Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.

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Viewing David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020

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Royal Academy, London
23 May — 26 September 2021

How better to reopen than with a joyful celebration of spring? After a bleak, lockdown winter, the Royal Academy is showing a series of new Hockney iPad ‘paintings’ that capture the unfolding and progression of spring last year at his rural home in Normandy.

Hockney created each of the 116 works (printed on large-scale paper for this show) using a bespoke version of the Brushes app. A restless experimenter, Hockney values the mobility and versality of the iPad, a medium which he first explored back in 2010, as it enables him to work rapidly, day or night en plein air, without needing cumbersome equipment.

Presented chronologically, the works chart the drama of seasonal change, from bare winter trees, via buds, to abundant blossoms and leaves. In each, his hand is clearly evident. ‘All the time I was getting better at my mark making on the screen,’ he says, ‘eventually doing, à la Monet, the water lilies in the pond.’

Viewing Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

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Serpentine Galleries

19 May — 22 August 2021

Packer’s first major survey in Europe makes the Serpentine’s reopening unmissable. Including new paintings and rarely seen drawings, it reveals her to be one of the most significant artists of her generation.

Born in 1984, the New York-based painter casts the traditional genres of portraiture and still life in a fresh, political light and addresses how Black lives can be represented today. ‘Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony,’ she says.

This bijou exhibition brings together 34 works dated from 2011 to 2020, among them 2015’s monochromatic Vision Impaired and the flower still life Say Her Name (2017), painted in response to the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, a Black American who is largely believed to have been murdered while in police custody in 2015. There will also be drawings, intimate interiors and portraits on display.

‘Jennifer Packer’s paintings demonstrate great commitment from the artist,’ says Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘and therefore demand slow, sustained attention from the viewer.’ There are a lot of outstanding painting shows in London right now, but this is one of the most intriguing — and rewarding.

Viewing Hospital Rooms X Anthropologie

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Hospital Rooms X Anthropologie

The brilliant arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms commissions artworks by such celebrated artists as Julian Opie, Bob and Roberta Smith and Gavin Turk for NHS mental health inpatient units across the UK.

‘We want to ensure people who have severe and enduing mental health conditions are surrounded by beautiful and restorative environments,’ says Hospital Rooms co-founder Niamh White, ‘and have access to creative activities to offer them hope, dignity and a positive view of the future.’

This year Hospital Rooms has partnered with Anthropolgie to further its mission. Like Hospital Rooms, Anthropologie believes in ‘the power of art to move people, to give people a voice and to make the world a better place to be in,’ says White.

In addition to supporting Hospital Room’s Digital Art School — which offers free creative workshops to inpatient mental health units and the general public — Anthropologie has commissioned a work by Susie Hamilton at Askew Ward, Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit in west London. White describes the transformative piece as ‘vibrant, hopeful and filled with the promise of light.’

What’s more, for Mental Health Awareness Week (10-16 May), Anthropologie will donate £1 to Hospital Rooms for every purchase made online or in store, up to a maximum donation of £10,000. Splashing lockdown savings has never felt so good. Will it be a new maxi or watermelon tote?