May 8 to September 30, 2018
Avenida da República, 300
2750-475 Cascais, Portugal

Any given work by Paula Rego has an electric charge at its core. No matter how familiar one might be with the individual piece, or how long ago it was made, it remains alive and ready to shock. Folktales and Fairy Tales spans five decades, from drawings made in the 1970s found recently in a drawer to Sophie’s Misfortunes, a painting completed six months ago. This large, freely exuberant work is the fruit of a lifetime in the studio. The museum devoted to Rego’s work is in Cascais, a tranquil seaside town outside Rego’s native Lisbon. The building itself is a masterpiece by prize-winning architect Edouardo Souto de Moura, an elegant fortress in gorgeous rusty pink set among trees, its pyramidal roof structures echoing historical Portuguese palaces and monasteries.

The exhibition, curated by Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliviera, is a feast of originality, with paintings, pastels, drawings, collages, and extra treats like a life-size papier maché pig in satin clothes, used as a studio prop; a collection of Rego’s exquisitely sewn grotesque figures; and the actual heavy volume of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, illustrated by Gustav Doré, which first captivated and, she has often said, terrified the artist as a child.

Brought up for a while by her grandmother and a nanny, Rego was exposed in her formative years to stories that have had a life-time’s grip on the artist’s imagination. Her parents sent her to London in her teens to get her away from Salazar’s repressive regime of ‘unquestionable certainties’ which demanded either fascist values or turning a blind eye to torture and pervasive dishonesty. In London, where she still lives, she met her future husband, the painter Victor Willing, then a star student at the Slade and friend of Francis Bacon. In an extraordinary, highly praised film made by their son Nick Willing, Secrets and Stories, Rego tells how everyone knew that all the men in Portugal went to brothels. Two piercingly good drawings of a procuress with her clients and a prostitute enjoying a rest show indolence and mercenary calculation, sleaziness and irony. Seen through Rego’s eyes, they are ultimately working women.

I asked Nick whether he thought that his father was his mother’s Muse. According to Rego, she adored and couldn’t help obeying him from the start, and when he died in 1988, aged 60, after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis, her first fear was that she wouldn’t be able to paint without him. She almost never directly drew him – although he made many beautiful nude paintings of her – but there is one portrait of him in the exhibition, sitting at a family meal. But a great deal of Rego’s work is, actually, about caring for him, and watching him being cared for by others, in paintings of strong young women vigorously dressing a limp soldier, father or brother figure, nearly suffocating him with their arms and pushing themselves up against the male figure’s crotch. And when the weak male figure is depicted standing alone with his bag, waiting to leave on a journey, he represents the dying Vic. But Nick pointed out that a female artist’s male muse is very different from, say, Picasso’s egoistic passion for a piece of flesh on the beach, and that all his mother’s work is imbued with the presence of his father and her feelings for him.

Rego’s use of myth and folktale is quite similar to Jung’s analytical approach: For both, the stories are a way to confront the self and access the unconscious. Rego’s practice is based in drawing from life. People pose for her in the studio, often having to hold extremely demanding positions. According to Nick, the living, changing presence of the model is important to her. In 1985, Lila Nunes came from Portugal as an au pair for the family. For years, she has been not only Rego’s model but a kind of alter ego. Paintings of her can be viewed, almost, as self portraits.

Snow White and her Stepmother (1995), despite its title, could as well be a procuress with her novice. Or else, in line with the original story, it could represent a jealous stepmother trying to prevent her stepdaughter from growing up. Two strong, coarse-featured women are involved in an act of strange intimacy. The more sophisticated elder, wearing a tight dress and high heels, takes charge, stooping to help the other remove, or perhaps put on, a sensible pair of white knickers. The younger one is a simpler and more compliant type—in fact it is Lila, wearing a shapeless version of the dress from Walt Disney’s “Snow White” and a child’s rumpled white socks on her large feet. Facial expressions are hard to fathom in a work charged with sexuality. Violence is in the air, but what exactly is happening is anybody’s guess.

Rego’s work defies explanation. Even the Abortion series of paintings and prints from 1998 – not included in the exhibition, these are among her most explicit and strongly focused works, made as a passionate protest against Portugal’s anti-abortion laws – extends far beyond its subject, and is intrinsically ambiguous. The small prints were easily portable and widely shown around the country, and did indeed help sway public opinion and ultimately change the law. Together with images that protest human trafficking and female genital mutilation, these are the works, according to Rego, of which she is most proud. But although they have earned her a following among feminists and human rights activists in Britain and Portugal, the crouching, writhing, agonized women she has depicted, she has observed, could as well be opening up to a lover as to the abortionist’s knife.

