Exhibitions Newsfeed

Earl’s Court performance of Heroes in 1978 is among highlights of exhibition exploring singer’s life and work

Rare “holy grail” footage of David Bowie performing Heroes at Earl’s Court in 1978 is to feature in a new immersive show about the singer’s life and creative practice.

Extended footage of the performance has been pieced back together by the team behind the new Lightroom exhibition, who had access to new camera angles found on film reels discovered in the artist’s archives.

The master portraitist’s process is spelled out, Cardiff celebrates the great Gwen, Lynda Benglis eyes up Giacometti and Scottish art schools wind back the clock – all in your weekly dispatch

Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting
Dig deep into the vision of this great artist with an exhibition that follows his portrait process from paper to canvas.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, from 12 February to 4 May

A new exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum looks at how the human body has been captured on film, from athletic portraits to revealing looks at ageing

Photography has a unique capacity to take us right to humanity’s extremes. Whether it’s the outsiders photographed by Diane Arbus, the revelatory motion studies of the human body made by Eadweard Muybridge, views of remote Indigenous communities taken by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, or in-your-face shots of heated competition from the sports photographer Walter Iooss, photographs can wow us with transformational dispatches from the fringes of the human condition.

All four of those photographers, plus about three dozen more, can be seen at the Phoenix Art Museum’s captivating new show Muscle Memory. It aims to delve into the question of how our human bodies can at once be the focus of so much of our awareness while also being something we frequently ignore.

The capital’s hospitality industry and cultural sector is vital but ensuring democratic consent is necessary for its expansion – and survival

Sir Sadiq Khan’s musical tastes tend toward soft rock and pop. But throughout his tenure as mayor of London he has positioned himself as a friend to its ravers, rockers and late-night revellers with his oft-relaunched vision of a culturally and economically vibrant “24‑hour city”. Those ambitions have fallen short of their promise, as London, like the rest of the country, has seen a steady erosion of pubs, bars and clubs.

There is reason to believe that the latest attempt – centred on a new nightlife commission announced last week by the mayor, and based on recommendations from a report endorsed by his office – will be different. The report’s authors include representatives of successful grassroots projects, rather than just industry figures associated with festivals and superclubs. It is unusually alive to local concerns. The debate is not really economic or cultural but political: who controls shared local space? Without councils and residents on side, the plan goes nowhere.

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Exclusive: Underdrawing suggests attempt to debunk myth that former wife of Henry VIII had sixth finger

Anne Boleyn’s Hever “Rose” portrait is one of history’s most iconic faces, with her “B” pendant, her French hood, her dark eyes and a red rose in her right hand. Now a secret that has remained hidden for nearly 500 years has been discovered beneath the layers of paint.

Scientific analysis of the painting at Hever Castle, her childhood home in Kent, has uncovered evidence that an Elizabethan artist sought to create a “visual rebuttal” to claims that Henry VIII’s ill-fated wife was a witch with a sixth finger on her right hand.

Gabrielle Goliath says Gayton McKenzie violating freedom of expression after ‘highly divisive’ artwork Elergy banned from SA pavilion

A South African artist is suing the arts minister after he blocked her from representing the country at the Venice Biennale, having called her work addressing Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza “highly divisive”.

Gabrielle Goliath filed the lawsuit last week, with Ingrid Masondo, who would have curated the pavilion, and the studio manager, James Macdonald. It accuses Gayton McKenzie of acting unlawfully and violating the right to freedom of expression and demands the high court reinstates her participation by 18 February, the deadline for confirming installations with biennale organisers.

The secret side of Japan’s warrior class, Holzer lights up Scunthorpe, Julia Phillips steels herself and Quentin Blake takes off in Dorset – all in your weekly dispatch

Samurai
A tremendous, awe-inspiring journey into Japan’s past, with samurai armour so sublimely crafted it seems darkly alive, as well as exquisite landscapes, erotica and other arts that delighted the samurai between battles. Read the review here.
• The British Museum, London, from 3 February to 4 May

From textiles and neons to paintings and her unmade bed, the largest-scale retrospective ever mounted of Tracey Emin’s work opens next month. Book before Thursday 26 February and save £20

Tate Modern in London is opening the largest ever exhibition celebrating Tracey Emin’s life’s work, on Friday 27 February.

Spanning her extraordinary 40-year practice, A Second Life showcases career-defining works alongside works never exhibited before. Through painting, video textiles, neons, writings, sculpture and installation, Emin continues to challenge boundaries, using the female body as a powerful tool to explore passion, pain and healing.

British Museum, London
Extraordinary battle armour, complete with moustachioed masks, enlivens this scintillating show, which brilliantly captures the theatrical side of a chivalrous epoch

Japan’s pre-modern warrior elite can’t still be alive inside the suits of armour that hold you awed and scared in this scintillating journey through their world of gore, power and artistic beauty. But they surely seem to be: samurai armour is so vital, so electric, with its grimacing, moustached, black face masks and full-body metal and fabric plating. The crests of their helmets incorporate eagles, dragons, goblins, even a clenched fist of metal emerging from one warrior’s head. It’s so intense you feel a presence.

Then again, the samurai always were ghosts in their suits. The metal mask became their face to the world, their carapaces transformed them into someone else. This idea that in battle the warrior becomes other, a bloody demon, is not unique to Japan: Viking “berserkers” lost themselves in a ritualised frenzy and may have believed they changed into bears. Armour in medieval Europe, too, was never just practical but a second skin, a full metal jacket suppressing softness and symbolising the steely transfiguration of normal souls into killers. But no culture has ever put quite as much creativity into blood-lust as Japan did from the 13th century – when samurai courage saw off Mongol invaders – until the abolition of this class in the 1800s.

David Zwirner, London
Though they were created for comic books, the artist’s horny and hilarious drawings of his own neuroses, and of glamazons in thigh-high boots, are unnervingly powerful on gallery walls

It is unnerving to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splayed out across the wall, but that is the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the wiry, weird, difficult and awkwardly horny artist (now in his 80s) has been churning out underground comics that lay bare his deepest neuroses, and reflect yours back in the process.

Now he is being celebrated in an ultra-high-end London gallery, with pages ripped from his notebooks and framed up like the finest of fine art. Except this isn’t fine, it’s filthy and angry and paranoid. It’s classic Crumb: skinny men quivering with worry and fear and hormones in a cruel, uncaring, senseless world – filled with towering women in thigh-high boots, obviously.

Holburne museum places renowned photographer’s pictures of ancient Roman statutes alongside his images of war and conflict

He is revered for his extraordinary black-and-white images documenting conflict, humanitarian crises and the tougher side of postwar Britain.

But an exhibition of work by photojournalist Sir Don McCullin opening this week at the Holburne museum in Bath focuses on a very different subject: Roman sculptures.

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.