Five exhibitions to visit this spring

As the UK crawls out of a rather dispiriting winter, galleries up and down the country are putting on a number of excellent exhibitions this spring. 

The Week takes a look at some of the best to spend a Sunday afternoon or two in this year. 

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican (London)

Textiles are having a bit of a revival, said Francesca Stocco, a researcher at Nottingham Trent University, on The Conversation, and one that is exploring their subtle potential for "subversion" and "political dissent". 

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This exhibition certainly proves that point. It's full of "blood, pain, pleasure, politics and history", said The Guardian, things not typically associated with the average person's conception of textiles. However, the artists use this unique medium to convey deep, complex experiences through "unquiet works".

José Leonilson's pieces, for example, were made when he was suffering from HIV in 1990s São Paulo. He knew his time was limited, but chose a painstaking process that "may well have been therapeutic".

Find out more: www.barbican.org.uk

The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, National Portrait Gallery (London)

Creators belonging to minority groups are often forgotten at the margins of the cultural fields they break into. It's true of television, film, literature and countless other mediums, but perhaps none more so than art. 

This exhibition remedies that in both literal and figurative ways, said the i news site, and centres the Black experience in "brilliantly experimental work".

Barbara Walker does this in a very literal way with her "Vanishing Point" series. She takes paintings from such iconic artists as Paolo Veronese and Titian and embosses them into paper, then intricately draws in the details of the work's sole Black figure, "inevitably positioned" in the margins.

Walker is one of 22 artists whose works are included. Their contributions span traditional portraiture, sculpture and "ominous dreamscapes", resulting in a "rich show" that is "playful, acerbic, fantastical and challenging".

Find out more: www.npg.org.uk

Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950–1970, Turner Contemporary (Margate)

The "often-denigrated" works in this exhibition now feel "unstoppable", said The Guardian.

It's a celebration of female artists who made transgressive art in a time that already looked down on women in a general sense, not least women who were sculpting "phallic bulges". Sexual organs were of particular importance to these artists, and now is the time to appreciate them properly.

That said, there's plenty more beyond the phalluses. One of the "great pleasures" is the wide range of materials, construction and execution, from Marisa Merz's "monstrous, unwieldy" "1966 Untitled (Living Sculpture)" to Hannah Wilke's "Androgynous and Vaginal" sculptures that "look as if they’ve been modelled in the palm of her hand".

Find out more: turnercontemporary.org

Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings, Ashmolean Museum (Oxford)

Containing 120 Flemish drawings spanning around a century, this show has "the very best of the best", said The Guardian. They are "vital, intimate, exceptionally intense" – and extremely varied in their subject matter. "Here's an earthworm straight from the garden… here's Johannes Fijt's harum-scarum dog, bristling across a page of tinted watercolour", and Jacob Jordaens "sketches five women arguing about the latest politics in the marketplace".

Through Rubens' work, you can see "his mind evolving through time, from his teenage animations of Bruegel's prints to his early drawings of ancient Roman statues brought alive through the graphic glint of an eye".

Up to nearly 600 years old, these "fragile visions" can only be shown for a short time before they "must all return to the protective darkness from which they came."

Find out more: www.ashmolean.org

Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story, Charleston (Lewes, East Sussex)

After meeting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Hepworth and Preece went on to develop "a radical queer and creative partnership that would span a rich body of work over several decades", said Wallpaper. "Magnetic and flamboyant", Preece was hailed as the creator of these pieces but they were actually by Hepworth, who was "shy but a prolific artist". 

The female form was Hepworth's focus and "Preece was her ultimate muse", becoming the "subject of countless portraits and nudes, each image radiating a soft sensuality". 

Preece married Stanley Spencer, and his portraits of her are here. Preece and Hepworth were buried in the same grave and Hepworth's "love of Preece shines through in each and every portrait".

Find out more: www.charleston.org.uk