Art
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast
Screaming apes, isolated in cages – and that’s just the people. Bacon was the most atheist of artists and his vision of humans and other animals is relentlessly Darwinian, so don’t look for cuteness or sentiment in his ruthless dissections of our nature. This is a sideways look at a modern master. JJ
Royal Academy, London, 30 January-18 April.
Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty
Provocateur, founder of Art Brut, or raw art, Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) embraced the arbitrary and irrational, using crude materials and working with an ironic rejection of skill and finesse. Immersed in French intellectual and artistic life, the show focuses on both Dubuffet’s own work and his extensive collection of outsider art, in the first major UK exhibition of this complex, fascinating artist in more than 50 years. AS
Barbican Art Gallery, London, 11 February-23 May.
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy
Taking its title from her most famous work, a masked head swathed in coloured cloths and feathers, this exhibition surveys one of the quirkiest and most appealing British artists of the 1930s. Agar translated surrealism into a British language of eccentricity and seaside fun. Is she really a neglected modern great? JJ
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 11 February-23 May.
Artes Mundi 9
The history of the slave trade in South Africa, cultural taboos surrounding the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45), colonialism in Puerto Rico, coal mining in India and the impact of the current pandemic on people of colour in the US are just some of the themes in this sometimes controversial and frequently moving exhibition by a shortlist of six international artists. Artes Mundi opens up the world in surprising ways. The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on 11 February. AS
National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39, Cardiff, 13 February-6 June.
Dürer’s Journeys
Albrecht Dürer was a restless visionary who brought the classical Renaissance home from Venice to Nuremberg, and marvelled at Aztec treasures on a trip to Belgium. Maybe journeys over the Alps and up the Rhine don’t sound so wild, but Dürer’s wanderlust inspired his captivating watercolour landscapes and fantastic engravings. JJ
National Gallery, London, 6 March-13 June
Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and the Port
The delayed 11th Liverpool Biennial thinks about the city as a body, a fluid organism that is continuously shaped by and shaping its environment. The curatorial premise talks about three entry points – the stomach, porosity and kin. Make of this what you can. There will be dance, music and all kinds of interdisciplinary shenanigans from a roster of international artists throughout the city. Pass the port. AS
Liverpool citywide, 20 March-6 June
Heather Phillipson
Phillipson’s Tate Britain Duveen commission follows her current Fourth Plinth commission, with its sagging ice cream cone, the giant fly and a uselessly twirling drone. It even has a cherry on top. The sculptor and video artist makes work that churns with humour, autobiography, knockabout asides and a poet’s sense of the unlikely conjunction. Then there’s the cheery feel-bad factor, the uplift and the downside. Can’t wait. AS
Tate Britain, London, 22 March-10 October
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser
The stories and verses of Lewis Carroll have fascinated and influenced modern culture from James Joyce to Tim Burton, anticipating everything from surrealist art to quantum mechanics. This immersive exhibition promises to take you deep into the rabbit hole of Carroll’s imagination, where mathematics meets wordplay in a playground of the absurd. JJ
V&A, London, 27 March-31 December
Sutapa Biswas
A welcome survey of the Bengal-born British Indian artist’s extensive career at Kettle’s Yard runs in parallel with work at Baltic Gateshead. Biswas often draws from myths and iconography from ancient Hindu mythologies, most famously in her Housewives with Steak-Knives, a painting of the Tantric goddess Kali wearing a necklace of severed heads, including politicians, Hitler and a European colonialist. Featuring painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video. AS
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 17 April-27 June; Baltic Gateshead, 8 May-31 October
Karla Black
Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery re-opens after a much needed £3.5m expansion with Scottish sculptor Karla Black, whose works since 2000, using ephemeral everyday materials – vaseline, bath bombs, raw plaster and pigment, cellophane and polythene – make a mess of things, in a good way. Earlier work will be augmented by two new commissions in the new, stripped-back warehouse spaces. AS
