August events in London

It’s hard to come away from a Picasso exhibition without thinking that he was a total bastard: a selfish, arrogant, mercurial, lascivious, lecherous, horny, misogynistic bastard. But there’s a brutish and near overwhelming animal magnetism to him and his work that draws you in and makes you fall madly in love, even though you know you shouldn’t. He makes foolish jilted lovers of all of us. That primal animality is front and centre in this beautifully put together and lovingly researched show focussing on his lifelong obsession with bulls, matadors and minotaurs. The half-man/half-beast creature is a symbol of Pablo himself. It represents raw, physical violence and sexuality, it’s a cypher for the artist as demi-god. The walls in the first gallery are draped with green curtains, the lights are low, it’s half way between a funeral home and your granny’s house. There are artworks everywhere. The drawings and prints are a treat. There are minotaurs with perfectly sculpted muscles, their genitals flapping in the wind as they save women from perilous situations. One series finds hairy beasts groping at sleeping women, or passionately humping away at them. There are simple, stark line drawings and complex crosshatched sketches. In all of these, Pablo is a powerful sexual animal, a saviour of women, a god amongst men. It’s brilliant, but absolutely and totally gross at the same time. There are gorgeous paintings here too – many of them great. There’s a stunning image of a sleep

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ said a wise uncle to his superhero nephew once. It’s a sentiment that hovers around Grayson Perry’s exhibition. Granted, Perry’s own alter ego wears lipstick and gingham rather than a mask and spandex, but the artist/transvestite/unlikely national treasure feels just as much the reluctant hero. This show is intended as a meditation on the role of popularity in art, but if it does anything, it highlights there’s little difference between one ‘P’ word and the other. It was Perry’s ceramic pots that threw him into the mainstream's limelight, but here you’ll also find tapestries, woodcuts, assemblages and custom-made motorbikes and skateboards. Those who deride him for glibly milking the zeitgeist (middle-aged broadsheet critics for the most part) won’t be converted here. Nationalist politics, art-world bickering, the class divide, austerity Britain – Perry casts his net far and wide, with a wry frown and his tongue in cheek. Curiously, it’s the bleaker moments that resonate most. Those who’ve read his book ‘The Descent of Man’ will know he views traditional masculinity as a ticking time bomb of rising suicide rates, domestic abuse and online misogyny; in one woodcut, it’s depicted as a snarling beast with humongous bollocks whose innards are labelled with words like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ and ‘important.’ Another piece, a savage takedown of the institution of marriage, features two miserable-looking wooden spouses encased in an ai

There’s something special about a tapestry, something traditional, a tangible aura of history. It’s as if the act of creating an image by slowly and meticulously weaving countless threads together is somehow more permanent, more holy, than just slapping a bunch of paint on a canvas. And that’s kind of true: tapestries have been used for centuries as ‘nomadic murals’ for royalty, movable canvases filled with symbolism and iconography. Now, Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili has gone the woven way, and is unveiling ‘The Caged Bird’s Song’ this week at the National Gallery – a huge, complex work, filled with nods to classical mythology. It Ofili first painted a watercolour image then worked closely with the Dovecot Tapestry Studio to create this vibrant, multi-layered wall rug (official art historical term for a tapestry, there), which will go on permanent display in Clothworkers’ Hall in the City once the National’s done with it. Apparently, it’s very tricky to turn a watercolour into a tapestry, but that’s not your problem, because it’s clearly much easier to look at than it was to make.

