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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
National Portrait Gallery, to September 7
Jenny Saville seemed to emerge fully formed as an enquiring and prodigiously skilled painter of the human figure. By the time she turned 30, she was reinventing the nude for the contemporary era, pushing, scraping and swiping oil paint to its fleshiest extremes. This mid-career survey shows that, at its best, Saville’s work is rooted in profound emotional and human response: the 55-year-old probes devotion, intimacy, grief and disgust, still restless, still pushing in new directions. Read the FT’s full review
Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road
British Museum, to September 7
The 19th-century Japanese artist was one of the last great masters of the ukiyo-e woodblock print, and a sharp observer of fleeting moments — of the ways, for instance, travellers scatter when a storm breaks. His piercingly atmospheric work is shown to its full effect in the British Museum’s magisterial survey. Read the FT’s full review
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Tate Modern, to October 19
The traditional Korean timber hanok in which the artist Do Ho Suh grew up is the image that has inspired him ever since, recaptured in fabric and resin and graphic-rubbed paper, sometimes in miniature, sometimes at monumental scale. Suh is on the one hand so simple, making us all think how we carry the stamp of past homes, and on the other a romantic conceptualist, considering ruins and displacement, pushing towards dissolution. Read the FT’s full review
Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra
TATE BRITAIN, to OCTOBER 19
Tate Britain has twinned these two relatively obscure artists for an ambitious double-header. Colquhoun’s abstract but half-recognisable forms and Burra’s antic take on the desperate gaiety of the interwar years unfold across two adjacent exhibitions. The pairing might seem baffling at first, but they gain in being considered together. Read the FT’s full review
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico
National Gallery, to August 17
The National Gallery’s first ever show devoted to a Latin American artist shines a light on Velasco, the 19th-century painter who helped Mexico to see itself. Treasured at home and rarely loaned, 14 canvases plus a handful of works on paper show the richness of the country’s unique topography, flora and fauna. Travels to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 27-January 4 2026. Read the FT review
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
Wallace Collection, to October 26
Three years in the making, this is Grayson Perry’s sharp-witted response to the old mansion’s holdings, presenting more than 40 new works by the Turner Prize-winning artist. Read an interview with Grayson Perry
Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party
Garden Museum, to September 21
Photographs, paintings and drawings explore the role flowers played in developing the artist, designer and writer’s creative practice. Alongside glorious images from the gardens of his Wiltshire homes, Ashcombe House and Reddish House, where he hosted everyone from David Hockney to Bianca Jagger and Greta Garbo, there are set and costume designs, diaries and dresses. Read designer Luke Edward Hall on Beaton’s gardens
Claudio Parmiggiani
Estorick Collection to August 31
In his “Delocazione” series, Claudio Parmiggiani arranges everyday items against wooden panels which are exposed to fire from burning tyres for days; when cooled, with the soot settled, phantoms of the originals remain in the traces drawn by the smoke. This is Parmiggiani’s first institutional British show and an ideal introduction: in his own economical language, Parmiggiani asks what remains of cultures, stories, ourselves, in the beauty of traces left by dust and time. Read the FT’s full review
