Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery looking at their Stubbs exhibition as it came to an end. Aliki Braine discussed the place of Stubbs in the National Gallery with the iconic “Whistlejacket” bookending one end of the longest vista in the gallery. She described him as “A place finder for visitors”. I hadn’t realised that he’d only been acquired by them in 1997. She discussed whether we can consider “Scrub”, the focus of the show, can be considered to be a portrait of a horse, looking at what she felt constitutes a portrait and concluding that it can be. She also looked at the two other projects represented in the show, Stubbs book on the anatomy of the horse and a series of portraits of all the thoroughbred horses over 50 years, a project which failed. This was an interesting lecture but very similar to others I had done on the show. I’d like to see these talks at the end of shows having more of a sense of reflecting on what had been learnt from seeing the wor...

Exquisite exhibition at the British Museum of Netherlandish drawings from 1400 to 1600. I love this period in Northern Renaissance art and this show didn't disappoint. Starting with the early works done as preparatory studies for workshops through to drawings made as works of art in their own right, they were shown with excellent explanations. This initial trip was a fairly quick one but I still managed to photograph most of the works! I'll definitely be going back particularly as I'll doing a course on it in a couple of weeks. The works were beautifully shown in the Print Room Gallery which gives you a shelf to lean on to study the detail, and what a lot of detail there was! I think my favourite was a procession by the workshop of Roger Van de Weyden with stunningly real faces. I also liked two kneeling ladies from the workshop of Hugo van der Goes. From the later period I loved a portrait of a older lady by Frans Pourbus and a print design by Pieter Bruegel the Eld...

Fascinating exhibition at the British Museum introducing the planned memorial gardens for the late Queen in St James's Park. The display had good illustrations and explanations which were shown with maquettes of the planned statues and sculptures as well as one of the park itself. I loved the one of the Queen and Yinka Shonibare's Commonwealth Wind Sculpture. My one complaint is that it was shown in the historic Reading Room which was full of tourist groups being lectured to about the room who seemed unaware of the exhibition and swarmed around it. It would have been a better experience if it had been shown in a different space. Closed 21 June 2026

Wasted installation at the British Museum to anticipate the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in September. The work was outside the main entrance to the gallery and consisted of trees and plants typical of East Sussex where the Battle of Hastings happened. They sat on hessian-wrapped rootballs in the colours of the tapestry. The work was designed by Andy Sturgeon. I say wasted as the space was too busy for the work, so it was very hard to see it. It was swamped by tourists and I suspect most of them had no idea that it was a temporary art work. It was such a good idea but it might have been better to place some of the trees in a cordoned off area so you could actually see them. The best area was the flowers along the top of the steps. Closed 2 June 2026

Colourful exhibition at the Wallace Collection examining the paintings of Winston Churchill. The show was arranged chronologically starting with some crude early works done in the First World War. Throughout there was an emphasis on how he painted to help his mental health. I know his work fairly well from Chartwell but it was interesting to see the work up close and to realise how thick the paint was. Often the work felt a little basic up close but worked well from a distance. I was fascinated to see he’d given the works to and the show also became an insight into friendship and political ties. Closes 29 November 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Interesting little exhibition at the Wallace Collection looking at how it operated during the Second World War. I had assumed it would be about how they moved the paintings and there was a small section on that but mainly it was about two exhibitions that took place in 1942 organised in support of the Soviet Union after it entered the conflict on the Allied side following the Nazi invasion of its territories in June 1941. The first featured work by British artists and this display included a number of works which were in the show as well as ephemeral. The second took the form of a Soviet-styled agitprop intervention, celebrating the achievements of the socialist state since 1917 and the display included photographs of the exhibition designed by Erno Goldfinger and a copy of the poster. Closes 25 October 2026

Moving exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery combining the photographs of Donna Gottschalk and the words of Helene Giannecchini. From the age of 17 Gottschalk has photographed her lesbian friends. Finding her work and becoming friends in 2023, Giannecchini was given access to her archive and worked it into a moving narrative framed as a walk around areas of New York where Gottschalk had lived. A deeply personal collection was transformed into the story of a community with words and images having equal weight. Closed 7 June 2026 Review Guardian

Quirky little exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery celebrating small online communities and   DIY and experimental publishing practices. I admit I’m not sure I understood it but at the heart was an interactive online quiz with questions about your online experience which then printed out a description of the type of online community you should join. Suitably for a blogger and former librarian it suggested I joined a wiki page. You were also invited on a second print out to write down your earliest online memory and pin it to a board. I’m not sure many went back to dial up modem which involved ramming a landline headset into two cups! Closed 7 June 2026

One of the better iterations of this annual exhibition at the Photographers’’ Gallery for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. I have learnt that this is not a straight photography award but also included contemporary art works which have included extensive use of photography. I found all the four shortlisted entries very engaging this year. On the top floor I began with Weronika    Gęsicka constructed images based on "mountweazels" , fictitious encyclopaedia entries inserted as copyright traps as well as fabricated Wikipedia pages. She asks us to question what is real and what is fictitious in these believable images.   Next was Amek   Mahmoodian   “One Hundred and Twenty Minutes” based on the fact that on average we dream for 120 minutes a night. An exile herself, she has asked fellow exiles to share their dreams and work with her to construct images of them in drawings, photographs and words. Down a floor found Rene Matić’s installation of diaristic...