Danish master Christian Købke painted empty skies, intimate portraits and melancholy landscapes. Jonathan Jones gets lost in a world of infinite mystery

When the Danish painter Christen Købke set out to depict the sprawling architectural mass of Frederiksborg castle, a dark genius seemed to possess him. The castle was a national landmark, and in the Romantic age was being rediscovered by writers and artists as a relic of Denmark’s glorious history: here was a great relic of the Danish renaissance, now long past. Like the devil tempting him to fly, this genius urged him to go up, up – higher, higher – into one of the soaring towers of the castle, to look down on its black rooftop and over the still landscape beyond. Look, look, said the devil, look into that sky. How empty it is – how infinite!

Købke drew the scene from the loftiest heights of the building and then, back in the studio, painted from memory, painted it exactly. Like a brutally cropped photograph, his view from Frederiksborg’s high towers takes in a roof as abstract as a bar placed across the canvas, a red rectangle of a chimney, the spire of a tower and the woods over the silver water. Yet this fills only the lower third of the canvas. Above there is nothing but air, the immense space of an illuminated sky. It seems to be pressing down into nothingness.

Købke’s painting Roof Ridge of Frederiksborg Castle, with View of Lake, Town and Forest (c1834–5) is a disconcerting masterpiece of Scandinavian art. Its empty sky, its melancholy attention to the unvisited heights of a building, can be seen as a precursor of the chilled fjord scenes painted by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch half a century later.

Comparisons with Munch might not be the first thing to strike a visitor to this new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Købke’s first outside Denmark. Initially, this feels like an introduction to Copenhagen’s own Jane Austen: a sensible, modest artist who patiently worked his little bit of ivory, portraying the people around him in calm, finely observed pictures of bourgeois life. Are the curators attempting to overturn the cliched view that Scandinavian art is, um, exciting? If you thought artists in the north were all about revelations of the sublime and encounters with the abyss – from the eerie Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich to the modern light art of Olafur Eliasson – then huh, what do you know? Here is a Danish artist of the Romantic age, regarded by Danes as the greatest of his time, and he is so sensible, looking at his work is like going to church.

But this is not the whole story, not by any means. Købke’s quietness is filled with strange imaginative wanderings. His eye seems drawn to the interstitial, the neglected, the silently waiting. Even if there was nothing Romantic about his art, the brevity of his biography would qualify him as one of this breed: the son of a prosperous Copenhagen baker, he was born in 1810, and dead by the time he was 37. A lot of his life was spent in the Citadel, a vast fortress built to defend Copenhagen’s harbour, and in his time used as a prison; his father was the prison baker. From his paintings, you would never guess its military origins, or that it housed prisoners locally known as “slaves”. Or would you?

A sky tinged with blood

Købke is drawn to the fortress’s gatehouses and drawbridges, which he paints with a hypnotic sense of time slowed to a snail’s pace. For instance, his 1837 picture The Northern Drawbridge of the Citadel in Copenhagen, concentrates on the red wooden structure that suspends the bridge over mirroring still water: ice-cold water, surely. People stop on that bridge and beside the moat, staring or talking quietly. Above and beyond, we see that empty sky again: it is tinged with salmon pink, as if blood were running from the bridge’s frame into the ether. At first glance so placid, this painting lures you into a frozen moment, so that you share the introspection of the people in it; you, too, are passing time by the bridge, gloomily. It reminds me of Munch’s paintings of young women gazing into Oslofjord, to the extent that I wonder if Munch saw this work. It resembles a Van Gogh painting of a similar drawbridge structure near Arles. Købke, like Van Gogh, appears attracted to the eccentricity of the framework, which becomes troubling and uneasy.

The difference between Købke and these later heroes of the northern vision is that he revelled in a precise academic style. At the time, Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Arts was one of the most highly regarded schools in Europe when it came to drawing and painting in the classical tradition. And Købke was a good pupil. His paintings testify to his belief in the Greek style, in close study of the human figure – all the rules of academic art that European painters were to rebel against 50 years later. Købke’s painting of a male nude is in a tradition that goes back to Michelangelo and Raphael. His 1830 painting View of the Plaster Cast Collection at Charlottenborg shows a curator wiping dust off a pedestal beneath a cast of a Greek hero fighting a centaur from the Parthenon.

And yet, look again at this painting. The wan contemplative spirit of Scandinavian art once again creeps in, over the shelves, infusing the silver light. Why show a man dusting? It is a pessimistic detail, and reminds us of the existence of dust. The custodian is engaged in the daily battle to keep these fragments white and gleaming. Suddenly we are there, in this empty gallery, on a freezing morning, watching this man dust antiquities in the gelid, vodka light.