Fruitmarket Edinburgh, from 21 April
Rodin
The sculpture of Rodin is joyously impressionist, a soft cloud of sense perceptions and intuitions frozen in space. Modern art begins here, as this 19th-century titan turned art into a dreamlike exploration of states of mind. This exhibition shows how he worked in plaster to create prototypes that could be reproduced infinitely in bronze. JJ
Tate Modern, London, 6 May-10 October
Nero
The Roman emperor Nero has been an archetype of tyranny for nearly two millennia, but was he really as cruel as the historian Tacitus painted him? His creations include the Domus Aurea, a palace whose frescoes electrified the Renaissance. This dark encounter with history and myth should be spine tingling. JJ
British Museum, London, 27 May-24 October
Helen Frankenthaler
The soaked-in colours of this abstract expressionist seem to rise from deep inside her psyche. There are moving echoes of Monet’s waterlilies, as well as the early surrealist paintings of Rothko, in her richly entangled forest of symbols. These great modern paintings should play with Dulwich’s old masters like Coltrane riffing on Bach. JJ
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 27 May-28 November
Eduardo Chillida
Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) is best known for his monumental sculpture The Combs of the Wind, on the coastal rocks overlooking his home-town of San Sebastián. Influenced, among other things, by the Basque ironworking tradition and by his dialogues with philosopher Martin Heidegger, by modernism and by his experience as professional goalkeeper for San Sebastián football team. Just like a goalie, Chillida’s weighty art grabs at space. AS
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 26 June-2 January 2022
Gustave Moreau
The melting decadent encrustations of this fin de siècle mythographer fascinated the French surrealists – and rightly so. Moreau lived in ascetic solitude while painting lush fantasies of dancers and beheadings. His art took the modern imagination to new territories of gold and red, yet he’s not well known in Britain. Discover him. JJ
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 12 June-31 October
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
The UK’s first exhibition dedicated to modernist artist and designer Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). Best-known for her glorious, playful geometric abstractions, this extensive show traces Taeuber-Arp’s unique career as a painter, sculptor, dancer, teacher, writer and designer of textiles, stage sets, marionettes and interiors. This major show should affirm the importance of this often overlooked, generative artist. AS
Tate Modern, London, 15 July-17 October
Marina Abramović
Avoid the void, steer clear of counting rice-grains or following the Serbian artist’s method, and whatever you do, do not make eye contact or Marina will get you. That said, Abramović is a force of nature, a phenomenon. The Royal Academy’s retrospective of 50 years of confrontational performance works and encounters, many restaged by younger performers, as well as new works made for the exhibition, will be unmissable. AS
Royal Academy, London, 25 September-12 December
Turner prize
After a year’s absence due to the pandemic the world’s most famous contemporary art prize returns. And it’s in the Midlands to mark Coventry’s year as city of culture. Hopefully it will be controversial business as usual for the event that’s done so much to put British art on the map since the 1980s. JJ
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, 29 September-12 January 2022
Anish Kapoor: Painting
The sculptor’s “paintings” are gory and noticeably three-dimensional. He summons Bacon and Rembrandt with bloody colours of the self. Yet Kapoor has always used pigment and powerful colour, so it’s doubtful if he really sees a difference between sculpture and painting. Gorge on his carnal effusions that seep off the wall. JJ
Modern Art Oxford, 2 October-27 February 2022
Sheila Hicks
The Paris-based American artist has used weaving as the basis of her work for more than 50 years. Drawing on wildly different weaving traditions, and working on small woven drawings she creates on a hand-held frame, as well as large scale installations that respond to the architecture of the gallery, Hicks’s show includes more than 70 works, and promises to be as ravishing as it is overdue. A perfect venue for her art. AS
The Hepworth Wakefield, 27 November-May 2022
Architecture
M+ Museum by Herzog & de Meuron
It’s not very often that the raw concrete box around a subway tunnel becomes the defining space of a major new art museum, but then there’s not much conventional about M+. The long-awaited blockbuster museum of contemporary art will finally open this year, complete with the largest LED screen in the world glimmering across its facade. OW
