1 A Handful of Dust
In 1920, the surrealist photographer Man Ray took a picture of a huge piece of glass lying on the floor of his friend Marcel Duchamp’s studio, covered in dust. The glass panel was in fact part of Duchamp’s masterpiece-in-progress The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, deliberately left to gather dust as part of Duchamp’s creative process. The photograph, entitled Dust Breeding, is a gothic celebration of decay that literally finds beauty in the dirt. Here it is the starting point for a history of modern dust involving such artists as Gerhard Richter, Walker Evans and Jeff Wall.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 3 September
2 Giovanni da Rimini
This exhibition reconstructs a turning point in art: the beginning of what would become the Renaissance. Giovanni da Rimini’s altarpiece Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and Other Saints, reunited here with the panel Scenes from the Life of Christ, is a beautiful insight into the moment when Italian artists rejected Byzantine austerity and started to paint real life.
National Gallery, WC2, 14 June to 8 October
3 Raphael: The Drawings
This moving and revelatory exhibition brings together the best drawings of the genius who brought the Italian Renaissance to its climax in the early 1500s. If Raphael seems a staid classical figure today, this will change your mind. His sensuality and passion, sensitivity and insight are not only technically dazzling but profoundly humanist. Raphael emerges as an artist of rare soul.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to 3 September
4 Arthur Jafa
As a cinematographer, Arthur Jafa has worked with Julie Dash and Spike Lee. As an artist, he explores what an aesthetic that translated the sound of black American music into visual images might look like. This installation uses film, found footage and photography to recreate a feeling of “absence” that Jafa sees as looming over black lives.
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, W2, to 10 September
5 Balenciaga
A spiralling silk hat that looks like the Tower of Babel and a dress shaped like an envelope – or a tulip – are among the surrealistic inventions of high-fashion craftsman Cristóbal Balenciaga in this sumptuous survey, which also features his followers such as Paco Rabanne and Oscar de la Renta. Balenciaga created shapes influenced by his own Spanish heritage, including flamenco dresses and the paintings of Velázquez, in designs that outrageously defy nature.
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, to 18 February