Back at the castle, Købke stands by the lake and watches evening redden the sky. The mass of red walls and spired towers is reflected in the water precisely. Dark shadows glare from the palace windows. Strands of cloud hang in the emptiness. Købke is a patient, careful artist, but what he records, so accurately, is a world whose routines seem poised on the edge of infinite mystery. He is a craftsman of the abyss.

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National Portrait Gallery to stage exhibition of works by Hungarian-born society portraitist whose style fell out of fashion

John Singer Sargent was reputed to have said: “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.” The same could not be said of Philip de László, his successor as the leading society portraitist in Britain from 1907 until his death 30 years later.

De László, born in Hungary, was flattering and prolific, painting 5,000 portraits during his British career and capturing the likenesses of royalty and the landed gentry. He was the last of a long line of portraitists in the grand style, a tradition stretching back to Van Dyck.

Over the past 50 years, however, his work has been written off as glib and facile. When he died in 1937, the role of the British aristocracy was soon to change forever after the second world war. In a transformed UK, his works fell out of fashion. Now, however, the National Portrait Gallery, in London, is to mount the first exhibition of De László’s work since his death.

One of the highlights will be a portrait of the Queen Mother, painted in 1925, when she was the Duchess of York, which the Hungarian Pesti Hírlap newspaper praised as “harmoniously expressing the winsomeness of the duchess’s personality”.

Another will be a portrait of US society beauty the Duchess of Portland. Her husband, who commissioned the painting, was thrilled with the results, writing: “It has a ray of heaven illuminating in her face the charming qualities of her soul.”

Paul Moorhouse, the 20th century curator at the gallery, said De László was ripe for reappraisal. “He is a much more sophisticated and complex painter than he has been given credit for. He was incredibly good at what he did. He was prolific, and that very facility has caused a certain amount of suspicion. In his day, he was celebrated for being able to capture a likeness in two hours, which has been taken as a mark of superficiality.”Moorhouse said De László’s “brilliance can now be seen for what it is. He was an excellent colourist, a wonderful craftsman and hugely accomplished”.

De László was born in 1869 and moved to England in 1907. He was interned during the last years of the first world war, despite a petition in his defence started by the writer Jerome K Jerome.

The De László works will be on displayat the National Portrait Gallery from Saturday until 5 September.

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Debt woes and a sprawlingly diverse programme haven’t stopped this year’s Dubai art fair from showing some exhilarating art – just don’t expect any nudity

Much more exciting than the recent completion of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (renamed at the last minute as a shout out to Dubai’s creditors in Abu Dhabi) was the relatively uncelebrated opening of the first sections of Dubai’s metro system. The idea of the “public” has never been prominent in Dubai, but that may be starting to change. The city’s incredibly diverse ethnicities, used to encountering one another only in strictly hierarchical service situations, are now being squeezed together in rude proximity for the first time. The only nationality I did not see on the crowded train, as we glided along elevated tracks beside Sheikh Zayed Road were Emiratis.
 
I start with the metro because it’s an unsung triumph for a city that you’d be forgiven for thinking – if you read the Daily Mail – or indeed certain commentators in this venerable publication – that this hubristic Babel of a city is slipping into the Persian Gulf like something out of Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Thanks to bailouts from its big brother in Abu Dhabi, it isn’t. And, sorry to say, its confidence – or at least defiance – is starting to return as a result. Even its art fair (who buys art with this economy?) enjoyed a surprisingly successful fourth edition in the Disney-like luxury of the Madinat Jumeirah Hotel last weekend.
 
Art Dubai is not like western art fairs: it doesn’t have the quality that connoisseurs are accustomed to at Basel or London’s Frieze. No works featuring nudity or obvious political content are allowed (of which more later); there is an exclusive “women’s day” for the sheiks’ wives to roam around and add to their burgeoning collections; and it has more accompanying exhibitions, installations, talks, tours, prizes and passion than one person could possibly absorb. In short, it feels like Dubai is trying to prove something here. Perhaps that it does indeed possess the culture that it’s derided for lacking?
 
Out of 72 galleries, the art has come from 31 countries – mostly from what Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai’s leader, calls the Central World: the Middle East and Asia, of which Dubai still wants to be capital.
 
So someone like Javier Peres, the hip LA and Berlin gallerist who’s right at home at a fair such as Art Basel Miami Beach, felt like a fish out of water the first time he participated in Art Dubai. “I had to look up where the United Arab Emirates was on Google before coming here,” he said. “I admit my stupidity.” By the second day, though, he had already made more money than he did at the recent Armory Show in New York, mostly by selling a few Dan Colen paintings. As for the rest of the works on show, mostly from the Middle East, Peres said: “I don’t know how to look at it. If I respond to it instinctively, with my gut, fine. But I don’t understand it.”
 
