were, they were just hidden away and passed over in favour of the blokes like Rothko and Pollock. That’s what this huge, sprawling show (150 paintings! 150!) wants to address: the international women of abstraction who have been ignored for decades.

We think we know what war looks like. And no conflict in history has been as constantly visually documented as the Russian invasion of Ukraine; you can probably watch it live if you really want. So why would you bother going to look at yet more pictures of it?

Memories are hazy, foggy things. The mind twists its own images and narratives with the passage of time. Iraqi-born artist Mohammed Sami is trying to make sense of that fog in his work. The paintings here are re-worked, rehashed, re-cooked memories of life in war ravaged Iraq, of being co-opted to paint propaganda images, of fleeing, of life in a Swedish refugee camp.

Spain is a very big country, with a very long history. So big and so long, that trying to sum it all up in one exhibition sounds like an impossible task, a bad idea doomed to unavoidable failure. 

An ancient petrified forest has creaked forebodingly into life at Tate Modern. Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge, towering forms hover around you as you walk around this show of her work, enormous fabric sculptures that have emerged from some bog, and now hang in the dark, threatening to envelop and smother you. 

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of imminent ecological disaster, but there are little things you can do: recycle, avoid single-use plastics, drive an electric car, or make enormous sculptures out of wool. That’ll help. It’s what Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña has done, and she’s suspended two of them from the ceiling of the Turbine Hall.

If you think science fiction is just for nerds, this big new show isn’t going to change your mind. The Science Museum has pulled together all the robots, spaceships and sexy green aliens it can find. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you.

Talk about timing. If Samson Kambalu’s Fourth Plinth sculpture had been unveiled last month, it would have just been your ordinary run-of-the-mill, colonialism-is-bad, the-British-Empire-is-evil bit of public art. But now, what with the death of Her Maj, it looks a hell of a lot like speaking ill of the dead.

The V&A’s latest exhibition starts with an immediate bombardment of wild, joyous neon, video, and the all-too familiar melodies of ‘Gangnam Style’. This blockbuster exhibition is a sensitvely researched, mind-boggling and ambitious attempt to record its explosion in recent years, through everything from cinema and television to music, fashion, beauty and tech.

Maria Bartuszová did not make art for clumsy people. Her delicate plaster sculptures look impossibly fragile, a world of brittle eggshells and paper-thin surfaces. Terrifying. 

The V&A’s ambitious new exhibition is a triumphant attempt to complete the near-impossible task of capturing an entire continent through its fashion. Incorporating textiles, design and still and moving images, ‘Africa Fashion’ takes visitors on a compelling journey from the 1960s to the present day in a bid to reshape existing geographies and narratives of style.