Exhibitions Newsfeed

Sylvia Grant-Dalton disliked house so never modernised it – putting her energy into gardening, floral displays and art

Sylvia Grant-Dalton was the custodian of a grand Victorian house that she never liked and never modernised, failing to replace peeling wallpaper, fraying carpets or broken shutters.

Nor was she able to sort out rampant rising damp or multiple pest infestations. For all of that, English Heritage is profoundly grateful.

Cecily Brown blooms into life, Ashanti folklore is remade and three Indigenous Australians spill their ancient knowledge

Cecily Brown: Picture Making
New nature-tastic works of kaleidoscopic, richly textured, painterly experimentation by the YBA who never felt cool enough to really be a YBA. Springing to life just as the blossoms around the Serpentine really start to bloom.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, until 6 September

Piece by late South African artist Dumile Feni is part of new series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme

On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.

While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.

Show draws almost entirely from collection of Lancashire schoolteacher Peter Smithson, a fan since he was 10

Peter Smithson’s wife, Belise, has never minded when he receives a corset from Japan or a pair of fur-trimmed knickers and they are not for her.

“No, she’s never seen it as strange,” said Smithson, a chemistry teacher and Vivienne Westwood supercollector. “She has never judged it. She gets it. She knows it is part and parcel of who I am.”

Royal Academy, London
Wautier’s mighty paintings have been misattributed to her male peers for 300 years, but now UK audiences can enjoy their first encounter with a 17th-century trailblazer

Art history is currently in the process of revising the accepted white male canon by uncovering overlooked female artists. We have had the recent explosion in interest of the extraordinary work of Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom major exhibitions such as the National Gallery’s have been at pains to extricate from the violent sexual assault that tends to overshadow her biography. By contrast, we have scant documentary evidence of her direct contemporary Michaelina Wautier (about 1614–1689) other than that she was born in Mons in the Spanish Netherlands (present day Belgium) and lived with her artist brother Charles in Brussels near the royal court.

Both share the commonality of being so technically accomplished – while operating in a patriarchal society that prevented women easily enjoying successful artistic careers – that their work has since automatically been misattributed to their male counterparts and thus obfuscated in art history for 300 years; for Artemisia her father Orazio, and Michaelina her brother Charles or other contemporary baroque painters. Wautier is also elusive in straddling several genres, all executed with consistent quality: portraits, history or religious painting, and decorative floral work – the latter more commonly associated with female artists – further preventing identification.

The Last Princesses of Punjab opens on Thursday at Kensington Palace

The extraordinary life of an exiled Punjabi princess, embraced by the British royal court and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, but who would become a pioneering suffragette and challenge the very authority of the elite social circles in which she moved, is to be told in a new exhibition.

Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharajah of the Punjab. As a child he was forced to surrender his lands to the East India Company in 1849, and sign away the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, now a potent symbol of colonial exploitation and set in the crown of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Objects that were believed to have some form of magic effect are part of an exhibition exploring how ancient cultures tried to change the world around them

Whether it’s an ancient amulet to protect a newborn baby, a love spell to lock down a romantic relationship, a potion that someone might pick up today from their neighborhood apothecary, or even a spray of Chanel perfume to make yourself irresistIble, humans have used – and continue to use – magic to get what they want. These spells and their use in the ancient world are the focus of Cursed! an entrancing exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art that offers a deep dive into the use of magic in ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

“Magic is in all societies, it’s a very basic human desire, to want to have some control over your world,” said show curator Dr Jeffrey Spier, a former senior curator with the J Paul Getty Museum. “There’s always been a desire to use some hidden power to get what you need.”

Grand Palais, Paris
An epic collection of the artist’s final 13 years of work explodes with the stunning colours and spiky cutouts that redefined art

Forget the joy and energy of youth – your best days might yet be ahead. Henri Matisse’s were, even when he barely made it out of surgery alive in his early 70s as war was breaking out across France. Sitting in his wheelchair, his hand wobblier and weaker than ever, his body scarcely able to muster the strength to stand and paint, he reinvented himself and reshaped modern art in the process.

Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais’ huge exploration of the last years of Matisse’s life – from his surgery in 1941 to his death in 1954 – is a dizzying, joyous celebration of colour, form, line, light and then a whole bunch more colour. It’s so good, so beautiful, so totally overwhelming. It was always bound to be – it’s Matisse, with all the resources of France’s vast collection of Matisse works. It’s a show full of hits.

Konrad Mägi is given his time to shine, Fiona Banner hits a word-picture high and Carrington takes over the home of Sigmund Freud – all in your weekly dispatch

Konrad Mägi
You mean you haven’t heard of “Estonia’s greatest modernist painter”? Who knows, this exhibition may put his name in lights.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 24 March to 12 July

In a new exhibition, the featured images reflect Britain’s attempts to classify and curb the Indian subcontinent’s population, but they also demonstrate the nobility of their subjects – and the futility of the task

At first, and without the context, someone looking at this collection of 150-year-old photographs of Indian men and women might think they were looking at compelling portraits. The faces are of individuals with piercing eyes and a striking presence.

But context changes everything. The images were taken by British colonialists as part of a great project of photographic ethnography, intended to classify and categorise their subjects.

Untitled (Indian family in Singapore), late-19th century, GR Lambert & Co

A Princeton University Art Museum show captures the urgent power of the iconic abstract expressionist’s 1945-50 breakthrough years

Artist Willem de Kooning held his first solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in spring 1948, just shy of his 44th birthday. A smash success, the exhibition made his reputation, repositioning the artist and catapulting him to international renown by the early 1950s. By the decade’s end, many would consider him the world’s pre-eminent painter.

