Cézanne’s Portraits

National Portrait Gallery, 26th October to 11th February 2018

According to Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cézanne held that “the goal of all art is the human face,” but sitting for him was excruciating. Even so, in his lifetime, Cézanne painted over 200 portraits, including 26 self-portraits and 29 portraits of his patient wife, Hortense. He would conjure, with his deceptively austere geometries, the unease of his sitters. This exhibition gathers together works ranging in date from Cézanne’s vigorous, thickly painted portraits of his Uncle Dominique, dating from the 1860s, through to his final portraits, in 1906, of his gardener, Vallier, with their patches of luminous paint

Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes

The Hepworth Wakefield, 21th October to 28th January 2018

In a landmark show, Hepworth Wakefield offers the first substantial UK retrospective of this darkly humorous, feminist Polish-Jewish sculptor. Born in 1926, Szapocznikow’s Holocaust experience underwrote all her work, with its visceral, surrealist approach to the human figure. She played across the boundaries between pop, conceptual art, design and mass consumer production. Dying aged only 47 in 1973, she is only now gaining the recognition she deserves.

Alfredo Jaar: The Garden of Good and Evil

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 14th October to 25th February 2018 

This major exhibition of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, is a highlight of the YSP’s 40th anniversary programme. Trained as a magician and architect, Jaar’s work addresses trauma, global injustices and the politics of image-making through sophisticated, emotionally delicate and poetic installations. Seminal works from the 1990s will fill the Underground Gallery while a new commission, The Garden of Good and Evil, will be planted in the space outside. An unmissable show.

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