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Mike's ARTY FACTS

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Monumental Nature

Henry Moore at Kew Gardens to 31 January 2027

There are 30 sculptures installed throughout the Gardens, spanning Moore’s nearly 70-year career. Here are some of my favourites:

Large Reclining Figure

Double Oval

Knife Edge Two Piece

Large Interior Form

Large Two Forms

Reclining Woman: Elbow

Two Piece Reclining Figure

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Charleston 1

From their website:

In 1916, the painter Vanessa Bell and her friend and lover Duncan Grant moved to Charleston along with Duncan’s partner David Garnett. It was the height of the First World War and, as conscientious objectors, Garnett and Grant needed to find farm work to avoid conscription.

Almost as soon as they moved in, Bell and Grant began to paint every surface in the farmhouse, transforming it into a living, breathing work of art. Over the following decades, Charleston became a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals.

The Barns

Photo from Art Fund site. The house was covered in scaffolding on the day of my visit.

Quentin Bell, Vanessa's son summed-up the Charleston experience, proclaiming it "not so much a house as a phenomenon."

Let's take a wonder...

Self Portrtait - Vanessa Bell c1958

Continued...see Charleston 2

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Charleston 2

...continued from Charleston 1

The Famous Women Dinner Service is a collection of 50 hand-decorated plates by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, celebrating famous women throughout history.

Commissioned by art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark in 1932, the dinner service was painted by the artists during their time at Charleston.

A few favourites from the collection:

Roger Fry

In their Wolfson and South gallery I was lucky to catch the Roger Fry exhibition which ends on 15 March 2026.

Some favourites:

Essay in abstract Design 1914 or 1915

Still Life with T'ang Horse c.1919 - 21

Poinsettias in a Vase c.1915

Barns at Charleston

Vanessa in a Deck Chair 1911

The Window

Three self portraits

Helen Fry c.1899

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Charleston

The Garden

Pomona, the Lemon Gatherer - Quentin Bell

Levitating Lady 1973 - Quentin Bell

The Spink - Quentin Bell

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The Arrival Of Spring

The David Hockney Sale - Sotheby's

The Arrrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (ipad drawing)

Detail

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Sotheby's Modern

Annie Morris - Bronze Stack 3 Cobalt Turquoise (behind Damien Hurst - Grecian Nude / Gerhard Richter - Cage Grid)

Left: Claude Venard - Sans titre 1952 /Centre: Emilio Greco - Piccola Bagnante 1958 /Right: Paul Delvaux - Nu Allonge c1940

Emilio Greco - Piccola Bagnante 1958

Ben Nicholson 1,2,8,0, 1970

Dmitri Krasnopevtsev - Still Life with a Broken Shell 1976

Euan Uglow - Girl Lying Down, Artificial Light 1965

Anselm Kiefer - Fur Velimir Chlebnikov: Lehre Voim Krieg Seeschlachten 2001

Detail

Rene Magritte - Le Buste Impassible 1936

Man Ray - L'Homme Nouveau 1964

Marc Chagall - Chariot au Ciel Vert 1911

Wilhelm Lehmbruck - Sketch for a Walking Female Figure cast c1916

Jules Lefranc - Interieur

George Grosz - Lotte and Eva (Two Acts) 1927

Man Ray - Les Mains D'Antonin Artaud 1926

Mimmo Paladino - Senza titolo 2014

Constantin Brancusi - Une Muse, Conceived 1912, cast 1972 - Behind: Robert Ryman - Series #28 (White) 2004

Ai Weiwei - Bubbles 2008

Victor Vasarely - Azur 1976 (1987)

Rene Magritte - L'Automate 1962

Joan Miro - Untitled ("Par Avion") 1937

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Always Venus, Never Mars

Carrie Moyer at Pilar Corrias gallery until 7 march 2026

From the Press Release: In this exhibition, Moyer continues to embed her queer feminist politics within an expansive and distinctly elastic legacy of 20th-century American abstraction. Born in an era shaped by the civil rights movement, Marcel Duchamp’s revival and Helen Frankenthaler’s triumph, Always Venus, Never Mars sees Moyer pushing deeper into the 21st century, steering away from apocalyptic thinking and toward imaginative possibility.

The works in the exhibition are crafted, as is typical across Moyer’s practice, from acrylic paint and a range of material inclusions, conveying her vibrant belief in a human-made future. She has described her commitment to acrylic as “a way to thumb my nose at the hierarchy of materials—noble and eternal oil on top; commercial, synthetic, disposable acrylic down below.” Plastic, she notes, though often dismissed as cheap, toxic, culturally inferior and ecologically destructive, “was and remains the invisible architecture of contemporary life.”

Installation shot

Freestylin' on the Moon, 2025

Always Venus, Never Mars, 2025

New Standards, No Stoppages, 2025 & Astro Awning, 2025

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Annely Juda Gallery until 28 February, 2026

From the Press Release: Inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s new space on Hanover Square.  

