“Textile is a universal language. In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component. Therefore, if you’re beginning with thread, you’re halfway home. There’s a level of familiarity that immediately breaks down any prejudice.” So said American artist Sheila Hicks in 2014 of a material that has been a mainstay of her career, woven, sculpted and teased into all manner of giant installations.

The Principal Wife is part of a series of works of the same name by the pioneering fibre artist. To make them, she wraps bundles of undyed linen thread with brightly dyed thread at random intervals to form sculptures that appear to cascade down the wall. The title recalls the varied roles of women that Hicks has observed and the ways in which they can split and combine into new forms.

Hicks’ work is currently on show in Weaving Abstraction in Modern and Ancient Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, until 16 June 2024.

A mother cradles her child in her arms in Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, swathed in a blue aura with a pattern that recalls Byzantine mosaics. The pair appear to sleep, unaware of our gaze. Beside them is an older woman, in a warmer aura of earthy tones, who hides her face between her hand and long, flowing hair.

The work represents the cycle of life in unflinching detail – including the folds of skin and sinewed arms of the older woman. Some say that, in separating the mother and child, Klimt is idealising youth and suggesting that life stops when a woman’s reproductive years pass, but others suggest that the work evokes the beauty and vulnerability of womanhood – a vision of femininity that eschews idealisation. To us, Klimt shows the beauty in all three states, offering a beguiling celebration of what it is to be a woman at any age.

Ruth Asawa’s undulating organic forms are instantly recognisable – and unfailingly alluring. Woven in wire and plunging from the ceiling, her sculptures broke down the binaries between creative disciplines. “It doesn’t bother me. Whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things,” she once said.

Born in California in 1926, Asawa began taking classes in art and painting at an internment camp in the US, where she and her family were among thousands of people of Japanese descent who were forcibly detained by the government during World War II. After her release, she enrolled at the legendary experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she was taught by the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. During those years, she travelled to Mexico with Albers and his wife, the fibre artist Anni Albers, and learned to weave in wire while visiting a village outside Mexico City. The technique – involving looping the material with a dowel – became a mainstay of her career. She compared the process to drawing in the air, saying “I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.” In this trio of sculptures, on view at the Hayward Gallery exhibition, When Form Comes Alive (7 February — 6 May 2024), the interior of each piece is as important as its profile. As the show's title suggests, they have a life of their own.

Francis Bacon’s tribute to “the only man I ever loved” radiates with the unsettling emotional intensity that came to typify his work. With a nod to the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh, it shows a small figure on the edge of woodland, darting across grass scorched by the searing African sun. It pulses with passion, ecstasy and pain – the highs and lows of his tumultuous relationship with his partner Peter Lacy, and his subsequent death in Tangier, Morocco.

Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier has resurfaced on the market for the first time in nearly 40 years and will go under the hammer at Christie’s in London on 7 March, with a pre-sale estimate of £15-20 million – more than 35 times its sale price when it was last auctioned in 1985 ($517,000, a world record for Bacon at the time).

The artist’s relationship with Lacy began after they met at the Colony Room in Soho in 1952. The former fighter pilot was a troubled man, who battled with alcoholism and reportedly had a violent streak. He once threw Bacon through a glass window, according to an account by art critic John Richardson, writing in the New York Review of Books. But that didn’t dim Bacon’s passion. He honoured Lacy in several other paintings, including the triptych, “Study for Three Heads” (1962), in the collection of MoMA, New York. Spinning with a “near centrifugal force”, as Katharine Arnold – the head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s Europe – puts it, Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier is a highly charged portrait of love and loss, in all its rich complexity.

Two young female lovers are locked in a passionate clinch, their limbs tangled together amid swirling, sea-blue bed sheets. This 1892 painting is one of four by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec depicting intimacy between two women in a maison close (brothel) – stolen moments of tenderness captured with deep sensitivity. They are part of the French painter, printmaker and illustrator’s long exploration of Paris’ demi-monde, which saw him paint as many as 70 pictures of prostitutes. There’s an empathy and sensuality to the way he captures this couple, as if he is using the ocean-like bedsheets to protect their forbidden love from the outside world.

As our patience with winter begins to wane, we’re turning to Wassily Kandinsky to see the season in a glorious new light. The Russian theorist and “father of abstract art”, as he is often dubbed, painted this colourful vision in 1909, during the early part of his journey towards abstraction and two years before his Blue Rider Period, when his work became even more colour saturated and free. “Colour provokes a psychic vibration,” the artist once said. “Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.” This soul-stirring scene is a case in point, with the vivid tones of the setting sun bouncing light across the snow and bringing the scene to life. Tall, slim trees – a Kandinsky hallmark – line a path up to an inviting house.

With its bold colours and spontaneous, expressive application of paint, this work is a vibrant example of the style that Kandinsky would so famously develop over the years that followed and that would make an indelible mark on the history of Western art. The painting is currently holed up inside the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, so this digital image is probably the closest you will come to it for many years, but it’ll make you want to embrace the winter chill nonetheless.

With Burns Night – the annual celebration of the life of Robert Burns – approaching this Thursday, we’re looking back to artist Douglas Gordon’s more nuanced homage to the giant of Scottish literature: Black Burns, shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2017. Gordon made a shattered counterpoint to the white marble statue of the poet by John Flaxman that stands proud in the Great Hall. Carved out of black marble from the same quarry, this broken double lay in ruins on the gallery floor.

The Glasgow-born artist often makes artworks by a process of destruction and is as unafraid to break down his idols as he is to laud them. Black Burns is an anti-monument that finds poignancy in the aspects of the poet’s life that Flaxman’s statue ignores – the poet’s womanising, drinking and the fact he was once so desperate for money that he booked passage to Jamaica with the goal of becoming a bookkeeper on a slave plantation (though the sudden success of his poetry meant the trip never happened). But Gordon was quick to point out at the time that he wasn’t seeking to disrespect the man who later wrote abolitionist poem The Slave’s Lament or to destroy his image, rather to open him up – to humanise a figure who has been cast in stone and placed out of reach.

As a cold snap bites the UK and the first snowflakes fall in 2024, we’re looking to the ephemeral land art of former London engineer Simon Beck. Based partly in the French Alps, Beck makes vast stretches of untouched snow his canvas, creating giant geometric patterns in the powder with nothing but his footsteps and some simple maths.

The professional cartographer creates maps to plan his designs, with one millimetre representing one step on the ground. Then he dons his snowshoes and takes to the outdoors, carefully plodding for up to 12 hours a day. One of his largest works – a four-leaf clover on a frozen reservoir in France – was the size of six soccer fields and took him 32 hours across four days to complete. All it takes to wipe his work away is a short snow shower, heavy gale or a rogue skier but that’s all part of its beauty. Each piece is a delicate balance between the geometric and the organic.

Let’s make 2024 the year we begin to live more in balance with nature. With that in mind, we’re looking to the work of Argentinian artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, whose vast, hand-tufted textile works – made from surplus materials – depict natural landscapes that are under threat or reimagine areas that have been desecrated by humans, giving them new life.

North of Buenos Aires is a river called Raggio creek, whose biodiversity has been stripped and topography transfigured. In her giant carpet No Longer Creek, she restores it to its pre-human state, rewilding its banks and watery depths. When she exhibits the work – first shown at Design Miami/Basel in 2016 – she invites visitors to step onto the carpet and lie down on the soft wool, experiencing an environment in which their activities leave no trace. It’s something to strive for in the coming year.