The Art Exhibitions Blog

Flowers -- Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture at the Saatchi Gallery gets its statement of intent across to you right from the start: big, bold and bright. Sure, there are all sorts of flowers, large and small, of every conceivable hue in this expansive show, but remember, we're on the King's Road in Chelsea. This is no place for shy retiring wallflowers or shrinking violets. The tone is set by Sophie Mess's enormous and eye-catchingly vibrant  Journey of Progress  mural on the walls of the stairwell you ascend to the start of the show; an only slightly more modest work by her -- appropriately entitled Burst -- is the very first painting you encounter as you enter the nine galleries.   It is stunning, but the big flower close-up is nothing new. A century ago Georgia O'Keeffe was producing canvas-filling paintings of irises, oriental poppies and  Red Canna .  The first room takes us on something of a magical history tour of flower painting. There's a ...

It's a bestseller: Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men . And if you've read her 2022 book rewriting art history, or even if you haven't, you can go beyond the printed page and see the real thing close up for yourself, in Europe's only art museum without men. It's in the south of France, in a hilltop village just outside Cannes: Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins .  Now in an ideal world, you shouldn't really need a museum in 2025 devoted solely to women artists. But this is clearly not an ideal world. As Hessel and many others have pointed out, women have historically been woefully underrepresented both in traditional museums and galleries and on the commercial art market. This women-only space (on the walls, we hasten to add; male visitors very welcome) aims to go some way to restore the balance. Did we like what we saw? Most definitely. The museum, which opened last year, displays a rotating selection from the hundreds of works by women artists collected...

We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in  Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before.  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country.  Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw:  Edvard Munch ...

We went along to  Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery expecting to gain most enjoyment from the artist's witty, whimsical early woodcuts and drawings. In fact, rather to our surprise, it was her late paintings and 3-D collages that stole the show: strange, sometimes childlike, sometimes quite sophisticated art, with a touch of the surreal and a great deal of fantasy. And often very joyful, when you consider how the last decade of Garwood's short life was marked by war, death and fatal illness.  That's the decade beyond Ravilious; her first husband, Eric, died in a plane crash while working as a war artist in 1942. It's only in recent years that Tirzah's own art has started to draw attention; we first came across her in a small show at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden back in 2019. This exhibition in south-east London is a much bigger, more comprehensive affair. And one that's been drawing crowds; we arrived at 1200 on a Tuesday and...

London's Courtauld Gallery is our first stop this month, for Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection in the Swiss city of Winterthur. Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh are among the artists featured in this show, which is taking place because the villa Am Römerholz, where the collection is usually housed, is being renovated this year. This exhibition is on from February 14 to May 26.  Think of Chelsea, and you may think of the annual flower show. The Saatchi Gallery, right on the King's Road, is picking up on that theme, playing host to some 500 artworks and objects in what looks to be a somewhat overwhelming exhibition entitled Flowers -- Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture . Dozens of artists are listed as being featured -- Pedro Almodóvar, Elizabeth Blackadder, Michael Craig-Martin and Damien Hirst, to name just a handful. It's on from February 12 until May 5. And with a younger audience in mind, Young V...

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...