Kapoor’s sublime spectacle, Hepworth’s sculpture sings and Hockney passes away – the week in art
Anish Kapoor gets a blockbuster showing, Barbara Hepworth’s pioneering use of colour is showcased and we look back at our beloved David Hockney – all in your weekly dispatch
Exhibition of the week
Anish Kapoor
The sublime is unleashed in a blockbuster spectacle by this modern master of colour, space and mystery.
• Hayward Gallery, London, from 16 June to 18 October
Also showing
Hepworth in Colour
You can hear the mermaids singing in this gathering of blue and white visions by the great St Ives sculptor.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 6 September
Hold to this Earth
Contemporary Indigenous North American artists including Dakota Mace, Virgil Ortiz, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and more bring an ecological vision to the Yorkshire hills.
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, from 13 June to 18 April
Summer Exhibition
It’s that time of year again and an army of enthusiasts from all over Britain get their work on the walls of Burlington House alongside the likes of Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry.
• Royal Academy, London, from 16 June to 23 August
Georg Baselitz: Back Again
A farewell from one of the giants of modern German art whose great late works rage, rage against the dying of the light.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 30 August
Image of the week
Setting the mood for this year’s Glasgow International – held in venues across the city until 21 June – is an exhibition of the work of David Wojnarowicz. A star of the 1980s New York art scene, the artist was a gay man in a violently homophobic world whose work documented and spoke out against the US’s handling of the Aids crisis, before his Aids-related death aged 37. The show, our critic writes, “serves as a fierce reminder that art is worth fighting for, and of what can be achieved through community and comradeship by those willing to take risks.”
What we learned
David Hockney, the revolutionary and beloved British artist, died aged 88
… his work was a feast of visual pleasure and his fashion sense was inspirational too
Caragh Thuring’s art is cosmic, chaotic and quietly rebellious
Artists are making ‘anti-slop’ to rebel against AI
An exhibition of the worst album covers ever has opened in Mansfield
Billy Dosanjh, ‘the Edward Hopper of the Black Country’, captured Sikh life in Walsall
Masterpiece of the week
A Discussion by Circle of Pontormo, probably mid-1520s
It’s often assumed that modern artists such as Van Gogh and Matisse pioneered the free, expressive use of colour but as this painting illustrates, the chromatic power of art had already been liberated centuries before them in 16th-century Florence. The city’s mannerist school, especially Jacopo Pontormo and his followers, created gossamer realms of drapery in ethereal pinks and electric blues, as here, that levitate their wearers. The two men in the foreground are talking seriously about politics or religion, with eloquent hand gestures, under a vaulted loggia, yet their scintillatingly bright garments don’t seem the garb of dignified city elders or holy saints. Where do such colours come from? One possible source is Leonardo da Vinci, who actually did go around early 1500s Florence wearing such colours, according an inventory he made of his clothes. But a more widely acknowledged inspiration of the mannerists was Michelangelo, whose paintings break with the naturalism of Renaissance colour and are full of quirky, weightless hues. Pontormo took inspiration from Michelangelo to paint religious scenes in which depth and space dissolve in sensual floating brightness. This artist in turn emulates Pontormo’s mysterious, ecstatic visions.
• National Gallery, London
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