1 Michael Andrews
A poetic eye for reality and flourishes of postmodern storytelling make Michael Andrews one of the most interesting, important British painters of the 20th century. Hopefully, this exhibition of some of his most haunting paintings will start a fashion for his admirable ways of seeing. It includes his eerie painting of a balloon’s shadow crossing a beach, which I loved long before I’d heard of him because it was on the cover of a Penguin poetry collection. But that’s Andrews: an artist you possibly know better than you think. And if you don’t, this is a chance to climb aboard.
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, W1, Friday 20 Jan to Saturday 25 Mar
2 Tales From Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The stories of gods, monsters, transformation and desire gathered by the ancient Roman poet Ovid from Greek mythology and given a sensual twist in witty Latin have shaped European art for millennia. Titian’s great (though damaged) Perseus And Andromeda is just one painting in the Wallace Collection that takes its tale from the Metamorphoses. This free display charts the changes artists have brought to Ovid and pursues his flights of imagination through one of the loveliest galleries in Europe.
Wallace Collection, W1, Thursday 19 Jan to Sunday 2 Apr
3 Matisse
The current fashion for seeing Matisse as a kind of proto-minimalist godfather of today’s art, just because he resorted to cutouts when he was too ill to paint, is wilfully ignorant of the development of his work. His blue nudes, on view in this Hayward touring exhibition, are the culmination of ideas he had been refining since the early 1900s. His cutouts do not replace painting, they consummate it.
Gerald Moore Gallery, SE9, Saturday 14 Jan to Saturday 11 Feb
4 The New Line
At the dawn of pop art in the 20s and 30s, V&A librarian Philip James collected modern adverts and magazine covers by avant-garde artists including László Moholy-Nagy to create an archive that reveals, among other things, how stylishly brands advertised between the wars.
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, to Sunday 12 Mar
5 William Kentridge And Vivienne Koorland
Kentridge is South Africa’s most powerful contemporary artist and Koorland is excellent, too. They have been friends for decades and, as this joint exhibition reveals, often share ideas. It explores their interest in how to represent history – in all its tragedy and hope – in art. It is their talent for humane and generous drawing that lets them achieve it.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, to Sunday 19 Feb
