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.

Exhibition includes linen shirt collar from when author suffered a fatal stroke along with other personal items

Rare surviving items of Charles Dickens’ clothing, including the linen shirt collar worn by the writer when he suffered his fatal stroke in 1870, are to go on display.

Other items being exhibited include Dickens’ black silk stockings – part of his only surviving suit – as well as personal effects and items related to his personal grooming, including a set of six silver razors used for his daily shave, a perfume bottle, silver candle snuffers and a gold locket, containing photos and locks of hair from Dickens and his son, Henry.

Exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making approach to fashion

When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

A spectacular record of a year in Normandy, the photogenic buildings of Sir John Vanbrugh and extraordinary paintings of horses – all in your weekly dispatch

Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse
George Stubbs’s emotional, sublime equine portrait Whistlejacket is rightly one of the best loved paintings in the National Gallery. This exhibition takes a closer look at what makes his paintings of horses unforgettable.
• National Gallery, London, from 12 March to 31 May

Exhibition at the V&A Dundee celebrates Maggie’s Centres created by Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and others

Maggie Keswick Jencks received her weekly breast cancer treatment in a windowless neon-lit room in Edinburgh’s Western general hospital. Her husband, the renowned landscape designer Charles, later described it as a kind of “architectural aversion therapy”.

It was then, in the early 1990s, that the Scottish artist and garden designer imagined her own blueprint that would allow cancer patients “a space of their own” within the alienating, clinical confines of the hospital estate, one where they might “not lose the joy of living in the fear of dying”.

A new exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich revisits the Belgian artist whose wild women of the demimonde scandalised the belle epoque – and still shock audiences today

During an oppressively hot week in Paris in 1878, the bohemian Belgian artist Félicien Rops painted a picture of a woman walking her pet pig. In it, the woman is blindfolded and naked – bar some stockings, long black gloves and a jaunty feathered hat – and the pig has a cute, pink curlicue of a tail. Pornocrates – which roughly translates as “the ruler of fornication” – is an eye worm. Once seen, it’s hard to forget.

Rops recalled composing his most famous work “in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. As viewers of Laboratory of Lust, a new exhibition on Rops at Kunsthaus Zurich, will discover to their amazement, or perhaps indignation, mating and painting were indelibly linked in Rops’ psyche.

A mesmerising new exhibition showcases the work of the Italian colour pioneer whose landscapes, motorways and swimming pools often seem more like abstract paintings

Artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson found an unusual way to remember those who were killed or died by suicide between 2018 and 2025

Between 2021 and 2025, Black nonbinary artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson visited 91 locations across 15 states – in all of these sites a trans, gender nonconforming, or intersex individual had died, either by murder or suicide. At each site they conducted a ceremony of their own to bear witness to what had happened there.

“It was very challenging in ways that I’m continuing to mend from and rest with,” they said. “It is not ‘inexpensive’ on my body and spirit. That cost I knew would be there.”

Though the art world is supposed to be inclusive, that isn’t the experience of many disabled creatives – and in a groundbreaking online exhibition at dis_place they have poured their frustrations into art

“I had a lot of frustration about the performance of diversity, equality and inclusion,” says curator Nathalie Boobis. Feeling that the art world’s commitment to access for disabled people was often performative rather than manifesting a sincere commitment to change, Boobis decided to step away. But then came an opportunity to be the in-house curator for Disability Arts Online’s new exhibition space dis_place, and she felt this was finally her chance to highlight disabled experiences in art.

Her inaugural exhibition for dis_place is called I Need to Be More Than a Lesson You Learned. Featuring the work of nine artists and collectives working across several media, it explores the ways in which disabled artists have experienced inaccessibility within the art world and wider society.

Oscar-winning director returns to his breakout 2000 hit for an exhibition seven years in the making, giving visitors a new experiential look at his debut film

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director, has been widely celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling. His 2000 debut, Amores Perros, was labeled a “hypertext film” for how its three main threads spiraled out of a central car crash, but were otherwise disconnected. In an interview where he discussed his new Lacma show, Sueño Perro – which sees Iñárritu return to hundreds of hours of footage that never made it into his debut movie – he shared that his father was the one who inspired his unique approach to film.

“My father was naturally a great storyteller,” Iñárritu told me via video from Los Angeles. “He always started with what was almost the end of the story, so he threw you a hook, but then he went back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to get you to listen to a long story.”

