The Art Exhibitions Blog

The first big exhibition of 2023 in London gets under way at the Royal Academy on January 21, and it features paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and  Joaquín Sorolla , as well as textiles, silverware and many other artworks from Spain and Latin America. There are more than 150 objects to discover from the  Hispanic Society of America  in New York, the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside its homeland. Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library  is on until April 10.  David Hockney has achieved the status of a British national treasure, and he's the opening attraction at a whizzy new venue in King's Cross, the Lightroom. From January 25 to April 23, the artist provides his own commentary for  David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) . In a cycle of six chapters, Hockney takes us through his career and constant experimentation with ways of seeing. The immersi...

Many of the big names in the history of American art are relatively little known in Europe, and so the idea of a show devoted to one of them at London's National Gallery is a tempting prospect. Winslow Homer: Force of Nature , from September 10 to January 8, features around 50 works, many focusing on man's relationship with nature and the elements. This introduction to the artist, who lived from 1836 to 1910, is organised together with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, whose own larger Homer show this summer had largely positive reviews.   Can you name Lithuania's most famous artist? Thought not. We'll put you out of your misery: It's Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911). Dulwich Picture Gallery has a fine tradition of introducing you to art you never knew existed, and M.K. Čiurlionis: Between Worlds , running from September 21 to March 12, will feature more than 100 works that often have an ethereal, fantastical quality. Most will be on show in the...

Walter Sickert -- the gloomiest, murkiest of English artists? We've definitely been a little too harsh.  There's certainly a fair bit of gloom and murk in the big Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain, but there's a lot that's much lighter and full of entertainment. From Sickert's inventive music-hall scenes, this fascinating show takes you through luminous townscapes and on to a revelatory final room that shows the painter in his later years as an unwitting pre-war pioneer of Pop Art.  And let's hear it for the Tate for once; we've sometimes found the way they curate their exhibitions infuriating -- the Hogarth and Europe show this past winter was in thrall to political correctness -- but this one is beautifully and logically put together; a straightforward retrospective, and all the better for it.  The first two rooms of the eight in the exhibition look at Sickert's self-portraits and his apprenticeship years in the 1880s (his early stuff, under ...

Raphael died before he was 40, and yet he's still reckoned among the very greatest of Italian Renaissance artists. A new Raphael  exhibition at London's National Gallery aims to show him as an all-round giant -- in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture and more -- exploring why he can be regarded on a level with Michelangelo and Leonardo. More than 90 examples of his work include loans from the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Louvre and the Prado. The show is on from April 9 to July 31, and standard tickets are an initially eye-catching £24 (more with Gift Aid). As we've noted before, prices for the biggest exhibitions in the capital have been steadily creeping upwards, but then £24 is relatively cheap compared with, say, the cost of tickets to a Premier League football match or a West End theatre performance. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, tickets are a reasonable-sounding £10 for Canaletto's Venice Revisited , which opens on April 1. This show features Can...