Contemporary Art Exhibitions

"In an era when art often seems content with small, dry efforts, Kapoor soaks the Hayward in the blood and guts of his unfettered imagination."

"These were revolutionary photographs at the time – and they still feel new in their search to express the inexpressible. The dimly lit, subterranean gallery keeps you cocooned in this elegiac, brooding atmosphere. Kawada is drawn to images that trace the extremities of the Earth, the visible outer edges of our existence – the sky, the horizon, water, burning suns and scorching fires."

"Across the four works, Chihying's humour keeps some pretty knotty ideas about labour, consumerism and technology from getting bogged down in theory. However, it is a small show. Some would say too small."

"This is such an unsettling, threatening exhibition, helped no end by the weird ambient soundtrack, which makes you feel like you're about to be pounced on by some mythical beast in a deep dark forest. There's a sense here of ancient rites seen through the lens of 1960s hippy love, and churned through the mill of millennial malaise. It's as if the Wicker Man wasn't set on an island off the coast of north-west Scotland, but in early 2000s semi-rural Kent."

"Yet art rock is not art. In a live gig or on vinyl (White's preferred medium), sounds and words, gestures and rhythms, create atmospheres that can be elusive and fragile in their romantic power, even when the lyrics are banal or nonsensical. But as a visual artist, White is a complete nonstarter."

"They're pretty paintings, but a bit laboured and indulgent. Guzmán is way better out in nature, where the landscape becomes the main character, where the jungle explodes into life."

"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."

"Banerjee's surreal juxtapositions do not banalise high culture, in the sense of bringing it down to the level of daytime television. Instead, they serve to re-enchant everyday life, bringing the Indian gods into a quintessentially British world of anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners and ghastly carpets."

"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."

"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."

"This love has a toxic edge. It's as damaging as it is nurturing, as painful as it is essential. Not because their love is unique, but because Mendick has realised that's just what love is."

"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."

"The focus on religion is heavy-handed at times – perhaps loving the Spice Girls or Elvis is just not that deep? – and it feels remiss for the exhibition not to question what happens when these obsessions go too far, if they are always healthy, or if idolising celebrities should be seen as a blanket positive thing. Still, Holy Pop! is a joyous celebration of pop culture fandoms, and all their quirky, messy extremes."

"Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos' beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain."

"It's the little gestures that linger in my mind. A bent eyebrow. Curled fingers. The childlike twist of a toe. Even in the most disturbing works, feeling is conveyed not through terrible acts but expressions."

"There is a Warholian quality to much of her work, which uses images of figures from mainstream media and pop culture."

"Freud’s drawings show the artist’s meticulous process, but lack the oomph of his paintings."

"More than four decades on, Goldin’s louche lovers, waxwork royals, divorcing Mexicans and frightening wallpaper feel uncannily present – normal even."

"Facing West is a good subtitle. Although there are cowboys and farmhands aplenty, these photographs do not romanticise the West: there are no tumbleweeds, saddles or tobacco. Avedon’s subjects are confrontational, tired and often smeared with the grime of dangerous hard labour. This was not Avedon’s first rodeo when it came to probing the fissures at the heart of American culture; he was also photographing radicals and protesters in the same style."

"With this new collection of bright and bold still lifes, iPad experiments and splotchy portraits, the art-world titan is beginning to show his age in intriguing, unsteady ways that remain inimitably Hockney"

"The stars of the show live in the middle gallery, a series of paintings which uses the Lion of Judah as a recurring motif, showing the king of the jungle in various states of play and rest in colourful, urban settings."