Hong Kong, autumn
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen by MVRDV
Looking like a gigantic salad bowl airlifted into Rotterdam’s Museumpark, the Depot is the latest provocative work by Dutch pop pranksters MVRDV. As the world’s first publicly accessible museum depot, the polished vessel will allow visitors a glimpse behind the scenes at the museum’s entire collection, as well as stunning views from its rooftop garden. OW
Rotterdam, autumn
Cosmic House Museum by Charles Jencks and others
A playful paean to the godfather of postmodernism, the private home of architecture critic and garden designer Charles Jencks will open to the public this year for the first time. An evolutionary work, produced in collaboration with a number of architects and artists over the years, the house features pedimented bookshelves, a sundial window seat, and a whirlpool bath in the form of an upside down classical dome. A Sir John Soane’s Museum for the Pomo age. OW
Holland Park, London, end of May
Luma Arles by Frank Gehry
Perhaps one of the 91-year-old Frank Gehry’s last ever projects, the Luma Arles will be true to form, looking like a big scaly crumpled aluminium tornado grafted on to a glass and stone box. The twisting tower will contain a mix of artist studios, workshops, seminar rooms and research facilities, standing as a centrepiece of the surrounding arts centre, founded by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann. OW
Arles, France, spring
Greenwich Design District
Bringing a glamorous architectural menagerie to the weird millennium hotchpotch of the Greenwich Peninsula , the so-called Design District will feature buildings by some of the most interesting architects of the moment. The development will contain creative workspace, along with a recording and broadcast studio, and a multisport rooftop court, designed by an all-star cast of firms including SelgasCano, 6a, Barozzi Veiga, Architecture 00 and David Kohn. OW
London, spring
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures by Renzo Piano
A big bulging blob on Miracle Mile in Los Angeles, the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures looks like an arrival from a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano , it is an appropriate guise for what promises to be a dazzling new mecca for film buffs, bursting with movie memorabilia and offering an in-depth look at how films are made. OW
Los Angeles, 30 September
Taipei performing arts centre by OMA
Featuring another protruding silvery orb, the Taipei Performing Arts Centre promises to be a veritable transformer of a building. It includes an auditorium, theatre and black box studio, which can be combined into one enormous multisided events space, while a public loop meanders through Piranesian spaces between the venues, giving enticing backstage glimpses. OW
Taipei, Taiwan, date to be confirmed
Photography
Peter Hujar
Peter Hujar’s reputation has grown since his death in 1987, his black and white portraits of musicians, artists, writers and performers from New York’s late 70s bohemian downtown milieu possessing an often melancholic intimacy. This exhibition features his candid backstage portraits of performers in the city’s theatres and nightclubs, many of them captured in a moment of transformation as they applied makeup or just before they took to the stage in full drag. SOH
Maureen Paley, London, 6 February-14 March
Stephen Gill
The Arnolfini hosts a 30-year retrospective of Bristol-born photographer, Stephen Gill, which presents new work alongside images from acclaimed series including Hackney Flowers, Buried, Night Procession, Coexistence and The Pillar. An experimentalist at heart, Gill has followed his own unpredictable path, moving between observational documentary and various interventions, including burying and submerging his prints and mounting a movement-sensitive camera on a wooden pole near his home in rural Sweden. The exhibition will also draw on his extensive archive of photobooks and source materials. A glimpse into the mind of one of contemporary photography’s true originals. SOH
Arnolfini, Bristol, spring 2021
Chloe Dewe Mathews: Thames Log
Over five years, Chloe Dewe Mathews walked the Thames “documenting encounters and happenings” from its source in rural Gloucestershire to its mouth in the estuary near Southend-on-Sea. Her forthcoming book, Thames Log, and this exhibition document the myriad ways in which people interact with the river, whether mudlarks in search of Roman coins or Hindus who gather in devotion to Ganesh. She has photographed contemporary pagans communing with nature and Pentecostal Christians carrying out full-immersion baptisms. The images are accompanied by a log that shows the weather and tide timetables of the day on which each photograph was taken. SOH
Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, 14 January-11 April