Ashley Bickerton is like a friend who’s just come back from travelling around Asia for six months and literally won’t stop talking about it and showing you pictures down the pub. Except the pictures aren’t irritating iPhone photos of a beach he dropped some wicked acid on, it’s a whole goddamn body of fine art. But that’s a little unfair: it’s actually only half that bad. Because before he moved to Bali to become an eco-art hippy intent on creating art that makes me wish I didn’t have eyes, Bickerton was actually pretty brilliant. Busting out of ’80s New York alongside his buddy Jeff Koons (part of what got called the Neo Geo movement), his early work was full of simple ideas about consumerism, identity and pop culture, all executed with humour, precision and a super neat aesthetic. The ‘paintings’ from that era here jut boxily out of the walls. They’re assemblages covered in handles and sheeting, screwed in place with industrial fittings. They’re like emergency equipment from cruise ships, or massive black box recorders. One has a digital counter displaying the work’s current estimated value, another features silhouettes of toilets and the word ‘ab-strakt’, there’s even a modern update of one of his early ‘self-portraits’ through brand logos. It’s all crisp, clean and clear, covered in logos and the stench of capitalism. Other works here are massive hulking impenetrable lifeboats, a framed cowboy outfit or Armani suit at their centre. There are bomb-proof boxes of seeds

It’s a commercial gallery show, scheduled to coincide with the Royal Academy’s blockbuster ‘Matisse in the Studio’ exhibition, opening in August. Is anyone else wondering if this is essentially a high-end gift shop for wealthy RA visitors buzzing on a Matisse high? It is what it is, and Matisse is still Matisse: the twentieth-century maestro who built a dazzling, sensual world of lavish interiors, opulent fabrics, lush houseplants, Oriental garments and reclining nudes. But, like all geniuses, he had off days, and the paintings on display here aren’t among his best. ‘L’artiste et le modèle nu’, a self-portrait of sorts where he appears painting a woman in his studio, feels wispy and indecisive. This gives his drawings and prints the limelight, and in many ways they’re way more thrilling: here, you bear witness to a stupendously gifted draughtsman capturing his subjects – the profile of a woman, a vase of flowers – with swift, gorgeous economy. Gorgeousness is perhaps half the problem with Matisse. It’s his unswerving devotion to beauty, and interest in little else, that’s always tended to land him in second place against his lifelong frenemy, the grittier, more political Picasso. Still, as much as he flirted with frivolity, we shouldn’t forget that once upon a time, Matisse’s pictures looked far less lovely: garish, expressionist and wild. It’s because of, not despite, these jittery, gloom-laden times of ours, that I have a feeling we’re all in need of a soothing dose of be

Much like politicians, artists tend to follow pretty narrow career paths these days. You do a Fine Art degree, then maybe another, then you head out into the big bad world. But Danish artist Per Kirkeby was halfway through a Geology masters when he took the swerve into artmaking in the 1960s, and his lifelong fascination with the natural world runs, like a lode, throughout this collection of paintings and sculptures from a couple of decades later. The paintings are earthen-coloured palimpsests of stains, splatters, scrubbed washes, gouged lines and trowelled slabs. At first, you’ll probably wonder if Kirkeby even had his eyes open while doing them. Then, after a minute or so, the poetry starts to emerge. In contrast to fellow neo-expressionists like, say, Georg Baselitz (another artist on Michael Werner’s books), these aren’t deliberately ill-composed, fuck-you conundrums. They’re strangely harmonious. In fact, what seems to power them is a strange sense of inevitability; the sort of slow, ponderous, monumental inevitability that sends tectonic plates drifting across the earth and the roots of plants piercing through rock. Whatever’s happened on the canvas had to happen. The bronze sculptures do much they same: they half feel like primordial rock formations, half like crude monuments hewn by prehistoric ancestors. Kirkeby’s point seems to be that it’s never – as so many artists would have it – a case of man-versus-nature, art-versus-life. For him, the two are always inext

This show takes a look back to the work of black artists during the turbulent decade that was the 1980s. Against a backdrop of seismic social and political change, these artists each sought to develop unique voices that expressed their – often conflicted – senses of identity.

Kiwi artist Thompson turns his attention to US race relations in this new exhibition. He's worked with Diamond Reynolds, an African-American woman who recorded the fatal shooting of her partner by the police on Facebook Live last year. Their collaborative film is intended as an alternate 'sister-image' to that widely circulated and overtly politicised footage.

A three-decade survey of works by the celebrated Japanese artist, whose lyrical paintings marry the nihon-ga tradition with an experimental, avant-garde ethos.

