Exhibitions Newsfeed

Balshaw, who joined in 2017, helped steer organisation through Covid-19 and fluctuating attendance

Maria Balshaw is to step down as the director of Tate in 2026, after a challenging nine-year tenure when she steered the organisation through the Covid-19 pandemic and had to deal with fluctuating attendance figures and financial instability.

Balshaw, who joined as director in June 2017 after a celebrated spell as the leader of the Whitworth in Manchester, said it was a privilege to serve as director but now was the time for her to move on.

With its soaring ceilings, meandering pathways and mesh-like walls, Taichung Art Museum, designed by Sanaa, sweeps visitors from library to gallery to rooftop garden for rousing views

Walking through the brand new Taichung Art Museum in central Taiwan, directions are kind of an abstract concept. Designed by powerhouse Japanese architecture firm Sanaa, the complex is a collection of eight askew buildings, melding an art museum and municipal library, encased in silver mesh-like walls, with soaring ceilings and meandering pathways.

Past the lobby – a breezy open space that is neither inside nor out – the visitor wanders around paths and ramps, finding themselves in the library one minute and a world-class art exhibition the next. A door might suddenly step through to a skybridge over a rooftop garden, with sweeping views across Taichung’s Central Park, or into a cosy teenage reading room. Staircases float on the outside of buildings, floor levels are disparate, complementing a particular space’s purpose and vibe rather than having an overall consistency.

Artists explore insomnia and snoozing, sculptors imagine alternative futures and we look back with a great British photographer – all in your weekly dispatch

To Improvise a Mountain
Painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye portrays fictional people in made-up settings. Where does she get her haunting ideas? Here she reveals her inspirations from Walter Sickert to Bas Jan Ader.
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, until 25 January

Letter written hours before her execution in 1587 will form part of exhibition and programme of events in Perth aiming to bring queen’s story to life

A letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots hours before her execution in 1587 will go on display for the first time in nearly a decade when it forms part of an exhibition in Perth next year.

Mary wrote what is believed to be her last letter at 2am on Wednesday 8 February 1587 when she wrote to her brother-in-law Henri III in France to put her affairs in order. She was executed six hours later at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire.

Unfettered love for late photographer in France and elsewhere stands in contrast to occasional reservations in UK

The death of Martin Parr, the photographer whose work chronicled the rituals and customs of British life, was front-page news in France and his life and work were celebrated as far afield as the US and Japan.

If his native England had to shake off concerns about the role of class in Parr’s satirical gaze before it could fully embrace him, countries like France have long revered the Epsom-born artist “like a rock or a movie star”, said the curator Quentin Bajac.

Ghana’s capital is a party and entertainment hub but members of the diaspora would do well to experience its spectacular art scene

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After more than 50 editions surfing across the waves of the global Black diaspora with Nesrine, this will be my final dispatch for the Long Wave, as I move on to a new role on the Opinion desk at the Guardian. I am heartbroken to be leaving, but I am so thankful to all of our readers for being so encouraging and engaged throughout the past year.

Any who, time to cut the sad music (this is my farewell tune of choice), as I have one more edition for you. In late autumn, I took my first trip to Ghana for Accra Cultural Week. While there, I visited the historic area of Jamestown, which was reflected in an exhibition by artist Serge Attukwei Clottey.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe made clothes for her daughter while waiting for her eventual release. Now, the idea of creativity as a form of resistance is the theme of a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum and the fabric department of Liberty.

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned home to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she brought back with her a small patchwork cushion. Pieced together from scrap material and made with the single sewing machine available in the prison, it was the product of a communal craft circle.

“It’s something very, very precious to me,” she said. So precious, in fact, that she has worked on a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty, creating three new prints that explore experience as a prisoner.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the expat artist and former puppet maker’s largest ever Australian exhibition contains popular hits and stunning new work

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We start arse first: two firm and fulsome buttocks, eye height and each double the size of my head. This will be visitors’ first encounter with the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ summer exhibition, Ron Mueck: Encounter – the largest ever Australian showing of the expat star sculptor’s work, spanning almost three decades.

Rounding the supersized figure, you feel a flash of understanding: she’s extremely pregnant, ready to pop, and her closed eyes and parted lips, as if exhaling, suggest a state of stoic exhaustion at being quite this gravid – in Sydney summer, no less.