That’s true of a lot of art in galleries such as ATHR from Jeddah or even the Middle East-dominated New York gallery Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (which reported such rapid sales that “we haven’t even had time to invoice”). But, amid the newness of the fair, there are moments of familiarity. A squat toilet by Iranian artist Behdad Lahooti is an obvious homage to Duchamp’s urinal, except Lahooti has charged his with political meaning by covering it with conjugations of the verb “to be free” in Farsi. Tehran’s Aaran gallery sold the piece on the first day for $4,700 to French collectors.
 
Over at the Third Line gallery, Dubai’s local powerhouse, a diptych of black holograms by Babak Golkar create the illusion of a circuit around the Ka’aba; the piece is called From God to Malevich. At Sfeir-Semler gallery, which has branches in Hamburg and Beirut, Etel Adnan’s stunning, Andreas Gursky-style photographs of the Golan Heights are loaded with anger and cold-eyed beauty.
 
As a western visitor to the fair, then, it’s hard to put aside familiar frames of reference. But the lesson of Art Dubai might be that such regional groupings and divisions are increasingly irrelevant, anyway. artists everywhere share similar influences, and work in multiple locations. We all dip in the same pool.
 
This might also explain why Art Dubai has managed to survive the fact that several heavy-hitting galleries that attended last year, such as Haunch of Venison and New York’s L&M, chose not to return this time around: the collector base is sufficiently broad to absorb local difficulties. “We don’t fear the crisis,” says gallerist Ulrich Semler. “It’s not important for us, because we sell to England, the US, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Lebanon. We don’t have any local collectors.” However, plenty of new faces graced the fair for the first time this year – sheiks, ultra-wealthy collectors from the Middle East and Ukraine, and the US mega-collectors Don and Mera Rubell.
 
Still, the variation in quality here is massive – excitingly so. Hunar, which was Dubai’s first fine art gallery, opening in 1998, displayed among lyrical paintings of horses and mysterious dishdasha’d figures a bronze bust of Sheikh Maktoum by British sculptor Carolyn Morton. It was commissioned, according to the gallerist, as a tribute. Only if appropriated by someone such as artist Jeff Koons – it seems like the kind of kitsch/sincere object he’d love – would it accrue the level of conceptual value expected at most art fairs. In the meantime, it’s a healthy challenge to have to swallow art that is made with no other purpose than pure glorification.
 
Another local gallery, Isabelle Van Den Eynde, showed a big, sloppy, jovial painting by the young Iranian Rokni Haerizadeh, of a chaotic picnic in the middle of a busy roundabout. I assumed – or wished – that this thrilling scene, reminiscent in spirit of Manet’s paintings/edouard-manet-music-in-the-tuileries-gardens”>Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) or Jean Dubuffet’s The Busy Life (1953), was in Dubai. Here is the vibrant public life, the cross-contamination, that the city has been allergic to. But it actually depicts Tehran, not Dubai, on the 13th day of the Persian New Year, when everyone eats together outdoors.
 
The gallery was also showing work by Haerizadeh’s brother Ramin. Or at least it did, until Dubai’s state censors – the same guys who diligently black out nipples from issues of the Sun destined for British tourists – removed it from the fair. They also slapped a big white sticker over the hundreds of issues of the art fair’s daily newspaper that featured Ramin’s work.
 
I took a break from the fair to visit the Haerizadeh brothers in their 42nd-floor penthouse at Dubai Marina, overlooking the artificial archipelago that is the Palm Jumeirah. The duo arrived in Dubai last year, shortly after appearing in Charles Saatchi’s exhibition Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East. The provocative nature of that show earned them a visibility they’d never had before in Tehran – including threats that were convincing enough to make them leave immediately for Dubai.
 
“We came here as exiles,” Ramin says. “And now we have a problem with censorship here as well.” The work in question was a political collage in which the Shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, pays a benevolent visit to a classroom. Instead of school children, though, Ramin had inserted multiple images of himself, with his massive beard, wearing a chador and gleefully munching on pieces of paper with the empress’s image on it.
 
Several gallerists privately warned journalists against overestimating the importance of censorship in Dubai. But the significant tragedy of the Haerizadehs’ situation is that Dubai, which is potentially a beacon of relative freedom and opportunity for the Middle East and Asia, has become so unstable for them. If Rokni’s brilliant new series of paintings depicting the torture currently going on in Iran’s prisons were discovered in his studio, he’d have to go into exile again – this time to London. “We are thinking of becoming fugitives,” he half-jokes.
 
In March 2008, a year after Art Dubai began, the newly-formed Dubai Cultural and Arts Authority announced plans for some permanent cultural infrastructure for the emirate. Khor Dubai was to be a 22km tract of culture, boasting 14 theatres, 10 museums (including a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art), 11 galleries, nine libraries, seven “cultural icons”, seven arts and cultural institutes, and an opera house. All of this is now in deep freeze.
 
