Curator at Large: Six Exhibitions to see this Spring

Fresh perspectives, reappraisals and new ideas: these are the exhibitions that I am most looking forward to this Spring. From the Drawing Room in South London to the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, this list contains the must-see shows for the beginning of 2024.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Camden Art Centre

Open 19 January - 31 March 2024

Having moved this year from South London Gallery, the London leg of this touring show of graduate talent will be a great way to experience an up-to-the-minute picture of some of the best work coming out of art schools today.  Rise Art favourite Harriet Gillet is among the 55 artists showing, all of whom completed their degrees this or last year. Some others - like Georg Wilson, Cai Arfon Bellis and Emma Sheehy, are names that I recognise from degree shows and group exhibitions. Others I haven’t heard of, and am looking forward to learning about what I visit.

Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads, The Courtauld

Open 9 February - 27 May 2024

Frank Auerbach, now 92 years old, was a founding member of what has come to be known as the School of London. He is generally known for - and still makes today - busy-handed portraits and street scenes that render his sitters and his city in sharp-edged strokes of charcoal or lashings of impasto oil paint. This exhibition features a less painterly, more eerie, series of work that Auerbach made in the 1950s and 60s. These large-scale drawings have been worked into until they look like relics, their subjects’ faces obscured and withdrawn. He has manufactured a fog between the viewer and the image that gives each portrait a haunting quality.

Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990

Open until 7 April 2024

Rewriting the history of art to pay women their dues is an often-put-off but undeniably necessary task. This exhibition takes on an interesting 20-year period - between the pop-mania of the 1960s and the tyranny of the YBA’s from the early 1990s - bringing to light some of the women making the most radical, transgressive and important work of the time. I have enjoyed seeing Gina Birch’s face plastered around the TFL network, mouth wide open in the middle of her video/performance piece 3 Minute Scream (1977), and look forward to learning about more artists who have shaped today’s culture without necessarily having been included in art historical narratives.

The Time of Our Lives, Drawing Room

Open 25 January - 21 April 2024

The Drawing Room, South London’s home of all things pencil-and-paper related - or pen, or graphite, or chalk, or… - moved into an impressive new site in Bermondsey this year. It’s an institution well worth the journey, both for its exhibition programming and its vast library, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of books on contemporary drawing. The exhibition which, like Women in Revolt!, focusses on women artists, takes a quote from Monica Ross which is equally profound and heartbreaking as its namesake and starting point: “and we’ll make art out of the time of our lives / that is always between one job, one role and another”.

Andrew Cranston, What made you stop here?, Hepworth Wakefield

Open until 2 June 2024

“A strong sense of place,” a string of words used in this exhibition’s accompanying text, is the kind of expression that it’s easy to attribute to any art that features, well, places. One way or another, that’s a lot of art. But it truly applies to Cranston, whose paintings - some the size of book covers, others taller than me - have almost mystical transportive powers. It’s quite a feat for one small picture on the wall of an over-lit, too-hot, full-of-unrelated-work art fair booth to transport the viewer to a quiet, chilly twilit beach somewhere on the Scottish coast. But I can attest, because it has happened to me. His paintings are not detailed, but with the relatively few brushstrokes he does apply, he imbues each work with an - excuse me - sense of place that is so precious and so rarely captured.

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican

13 February - 26 May 2024

Having long been patronisingly assigned to the “craft” category, textiles haven’t been given a fair showing in the art world until relatively recently. This international, intergenerational group exhibition explores how the medium can both offer warmth and comfort and be sites of political resistance. Some of the artists - like Lorna Pettaway, the quilter who said in an interview  “I didn't like to sew. Didn't want to do it”- started making their work out of necessity and since found their way into the gallery world. Others have identified as artists from the start. Together, they build a picture (a tapestry?) of the place of textiles in art and, more importantly, the wider world.