The British Museum is infused with Sufi spirit, Henry VIII’s storied Ottoman dagger gets its own show, Rego’s art is renewed and a Fabergé sets a new record – all in your weekly dispatch

Henry VIII’s Lost Dagger
A curious quest for the Tudor tyrant’s lost, highly phallic dagger in the house where modern gothic began.
• Strawberry Hill House, London, until 15 February

Baltic, Gateshead
ASMR prophets, Soviet hypnotists, mountaintop rituals … there is scene after scene of breathtaking beauty, elemental ambience and disorienting anxiety in this first solo UK show by the Uzbek artist film-maker

Your heart almost stops the moment you enter Saodat Ismailova’s As We Fade. Within a minute, you’ll forget about the outside world. The Baltic has curated a concise, brave first solo exhibition in the UK of film pieces by the Uzbek artist and film-maker. It is exhilarating, terrifying and unforgettable.

The room is dark. Four works are arranged around a padded black square in the centre for sitting or lying down on – a reference to the void, something Ismailova has been fascinated with throughout her two-decade practice. She grew up during perestroika, a period of widespread political, social and economic reform in the late 1980s, when Soviet ideology began to collapse leaving a void in the culture. Ismailova felt this deeply – her father was a cinematographer and she was on sets with him from a young age. The family lived in a building opposite the largest and oldest film studio in Uzbekistan. During perestroika, films stopped being screened in public.

As the band celebrate their 60th anniversary, a California exhibition draws attention to the unique psychedelic artwork that has long told their story

Artist Bill Walker is one of those guys who always seems to be in the right place at the right time. Having met Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead bassist and avant-garde classical composer, as a student at Nevada Southern University (now the University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Walker was invited in 1967 to make an album cover for the band’s second album, Anthem of the Sun. This experience led to an epic LSD and ayahuasca trip in the Valley of Fire outside Las Vegas over New Year’s Eve and when Walker returned to San Francisco, he painted Anthem of the Sun, complete with figures he came across in the desert.

The Anthem of the Sun painting visually demonstrates the intense innovation that happened in the psychedelic revolution, when music was electrified and LSD became central to the burst of culture that defined the 1960s. The Grateful Dead encapsulated this spirit in their music and came to be considered the most American band of all time for being at the center of the psychedelic movement and its transition from the Beat generation that preceded it.

Artist Naima Green has explored the concept and expectations of motherhood in a solo exhibition called Instead, I spin fantasies which is currently on show at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. The photos, which are a mix of real and semi-fictional, feature Green herself with a prosthetic pregnant belly and others in her life and community. ‘I’m trying to explore a very expansive picture across different geographies, different classes, different ideas of family, just as a way of seeing, understanding or creating different possibilities for family-making,’ she said in a recent interview

‘I spent the 90s with Pam – clubbing and partying in the way those times demanded. What I saw was a truly groundbreaking artist, and a life marked by independence, courage and kindness’

• Pam Hogg, fashion designer with a rock’n’roll spirit, dies at 66 – news
• Pam Hogg – obituary

There are people who live life to the full, then there’s Pamela Hogg. Pam’s tenure on this earth is a trawl through just about every significant cultural and creative moment in the UK over the last 30-odd years. One of our most groundbreaking artists, Pam was a colourist of Warholian proportions, creating art to be hung on the body rather than the walls of a gallery. She was a punk who provocatively mashed up gender and sexual stereotypes. Fashion was the art form that freed her imagination, and her success was due to her talent and drive being greater than her disdain of the conformist industry and the gatekeepers surrounding it.

I sat in St Joseph’s hospice in London by her unconscious but serenely beautiful figure – as if she’d made her exit into another work of art – telling her that her jam-packed life was characterised by creativity, independence, courage and kindness. “Hoggy, you left absolutely nothing on the table.”

Capturing the changing landscapes of the 18th century, the rivals transformed British art. The climate emergency gives new urgency to their work

JMW Turner appears on £20 notes and gives his name to Britain’s most avant garde contemporary art prize. John Constable’s work adorns countless mugs and jigsaws. Both are emblematic English artists, but in the popular imagination, Turner is perceived as daring and dazzling, Constable as nice but a little bit dull. In a Radio 4 poll to find the nation’s favourite painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which even features in the James Bond film Skyfall – won. Constable’s The Hay Wain came second. Born only a year later, Constable was always playing catch-up: Turner became a member of the Royal Academy at 27, while Constable had to wait until he was 52.

To mark the 250th anniversary of their births, Tate Britain is putting on the first major exhibition to display the two titans head to head. Shakespeare and Marlowe, Mozart and Salieri, Van Gogh and Gauguin – creative rivalries are the stuff of biopics. Mike Leigh’s 2014 film shows Turner (Timothy Spall) adding a touch of red to his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1832. Critics delighted in dubbing them “Fire and Water”. The enthralling new Tate show is billed as a battle of rivals, but it also tells another story. Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too.