That’s part of the reason why Abdul Raheem Sharif turned his modest old house (they do exist in Dubai) into The Flying House, a spontaneous, overflowing mini-museum for local artists to display and preserve their art in the absence of a proper institution to do it for them. Local artist Hassan Sharifi’s works dominate: he obsessively accumulates Arte Povera-type junk and stores it on shelves and in glass cases. It will be a shame when this place, and the delightfully unpretentious Dubai Museum in the old town, which features historical dioramas and relics, are inevitably superseded by some starchitect mega-museum.
 
What Dubai is left with in the meantime is actually much better: a burgeoning grassroots cultural scene in the industrial Al Quoz district, which will soon be accessible from the fair by metro (admittedly with a couple of taxi transfers). Young galleries like the Third Line, Carbon 12, Traffic and Ayyam are all sticking out the crisis here. “Dubai has always been the little guy,” says Hetal Pawani, director of Jamjar, a gallery studio space and sometime yoga venue. Pawani is one of the city’s apparently limitless supply of ambitious, self-confident young women who are basically running the art scene here. “We’ve always been bottom up,” she says, “and then the policy would emerge later. There’s a clear distinction between Dubai and Sharjah, with its biennial and art museum, and Abu Dhabi, which has its big plans.” (These bring for a cultural island featuring franchises of the Guggenheim and the Louvre.) “In Dubai,” says Pawani, “we have to do things ourselves.”

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Artes Mundi’s rhetoric doesn’t convince – but its flashes of beauty do

The trucks roar through Kyrgyzstan, on what was once the Great Silk Road. Laden with scrap metal and heading for western China, they fill the air with dust. A lone boy on a horse chases them. A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope is one of the works in Artes Mundi 4, now at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The trucks roar on, through Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev’s five-channel video. The artists live and work in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek. Youths laugh at the camera and a group of men sing a folk song on an empty road. The song echoes through the galleries, as you wander from room to room, artist to artist.

Albanian weddings, everyday life in Russia, trouble with Taiwanese immigration officials: Artes Mundi, with its £40,000 prize for the winning artist, aims to be global in its reach. “One World, All Humanity” reads a slogan on the cover of the gallery guide. The show’s remit also says that the artists should refer to “the human condition and the human form”. I’m not sure what that means: art with people in it, doing people-type things? Even Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s Telephone fits that category.

There is something a bit worthy about Artes Mundi. At worst, there are works that tend towards a National Geographic, slice-of-ethnicity view of the world, which doesn’t take us very far, except geographically. The show is sprawling and unevenly installed; sound leaks between different works.

Fernando Bryce’s art is at once a history lesson and the product of mind-boggling labour. A Peruvian-German, Bryce trawls through history’s major and minor events, redrawing and copying newspaper pages, advertisements and all kinds of printed ephemera. A pamphlet extolling America’s new possessions in the Pacific has nearby a drawing of US soldiers torturing a Filipino prisoner with the “water cure” (as if to say that nothing changes in the war on terror). There are adverts for the sailing of the Titanic and for Odol mouthwash. Bryce unifies all this into one big conspiracy. You could stay for hours.

Mostly, Artes Mundi focuses on video and film, and it eats your day. It’s easy to drift in and out of installations without quite grasping them. Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory mixes old footage of the Taiwanese economic boom with recent footage shot in a closed-down garment factory. There are some marvellous moments and passages of excruciating dullness.

Maybe these bewildered and frustrated victims of uncaring bureaucracy should follow the example of the family pushing a piano across the border between Bulgaria and Turkey in Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s Liminal Crossing. It’s a metaphor – but of what, exactly? Another piano is pushed up a hill in a second work shot in the British countryside, while an older and a younger men hold a stilted conversation. Its probably full of portent but the acting isn’t up to it. Raised in Bulgaria as part of a Turkish minority, Çavuşoğlu now works in London. Borders and migration seem to be his theme (as well as of several other artists in the show), but there’s too much going on to really make much sense of it.Sometimes all one is left with are startling images. In Adrian Paci’s Per Speculum, children sit in the branches of an English oak, flashing shards of broken mirror at the camera. The glass catches the sun and flares in the lens, the tree filled with flashing light. This is very beautiful, and enough in itself. In another room, Paci has erected two brick walls, which he has covered in plaster and frescoed with a sequence of pallid, painted images derived from videos shot at a wedding in Paci’s homeland, Albania. There is something nicesatisfying about rendering video-grabs in fresco painting, but it is difficult to know exactly why Paci is doing it. Perhaps for him, film and video are painting by other means, and he wants us to make the connection.

Muscovite Olga Chernysheva’s short films – a camera walked through a crowded train, a boy uncomfortable in his uniform at some kind of official parade – are a delight. A further film, shot in a St Petersburg museum, wanders between paintings and spectators and loses us in reflections – in the gallery windows and the glazing on the paintings. A girl looks at a portrait that looks like her. Chernysheva has installed this among the collection in the National Gallery of Wales. Here we are in one collection, looking at images of another. We overhear the Russian gallery guides delivering their spiel, and are interrupted by the gallery guides in Cardiff. Chernysheva’s work is extremely rich and rewarding. For me, she is the surprise of this show.

