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The English Prize, Ashmolean

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A few days into 1779, a pair of French warships rounded on the Westmorland, a merchantman bound for London from Livorno. The captain, out-gunned, surrendered. The Westmorland was towed into Malaga, where its cargo – anchovies, parmesan and 90 crates of art and antiquities being shipped home by gentlemen on the Grand Tour – was split up and sold. The crates were bought by Carlos III, Spain's Franco-Italian king, their contents dispersed among royal collections.

El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

At the start of the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast's magisterial show, El Greco and Modernism, is a small panel, egg tempera on wood, of St Luke Painting an Icon of the Virgin and Child. Its battered state apart, there is something wrong with the picture. St Luke is making a proper, Byzantine icon, painted without perspective; but the image in which he does so is painted perspectivally. The work is a manifesto against the Greek status quo, and was painted by a Greek. Spaniards, reasonably, dubbed him el greco.

Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican Gallery, London

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Such are the turns of history that we tend to see the Bauhaus as having sprung to life fully formed, a launch pad for Modernism that owed nothing to what had gone before except the burning desire to negate it. Common sense says that this cannot be so, and so does Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican.

Christian Louboutin, Design Museum, London

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

When talking of high heels, it's as well to define terms. There are the sort that Marilyn Monroe wore to wiggle along that railway platform in Some Like It Hot. There are the sort that Strictly dancers wear to sharpen their silhouette. And then there are the ones that cause young women to clutch each other for support in the street on a Saturday night, bracing their knees and arching their backs in the attempt to keep upright.

Out of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery, London

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Out of focus. On the face of it, not a promising name for an exhibition of photographs.

Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Various venues

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:55 +0100

The selectors of the every-other-yearly Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (GI) face an enviable problem. There are too many Glaswegian contemporary artists, and too much of what they do is good. Head for head, the city creatively outperforms any town in Britain. Were London to compete, Hoxton would have to be 10 times as big. The danger for GI selectors is of over-favouring local artists, making the project parochial. The word “International” is there between “Glasgow” and “Festival”, after all, although in the past it has sometimes felt overlooked.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sepentine Gallery, London

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

There is doubtless a word in German for the mood that pervades Hans-Peter Feldmann's work, something involving Schmerz, perhaps, or maybe Gestalt. It is a mood that is not restricted to Germans.

Damien Hirst, Tate Modern, London Gillian Wearing, Whitechapel Gallery, London

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Two retrospectives in two London galleries, of two once Young British Artists two dozen years after Freeze. Time for a reappraisal, and not just of the work in the shows.

Remote Control, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:33:27 +0100

As the television switchover springs us gaily into digital, that endlessly malleable world of glittering pixels, what is it that we are leaving behind us (aside from a mountain of outdated TVs)?

Zoe Leonard, Camden Arts Centre

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:20:26 +0100

The world usually rushes at us so quickly – its perfume, noise and changing weather, the skewing angles of our emotions and thoughts – that we find it hard to see.

Taking Time, Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

In his left hand, the boy holds a playing card, an ace of hearts. He studies it, his lips pursed as though the red symbol on the card is their imprint. The boy is not interested in kissing, though – the neglected gaming-chips on the table spell out the innocence of his youth. Nor is his interest in the card's value as an ace. Like other boys on the wall in this room, he is using it to build a house: more properly, a château de cartes, the four young card-players being French, the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

Brains: The Mind as Matter, Wellcome Collection, London

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

In a world where few mysteries remain, the human brain is a last frontier. Each of us walks around with a whitish, soft, pudding-like lump weighing roughly 1.4kg lodged at the top of our spinal column. It's responsible for processing and housing the totality of our life experience, yet despite rapid advances in neuroscience, many aspects of its inner workings are still unclear.

Keith Vaughan, Pallant House, Chichester

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

The seated man watching the Musicians at Marrakesh is – at least in the mind of Keith Vaughan – the artist himself looking on and listening in. The massive back, bottle-top head and wayward limbs are grey and lumpen. The musicians, by contrast, are glowing, creamy and luminous: the ochre drum, a radiant little sun, the cross-legged player as neat and focused as his observer is awkward.

Miro: Sculptor, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Unless, unlike me, you are a Miró specialist, you would probably not take Souvenir de la Tour Eiffel for the Catalan master's work. There are several reasons why not.

All About Eve: the Photography of Eve Arnold, Art Sensus, London

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:37:49 +0000

American photographer Eve Arnold, who died in January aged 99, was good with celebrities. Only, she called them ‘personalities’ – apt, given that’s exactly what she caught in her portraits.

Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, Royal Academy, London

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Was there ever a more ill-matched pair than George III and Queen Charlotte? I do not mean the royal couple themselves – as their marriage produced 15 children, we can assume that it was fond at the very least – but their portraits by Zoffany, in the show of his work at the Royal Academy.