A show that charts the rich and captivating lineage of surrealism that runs through several generations of women artists – from early pioneers like Leonora Carrington to contemporary artists like Laurie Simmons and Gillian Wearing.

Most of us don’t get any better with age. After our twenties we just get uglier, fatter and more useless. But Katsushika Hokusai was like a seriously fine wine. He was in his early seventies when he created ‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’ – a work that would become one of the most iconic images in all of history, and he just got better. His whole life as an artist led to that single moment, and then the world blossomed and unfolded in front of him. The Great Wave – a woodblock image – was printed in its thousands, making a star out of lowly Hokusai. It’s a gorgeous little picture, a swirling maelstrom kaleidoscoping around the tranquil mountain as boats crash and clatter in the waves. Later on in the show, two big ceiling panels focus in on the wave. The twisting shapes and spitting foam create mini galaxies that completely overwhelm you in their abstraction. He was taking nods from western art, and in the process, he’d go on to shape the work of Van Gogh and Monet in countless ways. But it’s not all waves and water. The show takes in his prints, of course, but also his books and his one-off paintings. It’s a journey through countless mythological worlds, lush unfolding landscapes, ghost stories and scenes of everyday life. But most of all, it’s a journey through the mind of a master, desperately trying to wring every last drop of art from his brush. You just wish the museum had dimmed the lights a little bit and given the show some atmos. The final works are sad and forlor

It’s hard to come away from a Picasso exhibition without thinking that he was a total bastard: a selfish, arrogant, mercurial, lascivious, lecherous, horny, misogynistic bastard. But there’s a brutish and near overwhelming animal magnetism to him and his work that draws you in and makes you fall madly in love, even though you know you shouldn’t. He makes foolish jilted lovers of all of us. That primal animality is front and centre in this beautifully put together and lovingly researched show focussing on his lifelong obsession with bulls, matadors and minotaurs. The half-man/half-beast creature is a symbol of Pablo himself. It represents raw, physical violence and sexuality, it’s a cypher for the artist as demi-god. The walls in the first gallery are draped with green curtains, the lights are low, it’s half way between a funeral home and your granny’s house. There are artworks everywhere. The drawings and prints are a treat. There are minotaurs with perfectly sculpted muscles, their genitals flapping in the wind as they save women from perilous situations. One series finds hairy beasts groping at sleeping women, or passionately humping away at them. There are simple, stark line drawings and complex crosshatched sketches. In all of these, Pablo is a powerful sexual animal, a saviour of women, a god amongst men. It’s brilliant, but absolutely and totally gross at the same time. There are gorgeous paintings here too – many of them great. There’s a stunning image of a sleep

Immerse yourself in an olfactory extravaganza this summer, as 'Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent' brings together a whole range of contemporary perfumiers who are pushing scents in new, exciting whiffy directions. The show will also feature a perfume laboratory, where visitors can not only see various fragrances being made, but also concoct their own. Find out more here. 

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ said a wise uncle to his superhero nephew once. It’s a sentiment that hovers around Grayson Perry’s exhibition. Granted, Perry’s own alter ego wears lipstick and gingham rather than a mask and spandex, but the artist/transvestite/unlikely national treasure feels just as much the reluctant hero. This show is intended as a meditation on the role of popularity in art, but if it does anything, it highlights there’s little difference between one ‘P’ word and the other. It was Perry’s ceramic pots that threw him into the mainstream's limelight, but here you’ll also find tapestries, woodcuts, assemblages and custom-made motorbikes and skateboards. Those who deride him for glibly milking the zeitgeist (middle-aged broadsheet critics for the most part) won’t be converted here. Nationalist politics, art-world bickering, the class divide, austerity Britain – Perry casts his net far and wide, with a wry frown and his tongue in cheek. Curiously, it’s the bleaker moments that resonate most. Those who’ve read his book ‘The Descent of Man’ will know he views traditional masculinity as a ticking time bomb of rising suicide rates, domestic abuse and online misogyny; in one woodcut, it’s depicted as a snarling beast with humongous bollocks whose innards are labelled with words like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ and ‘important.’ Another piece, a savage takedown of the institution of marriage, features two miserable-looking wooden spouses encased in an ai