From bold anti-Nazi posters to an acid-drenched take on Jean Cocteau, a new exhibition, curated by writer Philip Hoare, shows how influential the DIY designs of the 70s and 80s became

A collection of 3,000-year-old artefacts at Battersea power station gives Egypt’s most ambitious, self-aggrandising pharaoh a chance to emerge from Tutankhamun’s shadow

The mummy of Egypt’s most ambitious pharaoh, Ramses II (often spelt Ramesses), is a masterpiece of the embalmer’s art. The amazingly preserved 3,000-year-old face with its proud, beaky nose looks much as it must have when he died at the age of 90 or 91, after ruling for 66 years, fathering more than 100 children, smiting his enemies and making ancient Egypt great again. And that’s even before you notice how his hand seems to reach forward to grasp spookily at power from beyond the grave.

I’ve never forgotten Ramses since looking on his face, and that hand, in Cairo. But the world at large seems more interested in Tutankhamun, whose unspoiled tomb was found by Howard Carter in 1922.

Emin reminds us of the deep power of art, Ramses II parades his megalomaniac gold and Rose Wylie’s witty paintings finally get their due – all in your weekly dispatch

Tracey Emin: A Second Life
The most serious and intelligent, as well as passionate, artist of her generation proves art can still touch us all and express what it is to be alive.
• Tate Modern, London, until 31 August

Join one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists, Tracey Emin, as she takes us on a journey into her life in art.

Date: Friday 24 April 2026
Time: 7pm–8pm (BST)
Livestream only

• Book tickets

Emin has redefined autobiography in contemporary practice. Using the female body as a powerful tool, she challenges boundaries and confronts love, loss, sex, illness and identity with unflinching honesty. Her new landmark exhibition, A Second Life, offers a powerful survey of her work across four decades: from raw, confessional early pieces to more recent paintings and sculptures shaped by survival, resilience and renewal

In partnership with the Tate Modern and Tate Modern Lates, we’re inviting you to hear directly from one of Britain’s most provocative and influential contemporary artists. In this special event, she’ll sit down with the Guardian’s chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins, to reflect on her life in art, the ideas behind her newest exhibition and the experiences that continue to shape her work.

This livestream event will give you front-row access from wherever you are in the world, live and on-demand.

Book tickets

Barbican, London
The Colombian artist, who died this year aged 93, lived through years of conflict and corruption, making biting, macabre and endlessly forceful work from postcards, cheap furniture and press cuttings

The art of Beatriz González is drenched in light, strong colour and blood. Her sprawling, uneven retrospective reflects the turbulent politics and violence of her native Colombia, and the breadth of a body of work that addressed art history and popular culture, provincialism and universality. At times she is as biting as a cartoonist, depicting generals as a row of anonymous blank-faced parrots. “I did not want to be a lady who paints,” she once said. Born in the provincial town of Bucaramanga in 1932, González died this January in Bogotá, shortly before the current exhibition travelled to the Barbican from the Pinacoteca in São Paolo. She was 93.

González’s show is compelling. It is also, at times, difficult to bear. She didn’t get going as a painter until her 30s, beginning with loose transcriptions and variations on Diego Velázquez’s 1634-35 The Surrender of Breda (all big-hatted Spaniards and Dutchmen, as the city behind them goes up in flames), and Vermeer’s 1669-70 The Lacemaker. Attentive to her task, perhaps Vermeer’s subject is a stand-in for the young Colombian painter herself. Soon she began flattening the forms and dialling up the temperature, making the paintings her own. She teetered, but never became an abstractionist. Her exposure to European art had been limited (although she had travelled to Europe and New York) and most of her knowledge came from reproductions, often of poor quality.

Yin Xiuzhen builds cities from donated clothing while Chiharu Shiota weaves found objects into vast webs of thread. Now the two are exhibiting their massive, moving installations in two parallel exhibitions

These clothes are not “secondhand”, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. “I prefer to call them ‘used’ or ‘worn’,” she explains. “Clothes that have been ‘worn’ carry a lot of information … like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning.” In some of Yin’s works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.

Yin is showing a selection of these works in Heart to Heart, an exhibition occupying the lower floor of London’s Hayward Gallery. “Worn clothing acts as a narrator in my work … the lived experience is embedded in the fabric,” she says.

Catalonia’s most celebrated son kicks off his centenary in style, Derek Walcott energises his friend Doig and the Colombian great gets her first UK retrospective – all in your weekly dispatch

Beatriz González
A survey of this Colombian political painter and mixed media artist who died in January.
• Barbican, London, from 25 February to 10 May