But Yael Bartana should win. The Israeli artist shows the first two parts of an unfinished trilogy that takes as its premise a call for Jews to return to Poland. In the first film, a young man gives a political speech, exhorting Jews to return and save the country from being only for “Polish Poles in Poland”. Bartana plays on and inverts nationalist sentiment, EU and old-style Communist party rhetoric; the whole thing is stirring, but windswept, threadbare and absurd. In the second film, a kibbutz is built in a Polish suburb. First, a wooden tower is erected, then a wall. Everyone looks happy, motivated, their eyes shining with utopian zeal. As building work goes on, razor wire appears atop the wall, and the tower is fitted with a searchlight. It’s a watchtower, and the whole place looks like a prison camp, but no one seems to notice. Somehow, inadvertently, Bartana throws into relief Artes Mundi’s rhetoric of “one world, all humanity”, its empty talk of “the human condition and the human form”. Bartana skewers this, and comes up with the goods.

Artes Mundi 4 is at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, until 6 June. Details: museumwales.ac.uk. A longer version of this review appears at guardian.co.uk/artanddesign

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V&A, London
Lost children, poverty, imprisonment: 300 years of stories both personal and political are sewn into the quilts in this wonderful show

The soldier looks peaceful but alarmingly pale. He has a metal plate lodged in his head. They’ve patched him up at the military hospital and even given him something to keep his mind off the horrors of the Crimea. He is sitting up in his nightshirt stitching the most startling quilt.

The triangles alternate black and white, black and red, red and yellow in fierce chevron stripes. It is a terrific piece of op-art geometry. The painting that commemorates Private Walker’s labours shows not only the quilt and exactly how it is done, right down to the difficulty of keeping each fiddly little triangle from curling up as you stitch it to another, but something else too.

There on the bed lies Walker’s uniform, complete with medal. The quilt turns out to be made of his regimental colours, almost literally – a piecing together of the torn clothes, if not the bodies, of the dead.

Are all quilts an act of commemoration, more or less public or private? It seems so from this tremendous exhibition. Quilts 1700-2010 has had more advance bookings than any other at the V&A, with visitors due to fly in from all round the world. It deserves its enormous success.

For what it shows is an art form that takes scraps of the real world and transforms them into visions and images, that shores up the fragments of the past while making something new (and warm) for the future. This is not quilting as commonly imagined – Laura Ashley pre-cut squares machined together for the guest room – but something infinitely more imaginative, idiosyncratic, personal; another way of drawing or painting, another form of narrative or expression.

Look at the unknown 18th-century woman who has stitched her entire world into a coverlet, beginning with the clock at the centre that measures time and life, radiating out through the day’s objects – comb, thimble, scissors, the very needle she is using right now – to the emblems of her home and the garden beyond, where the spring birds arrive, then depart for the winter sun. It feels like the whole of an existence, circumscribed, confined and yet rich in the mind, condensed to the visual equivalent of a sonnet.

Look at James Williams’s anthology of wonders – a camel, an elephant, a Chinese pagoda, the whale swallowing Jonah; to which he has proudly added a perfect cloth reprise of Thomas Telford’s miraculous suspension bridge in Menai. Williams was a Welsh tailor. It took him a decade to piece the quilt together after work, and no wonder, for each vignette is united in a web of tiny shifting mosaics that feels like a dream adrift in the mind.

Ten years, 40 years: the curators have been able to determine from the fabrics themselves how long some of these quilts were under the needle – picked up and abandoned and picked up again. Each quilt is the measure of its own making. And as time passes, relationships and events are both implicit and explicit in the work. The death of a husband is felt in darkening tone and sombre embroidery; the length of a pregnancy apparent as the baby’s name is eventually added after the relief of a safe birth. Quilts reflect family history as much as private lives.

Some of these histories turn out to be dark or sorrowful. Miss Nixon’s quilt, made in the 1870s, and known as a strippy piece for its bold stripes of turkey-red and white cotton, was stitched in poverty at a miner’s quilting club in Northumbria. The painstaking art is all in the patterning of diamonds, roses and leaves described with infinitely small stitches, perhaps compensating in this case for the lack of affordable cloth with which to vary the design.

Even an inexperienced eye can gauge how many long months of patience, skill and eyestrain were involved just by examining a single inch. But such quilts earned for Miss Nixon and her friends nothing more than the equivalent of a miner’s wage for a fortnight.