There’s something special about a tapestry, something traditional, a tangible aura of history. It’s as if the act of creating an image by slowly and meticulously weaving countless threads together is somehow more permanent, more holy, than just slapping a bunch of paint on a canvas. And that’s kind of true: tapestries have been used for centuries as ‘nomadic murals’ for royalty, movable canvases filled with symbolism and iconography. Now, Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili has gone the woven way, and is unveiling ‘The Caged Bird’s Song’ this week at the National Gallery – a huge, complex work, filled with nods to classical mythology. It Ofili first painted a watercolour image then worked closely with the Dovecot Tapestry Studio to create this vibrant, multi-layered wall rug (official art historical term for a tapestry, there), which will go on permanent display in Clothworkers’ Hall in the City once the National’s done with it. Apparently, it’s very tricky to turn a watercolour into a tapestry, but that’s not your problem, because it’s clearly much easier to look at than it was to make.

You might not expect to connect with an artist who hails from Ottoman aristocracy and once sat down with Hitler to trade notes on painting. But that’s the cunning of abstraction: through a mesh of colours and spontaneous shapes, we can share and understand a common language, without ever saying the same thing. And that’s what you get with the work of Turkish painter Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid – pulsating hives of colour on large cuts of canvas that unfold in front of the viewer like living Byzantine mosaics, letting the interpretive chips fall where they may. Her painting story is a familiar one: starts out classically trained, strays from figurative work, ‘finds’ herself in the abstract. But in this extensive exhibition of Zeid’s work, the sea change is like a kaleidoscopic sucker punch; her paintings from 1948 onwards literally leave you seeing stars. Tate has done good, giving her biggest pieces room to scream, the same privilege afforded to the macho creations of the RA’s ‘Abstract Expressionism’ show. Zeid led an extraordinary life (as princesses tend to). In 1921, she became one of the first women to study at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. She went on to marry into the Iraqi royal family, and narrowly escaped assassination in Iraq’s 1958 military coup. Yet many in the West have never heard her story, let alone seen her work. Admittedly, her post-abstract period is less impressive. At 57 she cooked her first meal, and was so entranced by turkey bones that she pa

Now in its fifty-second year, the renowned and celebrated annual wildlife photography competition and exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum with images of the most extraordinary species on the planet, captured by professional and amateur photographers.  And FYI, all wannabe animal-snappers out there: next year's competition will be open for entries from October 24 and will close on December 15. Please note that last entry to the exhibition is daily at 5.15pm.

If you’ve heard of Alberto Giacometti, you’re probably thinking: ‘Oh yes, that bloke who did the spindly stick people.’ So much has already been written and said about the Swiss artist; luckily, this show doesn’t attempt anything too spurious. But that invites a slightly worrying question: if there’s nothing new to add to the Giacometti story, then does he still matter? The first few rooms go through the usual motions: formative years, early influences. He was 21 when he moved from Switzerland to Paris to train as a sculptor and entered an art scene that would have been a feverish petri dish of avant-garde movements and radical ideas. It’s interesting to see how the young Alberto dabbled in cubism and surrealism, and how he applied them to his twin sources of obsession: the head and figure. Lots of the early stuff is delicate and sensual – informed by the art of non-Western cultures like Ancient Egypt and West Africa – but do look out for the fascinatingly horrifying ‘Woman With Her Throat Cut’ (1932), a deconstructed heap of abstracted body parts, its ribcage open like a sprung bear-trap. By the time World War Two broke out, Giacometti found himself trapped in Switzerland and working on figurative sculptures that were growing ever smaller, in an attempt to depict a sense of distance between viewer and subject. Let’s be honest, bronze figures the shape and size of a matchstick should come off as a bit gimmicky. But they don’t. It’s at this point you realise the one, embarra

