While we’re on photography, the National Portrait Gallery houses the first major UK exhibition to date of the work of one of the medium’s modern greats, Catherine Opie (March 5 to May 31). The show includes her seminal, Holbein-style portraits of queer friends and contemporaries, as well as images installed in conversation with the gallery’s permanent collection.
Over at the Barbican, the season’s string of landmark solo shows from agenda-setting female artists continues. There, you’ll find an exhibition of monumental paintings and installations by the late Colombian artist Beatriz González, whose reflections on the role of circulated imagery and media culture in the propagation of violence take on an eerie resonance against the backdrop of current headlines.
In Bloomsbury, Prem Sahib’s installation at the Perimeter’s new site (until April 1)—a former pub next to its main space—prompts reflections on the queer subtexts of common material associations. Close by at Ibraaz, you’ll find Joe Namy’s “Cosmic Breath” (until August 30), a sound installation composed of recordings of the Islamic adhan, or call to prayer, arranged in the exciting new institution’s central space.
Heading east, explore punchy shows from progressive institutions like Whitechapel Gallery, whose program spans exhibitions of the rich, textural vocabulary of Veronica Ryan and rare photographs and recordings of Senga Nengudi’s radical, sculpture-centered performances from across the ’70s (both April 1 to June 14). Chisenhale Gallery presents Racheal Crowther’s first UK institutional solo show (April 17 to June 14), centered on an installation of repurposed technical apparatus that explores how scent is (or can be) deployed as a tool of influence and social control and, more broadly, fragrance’s capacity as a sculptural material.
Close by at Cell Project Space, artist and musician LA Timpa contemplates the traces that sound leaves on physical matter (until May 3), while at Nunnery Gallery in Bow, you’ll find a poignant installation by the young British-Bengali artist Laisul Hoque, who has recreated his bedroom from a period spent in Bangladesh tending to his father’s poor health.
Galleries
One of Mayfair’s standouts is Hauser & Wirth’s presentation of late Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s ingeniously wacky caged ecologies (until April 18), many of which reflect on humanity’s inevitable surrendering of agency to technology. Over at David Zwirner is a rather more sober affair, in the form of a show of multimedia works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Robert Ryman, and Fred Sandback—pioneers of American minimalism across the ’60s and ’70s (March 24 to May 22). And on Cork Street, Lehmann Maupin takes up residency at Frieze’s bricks-and-mortar address to stage an exhibition of Freya Douglas-Morris’s sublime landscapes (until March 28).