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PATTER-THINGS-TO-GO-SEE-joanna-pitrowska_untitled_2025

By Lucy Conway Hems

From Blackpool to Porto, a season of exhibitions that rewards careful looking — luminous paintings, recovered histories, and a few works never seen before.

<a href="https://www.thegrundy.org/whats-on/single/louise-giovanelli-from-here-to-here-to-here/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Louise Giovanelli: From Here to Here to Here, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool</a> 
Until 28 June
Since her debut solo exhibition, From Here to Here, at the Grundy Art Gallery in 2016, Louise Giovanelli has become one of the most celebrated young painters, recognised for her luminous hyper-real canvases. A decade on, she returns to Blackpool in a poignant full-circle moment. In From Here to Here to Here, her paintings unfold alongside archival material and work by graduates of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/apollopaintingschool/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apollo Painting School</a>, an independent non-profit programme co-founded by Giovanelli, which provides an alternative model of learning for the next generation of painters.

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DZIIIgNNWSI/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Modern Figures, Ben Hunter Gallery, London</a> 
Until 17 July
This exhibition brings together a group of artists who have redefined the human figure in British art across the last hundred years. The impressive line-up includes Ithell Colquhoun, Maeve Gilmore, Lubaina Himid, Chantal Joffe and Celia Paul, among others. While distinct in sensibility, these artists are united by a sustained engagement with the figure as a subject of psychological, political, and formal enquiry.

<a href="https://glasgowinternational.org/programme/projects/a-moment-of-darkness-at-noon/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Joanna Piotrowska: A moment of darkness at noon, The Common Guild, Glasgow</a> 
Until 18 July
As part of this year’s Glasgow International programme, Joanna Piotrowska presents her first exhibition in Scotland. The show includes a series of newly commissioned photographic and collage works, continuing Piotrowska’s exploration of the unconscious through Jungian psychoanalysis and the sculptural possibilities of image-making. Fragmented images from the artist’s family archive and her own ambiguous photographs blur narrative structures, forming constellations of images that exist between memory, dream, and the unconscious.

<a href="https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2026/michael-borremans-french-painting" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michaël Borremans: French Painting, David Zwirner, Paris</a> 
Until 22 July
An exhibition of new, meticulously composed paintings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, marking his first solo show in France for two decades. These exhilarating works, with their technical mastery, defy immediate interpretation and haunt the viewer with their disconcerting imagery. Happiness (2026), an explosive cloaked in a lustrous pink quilt, is seductive and unsettling — evoking classical image-making but speaking its own contemporary language.

<a href="https://alisonjacques.com/exhibitions/eileen-agar" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Eileen Agar at Alison Jacques, London</a> 
Until 25 July
Alison Jacques notes: “Whether dancing on the rooftops in Paris, sharing ideas with Pablo Picasso, or gathering starfish on the beaches of Cornwall, Eileen Agar transformed the everyday into her own magical and otherworldly beauty.” This exhibition brings together paintings and collages made between 1957–1985, focusing on the artist’s fascination with nature, whether that was inspired by her post-war journeys to Tenerife or from studying the pink granite boulders along Ploumanac’h’s coastline. We recommend buying <a href="https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/a-look-at-my-life?" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A Look at My Life</a> from the gallery bookshop, a new edition of Agar’s long-out-of-print autobiography chronicling her extraordinary life, first printed in 1988.

<a href="https://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/leonora-carrington-the-symptomatic-surreal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, Freud Museum, London</a> 
Until 10 August
Leonora Carrington was a painter, novelist and visionary obsessed with mythology, psychology, alchemy, tarot, and other esoteric traditions. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view drawings and letters from her Santander period made between 1938–1941, which were previously held in a private collection for over sixty years. They follow the artist’s flight from Nazi-occupied France, her hospitalisation in Sanatorium Morales in Santander, Spain, and her journey through Madrid to New York, where she was reunited with other Surrealists in exile. Of note is Down Below (1940), a seminal early painting made during Carrington’s hospitalisation and the recently rediscovered and unseen Villa Pilar.

<a href="https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-hepworth-in-colour/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hepworth in Colour, Courtauld Gallery, London</a> 
Until 6 September
Colour is not something we immediately associate with the mega-modernist Barbara Hepworth, whose famed sculptural forms are often restrained and almost monochromatic. At the heart of this research-led exhibition, which brings together over fifty sculptures and drawings, are extraordinary wood and stone carvings created in the 1940s, in which vivid blues and joyful yellows are painted into hollows and onto curves. Also on view, <a href="https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/hepworth-and-nicholson-the-hampstead-studio-photographs/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Hampstead Studio Photographs</a>, brings together a magical set of photographs of the studio shared by Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, taken by Paul Laib in the 1930s (until 4 October).

<a href="https://www.serralves.pt/ciclo-serralves/2607-alice-neel/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect, Serralves, Porto</a> 
Until 17 January 2027
Crowned the ‘court painter of the underground&#8217;, Alice Neel’s paintings celebrate those who were too often marginalised in New York society during a period when figurative painting was deeply unfashionable. Beautifully Imperfect focuses on Neel’s treatment of imperfection not as a flaw, but as something to be celebrated — a response to normative models of beauty, identity, and visibility. The works on show address the female body, motherhood, ageing, and the forgotten faces of society. Do not miss all that this wonderful museum has to offer, including the Art Deco villa <a href="https://www.serralves.pt/en/institucional-serralves/casa-de-serralves-apresentacao/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Casa de Serralves</a> and its vast <a href="https://www.serralves.pt/en/institucional-serralves/parque_apresentacao/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sculpture gardens</a>.

Things to Go See — Exhibitions for Summer

The arts, traditions, and creative expressions worth your genuine attention. From whispered-about gallery openings and cultural phenomena to the movements and customs that quietly reshape how we see the world—think of this as your discerning companion to what merits consideration, conversation, and perhaps a slight detour from the well-trodden path.

CULTURE

Sculpture with Colour, 1943 by Barbara Hepworth. Photographed by Betty Saunders

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James Hunter Black Draftee, 1965 by Alice Neel

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