London events in February

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

Twenty-three years down the line, it's easy to forget how Rachel Whiteread shocked audiences with her Turner Prize entry 'House': the concrete cast of the interior of a Victorian house in Mile End. But it won her the prize – she was the first woman to do so – and since then, Whiteread has risen to become one of the most influential figures of the art establishment. She'll always be chiefly for making casts of negative spaces, but her work stretches beyond that – this long-overdue retrospective should flesh out a highly accomplished career.

He's never captured public imagination quite like his contemporaries Gauguin and van Gogh – but Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was the real daddy of post-impressionism. His innovative way of modelling form with colour and geometric shapes lay out the path for cubism, fauvism and all of the modern art that was to follow. He's best known for his landscapes of the Provençal countryside, but this show brings together his portraits, including paintings of his wife, uncle and himself.  

Fifteenth-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck was as much a technical pioneer as he was an artistic genius, mastering illusionistic space in his exquisitely constructed paintings. Five centuries later, his masterwork 'The Arnolfini Portrait' inspired a new wave of artists: the Pre-Raphaelites, a circle of Victorian bad boys who championed his draughtsmanship and symbolism.

Amadeo Modigliani's star burned bright and fast. The Italian artist died from tubercular meningitis at the tragic age of 35, but in the years leading up to that he was a well-known – if not financially successful – player in the vibrant Parisian art scene. The elongated figures of his paintings and sculptures are unmistakeable: sensual, elegant, and now gathered together for his largest UK retrospective to date. 

This show looks at an often overlooked chapter in the impressionist story: when the Franco-Prussion war broke out in 1870, many French artists fled across the Channel to London. Here, they met a wave of enthusiastic contemporaries and patrons, and a new era of symbiosis between English and French art began. 

Black-and-white painting has a long history, but rarely gets looked at as a tradition in its own right. The NG should put paid to that, with an exhibition that traces monochrome painting from grisaille works of the Middle Ages to pieces by contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter.  

Aside from being the only English monarch to ever suffer the indignity of having their head chopped off, Charles I (1600-49) was also an avid art collector. He bought and commissioned work by some of his age's greatest artists, including Rubens, Titian and van Dyck. Although it's long been scattered across the globe, this exhibition will bring together over 90 pieces from Charlie Boy's illustrious collection.

You know how people say that you can tell God is cruel because he lets things like famine and disease and war happen? Well here’s something else you can tell about God: he’s got terrible taste in art, because he lets Bill Viola make videos for his cathedrals.  ‘Mary’ is his second (second!) permanent (permanent!!!) video work in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I asked a member of staff what ‘permanent’ means and was told: ‘Something like 300 years’. Lord have mercy. The first work, ‘Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)’ was unveiled in 2014, and sits in the opposite corner to this new companion piece of permanent (seriously, like, permanent) religious video art.  Let me take you through the work. It starts with a shaven-headed woman – playing Mary, mother of Jesus – breastfeeding a baby Christ as a timelapse of Los Angeles speeds by on a CGI background. Urgh. Then, it cuts to a river running through a red rock canyon. Mary, a different one this time, walks through the water. Then she stands on a mountaintop, sits in front of a fire in the snow, walks through a field and, well, yadda yadda yadda. Images of cracked salt flats, forests and riverbeds get collaged together, all moving in super slo-mo, ultra HD. Then – pow! – black and white shots of piles of dead fish. There’s a metaphor at play for Mary as grieving mother of the world. Then it cuts to Mary cradling the dead body of an adult Jesus, tears streaming down her face in the ruins of a church. The whole thing slowly fades to grainy