Exhibitions Newsfeed

Jessica Rankin sews up painting, arte povera’s Mario Merz comes in from the cold and Andy Warhol brings pop to the Midlands – all in your weekly dispatch

Jessica Rankin
This New York artist’s abstract works hover between embroidery and painting and have a seductive, lyrical beauty.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, 28 January to 28 February

The Box, Plymouth
Roof-felters, bawdy boozers, off-duty sailors, whip-wielding dominatrixes … this 100th birthday show in Cook’s home town is an exuberant celebration of working-class frivolity

Generally, you get two versions of England in art: it’s either bucolic vistas, rolling hills, babbling brooks and gambolling sheep – or it’s downtrodden, browbeaten, grim poverty and misery. But Beryl Cook saw something else in all the drizzle and grey of this damp old country: she saw joy.

The thing is, joy doesn’t carry the same critical, conceptual heft in art circles as more serious subjects, so Cook has always been a bit brushed off by the art crowd. They saw her as postcards and posters for the unwashed, uncultured masses, not high art for the high-minded. But she didn’t care: she succeeded as a self-taught documenter of English life despite any disdain she might have encountered. And now, on what would have been her 100th birthday, her home town of Plymouth is throwing her a big celebratory bash.

From newbie drag queens to wild voguing performances, a new archival exhibition boasts images from four decades of riotous nightlife

From naked embraces and sofa snogging to the very final stages of life, a new exhibition proves there is no one way to age

Major retrospective in Plymouth, her adopted city, presents her as a skilful chronicler of social transformation

In her lifetime, Beryl Cook’s colourful, vibrant paintings tended to be dismissed by most critics as mere kitsch or whimsy.

A major retrospective of Cook’s work opening in her adopted city of Plymouth next weekend makes the case that she was a serious, significant artist who skilfully chronicled a tumultuous period of social transformation.

Tracey gathers the melancholy giants, a lost London is remembered and collages celebrate Scots strugglers – all in your weekly dispatch

Crossing into Darkness
Tracey Emin curates an exhibition about thresholds of despair and the power of melancholy featuring Goya, Munch, Bourgeois, Baselitz and other visionary artists.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, opens Sunday

A new exhibition at the New York Historical museum looks at the immigrant experience in New York City through a range of revealing and diverse viewpoints, with more than 100 photographs and objects showing how the city has been shaped by people from across the globe. The exhibition runs to 29 March

For the first time in the UK, the photographer’s magnum opus is going on display in its entirety – introducing new viewers to New York’s edgy downtown scene and a generation lost to Aids. Here, she looks back at the ‘fearlessness and wildness’ of her life and times

Gagosian, London
More than four decades on, Goldin’s louche lovers, waxwork royals, divorcing Mexicans and frightening wallpaper feel uncannily present – normal even

Now more than 40 years old, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a lost world, but one that feels as present as it did when I first saw these images. A compilation of photographs taken by the artist between 1973 and 1986, the Ballad has been presented as an ever-changing slide show, with various accompanying soundtracks and voiceovers, since the 1980s.

It has also been presented on video, as a film and a book. I’ve been familiar with these images for much of my adult life, watching Robin smoking, with Kenny in the background in the purple room. The smoke still hangs there beneath the mirrorball and Robin’s profile is still astonishing. I have seen Suzanne in tears and, in another shot, looking at her face in the mirror in a tiled bathroom dizzy with slanting reflections.

In 1969, Arthur Tress started making images at an overgrown corner of Central Park known as the Ramble – the beginning of an archive of a transitional period in queer culture

A study has shown the devastating impact of arts funding cuts on institutions across America and many within the industry are concerned for what’s next

From Times Square to the Washington Monument, America saw in the new year with a bigger bang than usual, celebrating the fact that 2026 marks the nation’s 250th birthday. Yet as the US looks back, precious repositories of the nation’s history are facing an uncertain future.

Museum attendances are down. Budgets are precarious. Cuts in federal funding are taking their toll. And Donald Trump’s culture wars are spreading fear, intimidation and self-censorship among some directors and donors.

Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London
There’s no escape from the torments of the past in this show, which celebrates the German artist at his most Wagnerian, enchanting and sickening you simultaneously

Born in 1921, Joseph Beuys was the “perfect” age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The Andy Warhol portraits that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally catch his gaunt, ravaged face in the glare of a photo flash under the hat he wore to hide burns sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe. The most haunting portrait turns Beuys into a spectral negative image, all darkness and shadow, his eyes wounded, guilty, lost. This was in the 1970s when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, lecturing about flows of ecological and human energy – and, in breathtaking performances, speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote.

All that remains today of those actions, protests and performances are posters, preserved scrawls on blackboards and mesmerising videos. Yet the moment Beuys disappeared – he died in 1986 – his solid, material sculptures took over. He believed passionately in flow and flux, promoting an animist vision of humanity and the cosmos. When he stopped talking and acting, entropy gripped his art, making it a static, slumped set of dead objects. And all the greater for it.

Jewels of island life go on display, Beuys introduces heroism to washtime and Nan Goldin’s classic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency reveals itself – all in your weekly dispatch

Hawai‘i
Some of the most spectacular masterpieces in the British Museum, including feathered war helmets and glaring gods collected by Captain Cook, make this exhibition created in collaboration with Hawaii community leaders and artists entrancing.
• The British Museum, London, from 15 January to 25 May

The next 12 months promise blockbuster surveys of noted greats and introductions to intriguing lesser-known artists

From old masters to pop artists, contemporary greats and even a major Mexican film-maker, art museums and galleries across the US have some dazzling shows coming up in 2026.

Must-sees include Beryl Cook’s postwar brilliance, Tracey Emin’s new highs, Frida Kahlo’s confessions – plus Google’s HQ and Gaudí’s finally finished fever dream

Novels only ‘reinforced Victorian stereotypes’ of meek women to give readers what they wanted, says curator

Charles Dickens’s female characters have often been criticised as being too meek, compliant and dutiful, or depicted as figures of fun as the novelist reinforced patriarchal Victorian stereotypes.

From the loyal Emma Micawber to the innocent Little Nell, Dickens drew on many extraordinary real women for his novels, but they never truly made it on to the page, appearing only in diluted form.

Jenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
• The best design and architecture of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

This year’s highlights include the remodelling of a Richard Seifert brutalist ‘corncob’ tower, a celebration of Japanese carpentry and a wearable hot-water bottle
• The best art and photography of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly shoehorned into the gargantuan hangar that was originally the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympics, it’s an Amazon warehouse crammed with global treasures, setting visitors off on an odyssey of “curated transgression” through an immersive cabinet of curiosities.

The Spanish master’s angle on performance, treasures from Egypt and the year’s best wildlife images on Earth – all in your weekly dispatch

Made in Ancient Egypt
Wonders to amaze and move all ages, in this magical exhibition that brings ancient Egyptians to life.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 12 April

Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
The birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different story

In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”

Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun”, as a passerby observes. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.