Other quilts tell of lost children, unfaithful husbands, imprisonment and poverty, of persecuted Baptists and women convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. One of the most dynamic – and vitality, not weakness, remains the dominant characteristic – is the so-called George III coverlet which shows the monarch reviewing his troops in the middle. But this formality is surrounded, and nearly upstaged, by a wonderful border in which official portraits of soldiers alternate with unofficial portraits of women: talking, writing, painting, laughing, walking and – of course – making quilts. There is no sense of Penelope sadly spinning away the war years; this is Homer revised, with women rising to the moment, refusing to waste either life or time.

This coverlet includes fragments of regency petticoat. The condition of life is materially apparent, so to speak, in a quilt. A tiny piece of expensive brocade, a circle of Indian fabric illegally imported during the 19th century trade ban, the lace from a Victorian wedding dress: what’s prized is presented like a jewel in the ordinary cloth.

There are quilts made entirely from striped pyjamas, blankets, old coats, black-out curtains. Ingenuity is underpinned by frugality. The curators of this show had their ears to the ground when they first began to gather quilts five years ago, for this is an art that speaks more clearly than ever to our make-and-mend era.

And it does feel like speech. The most obvious (and commonly drawn) analogy is with abstract art: primary shapes, blocked colours, modular non-representational arrangements. Quilts have the shape and form of paintings; museums and collectors like to hang them on the walls. The great Amish quilts look like precursors to the minimalism of Sol Lewitt, Joseph Albers and Frank Stella.

But this is an exhibition of British quilts, and though there is one stunning abstraction, mute in its glowing cobalt and red, the sense is far more of representation, of the power of quilts to make a direct address.

Which is precisely the subject of a piece by Sara Impey, one of 10 works specially commissioned for this show. Impey found a letter in a drawer after her mother’s death that breathed a hint of lost love; she has preserved it, like scented air in a bottle, in a most beautiful quilt in which phrases and half-phrases are stitched into the spectral surface of the fabric in broken lines that both imitate the patterns of speech and the motion of sewing itself, piercing the cloth, then drawing the thread slowly away.

We are all familiar with quilts that anthologise a family’s old clothes, or commemorate its story through births or marriages; with quilts as complex pixellations of colour, tone and shape, patterned in jockey’s cap or sawtooth star. But what this show reveals is the sheer originality that can thrive within such precise parameters. It is a show to enthral and inspire in equal measure, not least because there is such a sense of order in this hardwon art, this creation of a world out of scraps. It is all there in the portrait of Thomas Walker in his bed: the strange peace of making a quilt.

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John Tunnard, Chichester

Amorphous shapes dance in dream-like landscapes of seemingly infinite regress in the canvases of British artist John Tunnard. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Tunnard fused surrealism with abstraction in paintings exploring inner worlds, the Cornish vistas that surrounded his home and even space travel. Melodically composed with upbeat colours or introspective muted hues, his paintings are a little-known delight. Tunnard worked in a time when artists clustered in groups and he was clearly in step with modernist currents. He showed work alongside Max Ernst, Magritte, Henry Moore and Paul Nash, was championed by artworld linchpin Peggy Guggenheim and the St Ives artist Ben Nicholson invited him to join the Penwith Society. But he resisted being part of a gang. Perhaps that’s why he’s been sidelined in art history, something the first survey of his work in 30 years should rectify.

Pallant House Gallery, to 6 Jun

Skye Sherwin

Without From Within, Nottingham

René Magritte’s La Condition Humaine is a painting of a painting of a landscape on an easel in front of a window that looks out on to the very same landscape that the painted painting depicts. Got that? This intriguing exhibition curated by Anne Goodchild focuses both on paintings of windows looking outside and painting as a window on reality, with works ranging from the early-20th century Camden Town post-impressionism of Spencer Gore to the painstakingly enamelled provincialism of a recent George Shaw. In between we get the poetic graphic reveries of David Jones, the kitchen sink squalor of John Bratby, the Californian hedonism of David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin’s delightful Proustian daubs.

Djanogly Art Gallery, to 3 May

Robert Clark

Anni Albers, London

Although she wanted to be a painter, when Anni Albers enrolled at the legendary Bauhaus college, she was sidelined into the weaving workshop. Yet with what she described as “limp threads” she flourished, emigrating to the States where she and her husband, the painter Joseph Albers, established the Black Mountain College as an avant garde powerhouse. Balancing usefulness with aesthetics, Albers put textiles on the art map, uniting hand-weaving with industrial production. Typically working in hushed hues true to her materials, her abstract patterns nudge at the pure art of painting while drawing inspiration from traditional Peruvian weavers. This show focuses on her later work as a printmaker, and boasts every print she ever made, evolving from maze-like patterns to her later eye-popping geometric constellations.