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Artists turn from the heroic to the everyday, Paula Rego gives everyone a fright and a stealth wealth still life is subtly revealing – all in your weekly dispatch

Monument to the Unimportant
With the birth of modernism, artists turned their gaze from the heroic to the “unimportant”. This attention to the everyday continues, as Rachel Whiteread, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Gober and others demonstrate.
• Pace Gallery, London, until 14 February

When the great artist saw a shocking play by Martin McDonagh about the torture of children, she asked him for more dark stories. As the vivid, extraordinary works they triggered go on show, the playwright looks back

In the summer of 2004, Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh asking for permission to name some pictures after his play The Pillowman. His shocking investigation into the relationship between art and life featured two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children. One is a writer whose stories are summarised by an investigator as: “A hundred and one ways to skewer a fucking five-year-old.”

Rego, then a 69-year-old grandmother as well as a world famous artist, had gone to see the play at the National Theatre in London at the suggestion of one of her daughters, who knew it would resonate with her. “The brutality and beauty and humour rang very true and like something I had known all my life,” she wrote to McDonagh. “I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are brusque and cruel like yours.”

The artist and his wife, novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, lost seven pregnancies before their daughter was born. They explain how his nude paintings of her helped them process their grief – and eventual joy

‘The subject comes with huge baggage and I like that,” says Tom de Freston. The painter and I are in his studio in a village outside Oxford, surrounded by nude portraits of his wife, the novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave. “I wanted to ask, ‘What does it mean as a male artist to be looking at the female figure? And where does the agency sit?’”

We have been talking about Titian’s Poesie series, how those paintings – commissioned by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Spain – fetishise the naked female body. “Obviously there’s other things going on in them … I think Titian’s often prodding at morality and power,” De Freston says.

Tate Britain, London
JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show. But who cares when the work is so sublime you can hear the squelching and smell the river?

Turner or Constable: who’s the boss? Tate Britain’s exhibition of work by the two artists, subtitled Rivals and Originals, fudges the question. Born a year apart and both alumni of the Royal Academy schools in London, each was keenly aware of what the other was doing, in a British art world that was as febrile and competitive, if immeasurably smaller, than it is today (although you should try the Italian Renaissance if you want full-blooded rivalries and enmities). Sometimes, they sought the same collectors and painted the same subjects. Turner was encouraged from an early age by his father, a Covent Garden wigmaker and barber; Constable was the son of a Suffolk mill owner and grain merchant who wanted him to take over the family business.

As well as their contrasting backgrounds, their temperaments could not have been more different. A scene from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as Turner and James Fleet as Constable, plays in the show, presenting the two painters bickering on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy in 1832. Turner added a touch of red, in the form of a buoy, to his seascape Helvoetsluys; the City of Utrecht, 64, Going to Sea in order to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, on which the painter had been working for more than a decade. But whatever their rivalry entailed, it was hardly the odd-couple bromance between Van Gogh and Gauguin depicted in the 1956 Vincente Minnelli movie Lust for Life (Gauguin: “You paint too fast!” Van Gogh: “You look too fast!”). It is worth remembering that Constable once wrote in a letter: “Did you ever see a picture by Turner, and not wish to possess it?”

In three thrilling works by Caravaggio, the same boy’s face crops up. As one – the astonishing Victorious Cupid – arrives in Britain, we ask: who was this anarchic model and muse?

The boy howls as his head is held down, a huge thumb pressing into his cheek as his father’s mighty hand holds him by the neck. This is The Sacrifice of Isaac and I am looking at it in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, feeling distressed by how Caravaggio has so chillingly rendered the face of this suffering child from the biblical tale. It looks as if Abraham, who has been told by God to kill his son, could break his neck with just one twist. Yet Abraham’s preferred method is with the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac’s throat. One thing’s for certain – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work was a great actor. There is not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

Standing in front of the painting, I know this is a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – recognisable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each, that richly expressive face steals the show. In John the Baptist, he looks mischievously out of the shadows while cuddling a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome’s streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked kid running riot in a well-to-do house.

Caravaggio’s masterpiece hits the UK, Margate goes dotty for Riley, and it’s paintbrushes at dawn for Turner and Constable – all in your weekly dispatch

Caravaggio’s Cupid
The shock of the old hits London as Caravaggio’s most confrontational and mind-boggling masterpiece goes on free display. Prepare to be dazzled and traumatised.
• The Wallace Collection, London, 26 November to 12 April