Overwhelmed by the great wave of spring openings? You need the Times guide to the best exhibitions to book this month. If Japanese prints float your boat, make a pilgrimage to the Whitworth in Manchester, where Hokusai and Hiroshige go head-to-head in a ravishing exhibition of woodcuts. Make it a double on a trip to Kensington Gardens where David Hockney salutes the seasons at Serpentine North and Cecily Brown’s poetic park life paintings fill the walls at Serpentine South. If you’re still standing, sashay down to Schiaparelli at the V&A for haute couture with a side order of lobster.
David Hockney: A Year in Normandie — the master’s swansong?
David Hockney “A Year in Normandie”, 2020-2021© David Hockney
Serpentine North Gallery, London
The year opens in mist. It lies in sullen stripes across grass the colour of a Dunlop flash. Bare trees rise upwards like bathers coming out of the sea. Pull your collar closer. This weather gets into your bones. You feel David Hockney’s A Year in Normandie as much as you see it. Plenty of exhibitions promise an immersive experience. This one draws you in and wraps you up. Rarely has the Serpentine North Gallery made a happier marriage with an artist. It’s a tricky space — a running track with two central chambers — often out of sympathy with its shows. The track works perfectly here. Laura Freeman
To Aug 23, serpentinegalleries.org
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Cecily Brown — where has this mesmerising artist been?
Cecily Brown’s Serpentine PictureGenevieve Hanson
Serpentine South Gallery, London
Considering Cecily Brown is one of the most expensive living female painters, and home-grown (though she has been based in New York since the 1990s), it’s remarkable how rarely we have had the chance to see her work in the UK. Since leaving London, because as a painter her work was out of step with the sensational shenanigans of the YBAs and Britain was breathless with the “death of painting”, she has had only two big public gallery exhibitions here — at Blenheim Palace and the Whitworth, Manchester — in the past 20 years. So Cecily Brown: Picture Making, a show of 32 paintings, plus 23 drawings and a handful of monotypes, at the Serpentine South Gallery, is a treat. Nancy Durrant
To Sept 6, serpentinegalleries.org
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Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art — give into a riotous imagination
Designer Elsa Schiaparelli is being celebrated at the V&AFredrich Baker/Conde Nast/PA
V&A, London
Coco Chanel didn’t think much of Elsa Schiaparelli. “That Italian artist who’s making clothes” was her dismissive assessment and on the face of it, it’s accurate. As this absorbing exhibition at the V&A South Kensington shows, Schiaparelli’s ethos was that fashion was not a profession but an art. Born into a family of academics and aristocrats in Rome in 1890, Schiaparelli was never going to conform. On the evidence here she was certainly an artist. I’m not sure that was quite the insult Chanel intended. ND
To Nov 8, vam.ac.uk
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Beneath the Great Wave — a fresh look at a Japanese icon
Hokusai’s infamous Great Wave2023 Christie’s Images Limited
Whitworth, Manchester
Last year an impression of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa sold for $2.8 million, a record for the artist, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. That’s a lot of noodles. Although about 8,000 impressions are thought to have been printed from Hokusai’s woodblocks, only a hundred or so survive today. We’re so used to seeing The Great Wave, we forget to look. Beneath the Great Wave: Hokusai and Hiroshige, at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester, introduces us to Hokusai’s most famous print as if we were encountering it for the first time. This perceptive, beautifully presented show is arranged across two rooms. LF
To Nov 15, whitworth.manchester.ac.uk
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