The Courtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic is a delight for two reasons – because an institution that has often seemed locked in the past is now embracing change and also because the sculptures on show are clever, suggestive and subversively funny.For the first time since 1966, the exhibition brings together Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams and Eva Hesse – the three women included by New York critic Lucy Lippard in a show of artists using offbeat materials like plaster, latex, rubber and papier maché. Reacting against the clean lines and sharp edges of the Minimalism currently in fashion, they were Read more ...

Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.Stepping into the main gallery, you are infused with a supreme sense of calm. Hanging from the ceiling is a Newton’s cradle – 18 glass orbs suspended a few inches apart on fine wires (main picture). Glowing golden yellow, these fragile vessels are serenely beautiful. Read more ...

Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic buds, blooms and supersize tubers reflect a deep, tropical past that predates the very English landscape we now associate with this part of the world.So artist Vanessa da Silva invites you to reconnect with 300 million years of history by sitting here a while. When the sun is out, as it was on the opening weekend of Bradford 2025, you might reflect Read more ...

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...

Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris Read more ...

Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.Funded by the Max Mara Fashion Group, the Art Prize provides the winner with a six month residency in Italy and, in an interesting film, White describes the research she was able to carry out during that time. The four powerful sculptures now on show were Read more ...

One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work since 1995, provides an exhilarating and in many ways definitive perspective on one of the founding figures of 20th century modernism.“Beaubourg”, as the great tourist attraction is known, will undergo major changes in 2025, including a new setting for Brancusi’s studio, which the artist gave to the French state, along with all his papers, sketches and studio contents, when he died in 1957. In the meantime, we are given a Read more ...

Yinka Shonibare’s Serpentine Gallery exhibition opens with a piece of cloth twirling in the breeze; except that it’s a bronze sculpture probably weighing a ton or more – such is the power of art (pictured below right: detail of Wind Sculpture IV, 2024 with African Bird Magic, 2023).And metaphorically speaking, this is the airiest piece on show. Other works address weighty and contested subject matter, but with such beauty and lightness of touch that you never feel preached at or pulverised with guilt.Take The War Library 2024, for instance (pictured below: detail). Gallery Read more ...

Under the guidance of director Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery seems hell bent on reducing art to the level of fun for all the family. And as though to prove the point, cretinous captions strip the work of all meaning beyond the banal, while press pictures showcase kids gazing at large sculptures.Their latest exhibition, When Forms Come Alive consists of sculptures by 21 artists, all of whom employ organic rather than geometric forms. “Dynamic, exuberant and playful, the works in this show, take visitors on an adventure into a world of fascinating forms,” says Rugoff.The “adventure” begins Read more ...

We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to Paris to meet the crumbling but venerable form of Alberto Giacometti, a letter of introduction written by Francis Bacon tucked into his pocket.He arrived at the unassuming studio: a hermit’s-squat-cum-Aladdin’s-cave of near-equal fame to the artist, housing within crowds of definitively unfinished sculptures, scrawled-upon walls, skeletal armatures, abandoned sketches, an air choked with plaster, and, most oddly, a thin-limbed tree piercing its way up through a floor composed of compacted Read more ...

Donna Fleming’s exhibition at the Pie Factory Gallery in Margate is called Apocalypse, which is confusing because it has nothing to do with the end of the world. Fleming does not even watch the news because she “does not want to think about miserable things”. Instead the title refers back to the Greek word that apocalypse is derived from, apokalypsis, which means uncovering.At first it’s not exactly clear what is being uncovered. There’s a lot to take in. There is six years’ worth of work in the show and Fleming is prolific, working in a wild array of different media. She trained at the RCA Read more ...