1 South Africa: The Art Of A Nation
There is only one country in the world that can claim an art heritage that goes back 100,000 years. The world’s oldest artworks, found in Blombos Cave in South Africa, stand at the dawn of a national art epic that today includes one of the world’s greatest living artists, William Kentridge, alongside a variety of makers, from community groups to installationist Willie Bester. On the way, the nation has seen huge diversity in its output; this exhibition spans the lot.
British Museum, WC1, Thu to 27 Feb
2 Marcantonio Raimondi And Raphael
Raphael’s paintings are graceful summations of the human spirit. Yet he was also a pioneer of modern communications; he took a big interest in the power of printing and worked with engraver Marcantonio Raimondi on gorgeous reproductions of his art. This exhibition reveals how mechanical reproduction began and how Raimondi invented pornography with the salacious 16th-century visual book I Modi.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, to 23 Apr
3 Howard Hodgkin
As this exhibition of his prints makes clear, the memory art of Howard Hodgkin is a sensual well of sorrows. His powerful colours are ecstatic and almost criminally beautiful, his passion for places and people a great act of witnessing and elegy. One of Britain’s greatest artists, not just of today but of all time.
Alan Cristea Gallery, SW1, to 18 Nov
4 Maíno’s Adorations
You know Christmas is on its way when galleries wheel out the adorations of the kings and shepherds. This little show is special, however: a rare loan from Madrid’s Prado of two early Spanish baroque masterpieces by Juan Bautista Maíno, painted under the influence of Caravaggio after a trip to Rome. Raw reality meets Spanish mysticism in dreamlike altarpieces created for a church in Toledo.
National Gallery, WC2 to 29 Jan
5 Edward Krasinski
Avant-garde art has never been more subversive than it was in eastern Europe under Communism. The Polish artist Edward Krasinski, for instance, created works that could never be co-opted as state propaganda. His mysterious gestures included turning his apartment into a private work of art, with a line dividing it in two. This fascination with creating lines out of tape and rope is explored here, in the artist’s first British retrospective.
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