Princeton University Art Museum now offers a kind of revisiting of de Kooning’s transformative star-making show with Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, covering 1945-50. Featuring 18 paintings that reveal an artist feeling his way between figuration and abstraction, it shows de Kooning finding his own unique relationship with both styles. Although The Breakthrough Years does not feature the exact lineup of paintings from the Egan show, it does take audiences intimately into the artist’s creative life from that period.

A new exhibition explores how graphic design helped define New York City’s response to Aids from the late 1970s to the 2000s. Grassroots groups such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Act Up created posters to promote safe sex and healthcare, as well as calling out the Reagan administration for inaction in the face of the crisis. Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS is on display until 6 September

Show in part a rediscovery of more than 40 mostly forgotten women who plied their trade in the Low Countries

Judith Leyster, an artist of the Dutch golden age, was thought to be about 21 when she painted her self-portrait in 1630. In the picture she presented to the world, Leyster exudes cheerful confidence. Clad in shimmering silks and a stiffly starched lace collar, she leans back in her chair, palette and brushes in hand, a painting by her side.

This work, completed in the year she was admitted to a painters’ guild in Haarlem, proclaimed her arrival as an established artist. It was one of the first self-portraits by an artist in the Dutch republic, a device most male painters did not adopt until years later.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
From poppy seeds and opium pipes to the astonishing truth about tulips, science and obsession collide in this aromatic history of plants and pioneers

Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, died in 1715 having spent her life changing the floral world. She procured plants from Africa, India, China, Japan and South America that had never been seen in Britain before. These were for her vast formal garden – a print featured in this delightful exhibition shows its regular avenues and plantations, all covering a considerable part of Gloucestershire. But if Somerset’s disciplined parkland is pure Age of Reason, a painting she commissioned of one of her sunflowers is a yellow ecstasy: a blazing cosmic eye staring wildly at you.

Science and obsession, this show reveals, have never been far apart in the history of humans and plants. In the 1600s and 1700s, European botany made huge intellectual advances, filling European gardens with new colours and aromas. All this depended on growing commercial, naval and military might that brought the world’s seeds and bulbs to Britain and its neighbours. Yet even as pioneers collected and classified global flora, the sheer beauty and sensuality of flowers threatened to turn analysis into beauty-addled reverie.

Bibby Boys photo exhibition documents experiences of the men who lived on the former asylum seeker vessel in Dorset and the local community that rallied around them

The Bibby Stockholm barge, which was moored off Portland, Dorset to accommodate asylum seekers, attracted many negative headlines – from evacuation after the discovery of legionella bacteria, to the suicide of Albanian asylum seeker Leonard Farruku and angry far-right protests.

But an exhibition launching this week reveals a less reported side of life on the barge, where enduring connections between asylum seekers and members of the local community were forged and continue long after the last group of asylum seekers left the vessel in November 2024.

Documentary photographer Viva Gibb captured the people who lived in her neighbourhood around north and west Melbourne in the 1970s and 80s. The community portraits are now on show in a free exhibition at the City Gallery.

• On the street where I live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne is at the City Gallery until 7 August

Alexis Ralaivao’s provocative paintings, Hiroshige and Hokusai in perspective and a grand survey of flowers in fine art – all in your weekly dispatch

In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World
Lovely flower paintings to herald the spring, but all is not what it seems in this survey of how science, trade and tulip crazes helped shape the modern world.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 19 March to 16 August

A new exhibition at New York’s Poster House celebrates the work of Black performers on the stage and screen from the 1880s to the 1940s. Many of these posters are the only surviving documentation of certain shows, with no recordings of plays and certain films having been lost over time. They offer a history of Black Americans trying to counter harmful stereotypes and provide vital and humanizing contributions to a growing Black culture. Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is on display from 13 March to 6 September. All words and images from the Poster House and curator Es-pranza Humphrey

National Gallery, London
Britain’s greatest painter of animal anatomy receives a tiny survey in a single room, while his masterpiece remains on show elsewhere in the building. Why, when he’s as good as Constable – and better than Blake?

Everything keeps getting simpler and shallower – even exhibitions at the National Gallery. A decade ago, if it put on a show about George Stubbs, the 18th-century painter of the natural world, you’d get a thorough survey of the Liverpool-born artist who left a huge number of great portraits of animals – not just horses but a zebra, a kangaroo, a rhinoceros. But in 2026, the National gives him a single room aimed at the most incurious of audiences.

It is certainly a beautiful room. Towering at the centre is a spectacular painting of a riderless, unsaddled, rearing horse called Scrub. As you contemplate his chestnut flanks, something weird happens: a network of veins becomes visible and the ribcage materialises like an X-ray. Look to the left and you see where Stubbs got such an uncanny ability to see inside Scrub. Some of the stunning drawings he did as research for his 1766 book The Anatomy of the Horse hang like spectres against the dark green wall. Stubbs took these horses apart, hiding out in a cottage in Lincolnshire where he could sling up their carcasses and reverently eviscerate them. The flayed, dissected bodies possess a mysterious dignity.

Experience the artist’s largest ever exhibition at a private view hosted by the Guardian at Tate Modern in London

On Thursday 16 April, the Guardian and Tate will be hosting a private, after-hours event to celebrate the groundbreaking work of world-renowned artist Tracey Emin – and as a valued Guardian reader, you’re invited.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life is the largest ever exhibition of Emin’s work, and features career-defining sensations alongside works never before exhibited.