Photograph by me of photographer’s subject! This is Iris and her bunny in front of a photograph taken in her family kitchen by her mother, Kirsty Mackay. It’s one of the many sensitive and charming portraits in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize on show at the National Portrait Gallery’s temporary space at Cromwell Place.
If you ever thought surrealism was something from the last century the Design Museum’s new exhibition shows that the spirit of the surreal has prevailed and finds form in design ideas and movements from all around the world and continues to influence contemporary designers and artists.
A King is executed and a huge crowd watches in Whitehall. It is 1649 and what a gruesome spectacle it must have been. Yet, centuries ago, executions were not only viewed as the ultimate deterrent to crime they were also a kind of entertainment. The Museum of London in Docklands has created an impressive and fascinating exhibition entitled Executions which charts the public deaths of people from 1196 until the last recorded public execution in 1868.
A very satisfying exhibition of work by Lucian Freud has just opened at the National Gallery. It’s well curated, using seven galleries to cover the seven decades of his working life. Freud died in 2011 but 2022 is the centenary of his birth and it’s a good opportunity to see the span of his work in one very impressive show.
Cezanne: the EY Exhibition at Tate Modern is a huge treat. Described as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ chance to see a great collection of the French painter’s work this show has been five years in the planning. There are some ‘old friends’ familiar from London galleries but also many paintings which have never been seen in the UK before. Together they give the visitor a really ‘in the round’ impression of Cezanne’s artistic career and the landmark works which changed not only his personal style but that of his artistic confederates and those who followed in his wake.
William Kentridge fills the Royal Academy galleries with such strong, graphic images that you feel he has only just put down his stick of charcoal and moved onto something else. This astonishing show give us a chronological view of this important South African artist’s development.
The National Gallery offers a fascinating introduction to American artist Winslow Homer with a terrific exhibition of his paintings from the time of the American Civil War to observations of a fishing village in Northumberland in the 1880s. A self-taught artist, Homer is technically brilliant in oils and watercolours and presents an enigmatic portrayal of people at times of transition, trouble and contemplation and is masterful at capturing the power of nature.
Art goes figurative at City & Guilds of London Art School. At the show of work by MA students it was heartening to see so many artists being inspired by the need to make figurative and narrative images the abundance of seriously impressive work.
Paper Places 