For some it’s the ritual of looking back over the year just gone that brings most pleasure, but if you’re in the other camp, there’s a bumper crop of cultural treats coming in 2026 that will marinate very nicely in a good sousing of armchair anticipation.
An armchair is just the place to enjoy Susan Owens’ new book Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons, which hits the shelves at the end of January, to usher in the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Though so closely associated with the countryside, Constable’s immersion in it – from his farming background, to his habit of painting even large works out in the fields – is often rather overlooked. Inspired by her own move to Suffolk a decade or so ago, Owens follows Constable through the seasons to bring a new perspective to this ubiquitous yet enigmatic painter.
Brazilian artist Laura Lima (b.1971) will be new to many in the UK, and her first solo London show, opening at the ICA on January 27, kicks off a year studded with exhibitions dedicated to artist women. Performance and the body figure large in Lima’s multidisciplinary practice, and her sculptural installation The Drawing Drawing, from which the exhibition takes its name, invites the public to join in with a reimagining of the traditional life-drawing class.
Suggested Reading
The quiet genius of Fra Angelico
The Female Body in Art is the title of Amy Dempsey’s new book, a beautifully illustrated chronology of women’s bodies as depicted by 80 artists from the Renaissance to now. It’s a structure that allows Dempsey to explore the shift from female archetypes to more nuanced portrayals of individual women, considering the impact of social and political climates, and tracing the lines between ideas and images made centuries apart.
Ana Mendieta’s (1948-1985) own body was her principal subject and medium, with which she reacted to and re-enacted her brutal separation as a teenager from her mother, and native Cuba. Her retrospective at Tate Modern is one of many exciting monographic shows next year, including Tracey Emin, and Frida Kahlo, both at Tate Modern, Colombian painter Beatriz González (b. 1938) at Barbican, and Rose Wylie (b.1934), whose Royal Academy show briefly overlaps with that of 17th-century Flemish “trailblazer” Michaelina Wautier (1604-1689), from March 27. American land artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014) spends the summer at the Goodwood Art Foundation, and in the autumn, star artist and designer Es Devlin gets the Design Museum treatment, and Tate St Ives surveys the eight-decade career of abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004).
But “where are the men?”, you may be asking. Don’t worry. Renoir and Love at the Musée d’Orsay, and then at the National Gallery, promises a major re-evaluation of an artist whose credibility has suffered from his wholesome, even soppy image. Comprehensive as Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 2023 retrospective seemed to be, Mark Rothko is an artist of unfathomable depths, and Palazzo Strozzi’s Rothko in Florence promises to be revelatory. On that note – it’s essential to mention Kunstmuseum Basel’s Helen Frankenthaler show which will be the largest European exhibition of her work to date.
Back in the UK, veteran photographer Don McCullin marks his 90th birthday at the Holburne Museum, Bath, Sunil Guptais at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and Belle Epoque pioneer Jacque-Henri Lartigue is at Milton Keynes. If the armchair still beckons, settle in: “a desperate gallerist conspires to sell a dead body at Art Basel Miami” is the unimprovable plotline of The Gallerist, starring Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Florence Hallett is an art writer
