Here is our carefully selected list of exhibitions from around the country that Lisa, Julie and I recommend to see this March. From what has been said to be the exhibition of the year, ‘Inventing Impressions’ at the National Gallery to Norwegian Artist, A. K. Dolven’s beautiful landscapes showing at Ikon Gallery, this month’s list is certainly dynamic.
1. Inventing Impressionism
Paul Durand-Ruel, an entrepreneurial art dealer from Paris, discovered this group of young artists – including Monet, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley – and gambled. Realising the fashionable potential of their derided ‘impressions’ of urban and suburban life, Durand-Ruel dedicated the rest of his life to building an audience for their work – creating the modern art market in the process. This exhibition celebrates this man’s life, showcasing all of his discoveries.
Showing at The National Gallery until 31 May 2015.
2. Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album
This major exhibition reunites all the surviving drawings from the Witches and Old Women Album for the first time, offering a fascinating and enlightening view of a very private and personal Goya. Drawn in the last decade of his life, the album was never meant to be seen beyond a small circle of friends. Goya gave free rein to his creativity, inventing extraordinary images that range from the humorous to the sinister and the macabre.
Showing at The Courtauld Gallery until 25 May 2015.
3. Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the greatest portrait painter of his generation. Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, he was closely connected to many of the other leading artists, writers, actors and musicians of the time. His portraits of these friends and contemporaries, including Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Robert Louis Stevenson, were rarely commissioned and allowed him to create more intimate and experimental works than was possible in his formal portraiture.
This major exhibition of over seventy portraits spans Sargent’s time in London, Paris, Boston and New York as well as his travels in the Italian and English countryside. Important loans from galleries and private collections in Europe and America make this an unmissable opportunity to discover the artist’s most daring, personal and distinctive portraits.
Showing at The National Portrait Gallery until 25 May 2015
4. Maggi Hambling: War Requiem & Aftermath 
The starting point of the exhibition was Hambling’s site-specific installation War Requiem, shown at ‘SNAP’ (Art at the Aldeburgh Festival) in the summer of 2013 to wide critical acclaim. Hambling has created a successor to the first installation, War Requiem 2, in which anonymous portraits of war victims and ravaged battlefields emerge as spectral visions out of charged and turbulent paintwork. Pervading the new canvases is Indian yellow pigment that simultaneously evokes fanfare and fire. The paintings are juxtaposed with an extract from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem of 1962.
Showing at Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing until 31 May 2015.
5. Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector 
This is the first major exhibition in the UK to present the fascinating personal collections of post-war and contemporary artists. Ranging from mass-produced memorabilia and popular collectibles to one-of-a-kind curiosities, rare artefacts and specimens, these collections provide insight into the inspirations, influences, motives and obsessions of artists.
Showing at the Barbican until 25 May 2015.
6. AK Dolven at the Ikon Gallery Birmingham
Ikon is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by A K Dolven, one of Norway’s most prominent artists. Through a variety of media – painting, photography, film and sound – she is concerned essentially with the representation of sublime natural forces. In this respect she identifies with the renowned nineteenth century Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 – 87), whose work is also included in the exhibition. In his landscapes of the far north, Balke’s human subjects are dwarfed by their circumstances, as small figures in the landscape; Dolven is more overtly philosophical, dealing with the nature of perception and the subconscious functioning of memory and emotions. It is significant that she focuses on densely multisensory situations, in which her main subject is at once very present and resonant with lost time.
Showing at Ikon Gallery until 15 April 2015.
7. JOHANNES NAGEL : VESSELS, PERHAPS
The New Art Centre is delighted to announce Johannes Nagel’s first solo exhibition in the Artists House. It will include ceramics from his ‘Improvisorium’ series and the ‘NEWJAZZ/Isolator Series’. Nagel last showed at Roche Court in 2014 in the Design Show curated by Sarah Griffin. She describes perfectly the experimental nature of Nagel’s ceramics: ‘Nagel reverses the axiom that form has to follow function, letting spontaneity and inaccuracy of method determine the outcome of each pot’. The title of Nagel’s current exhibition also sums up the improvised and experimental nature of his approach.
Showing at New Arts Centre until 22 March 2015
8. British Self-Portraits: Highlights from the Ruth Borchard Collection 
The writer Ruth Borchard (1910 – 2000) amassed one of the most significant collections of self-portraits by British artists. Setting herself a ceiling of 21 guineas for a picture irrespective of the artist’s fame or reputation, she acquired 100 pictures including oil paintings, watercolours and pencil and ink drawings which provide a fascinating overview of British art during the twentieth century.
Showing at Pallant House Gallery until 31 May 2015.
9. Signs of Colour at Hilton Fine Art, Bath
Showing at Hilton Fine Art until 7 March 2015
10. Alex Katz: Black Paintings
Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Alex Katz. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally since 1951, Katz has been honoured with numerous retrospectives including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Tate St. Ives, UK; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; and The Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain. This is the artist’s seventh exhibition with the gallery.
Showing at Timothy Taylor Gallery until 2 April 2015.
