Painting

"There are some lovely works of art here but I couldn\’t escape the thought that all of art and science are helpless before the mystery and beauty of a single living daisy."

"The word 'visionary' is done to death but the 17th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán demands it: he paints supernatural things naturally and natural things supernaturally. Space becomes different in his world, melting distance and erasing the barrier between you and the picture."

"In Anderson's work, the natural world is almost ominously abundant. Greenery seems to suffocate man-made structures, which often appear dilapidated – like ruined temples in a jungle. The sense of melancholy this generates is offset by the pleasure that Anderson evidently derives from manipulating paint. His compositions – some of which flirt, ingeniously, with abstraction – are awash with attractive blotches and drips."

"For the past 50 years, Hockney has flitted between these two modes, returning occasionally from noodling to remind us of his gift for direct communication (see his portrait of the performer Divine, the affecting drawings of his ageing mother, or his paintings of the Yorkshire landscape in the 2000s). But, sad to report, it is to the late stages of the jazz tendency that most of this exhibition belongs."

"I've never been a huge Baselitz fan: I found the whole upside down painting thing an affectation and I would have happily fronted a campaign to have all his work shown the right way up so we can see what it's really about. I also think he churned out the same painting for decades. But this is brutally emotional stuff."

"Elsewhere, slender ceramic figures are gathered like pawns on a chessboard, though here they are more crowded, more claustrophobic, not helped by the cages covering their heads. What are we to make of these structures? Devices for trapping fruit-eating pests, or part of a wider system of confinement, of lives hemmed into structures larger than themselves."

"Walking into Tate Modern's huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty, as if you have stumbled into something painfully private. Don't come here looking for a good time – you won't find it. But come looking for pure, unapologetic, undiluted, full-frontal love, grief, heartache and sadness, and you will end up feeling more feelings than you've probably felt for years."

"But the exhibition does not sing. It spits out theory instead. Every section is framed as an essay, with artworks chosen to illustrate an argument: one bay is based around the ideas of sociologist Stuart Hall, which the works don't seem to illustrate anyway. This is a show that wants to conjure up a utopian place, Panafrica, and make it real, which would be a powerful piece of political enchantment."

"On a spring day, with bluebells in the churchyard of St Peter's next door, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more uplifting exhibition. If you have a greenhouse, get to it. For me, the pots on the patio call."

"And she is magnificent — not merely critically, but commercially. Brown is among the most expensive living female painters in the world, her canvases commanding prices that would make lesser talents weep. The market, for once, is not wrong."

"Others (like me) may be put off by his somewhat patrician perspective: a landowner surveying a plot in which everyone is busy at work, driving cows or ploughing fields. This small show at Hampstead's Burgh House offers something like an olive branch to Constable haters."

"As an exhibition, it's a leaf through a scrapbook rather than a comprehensive survey. Summers run together, the days seem long and hazy, the irises are always in bloom. I left this evocative and convivial show craving ratatouille, resolving to plant irises and level the earth at the back of the garden for a greenhouse of my own."

"Certainly, blockbusters showing Van Gogh have the most populist pulling power, but credit is due to the National for truly seeking to provide a fuller geographic and historical view of other artists and movements. To this end, this Waldmüller showcase is the art historical equivalent of eating your greens: it may not quicken the heartbeat but is nonetheless a healthy exercise forming a fully balanced palate."

"Then, in 1865, Whistler suddenly paints the sea as if it was a piece of silk decorated with white lace and a ribbon. Green and Grey, Channel is a stunning declaration of artistic independence. He takes the sea, the element humans can't control, the roaring theme of Turner's visions, and makes it a painterly plaything."

"Constable gets caricatured as a conservative. In reality he is a conservationist. The Hay Wain, his most elegiac work, is about space and time."

"The best work, by contrast, finds strangeness in the familiar, and summons a forceful, idiosyncratic poetry. Paul Nash and Ivon Hitchens are the stars, although a couple of free-and-easy drawings by Peter Lanyon, inspired by gliding above Cornwall, are thrilling – and don't deserve to be stuffed in a corner."

"After centuries of colonialism and exploitation, there's just so much anger and pain here. This show isn't just about the earth and memory, this is art as a form of aesthetic resistance. It's hard not to see these ideas of stolen land and colonialism through the lens of Trump's regime with its ICE raids and travel bans."