These very, very, very new paintings mark the most developed stage yet in Hockney’s dedication to ‘reverse perspective’ in paint. For decades, Hockney has observed that traditional linear perspective in art and photography doesn’t reflect how humans actually see: we have peripheral vision, we move and we constantly generate multiple viewpoints. Viewing is therefore not static, but dynamic and experiential. It’s not an inversion of perspective that interests Hockney, but an expansion of the possibilities of representation. In these recent canvases, which depict colourful interior scenes, he disrupts planar perspective and engineers multiple vanishing points in a single picture, bringing us closer to the lived experience of perception. 

The show will also include "The Moon Room", comprising 15 iPad paintings of the night sky. The moon works were created in 2020 outside Hockney’s Normandy studio in France throughout the seasons. Hockney said: “Once, when we were just sitting outside the house, we put all the lights off in the house to see the moonlight more clearly. The moon could then be seen to cast shadows of the trees on the grass, so with my backlit iPad I could draw it. This would have been virtually impossible without it.”

Vincent's Chair and Gauguin's Chair, 4 July 2025

Reverse Perspective Room No. 1, May 2025

Three Vases on a Table, Inside, August 2025

Dancers with Audience and Orchestra, August 2025

Detail

Detail

The Moon Room:

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Shifting Boundaries

Takesada Matsutani at Hauser & Worth (North Gallery) to 18 April, 2026

From The Press release: The artist’s diverse practice is concerned with the reshaping of matter, namely his signature materials of vinyl glue and graphite. This exhibition ranges from the sensational sculpture ‘The Magic Box’ (1988) to brand-new works that epitomize his experimentation with glue.

From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the influential post war Japanese art collective, the Gutai Art Association. Over six decades Matsutani has developed a unique visual language of form and materials. As part of the Gutai group, Matsutani experimented with vinyl glue, using fans and his own breath to manipulate the substance, creating bulbous and sensuous forms reminiscent of human curves and features.

Microcosms

Tetysumi Kudo at Hauser & Worth (South gallery) to 18 April, 2026

From the Press release: A selection of works that include the artist’s signature cages, cubes and gardens. Using found materials, store-bought items and hand-sculpted body parts, they suggest a world in which nature, technology and humanity influence each other in a mutually reinforcing system he called the New Ecology. The varied environments he created are intended to encourage viewers to understand themselves as part of an integrated and intricate cosmos.

Kudo was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935 and attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts from 1954 – 1958. He remained in Tokyo until 1962, when he was awarded the grand prize in the 2nd International Young Artist Pan-Pacific Exhibition. With the prize money earmarked for study in Paris, he moved to the French capital. In Europe, Kudo thought of himself as an ‘observer’ of the West, compelled to disrupt the political, economic and anthropocentric climate of European humanism and its influence on 20th Century art and culture.

In 1965, Kudo began working with cages, which he continued to explore for the next 15 years, his longest sustained engagement with a form. In ‘Coelacanth’ (1970), Kudo filled food and water trays with aspirin and antibiotics instead of bird seed, suggesting that people, like pets, were being ‘fed,’ observed or controlled by larger organizing systems. ‘La Mue’ - For Nostalgic Purpose - For Your Living Room’ (1967) features forms that resemble both pupae and phalluses whilst plastic flowers offer commentary on the eager adoption and excess of mass-production, alluding to a world in which the distinction between the synthetic and natural has blurred. The use of cages, quotidian objects purchased in Parisian pet stores and titles referring to the living room contextualize these works in urban commerce and insert them into the realm of the domestic, while works such as ‘La Mue,’ with its cocoon-like forms allude to cycles of life, suggesting that the cages might be microcosms of organic transformation.

Kudo’s dome works, such as ‘Cultivation of Nature & People Who Are Looking at It’ (1970 – 1971), are perspex spheres containing artificial plant life and soil, store bought items, spent vacuum tubes and rubbish collected in Paris. These mini-environments or time capsules illustrate the evolution of the New Ecology, the physical and cultural fusion of the biological and mechanical. His use of acrid greens and pinks suggest a highly polluted environment, illustrative of Kudo’s feeling that with the pollution of nature comes the decomposition of humanity.

Works in Kudo’s cube series are painted as die, symbolic of the role of chance in life as opposed to the idea that people can control their destinies. Here, Kudo offers a reflection on society’s abdication of agency to technology, an increasing reliance on machines and the consumption of drugs and media for personal fulfillment. Pertinent both in the 20th Century and today, these works implicate the viewer through their titles, such as ‘Your Portrait R’ (1965 – 1966) and ‘Your Portrait’ (1966). Using cages, vitrines, spheres and cubes to illustrate processes at play within our modern world, Kudo’s oeuvre transcends formal categorization, yet his microcosms are consistently universal and timeless in their language.

Your Portrait 1

Coellacanth

Portrait of Artist in The Crisis

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There’s No end to the Nonsense

R. Crumb at David Zwirmer Gallery to 14 March 2026

Fabulous exhibiton! Some of my favourites:

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Facing West

Richard Avedon at Gagosian Gallery - until March 14 2026

Avedon spent five years, from 1979 to 1984, travelling to 21 US states. He conducted more than 1,000 sittings, finally producing 126 editioned images, 21 of which are on view in London.