A design for living from the Mojave Desert

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Growing up in the California suburbs gave the artist Andrea Zittel a feeling that her life was artificial. She longed for something more authentic, and her experiments with ways of living have become her art. She now lives in a complex in the Mojave Desert, where her house and studio has been beautifully converted from former shipping containers, painted white. It is a place where all parts of everyday life are questioned, and become art. She has lived without clocks, only worn clothes that she has made herself, eaten dehydrated food for a year, and made living shelters of her own design – not houses, but constructions called Wagon Stations, which makes them sound like something from the Wild West.

The Starry Rubric Set, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:23:47 +0000

Cosmology and traditional astrology are ostensibly the themes of this sparky group show at experimental residency centre Wysing in Cambridgeshire, titled after a line in Milton's “Paradise Regained” (in which Satan describes to Jesus that he sees for him a future of pain, sorrow and death, as well as a kingdom of sorts, but he cannot tell the real from the allegorical and cannot see a timeframe). This inability to place the future in time perhaps offers more of an explanation to this exhibition than anything relating to Aquarius or Virgo, though images of constellations do draw many of the works together aesthetically.

Alighiero Boetti, Tate Modern, London

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Halfway through Tate Modern's Alighiero Boetti show is a work that you will almost certainly never see, or at least not see in action. Called Lampada annuale (Annual Lamp), it consists of a mirror-lined black box or crate holding a single, outsized light bulb.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, Hayward Gallery, London

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

In 2007, London Underground approached Jeremy Deller with a commission to design a new cover for the Tube map. It was, with hindsight, a foolish thing to do. Deller is a militant cyclist: the image he produced for LU reshaped the familiar coloured plan of Harry Beck's map – Central Line red, District green, Circle yellow – into a bicycle. Sensing subversion, the company turned Deller's design down. You will find it towards the end of his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, under the bald if accurate title Rejected Tube Map Cover Illustration.

Fascinating Mummies, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Dignity in death, or at least the right for a corpse to moulder in peace, is a given in our time. The church no longer divvies up the remains of saints. Graveyards are sacrosanct, more or less. Even 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummies can rest undisturbed, now that X-rays and CT scans can see beneath their wrappings.

Mary Heilmann: Visions, Waves and Roads, Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:35:17 +0000

In the 1970s Mary Heilmann, an American painter, did something to abstract painting that, at that time, seemed pretty unlikely.

Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, London

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:33:15 +0000

Seeing spots from the mind of Yayoi Kusama is not always a pleasant experience. An artist from Japan, now in her 80s, Kusama made her name in New York in the 1950s and 60s, in an artworld dominated by abstract expressionism, predominantly made by men.

The Starry Rubric Set, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:31:31 +0000

Cosmology and traditional astrology are oestensibly the themes of this sparky group show at experimental residency centre Wysing in Cambridgeshire, titled after a line in Milton’s Paradise Regained (in which Satan describes to Jesus that he sees in his stars a future of pain, sorrow and death, as well as a kingdom of sorts, but he cannot tell the real from the allegorical and cannot predict a timeframe of events).

The Forgetting of Proper Names, Calvert 22

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:30:37 +0000

A young blonde woman in a teensy white bandeau top is singing straight to a video camera that ‘Jesus loves her for the Bible tells her so’.

Picasso and Modern British Art, Tate Britain, London Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel, Courtauld Gallery, London

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

That Ben Nicholson is the co-subject of two major exhibitions in London this month suggests something is afoot.

Song Dong: Waste Not, Barbican Curve, London

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

So do you think some big gallery – maybe Tat Britain, ha ha – would let me put my mother's old rubbish on display and call it art?

Lucian Freud Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Towards the end of the National Portrait Gallery's Lucian Freud show is a disquieting picture, not by the artist but of him.

David Shrigley: Brain Activity, Hayward Gallery, London

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:53 +0000

Even more than any of his contemporaries, David Shrigley forces us to ask the Big Question: is it art? Shrigley, 43, is best known for his newspaper cartoons – scratchy, naively drawn figures in black and white, usually with a deadpan legend attached. One that sticks in the mind, for some reason, is a pig with the words “I’m a pig” written on its side. It is not particularly funny, but then nor is it meant to be. Shrigley’s drawings have a higher aim than that. Their maker went to art school, ergo they are art.

Hanne Darboven, Camden Arts Centre, London

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Were you to start your visit to the Camden Arts Centre's new show in the gallery's study room, you might come away with entirely the wrong idea about Hanne Darboven.

Hajj: Journey to the heart of Islam, British Museum, London

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Trust the British Museum, under the leadership of Neil MacGregor, to grasp the nettle.