There are stories of John Singer Sargent painting in the field: sploshing colour around with sponges, hissing at his paper, muttering to himself. The American artist is best known for his fantastically accomplished, mildly eccentric society portraits. He was the classic expat Yank Europhile, courting favour (and occasionally opprobrium) among monied sorts in Paris and London. Alongside his day job, though, he painted watercolours throughout his life, and this show of them, the first in this country since 19-bloody-18 reveals Sargent’s manic devotion to his craft. He returns to the same subjects over and over. Venice in particular obsessed him: he would paint in a gondola, so his perspective on the city is sea-level, with buildings and boats looming over the viewer, dashing in the rippling, ever-changing light and water. You sense his freedom away from the salon and the studio: constantly starting over, revelling in the never-finishable. You can see the influence of photography, too. Scenes are tightly, weirdly cropped: nothing is polite or planned. Elsewhere, there are superb studies of Alpine torrents and glacial moraines. Unlike a lot of watercolourists, Sargent could actually paint people, and his workmen, recuperating soldiers, friends and family are all accorded the same democratic casual brilliance. I think this is key to this show: in a Europe increasingly divided and class-ridden, Sargent went looking for subjects and places that didn’t have any attendant societal bag

This exhibition looks set to flip the idea of 'black art' on its head, tracing an underlooked 20-year period of creative innovation among African-American artists, against the seismic backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. 

The year is 1769: James Cook lands in Tahiti, Napoleon Bonaparte is born in France and, in London, the newly-founded Royal Academy of Arts invites ‘artists of merit’ to submit paintings to its first annual open exhibition. If you’ve seen Timothy Spall’s ‘Mr Turner’ pimp his seascape to piss off John Constable in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, you’ll have a sense of how lively this monster of a show has been over the centuries. These days you’re unlikely to witness fisticuffs over the framed prints but a spirit of competition still wafts through the oldest open-submission show in the world, now in its 249th year.  This year's show is overseen by Royal Academician Eileen Cooper. There are over 1,200 artworks splooged all over the walls of Burlington House – as ever, by big names and recent graduates alike. Some of it’s a total mess, some of it’s totally great. It’s packed full of art, and – more than anything – it’s just an amazing opportunity to spot new talent alongside art world megastars like Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and countless others.

Ashley Bickerton is like a friend who’s just come back from travelling around Asia for six months and literally won’t stop talking about it and showing you pictures down the pub. Except the pictures aren’t irritating iPhone photos of a beach he dropped some wicked acid on, it’s a whole goddamn body of fine art. But that’s a little unfair: it’s actually only half that bad. Because before he moved to Bali to become an eco-art hippy intent on creating art that makes me wish I didn’t have eyes, Bickerton was actually pretty brilliant. Busting out of ’80s New York alongside his buddy Jeff Koons (part of what got called the Neo Geo movement), his early work was full of simple ideas about consumerism, identity and pop culture, all executed with humour, precision and a super neat aesthetic. The ‘paintings’ from that era here jut boxily out of the walls. They’re assemblages covered in handles and sheeting, screwed in place with industrial fittings. They’re like emergency equipment from cruise ships, or massive black box recorders. One has a digital counter displaying the work’s current estimated value, another features silhouettes of toilets and the word ‘ab-strakt’, there’s even a modern update of one of his early ‘self-portraits’ through brand logos. It’s all crisp, clean and clear, covered in logos and the stench of capitalism. Other works here are massive hulking impenetrable lifeboats, a framed cowboy outfit or Armani suit at their centre. There are bomb-proof boxes of seeds

It’s a commercial gallery show, scheduled to coincide with the Royal Academy’s blockbuster ‘Matisse in the Studio’ exhibition, opening in August. Is anyone else wondering if this is essentially a high-end gift shop for wealthy RA visitors buzzing on a Matisse high? It is what it is, and Matisse is still Matisse: the twentieth-century maestro who built a dazzling, sensual world of lavish interiors, opulent fabrics, lush houseplants, Oriental garments and reclining nudes. But, like all geniuses, he had off days, and the paintings on display here aren’t among his best. ‘L’artiste et le modèle nu’, a self-portrait of sorts where he appears painting a woman in his studio, feels wispy and indecisive. This gives his drawings and prints the limelight, and in many ways they’re way more thrilling: here, you bear witness to a stupendously gifted draughtsman capturing his subjects – the profile of a woman, a vase of flowers – with swift, gorgeous economy. Gorgeousness is perhaps half the problem with Matisse. It’s his unswerving devotion to beauty, and interest in little else, that’s always tended to land him in second place against his lifelong frenemy, the grittier, more political Picasso. Still, as much as he flirted with frivolity, we shouldn’t forget that once upon a time, Matisse’s pictures looked far less lovely: garish, expressionist and wild. It’s because of, not despite, these jittery, gloom-laden times of ours, that I have a feeling we’re all in need of a soothing dose of be

