February

February opens the London season hard, with Tate Modern giving Tracey Emin her largest survey and the galleries falling in behind.

The month belongs to London. Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery, the Barbican and the Royal Academy all open substantial shows in a three-week window. Berlin offers David Lynch's paintings at Pace, Paris offers Martin Parr's last retrospective at Jeu de Paume, and a Thomas Bayrle survey opens in Frankfurt's temporary Schirn venue.

Show of the month

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Tracey Emin

27 FEB Tate Modern London

Ninety works, forty years, one room that still holds My Bed. The hang traces the illness and what came after, with the new paintings and the embroidery hung close. Emin's neons read differently now that the drawings around them are so unguarded. A retrospective that insists on the body first and the text second.

Gallery site ↗

Also this month

29 JAN · BERLIN · PACE GALLERY

David Lynch

Paintings, watercolours and the 1999 Berlin factory photographs, hung inside a refurbished petrol station off the Spree. First proper survey since his death, and it feels like the work remembers him.

Gallery site ↗

David Lynch, untitled Berlin painting, at Pace Gallery Berlin.

12 FEB · LONDON · NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting

Lucian Freud

A hundred and seventy drawings, etchings and paintings, arguing through the hang that the line came first and the paint followed. The etching plates are on the wall too, which is new.

Gallery site ↗

12 FEB · LONDON · BARBICAN

Encounters: Giacometti x Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis and Alberto Giacometti

Benglis's thirty new paper-and-chicken-wire forms set against Giacometti bronzes in the Barbican's new Level 2 room. The paired room works; the material dialogue does the heavy lifting without needing wall text.

Gallery site ↗

Lynda Benglis, Cliff Dweller, 2017-18, installed at Barbican.

17 FEB · LONDON · HAYWARD GALLERY

Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life

Chiharu Shiota

Shiota's first major London survey. A floor-to-ceiling woollen web is strung with old keys, and a pair of wooden doors stands in the middle for visitors to pass through. The red-thread rooms do what they always do.

Gallery site ↗

28 FEB · LONDON · ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS

Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First

Rose Wylie

Wylie at ninety-one, the largest UK survey to date. The new works are as loose as the old ones. Nothing in the hang tidies her up, and that is the correct decision.

Gallery site ↗

12 FEB · FRANKFURT · SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT

Thomas Bayrle: Be Happy!

Thomas Bayrle

Fifty-five works across paintings, sound, sculpture and video, staged in the Dondorf print factory while the Schirn is being refurbished. Bayrle's patterns always read better under warehouse light.

Gallery site ↗

Footnote

— Heidi leaves Berlin. The Mitte gallery Heidi, quietly one of the most-watched openings of the last five years, confirmed this month it is relocating to London in September. A small exodus, but the kind people keep track of.