Exhibitions Newsfeed

The second addition to Stratford’s new skyline from architects O’Donnell + Tuomey is a triumph, its bold lines and simple interiors a welcoming home for the art, people and creativity it celebrates

• Our art critic on the collection

It’s hard to tear your eyes away from Leigh Bowery’s pink sequined codpiece, just one of the many sumptuous objects in the cabinet of curiosities that is V&A East Museum, the new museum in London’s Olympic Park. But the idea of radical tailoring underpins this whole building, which exudes an explicit haute couture vibe. For Dublin-based architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, it all started with a sleeve in a Vermeer painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. “I was trying to work with the folds,” says John Tuomey, “which became the first iteration of the building. I started thinking about the fabric that clothes you, the body that’s sheltered, but also the space in between.”

Ideas of draping and concealment were also sparked by the work of Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, the subject of a 2017 V&A retrospective. As part of that exhibition, ghostly X-ray images, at once beautiful and forensic, revealed details not visible to the naked eye, such as boning, hoops and dress weights, which determined the precise fall of fabric and shape of garments.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
An exhibition of almost 100 artists, from Gordon Parks to Roy Lichtenstein, positions the US as ‘a living idea that’s shaped by many voices’

Set foot in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition marking America’s 250th birthday and it is immediately clear this is not the kind of jingoistic, flag-waving orgy that Donald Trump is plotting for 4 July.

There, to be sure, is the Statue of Liberty, but not as millions of tourists know it. Instead the statue is evoked by an image of a Black woman from the South African photographer Zanele Muholi and by a colour screenprint – geometric planes and shapes against a backdrop of diagonal purple stripes – from Roy Lichtenstein.

Born into slavery, Adolf Ludvig Couschi Badin became part of Swedish royal court and left legacy of books and letters

In 1760, a Black child around 10 years old arrived at the Swedish royal court as a “gift” to the queen. Adolf Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albrecht Couschi, who became known as Badin (derived from the French for joker or prankster), later held titles including chamberlain, court secretary, ballet master and civil servant.

He is thought to have been born into slavery between 1747 and 1750 in the former Danish colony of St Croix (now part of the US Virgin Islands), where he was “owned” by Christian Lebrecht von Pröck, who took him to Denmark. He was “received” by Gustaf de Brunck, a Swedish councillor of commerce, who later “donated” Badin to Queen Louisa Ulrika.

Swedish artist, now regarded as predecessor to Kandinsky and Mondrian, died thinking world was not ready for her work

The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died believing the world was not ready for the mystical paintings that would shock the art world half a century later.

The painter, now credited with pioneering the abstract art movement, did not seek recognition after peers rejected her avant garde works. Instead, she ordered that they be hidden for 20 years after her death and never sold.

Digital wizard John Gerrard on the energy industry, Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s first UK museum exhibition and a foreboding view from Artemis II – all in your weekly dispatch

Extraction
This ominous exhibition takes a look at the filthy world of oil, gas and petroleum, all seen through the lens of artists such as biomorphic sculptor Marguerite Humeau and digital wizard John Gerrard.
• Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, 11 April to 26 July

The great photographer documented black family life in postwar Alabama – and the dignity and resilience people showed under discriminatory Jim Crow laws

BFI and National Portrait Gallery to mark centenary of the film star’s birth with ‘the summer of Marilyn’

Though often reduced to a sex symbol frozen in time, or a tragic figure at the centre of several scandals, Marilyn Monroe was something far more subversive, according to two exhibitions that will herald what has been nicknamed “the summer of Marilyn”.

To mark the centenary of her birth, Monroe is being celebrated by leading British cultural institutions as a performer of sharp comic intelligence, a canny architect of her own image, and a woman who reshaped the possibilities for female stardom on screen.

This new NGV exhibition examines historical images of maternity alongside works by real artists made during the throes of motherhood

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When asked about her art-making practice later in life, after her children had grown up and left home, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz replied: “I work like a cow grazes.”

She didn’t mean she was relaxed, content and experiencing a newfound creative liberty; she meant that her work was suffering from the absence of child-rearing demands. Time now stretched out and her art-making, similarly uncontained, had lost its urgency.

Scottish designers are showcased alongside a backstage set and props including a Chanel-branded megaphone

In 1971, Manolo Blahnik created shoes for the designer Ossie Clark’s catwalk show in London. Relatively new to shoemaking, the Spanish designer forgot to put steel pins in the heels of the shoes, which meant that models wobbled, unbalanced, down the catwalk. Blahnik thought it was the end of his career. But the press thought it was a deliberate style; the photographer Sir Cecil Beaton even christened it “a new way of walking”.

The sandal in question, a green suede heel with ivy leaf embellishments, is just one treasure currently on display at the V&A Dundee’s new exhibition, Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show, which helps bring to life more than 100 years of history, charting its journey from the discreet salons of 19th-century London and Paris all the way up to the extravaganza it is today.

Sadie Coles HQ, London
From holiday snaps to atrocities, Throbbing Gristle album covers to backsides in shorts, the Polish painter reproduces the scattered attention and flattened perspective of our social media age

Wilhelm Sasnal has transformed the ground floor of Sadie Coles’ elegant gallery into a parade of broken images: the Oval Office, a ghastly forest, a blasted tree trunk, the artist’s wife and daughter, a British post-punk band, and the sitting US president surrounded by cronies, his face resembling the burn produced by screwing a lit cigarette into a photograph.

These paintings, most of which are untitled, are broken in the sense that an online link can be broken: it is difficult to connect them to their source. (It would be useful to know the location of that tree, for instance.) They are also broken in that they do not fit together as a whole. What connects that revolting White House interior, with its acid greens and faecal browns, with a spooky forest? What links President Trump to the founders of industrial music?

Poland’s leading figurative artist de-faces Trump, feminist art rebels squat in East Sussex, and the UK’s street art is captured – all in your weekly dispatch

Wilhelm Sasnal: family/history
The domestic meets the political in these unsettling new paintings of family life and global current affairs (including some greyed-out visions of the Oval Office) by Poland’s leading figurative artist.
• Sadie Coles HQ, London, until 23 May

As the daughter of refugees, Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani’s work reframes caring for bodies – both human and animal - as a political act. Her new exhibition, Forest of Stars, will be on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery from 16 April to 22 May

A new book celebrating four decades of fashion photography duo Inez and Vinoodh features celebrity portraits, surrealist visions and a meditation on love itself

The pioneering Nordic artist brought wit, verve and cinematic flair to postwar photography. A new exhibition celebrates her vibrant visual style

He has faced off a fighter jet, ridden a motorised bed and even been a Beano character. As he steps down, the mighty Guardian critic delivers his insights, confesses his crimes and relives his highs

After writing about art at the Guardian for 30 years, I have been asked by my editor to reflect on what I have learned. I am not sure I’m capable of doing that. What I can do is write about what I have seen. Even when you are an eyewitness, things get murky very quickly, and critics are among the most unreliable of narrators.

An unknown woman at a table writes a letter we can’t see, while her maid reacts to something beyond the painted window. We can’t see what she’s smiling at either. How is it that Vermeer’s 1670-71 Woman Writing a Letter, With Her Maid, makes me feel somehow privy to its intimacies when almost everything that matters is withheld? You have to make it up. The stories come barging in, something you can’t quite imagine happening in such an ordered world.

The images are famous, but the women who took them are often forgotten. An inspiring exhibition focuses on the pioneering ‘new vision’ of Marianne Brandt, Lucia Moholy and more

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.”