Revolution is a powerful word, and this exhibition – commemorating 100 years since the communist uprising in Russia – is about civil unrest, propaganda and disenchantment. It starts in a chandelier-lit foyer with images of Tsar Nicholas II and the bourgeoisie. The first-edition Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels (published in London) inconspicuously sits amongst maps of the former Russian empire. As you descend the staircase the exhibition winds its way, like a red snake, through the events leading up to, during and after the revolution. There are film projections of life during the rule of the Tsar, curios and audio accounts of the tension felt by civilians in Russia because of the anti-royal sentiment during WWI. Photographs show the impact of the war efforts on everyday life – starvation, poverty and growing resentment. It’s heavy stuff. The highlights are images from political satire magazines and the propaganda posters that depict the stark divide between the White Army (capitalist) and Red Army (Lenin’s socialist Bolsheviks). The White Army propaganda is rare and worth seeing, with its heavily symbolic design. Trotsky is depicted as the devil incarnate and the Red Army as a dragon, death itself, a skeleton and pretty much anything hellish you can think of. There are also some interesting socialist and avant-garde artworks on the opposing side bolstering the Bolsheviks to even things out. Post-revolution, the propaganda changes to ascribe God-like status to

The annual photography award makes its return to the National Portrait Gallery – rather staggeringly, for a thirty-eighth year. As ever, expect a wide-ranging selection of contemporary portrait painting. 

Much like politicians, artists tend to follow pretty narrow career paths these days. You do a Fine Art degree, then maybe another, then you head out into the big bad world. But Danish artist Per Kirkeby was halfway through a Geology masters when he took the swerve into artmaking in the 1960s, and his lifelong fascination with the natural world runs, like a lode, throughout this collection of paintings and sculptures from a couple of decades later. The paintings are earthen-coloured palimpsests of stains, splatters, scrubbed washes, gouged lines and trowelled slabs. At first, you’ll probably wonder if Kirkeby even had his eyes open while doing them. Then, after a minute or so, the poetry starts to emerge. In contrast to fellow neo-expressionists like, say, Georg Baselitz (another artist on Michael Werner’s books), these aren’t deliberately ill-composed, fuck-you conundrums. They’re strangely harmonious. In fact, what seems to power them is a strange sense of inevitability; the sort of slow, ponderous, monumental inevitability that sends tectonic plates drifting across the earth and the roots of plants piercing through rock. Whatever’s happened on the canvas had to happen. The bronze sculptures do much they same: they half feel like primordial rock formations, half like crude monuments hewn by prehistoric ancestors. Kirkeby’s point seems to be that it’s never – as so many artists would have it – a case of man-versus-nature, art-versus-life. For him, the two are always inext

If you’re poor – and hey, the overwhelming majority of us are – here’s a tiny crumb of comfort: money trickles down. The richer the rich get, the richer us deluded proletarian bozos get. That’s the idea behind trickle-down economics, anyway. And in British artist Benedict Drew’s first major institution show in the UK, that dry, depressing economic theory is reimagined as a dystopian daydream. The central installation is a symmetrical mound of mirrors, monstrous eyes, TV screens and a big quivering gold gong. A voice from the screens waxes lyrical about socio-political economics as electronic blips and bloops fill the air. Images of bodies moving through mud blob across the screens, static hisses, the gong shakes. It’s like a future altar, a place where the plebs go to praise their rich overlords. There are big textured wall hangings here too, and two more little film installations in colour Perspex environments. They’re definitely more of a sideshow, and work less well than the main room, but are cute enough.  Drew seems to be making a big political point, and he expresses it neatly with his paranoid DIY sci-fi aesthetics. But the whole thing is just too conceptually muddy. Honestly, Drew gives you so little to go on in terms of figuring the work out that my interpretation – or yours – might be total bollocks. It’s too obtuse, too abstract and a little too unapproachable to be something really great. But, being generous, it still works as an installation. The whole thi

