As the UK finally begins to welcome sunnier weather, here are five art and photography exhibitions to seek out across London this March.
Julian Lombardi: The Global Carnival at Carl Kostyál (5 March – 29 March)
London-based painter Julian Lombardi presents a new body of work that pushes biomorphic abstraction into unstable psychological terrain. In The Global Carnival, fluid forms swell and mutate across luminous fields of colour, creating dreamlike environments where architecture, landscape and the body dissolve into one another. The exhibition reflects on the instability of contemporary life while proposing painting itself as a site of reflection and renewal.
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Dreaming in Colour at Opera Gallery London (5 March – 6 April)
Bringing together more than twenty emerging artists from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Dreaming in Colour explores the pull of the dream as both subject and artistic method. Taking place over a century after the birth of Surrealism, the exhibition revisits the unconscious as a generative space for experimentation and imagination. The works range from expressive painting to multimedia installations, linked by their interest in colour as a language of psychology. Across the exhibition, dream imagery proves to be a way to think about memory and displacement, with artists using vibrant palettes and shifting forms to evoke states that are situated between reality and reverie.
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Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery (5 Mar – 31 May)
American photographer Catherine Opie presents her first major museum exhibition in the UK, bringing together more than three decades of portraiture. Opie is known for documenting communities and subjects often overlooked by mainstream culture, including queer friends, performers, surfers and football players. The exhibition includes early works such as Being and Having (1991) alongside later portraits that examine themes of belonging and identity.
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Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize at The Photography’s Gallery (6 March – 7 June)
One of the most significant awards in contemporary photography returns to London this spring. The annual prize highlights four shortlisted artists whose practices have made a major contribution to photography over the past year. Presented through an exhibition of the finalists’ work, the show offers a snapshot of the medium’s evolving possibilities, from documentary and conceptual photography to experimental image-making. Together, the projects demonstrate how artists continue to use the camera to reflect on politics, technology and social change.
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David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting at the Serpentine North (12 March – 23 August)
In this expansive exhibition, David Hockney reflects on the act of painting through one of his most ambitious recent works. At its centre is A Year in Normandie, a monumental frieze-like painting created on an iPad and later printed at a vast scale, capturing the changing seasons around the artist’s home in rural France. The exhibition offers a meditation on observation and time, revealing how the artist continues to reinvent the possibilities of painting well into his later career.
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