Alan Cristea Gallery, W1, to 17 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Alan Davie, Leeds

A Scot with a taste for zen spontaneity and free jazz, Alan Davie is the bearded beatnik of abstract expressionism. His paintings, no matter how apparently abstract, always contain hints of archetypal symbols. Davie also loves gliding, and it shows. His bold primary colours swoop and zoom. With Davie you can feel the fun of throwing the paint about, the excitement of laying it down and seeing what weirdness it comes up with almost of its own accord. This is Jungian auto-suggestive doodling on a flamboyant scale, producing a carnival array of mystic convolutions. Life-affirming get-up-and-go stuff.

Stanley And Audrey Burton Gallery, to 6 Jun

Robert Clark

Curtain Show, Birmingham

The starting point for this show is a faded photograph of Lilly Reich’s Silk And Velvet Café, made for the 1927 Women’s Fashion Exhibition in Berlin. The cafe itself was an elegant architectural maze of coloured silk and velvet curtains. So here contemporary artists, including Tacita Dean and Hannah James, present installations that play with the idea of curtains, blinds and screens. There are aspects of divided spaces, shrouded figures and the onset of dusk and dawn. A typically spooky affair, Douglas Gordon’s Off Screen is a video installation in which an image of a curtain is projected on to a curtain, setting a stage for visitors to become shadowy silhouetted protagonists.

Eastside Projects, to 17 Apr

Robert Clark

Ben Rivers, London

Ben Rivers’s films follow a back-to-basics ethos. He shoots on out-of-date stock on an old Bolex wind-up camera, processing the film in his kitchen sink, and his subject matter is people and places on society’s fringes. These have included the modern-day hermit Jake Williams, abandoned houses and a family living off the land. Conjuring alternative worlds not so far from urban bustle, Rivers’s work has a fantastical quality, more collagist poem than documentary, with moody soundtracks which filter a noirish, ghost story vibe. His recent film, Origin Of Species, is the focus here. A patchwork of aged-looking footage chronicles the life of an elderly man in a rundown cottage while a narrator muses on subjects such as Big Bang theory.

Kate MacGarry, E2, to 2 May

Skye Sherwin

Mark Francis, Kendal

Mark Francis first gained acclaim in the early-90s with paintings of what looked like close-ups of sperm. As he developed, the animated blobs looked like anything teeming with small-scale or cosmic energy. This was distinctive stuff, like a microscopic or telescopic super-reality. Yet, even at their most pulsating, Francis’s organic goings-on were always set on a grid-like backdrop of darkness. His more recent work retains the micro/macro ambiguity while the grids now evoke aerial or astronomy maps, or a mass of musical notations. Scenes that lie at the limits of vision.

Abbot Hall, to 3 Jul

Robert Clark

Bharti Kher, London

Bharti Kher’s trippy sculptures of fabulous beasts suggest she’s had a good dose of William Blake and Hieronymous Bosch with a hit of Indian and Greek mythology on the side. In memorably weird fibreglass works she’s conjured the likes of a centaur woman with green skin, hooves and a peacock’s tail of shopping bags. While the British-born, Delhi-based Kher is one of India’s best-known contemporary artists, her creations outpace any easy classification. Fragmented identity, domestic drudgery and the hidden meanings in everyday stuff are some of the themes she juggles. Her first London solo show includes bizarre disjunctions such as a rocking-horse unicorn, a room like a confessional box whose inner walls are decked in glittering bindis arranged to form watching eyes, the meditative ring of a singing bell, and aged medical charts about giving birth, enveloped by sperm-like bindis.

Hauser & Wirth, W1, Sat to 15 May

Skye Sherwin

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.

His new installation at Tate Britain sees him guiltily return a stolen stone to the Pyramid of Giza. It’s a gripping work of art

It’s unusual to see a new work of art about conscience. I mean individual conscience, not some generalised idea of political guilt. There are plenty of contemporary artworks that might play on our collective guilt about the environment or global relations. But for a young artist to meditate on the power of personal guilt, in a private and introspective way? That’s quite striking.

Andy Holden’s Art Now installation at Tate Britain tells the story of a childhood crime and an adult’s attempt to make amends. On holiday in Egypt, the young Holden plucked a loose piece of stone from one of the pyramids of Giza. In his imagination, this archaeological theft assumed massive proportions. The tiny fragment became a gigantic boulder – almost a mountain. That is the scale it assumes in his sculpture, Pyramid Piece, a towering fragment of rock, like a fallen meteorite, that dominates the gallery, covered in knitted wool like a Joseph Beuys piano covered in felt, and revealed by that incongruously soft surface to be a dream, a phantom stone, that exists only in his guilty mind.

A film playing on a TV monitor, which Holden made by giving a camera to someone he met at the pyramids, records his attempt to return the stolen fragment. On shaky handheld video, the artist clambers up the vast stepped sides of the Great Pyramid, looking for the right place to put his shard; vainly, madly trying to identify its original location in the immensity of stone.