Get ready to see some serious shapes thrown at the Barbican this summer! American choreographer Trajal Harrell will be showing a series of his genre-bending, age-spanning dance routines, in which everything from vogueing to traditional Japanese butoh is thrown into the mix. Watch out for the restricted opening hours, though – this stuff's kinda exclusive. 

Two pieces of legislation set the timespan for this exhibition. One is the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861; the other is the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. And it’s the shadow of illegality and widespread prejudice that’s cast over everything on display in this rich and fascinating survey of queer art. Concealment is, without a doubt, the show’s biggest theme. Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon used classical imagery as a veiled means of expressing desire, as seen in his sultry drawing of a Babylonian prince and his androgynous courtesan. Several decades later, Keith Vaughan was using abstraction to the same ends. (Solomon’s career never recovered after he was arrested for attempted sodomy in 1873; Vaughan took his own life in 1977.) Often, it’s as much about the subject matter as it is the artist: there are several pictures of notable LGBT+ figures, including Oscar Wilde, whose portrait by Robert Harper Pennington hangs beside the cell door from Reading Gaol, where he was sent for gross indecency in 1895. The accompanying quote is characteristically pithy: ‘When I am released, I shall only trade one prison for another.’ Not that joy and exuberance are completely absent. It was on the stage, rather than the canvas, that queerness found its least stifled home. Performers like drag queen Jimmy Slater – look out for his wig, earrings and tiara – were seen as nothing more than camp by naïve audiences. That’s another big theme: hidin

This show takes a look back to the work of black artists during the turbulent decade that was the 1980s. Against a backdrop of seismic social and political change, these artists each sought to develop unique voices that expressed their – often conflicted – senses of identity.

Gutted. Absolutely gutted. That’s how I came away feeling from Arthur Jafa’s show – his first in the UK – at the Serpentine Sackler. Gutted because his art is so full of promise, so rammed to the hilt with vital, essential and just plain fucking NECESSARY ideas, that to see him fall so far short is one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had in a gallery for years. Jafa is a noted and respected cinematographer; he’s influenced Beyoncé, worked with Solange, and had a massive impact on the look and feel of contemporary African-American cinema. A couple of years back he turned his hand to art. The result was ‘Love is the Message, the Message is Death’ – seven minutes of neatly edited found footage, set to Kanye West’s ‘Ultralight Beam’. It’s shockingly powerful, stunningly good. It’s a tribute, a paean, a tear-drenched hymn to the power, history and pain of black America. It’s ecstatic, feverish, brutal, heart-wrenching, painful, funny, proud. Jafa wants to create a black visual aesthetic with the same impact as black music in America, and that film is an incredible starting point. But this show is him stumbling at the first hurdle. It centres around three screens showing a mixture of found footage and YouTube videos. There’s an Alice Coltrane live performance, video game screenshots, someone emoting to Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’ – it’s all long, grainy, noisy. You walk around, silent disco-style, with headphones on, switching between channels to listen to each film. One o

Kiwi artist Thompson turns his attention to US race relations in this new exhibition. He's worked with Diamond Reynolds, an African-American woman who recorded the fatal shooting of her partner by the police on Facebook Live last year. Their collaborative film is intended as an alternate 'sister-image' to that widely circulated and overtly politicised footage.

A three-decade survey of works by the celebrated Japanese artist, whose lyrical paintings marry the nihon-ga tradition with an experimental, avant-garde ethos.

A show that charts the rich and captivating lineage of surrealism that runs through several generations of women artists – from early pioneers like Leonora Carrington to contemporary artists like Laurie Simmons and Gillian Wearing.