August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run. The one major opening is Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023. Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...
Work, work, work, of course. It was Thomas Edison who said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and for every artist's light-bulb moment, there'll be a lot of hours sitting in the studio. A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London takes us to a hundred of those studios to witness the hard labour of the creative process in an ambitious and often fun exhibition. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...." intone the voices in the video From March to April.... 2020 by the Dubai-based Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Tehching Hsieh took it further. One-Year Performance saw him clocking on daily. In Darren Almond's A Real Time Piece nothing disturbs the eerie quiet of the artist's empty studio apart from the loud thwock once a minute of the changing display of the mechanical digital clock on the wall. In this other piece by Almond there's not a sound to be heard, but if the...