The Art Exhibitions Blog

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Does this image seem vaguely familiar? There's a very similar painting in the National Gallery in London. It's by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and it depicts  Lake Keitele in the centre of the country at the start of the 20th century; an apparently peaceful and isolated midsummer scene, seemingly devoid of the impact of man. He made several versions of this picture.  But as so often in art, a painting can be more than it appears at first glance, as we were to find out in  Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland  at the Belvedere in Vienna. Those zigzag lines on the water are a natural phenomenon created by the wind and the currents, but the artist uses them to give his work a far deeper meaning. When he painted this, Finland was still a Russian possession, and Gallen-Kallela was heavily involved in the Finnish nationalist movement. For him, those stripes represented the traces left by the boat rowed across the lake by the old sage, Väinämöinen, in the F...

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of  Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...

The 17th- and 18th-century Palace of Versailles wasn't just wealth, pomp and opulence; it was also a place where France's kings encouraged and promoted scientific research and innovation. The story will be revealed in Versailles: Science & Splendour at the Science Museum in London from December 12 to April 21, featuring historic objects and art from Versailles and other French collections.  A new free display at the National Gallery focuses on a painting that's going back on show after 10 years of conservation. Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome  explores a work created by an artist seen by the Pope as another Raphael. December 5 to March 9.  Can you deduce what a pronkstilleven is? It's a Dutch word, and the painting below is the perfect illustration. One of the Golden Age artists who specialised in the genre of sumptuous still lives was Jan Davidsz de Heem; he painted four enormous such scenes that are now being displayed together for the first time ever at...

Near the top of our list of exhibitions we want to go and see: retrospectives of relatively neglected women artists. Also right up there: Nordic painters we would like to learn more about. So it's no surprise we were keen to explore  Harriet Backer (1845-1932): The Music of Colours  at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.  Backer was Norway's most renowned female painter of the 19th century, if little known outside her homeland. We must have seen her work in the past in the old National Museum in Oslo, but she'll have been one of many unfamiliar names. Now, though, she's getting the full retrospective treatment with a show that's already been seen in the Norwegian capital and in Stockholm.  Backer's paintings are mostly intimate depictions of interiors, both domestic and church. There's a calmness to them, and often a very interesting treatment of light, with Impressionism showing an influence from time she spent in France. One or two of the pictures on show are ...

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...