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It’s finally starting to look like spring, which means it’s time for all the big museums and galleries to close their winter shows and get ready for summer.
So you’ve only got a month left to catch great winter exhibitions you may have missed. There’s a bit of everything: cute kittens, angry women, Tudor royalty, Arctic beasts, huge sails and demons in leather. Something for everyone.
Seven London exhibitions closing soon
‘Women in Revolt!’ at Tate Britain, closing Apr 7
If anger is an energy, there’s enough here to power the Tate for decades. The gallery is buzzing with the violent ire and shrieking fury of second-wave feminism, because after all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed. And they were furious. This is an exhibition of 100 feminist artists and collectives kicking violently against the system.
Read the review here.
‘Cute’ at Somerset House, closes Apr 14
Cuteness here is presented as a cultural powerhouse, an internet language that’s spread its grammar throughout society, a contemporary aesthetic force with almost no equal. There are missteps and flubs here. It’s way too full of stuff, some of the art is so tangential to the theme that it’s hard to figure out why it’s there, and at points it goes too far in pandering to what it thinks a non-art audience wants, getting just a little desperate to attract the Instagram crowd. But at its adorable heart, this is a brilliant exploration of an all-consuming cultural phenomenon, of how cuteness has swept the world, and it does it by neatly combining art and pop culture.
Read the review here.
‘Holbein at the Tudor Court’ at the King’s Gallery, closing Apr 14
Arriving from Basel with nothing but a letter of recommendation from humanist philosopher Erasmus, Holbein worked his way to the very top of English society, painting aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, soldiers and, eventually, the king himself. The real gold in this show of drawings is in watching a master figure things out, in seeing how Holbein sketches and scratches, erases and crosses out, in finding out how he made images that have survived the centuries, and still somehow look modern today.
Read the review here.
El Anatsui: ‘Behind the Red Moon’ at Tate Modern, closing Apr 14
Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has draped the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall in vast reams of fabric, all as an exploration of the human cost of the history of trade. it makes sense that it’s here, in an institution founded on sugar money, by an artist who grew up with Tate & Lyle sugar; that sweetness later made bitter by the knowledge of what created it. El Anatsui’s installation is a shimmering, gorgeous, powerful elegy for a a half-forgotten past, and for the bittersweet taste of endurance in the face of colonial exploitation
Read the review here.
Sibylle Ruppert: ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ at Project Native Informant, closing Apr 20
The German artist (1942-2011) filled her drawings, paintings and collages with writhing bodies and gnashing teeth, evil spirits and throbbing phalluses, glistening leather and technological freaks. All this erotic, traumatic horror is way too over the top, absolutely obscene, disconcertingly vile and genuinely amazing. Is it a warning about the dangers of transhumanism, of the devastating power of technology, of the endless shadows cast by trauma? Maybe, but it sure makes all of that look like a lot of fun.
Read the review here.
Joshua Leon: ‘The Missing O and E’ at Chisenhale Gallery, closing Apr 21
As artist and writer Joshua Leon shows in his Chisenhale exhibition, names are malleable things for Jews; signifiers that can be twisted and altered to allow you to better fit in, to integrate, to avoid the crushing pressure of antisemitic discrimination. The installation here doesn’t really work as an exhibition, it’s too empty, sparse, vast, it doesn’t give you enough. But the ideas are brilliant, moving, intimate.
Read the review here.
Shuvinai Ashoona at The Perimeter, closing Apr 26
Ashoona’s pencil and pen drawings show everyday Inuit life, filled with spiritual presences and hints of encroaching modernity. The key, for viewers force-fed a diet of ultra-proscriptive Western art history, is to forget what you know. Don’t place this in the context of Dali or Matisse or whoever, don’t look at the work or analyse it like you would something by a CSM graduate. Ashoona’s art is in its own context, it’s its own thing, a gorgeous reflection of life in the ice-bound north that’ll leave you shivering, snow-blind and totally mesmerised.
Read the review here.
Not enough art? Here, try the top ten art exhibitions in London then.
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