Between 1899 and 1901, while staying in London at the Savoy Hotel, Claude Monet produced some of his most famous paintings, including his Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Houses of Parliament series. In these works, his principal concern was to capture the changing light patterns over the Thames caused by smog. ‘Without fog London would not be beautiful,’ he claimed.

It was during his 1901 visit that Monet most likely painted this exuberant night scene of Leicester Square, located just a stone’s throw from his hotel on The Strand. It was then — as it is now — a hub of bustling activity. Using rapid brushstrokes and daubs of brilliant colour, Monet deftly captures the square’s nocturnal energy, transforming it into a near abstraction of colour and light. The result is quite simply mesmerising.

To mark Earth Day last year, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson unveiled a new participatory artwork on Instagram, Earth perspectives, comprising nine orange and pink coloured images of the Earth with a dot in the middle. Each of the nine images features a different view of the planet, as taken over such celebrated natural wonders as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Ganges River in India and the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia.

Eliasson asked viewers to stare at the dot for about 10 seconds and then gaze at a blank surface where an afterimage in complementary colours appears — literally a new view of the world. Using a simple optical illusion, Eliasson prompted his audience to reflect on their relationship with the planet. ‘I want to advocate — as on any other day — that we recognise these various perspectives and, together, celebrate their co-existence.’

Earth perspectives was commissioned as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s 50th anniversary Back to Earth initiative, which featured works by artists, musicians, scientists, designers, filmmakers, architects and poets made in response to the climate emergency. Eliasson’s series of nine Instagram posts have since been viewed by around 100,000 people. Watch and share if you haven’t already.

Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA is one of Britain’s foremost colourists. ‘My art is not about politics,’ he once said. ‘It’s about paint — the way that colour washes, spreads, bleeds and runs across the canvas, and the way that paint-colour emits light.’

Over the course of his six-decade career, divided between London and New York, Bowling has moved from figuration to abstraction, experimented with the materiality of paint, colour and geometry, and explored autobiographical, symbolic and socio-political concerns on canvas. He’s also been elected to the Royal Academy, enjoyed solo shows around the world and been knighted by the Queen.

Dan and Them was produced shortly after the completion of his celebrated Map Paintings in 1972. Ablaze with brilliant layers of magenta, pink and orange, it features repeated imagery of Bowling’s eldest son Dan, who died suddenly in 2001. It is a beautiful example of his works from the early 70s: still abstract but now marked with personal memories.

Chris Ofili gained celebrity in the 90s for such bold and controversial works as No Woman, No Cry (his homage to murdered London teenager Stephen Lawrence) and his black Virgin Mary, featuring elephant dung and angels shaped from porn magazine clippings.

There is a huge variety and range in his work, but nearly all of it explores Black culture and Black experience. The artist draws on everything from political, biblical and cultural references to hip hop, jazz, exoticism and racism.

In 2005 he left London for Trinidad, where his art took a bold, new direction. He abandoned the things that had made him famous — the glitter, the dung, the dots of paint, for instance — in favour of simple, pared-down forms that are arguably harder to read. The Raising of Lazarus (2007), now held in the MoMa collection in New York, exemplifies this radical creative shift. ‘I liked the idea of having only paint and a surface,’ he told The Guardian in 2017. ‘And I think it is working for me.’

This enchanting image forms part of the Jim Naughten’s ‘Eremozoic’ series, which will be exhibited at Grove Square Galleries in support of Fauna & Flora International. The collection name is inspired by biologist E.O. Wilson, who suggested that we are now entering the Earth’s Eremozoic period — an age of loneliness following the mass extinctions caused by human activity. With these images, the artist explores the inextricable relationship between humankind and nature, examining how humans have attempted to capture and contain the natural world and simultaneously proven incapable of understanding its full power and complexities.

Trained in both photography and painting, this ‘Gibbons’ image — as with all in the series — extrapolates photographs of dioramas of animals from natural history museums and digitally reimagines them in saturated colours and unnatural palates. By seeing the natural world through this artificial lens, Naughten manifests our rose-tinted view of the future of the natural world and our tendency to think of the environment that we have put at risk as a distant fantasy land. Through his medium of digital painting, Naughten challenges our sense of illusion, evoking a magical realism style to question the view of nature we are given through these dioramas, and the consequential blurring of our much-needed sense of responsibility to the world.

This AI portrait of Royal Academy Summer Exhibition curator Yinka Shonibare was painted by a bright orange robotic arm called Heidi. Programmed by artists Rob and Nick Carter, the six-axis Kuka Robot ‘feels very life like as she moves,’ they said. ‘Our robot has no eyes and the idea that she can paint so beautifully without seeing anything is remarkable.’ It took Heidi just over 46 hours to complete the work, with 11,404 strokes of acrylic paint.

The work, which is part of the artists’ Dark Factory Portraits series, is inspired by the rise of ‘lights-out manufacturing’ where factories can operate in darkness as robotic systems don’t require light to function. ‘We would like people to embrace robotics and not be afraid,’ the artists added. ‘We are proud to have managed to bring this technology into the context of the art world.’

Yinka Shonibare, Robot Painting is currently on display at the Royal Academy, and is the first painting by a robot in the Summer Exhibition’s more than 250-year history.

Flowers are a constant presence in the fashion photography of Tim Walker, by turns evoking whimsy, fantasy, romance and lust. Existing in a surreal realm somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, Walker’s storied images invite you on a journey of imaginative discovery. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Walker says inspiration for his compositions comes from ‘anything that any one of us has seen – high, low, mid – and then I mix it all up.’ This celebrated image of model Siobhan Finnigan holding a fulsome bouquet of flowers was taken in London in 1998. As with many of Walker’s images, we are drawn into a meticulously crafted scene that prompts as many questions as it answers.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is one of the hottest artists in London right now. The young Zimbabwean held her first solo show at London’s Tyburn Gallery in 2017. In 2019, at just 26 years old, she represented Zimbabwe at the 58th Venice Biennale, and in December last year she made her auction debut, with her psychedelic mushroom trip portrait Eve on Psilocybin selling for $252,000, more than six times the high estimate.

Now she’s enjoying her first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro London. On display are a selection of her bright, energetic canvases celebrating the complexities of diasporic identities, gender and sexuality. Among them is this painting, Antennae to the Ancestors (2018), which features Shona sculptures behind a digitally manipulated plant. ‘There was a spiritual meaning behind that painting,’ the artist once said. ‘Plants have become symbolic gateways.’

Thandiwe Muriu’s playful work is impossible to ignore. A witty celebration of the young Kenyan’s culture, her Camo series is characterised by bold, brilliant colours and exuberant patterns ‘with an almost psychedelic quality’ that confuse the eye. Thandiwe trademarks feature throughout, among them architectural hairstyles, ebony skin and fabrics and accessories from everyday life.

But a barbed critique simmers beneath each glossy surface. The series is ‘a personal reflection on how I felt I can disappear into the background of my culture,’ she has said. Camo also challenges standards of beauty in Kenya — notably the culture of skin bleaching and hair straightening. She wants Kenyan girls to see these images of dark-skinned models with natural hair wearing recognisably African fabrics fashioned in modern, funky ways and say: ‘That’s me’.