Gallery shot

Some favourites:

Charlene Van Tighem, physical therapist, Augusta, Montana, 1983

Annette Gonzales, housewife, and her sister Lydia Ranck, secretary, Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico, Easter Sunday, April 6, 1980.

B.J. Van Fleet, nine-year-old, Ennis, Montana, July 2, 1982.

Joe Dobosz, uranium miner, Church Rock, New Mexico, June 13, 1979.

Unidentified migrant worker, Eagle Pass, Texas, December 10, 1979

Monument to the Unimportant

Pace Gallery until 14 February 2026

Gallery shot

Elmgreen & Dragset - Gay Marriage, 2010

B Wurtz - Untitled (Steamer) 1987

Claes oldenburg - Ice Cream Sundae on Tray 1962

Tony Matelli - Weed (791), 2025

Picasso Pistoletto

Helly Nahmad Gallery

From the Press release: Separated by decades but united in their revoluntionary spirit, both Picasso and pistoletto understood that art's greatest power lies not in representing the world as it appears, but in revealing new ways of seeing and understanding it.

Bathtub for a Heroine

Thaddaeus Ropac gallery

Constantin Brancusi’s photographs 

Unveiled Desires

Part 2 at Richard Saltoun Gallery until 28 February 2026

Siomha Harrington - How to Leave your Body Behind 2025

Natalia Gonzalez Martin - Cascara II, 2024

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Art About Town

Paul Vanstone - Carrara Triceratops Skull 2025

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Small is Beautiful

Flowers Gallery

A couple of favourites from the show:

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Nigerian Modernism 

Tate Modern until 10 May 2026

Some favourites:

Akinola lasekan - Yoruba Acrobatic Dance 1963

Ben Enwonwu - Monotony 1948

Ben Enwonwu - Dancing Girls 1947

Installation shot

Installation shot

Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature was a Nigeria-based literary journal founded in 1957 by German expatriate Ulli Beier 

Textile design - Nike Davies-Okundaye

Detail

Uche Okeke Ana Mmuo (land of the Dead) 1961

Uzo Egonu - Artist Painting Mother and Child 1978

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Night Owls and Abstractions

Koestler Awards for people in the UK’s criminal justice system - The Southbank

Some favourites from the show:

Portrait of a Woman - HM Prison Woodhill - Coloured pencil on paper

Where Dreams Have Flown - HM Prison Bure - acrylic pencil on paper

HM prison Magilligan

Chain Mail Bag - HM Prison Ashford - Aluminium pulls and shoe laces

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Telluric and Primitive

Museo Carmen Thyssen, Malaga (until 1 March 2026)

From the PRESS RELEASE: The earth and a primordial language of signs and basic forms – or, as we have defined it in this exhibition, the telluric (terrestrial or geological) and the primitive (primordial) – offered two paths of renewal starting from the very first episode in modern Spanish art (the 1920s and 1930s). Persistent and recurrent, they constitute an idiosyncratic substratum of Spanish avant-garde art that is still recognisable today.

The break with academic tradition before the Spanish Civil War and the resumption in the late 1940s of the advances interrupted by the conflict was a joint endeavour involving artists with very diverse leanings. Individuals or groups representing trends ranging from Surrealism to Art Informel and its offshoots (and beyond) relaunched artistic expression based on new avant-garde principles. To do so they turned to the earth, proposing their own ‘natural creations’ with unusual, original and surprising appearances that transcended reality.

Some favourites:

Benjamin Palencia - Stones Creating a Landscape 1930

Benjamin palencia - Women in the Landscape 1932

Julio Gonzalez - untitled 1940

Alberto Sanchez - Bird drinking Water c. 1956-58

Esteban Frances - Arrangez Vous 1939

Angel Ferrant - Muchachas 1950

Eudald Serra - Form and Space 1966

Eduardo Chillida - Beige Collage and Drawing

Antoni Tapies - Tribus. El blat deis cafres 1949

Alfonso Fraile - The Loner 1976

Nicolas de Lekuona - Untitled 1935

A visit to the Carmen Thyssen is one of my highlights whenever I visit Malaga. I have so so many old favourites in their permanent collection. Here are just a few:

Ramon Casas i Carbo - Julia 1915

Julio Romero de Torres - The Fortune-telling 1920

Detail

Jose Garcia ramos - leaving the Masked Ball 1905

Detail

Antonio cabral bejarano - A Bolera Dancer 1842

Ricardo Lopez Cabrera - Newlyweds c. 1905

Look at the the mother of the bride...and the shady priest?

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House of Alba

Back in fabulous Malaga

The exhibition "Patronage and collecting in the House of Alba" is currently on display at the Centro Cultural Fundacion Unicaja in Malaga until 11 January 2026

The exhibition features over 250 pieces from the House of Alba's three palaces in Spain.

Images are from their website (photography was forbidden)

Beautiful azulejos in the courtyard of the building: