2 weeks Ago By The Guardian
This exhibition is both beautiful and lucid in its introduction to the aesthete rulers who built the Taj Mahal. • , from 9 November to 5 May Retrospective of this Tanzanian born, Edinburgh based painter, who champions the healing power of art. • , until 25 May Put your money on Leonardo in this restaging of the Turner prize of the High Renaissance.
• , from 9 November to 16 February Neons, collages, sculptures and more that mix the Punjab and Britain in a pop mashup. • , until 1 March Pictures by Gordon Parks, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Horace Ové and others document Black life around the world. • , until 20 January Between 1976 and 1982, DB Burkeman was a teenage school dropout and aspiring photographer, immersed in the punk scenes in the UK and US but struggling with substance abuse issues.
While he spent his disposable income on self-medication, rolls of film remained undeveloped in a bedside drawer. Decades later, following his mother’s death, Burkeman cleared out his old bedroom and discovered a time capsule of the explosion of punk rock – now published in book form. This creamily painted, lushly textured impressionistic painting is a modern version of a traditional Spanish genre.
Just a few years before it was painted, Picasso too depicted scenes of poverty and drinking in his blue period. Both were responding to the injustice and economic backwardness of Spanish life at the start of the 20th century. Yet Spanish artists had always cast an eye on the ordinary.
The model for this work is , painted by Velázquez in 1628-9, in which country boozers share a wine or several with the god Bacchus. One of them looks out of the painting at you, just like the most inebriated-seeming of the men here. As you look back at Sorolla’s drinker, holding his blurred gaze, the slopped melting manner of the paint sucks you into his perspective and the canvas itself takes on a drunken sway.
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