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...

We're going to start our September preview in Paris, where an absolute stunner of an exhibition is set to open belatedly at the Petit Palais: The Golden Age of Danish Painting . That Golden Age lasted for just over 60 years from the start of the 19th century when artists such as Christen Købke expressed a growing national pride in works of precision and clarity tinged with romanticism. We got to see this fabulous show early last year at the National Museum in Stockholm. It's on in Paris from September 22 to January 3, and if you get the chance to go, don't hesitate. A few minutes walk away, at the Musée de l'Orangerie,  Giorgio de Chirico: Metaphysical Painting opens on September 16. De Chirico's enigmatic art from the first two decades of the 20th century draws on the German Romantics and prefigures the Surrealists. After it closes on December 14 it will transfer to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg early next year. If you head down the Seine from Paris to the Musé...

August is normally a thin month for new exhibitions, but as more and more museums and galleries open up again to the public, August 2020 will be rather busier than normal. In London, the Royal Academy gives a new lease of life to one show that was interrupted by the coronavirus lockdown and celebrates the delayed start of another. The interrupted show looks at  Léon Spilliaert , an artist whose finest work stems from his years at home in Ostend at the start of the 20th century, wandering the Belgian port city at night, haunted by insomnia and stomach troubles. It was the last exhibition we reviewed before lockdown, and Spilliaert really couldn't be a better symbol for social distancing, pictured alone in his studio or capturing the eeriness of deserted streets or beaches. August 5 to September 20. Two days after the Spilliaert show restarts, the RA welcomes Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection in Denmark, which is currently undergoing...

Let us take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Ostend, in the company of an insomniac artist with stomach ulcers. Things appear odd at night, eerie lights down deserted streets and along the promenade, when everyone else in the Queen of Belgian seaside resorts has gone to bed. Welcome to the world of  Léon Spilliaert   at the Royal Academy in London, the latest in the RA's spate of exhibitions featuring European artists you've possibly barely heard of but who are rather big names in their home countries. Spilliaert was born in Ostend in 1881, and though he moved away to Bruges to study and later to Brussels and Paris, it's his home town that seems to have inspired his most intriguing pictures. He worked mostly using a wash of Indian ink, with occasional pastel and coloured pencil, to produce often haunting, otherworldly images. Here in  Dyke at Night, Reflected Lights , the town is asleep, apart of course from the solitary wandering artist. There...