GAUGUIN AND THE VOYAGE TO THE EXOTIC

With so nuch competition from the public sector, the quality of Madrid private galleries and museums has also improved. The current Gauguin Exhibition at the Thyssen features the voyage as an escape from civilisation, a theme that provided the avantgarde with new impetus, but also as a return to the origins, to the edenic state.

TREASUE ISLAND: BRITISH ART FROM HOLBEIN TO HOCKNEY

'Treasure Island' portrays the artistic evolution of the British Isles, from religious sculptures - damaged by the Puritans during the Reformation - to Pop Art pieces by Blake and Hamilton and Toni Cragg's emblematic 1981 sculpture `Britain Seen from the North´.

According to the organizers, its title 'invokes the eponymous novel by the British writer R. L. Stevenson, showing how the island has a treasure -its art, painting and sculpture- which, like almost every treasure, remains half-hidden, waiting to be discovered.' Very impressive.

FUNDACION JUAN MARCH, MADRID.

MIHO SATO

Interested in Contemporary Painting? You will like this: Miho Sato talks to Alli Sharma at her studio in London. (Check out a blog called Articulated Artists)

CHINESE GARDENS: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats

This exhibition explores the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than one thousand years. It features more than sixty paintings as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, textiles, and even several contemporary photographs that illustrate how garden imagery has remained an abiding source of artistic inspiration and invention.Through January 6, 2013. 

(Source:The Metropolitan Museum of Art)