The film has a wonderfully sad soundtrack, recorded by Holden’s band the Grubby Mitts, that you can listen to on headphones. It adds hugely to the conviction and emotion of the work.

Replicas of the pyramids sit on a table, a final comment on memory – how fragile it is, how reducible to cheap souvenirs. But Holden’s attempt to return the stone is a poetic and haunting parable of remorse. Inward-looking and subtly monumental, Holden’s work confirms the seriousness and intelligence of young art at the moment.

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.

‘It’s like blowing the dust off buried treasure!’ David Smith revels in his discovery of township artist Ephraim Ngatane

When I lived in London, I was a sucker for the blockbuster art exhibition. Caravaggio and the Terracotta Army lived up to the star billing. Others did not. But there was an equally special pleasure in stumbling on the unexpected and revelatory somewhere out of the limelight.

Blockbusters are thin on the ground in Johannesburg but surprising, striking, serendipitous shows are not. I watched a bulldozer knock down the wall of the Goethe-Institut to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Johannesburg Art Gallery, located in the now unfashionable downtown, has a terrific combination of old masters and contemporary talents. Arts on Main, the Everard Read and the Goodman Gallery also stand out.

Last weekend I arrived at the Standard Bank Gallery, 90 minutes before the end of its latest month-long show, Ephraim Ngatane: Symphony of Soweto. I’d never heard of Ngatane and didn’t know what to expect. It was one of those wonderful moments of blowing the dust off buried treasure.

He was nicknamed the “Hogarth of the township”. I could see why.

This retrospective featured his acutely observed images of music, sport and social life in Soweto in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Ngatane, who died young, was far from the only township artist in the apartheid years, but I imagine he was the best.

His eye settled not on the bland generality but the telling particular. “Celebration” shows a family at a dinner table. Their faces, body language and clothing give an ironic rebuttal to the title. The geometric shapes of the figures seduce the viewer up close or from afar.

“The Wedding”, similarly, has all the joy of a funeral. “Seated figure” depicts a man in a hat, slumped with hands on knees in cosmic despair, but his left shoulder standing improbably tall in defiance and pride.

“Snow Scene, Township” is a sublime impressionist rendering of that rare occurrence, snowfall in Johannesburg. “The Penny Whistlers” nods to a cheap and popular musical instrument, while “Fah Fee” recalls a widely played Chinese numbers game not unlike working-class bingo.

A “Township Scene” from 1969 is a glowing red and orange haze of people and animals that evokes San cave paintings from millennia ago.

Ngatane walks that tightrope from which many fall. He captures the warmth of township people, even with a tinge of nostalgia, yet never glosses over the hardship and degradation represented by shacks, dirt roads and stray dogs. He eulogises the poor but never glamorises poverty.

The grimmest of scenes are parodied with flamboyant colours. Neville Dubow, an art critic, put it: “This is life in the raw, but couched in terms which are always life-enhancing and not life-defeating.”

What’s also remarkable is the range of subjects and styles, borrowing from old masters but bending them to his own expression. Aside from these scenes from Soweto, you are caught off guard by “Nude Woman”, a tender portrait that, the caption noted, “is a rare reminder that the nude does not have to be the prerogative of white artists only”.

A still life painting shows a feather in a jar, the silence inviolable, the fibres so exquisite you long to touch them. A portrait of Ngatane’s younger brother shows him an earnest and hopeful student; but a stylised version in violent colours locates him in some Van Gogh or Munch nightmare.

Impressionism and cubism, abstract and documentary realism are all here, delivered in watercolours and oils but also in varied materials including sand and plaster-of-paris. He belonged to an artistic community but followed the beat of his own drum.

Ngatane was born in Lesotho in 1938, went to school in Soweto and studied at the influential Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, where Picasso was a lodestar. His teacher, Cecil Skotnes, said: “We soon discovered that painting was not just a hobby for him, but a way of life.”

A book accompanying the exhibition, A Setting Apart, notes that the perpetually difficult life of an artist was heightened by South Africa’s apartheid legislation. Failure to show a regular job in their pass book when it was inspected by police could see them sent to labour farms or prison.

Ngatane held down a day job for a while, but became a successful painter and teacher able to exhibit and sell his work. He was also famed locally as a registered boxer and for playing the penny whistle in jazz bands.

But in 1970 he was involved in a car crash that led to the death of his wife, Thembi. His health and his art went into decline, and a year later he collapsed and died from the effects of tuberculosis. He had worked in a small studio which lacked proper ventilation to remove the turpentine fixatives that slowly poisoned his lungs.

Ephraim Ngatane was 32 years old, though it seems perverse to say that such a body of work represents promise unfulfilled. His father lived to be 100, his mother to be 99. At their request, new tombstones were placed at the graves of Ngatane and his wife in 1993.

Unfortunately, the engraver misspelled the name of this neglected genius. So it stands, carved in stone, as “Ephriam”.

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment.