Nengi Omuku’s 'There We Sat Down' at SCAD Museum of Art brings together paintings that explore the relationship between the body, memory and shared human experience. Drawing on both West African textile traditions and European oil painting, Omuku crafts dreamlike scenes featuring abstracted figures set within lush, otherworldly landscapes. Through their obscured identities, the figures move between the personal and the universal, while the exhibition considers themes of ancestry, gender, domesticity and cultural heritage, reflecting on the endurance of indigenous traditions and the ways in which personal experience can speak to collective histories.
The Royal Academy’s 'Painting the French Riviera' explores the profound influence of the Côte d’Azur on modern art, bringing together more than 160 works dating from the 1870s to the 1960s. From Monet, Renoir and Cézanne to Matisse, Picasso and Yves Klein, the exhibition traces how the intense light, vivid colours and Mediterranean landscape of the French Riviera inspired successive generations of artists. The exhibition also considers the Riviera’s wider cultural legacy through travel posters and film, charting its transformation from an artists’ retreat into an enduring symbol of modern glamour and sophistication.
Francis Picabia: Expanding Horizons at Hauser & Wirth brings together an exceptional selection of works spanning the artist's remarkable five-decade career. Organised in collaboration with the Comité Picabia, the exhibition explores the extraordinary breadth of his practice, tracing his continual reinvention across a succession of artistic movements and reaffirming his enduring influence on twentieth-century art.
'Georg Baselitz. Eroi d’Oro' on show at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini presents large-scale paintings in which figures are rendered in stark, calligraphic lines set against luminous gold backgrounds that deliberately flatten pictorial depth, evoking medieval icon painting and early Renaissance altarpieces. The effect is both austere and theatrical: bodies appear suspended, at once fragile and monumental, while the gold asserts a timeless, metaphysical backdrop. The exhibition reflects on Baselitz’s long trajectory of rupture and reinvention—from the “Heroes” of the 1960s to the upside-down paintings that redefined his practice, and later the retrospective “remixes” of his own imagery.
At the Fondazione Prada in Venice, 'Helter Skelter' brings together Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Ca’ Corner della Regina. The exhibition unfolds across the palazzo’s historic interiors, where Jafa’s emotionally dense, rapidly assembled visual language meets Prince’s cool, conceptual détournement of mass media imagery. Here, Jafa’s montages of Black life, violence, music, and spirituality are set against Prince’s detached recycling of cowboy mythologies, white masculinity and advertising.
Palazzo Grassi presents a visually charged exhibition of works by Michael Armitage exploring contemporary life through lush, monumental paintings that pulse with colour, tension and ambiguity. Drawing on East African landscapes, global art history and myth, Armitage layers personal memory with political realities — migration, conflict and collective identity — into scenes that feel at once intimate and expansive. His figures drift through dreamlike spaces, inviting viewers to navigate shifting perspectives and overlapping narratives, in a deeply thought-provoking show.
Hurvin Anderson's exhibition at Tate Britain is a vivid, immersive journey through memory, identity and belonging, bringing together more than 80 paintings spanning the artist’s career. Moving between Birmingham and the Caribbean, Anderson’s colour-saturated landscapes and interiors blur personal recollection with cultural history, creating scenes where figures dissolve and familiar spaces feel both intimate and distant. Through recurring motifs like barbershops, grilles and lush foliage, the show captures the tensions of diaspora and identity offering a powerful reflection on what it means to belong.
Opening at the end of March, Cecily Brown’s Picture Making at the Serpentine South Gallery marks the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the UK in over two decades. Inspired by the gallery’s unique setting in Kensington Gardens, Brown’s vigorous brushwork, vivid colour and dynamic compositions explore themes of nature, memory and storytelling—incorporating her fascination with children’s book illustrations and the darker undercurrents of cautionary tales. The exhibition brings together key works from across her practice alongside new paintings made specifically for the show, offering a compelling encounter with one of contemporary painting’s most distinctive voices.
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