Latest art reviews

Noah Davis, the Los Angeles painter known for his figurative works depicting dreamlike visions of everyday Black life, was not one to be pigeonholed. He pushed back against the perceived expectations of the art world and played with paint, commanded it. There’s an element of the uncanny about it all – sometimes sinister, otherworldly – or a sense that things were not always this way. A stunning retrospective of paintings from an artist we lost too early is quietly, yet urgently political. 

London has seen no shortage of Impressionism exhibitions in recent years. Do we need another? Possibly not. But this one does offer the chance to see some magnificent paintings from the collection of arts patron and Impressionism superfan Oskar Reinhart for the first time outside of his native Switzerland. From Goya, Cézanne, van Gogh and Manet to Honoré Daumier, Théodore Géricaul and Gustave Courbet, it features some truly impressive work from some of the world’s best-loved artists – and that’s not to be sniffed at.

A contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, and a close friend of Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar rubbed shoulders with countless artists and literary luminaries from New York’s downtown scene in the ’70s and ’80s. Many of these photographs are on display in this landmark exhibition, alongside tender, poised, compassionate, beautiful work spanning a huge variety of subjects. The largest-ever exhibition of his work in the UK, it cements Hujar’s reputation as a major force in 20th-century photography.

Chew it all up and spit it out, that’s what the Brazilian modernists did. In the early twentieth century it was a country shackled by artistic conservatism but bursting at the seams with vibrant indigenous and immigrant cultures, so the modernists decided to gorge themselves on ‘cultural cannibalism.’ It’s a term from the writer Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropofago’, urging artists to ‘devour’ other influences in order to spit out something new and totally Brazilian.

‘Where did it all go wrong’ is a question I ask myself almost daily. American ecologist David Abram, whose 1996 book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ is the inspiration for this group show at Edel Assanti, thought he knew the answer: it all went to shit when we figured out how to write.

Standing in front of ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ is like slipping down a water slide. The most important painting by sixteenth century Italian maestro Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, aka Parmigianino, is an exercise in sinuous, surreal psychedelia, and it’s stunning.

This huge, complex, ambitious show looks at the artists who were present at the dawn of the computer age, artists filled with hope and creativity, long before that tech became fridges that can spy on you and an internet good for nothing but trolling and doomscrolling.

Like a blast of hairspray to the eyes, the Tate is about to blind you with the ’80s. This expansive, exhaustive and exhausting exhibition features dozens of photographers and hundreds of photographs depicting all the turbulence of that most turbulent of decades.

Everyone in 1970s Lagos was cooler than you. At least they were on the evidence of this show, which collects together the best work of Abi Morocco Photos, a husband and wife duo who documented life in Nigeria as prosperity blossomed and the economy boomed.

The camera is meant to be a tool of truth, an instrument that captures reality. But it captures something else in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work: fantasy. The Nigerian-born artist lived in Brixton until his early death in his 30s in 1989. In the privacy of his studio, he was able to use the camera to explore ideas of difference, identity and a whole lot of desire.

Picasso never stopped. He was relentless, prolific, voracious. He apparently produced 50,000 artworks in his lifetime, including thousands of paintings, countless drawings, tons of ceramics and – as this show at the British Museum proves – a vast amount of prints.

Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there. She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera.

Why go: This is what photojournalism is all about: the truth.

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space.

Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed.

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid.

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.