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From the outside, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) looks like what it was: a concrete grain silo built in 1924. You have to get inside that impassive exterior to see the magic achieved by the British architect Thomas Heatherwick, who carved through 42 vertical cylinders which made up the giant block to create a soaring, cathedral-like interior – rather like, he has said, taking a scoop of ice cream out of a carton.

Standing on the Cape Town docks overlooking Robben Island, where heroes of the struggle against apartheid were once incarcerated, this is where maize was collected for export around the world. Now it is the collection point for art from all over Africa and its diaspora: The building has been privately funded by the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, while the art is drawn mainly from the collection of the German businessman and philanthropist Jochen Zeitz, on long loan to the museum. Zeitz MOCAA’s stated aim is to collect, research and exhibit 21st century African art; it is the biggest museum of its kind, and the first on the continent.

The architecture is overpowering, but the art stands up to it. It seemed – at first, to me – to speak almost with one voice, or like a choir of voices that echo and blend with each other. A fanciful thought in a temple-like structure – where Nicholas Hlobo’s mixed media African Dragon slithers into the atrium like a falling crucifix. Although the artists are foreign to each other, come from different countries and have very different relationships with Africa, and express themselves through different media, almost all are concerned with the same basic themes: post-colonialism, self-identity, slavery.

Haunted by untold, perhaps untellable history, and the desire to make sense of it, there is a common pulse. The history is dark and the pain presents itself in many forms. But the work is far from gloomy. If African art has its own character it’s about the stylishness, cool wit and enjoyment of any medium, plus extraordinary, uninhibited talent – exhibited, for instance, by the young Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai, who gets by far the most space, as far as I could see. With scores of artists and over 100 galleries spread over seven floors, I may have missed a few. Through painting, large-scale multimedia compositions, and photographic stills from his films, Chiurai creates a lush pageantry that satirises colonialism, and African leaders, reveals the violence in Johannesburg where he now lives, and puts women on top. Empowering women seems also to be his way of critiquing homophobia, like his take on the Last Supper as a flashily dressed, all-women drinking party.

Mohau Modisakeng’s art comes out of extreme poverty and violence witnessed while growing up in Soweto, near Johannesburg. Pain and dignity are expressed in his large black and white photographs of a man I assume was himself. Crouching like a bird, or strapped like an animal, the postures suggest humiliation and slavery, but the figure is formally attired, with a hat. I thought of the characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and their heroic attempts at human dignity against all odds.

But Where Have You Been?, a series of small-format photographs taken in 1900 at a ball held by French colonials, is what I would want to take home. A group of colonized Malagasy who have been elaborately dressed by the French according to their notions of civilisation, men and women in suits and ballgowns, are posed under chandeliers in a ballroom. Their feelings of discomfit and bewilderment are clear. These old photographs were discovered in FTM (Foiben-Taosarintanin’i Madagasikara) archives by Madagascar artist Joel Andrianomearisoa, and are the starting point of his weaving and sculpture installations dealing with memory, identity and pain.

The life-size figures of South African Mary Sibande are made of fibre-glass and fabric, and based on her own body. In her iconic early work she depicted herself in the tight-waisted, flowing dress of a Southern slave, with a skirt that took up nearly a whole gallery. In her new installation In the Midst of Chaos, There is Opportunity, she shows herself battling but triumphant on a rearing horse, surrounded by snarling dogs, wild birds, and prowling soldiers. Nandipha Mntambo from Swaziland brings animals into her work too, with figurative sculptures made out of moulded cowhide, and she films herself in the role of a matador, exploring the boundaries between humans and animals, men and women.

Among the international artists are William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare and Chris Ofili, each with their own connection to Africa, and the painting and needlework art of Egyptian Ghada Amer is also considered African. Lesser known Frohawk Two Feathers and Glenn Ligon are both black Americans whose art comes out of imaginings about African history and slave heritage. Liza Lou, famous beadworker, and photographer Roger Ballen are white Americans who have adopted South Africa as artists. The term ‘Art Africa’ is a big and flexible umbrella.

If I have a criticism, there is too much posed photography and too many tableaux vivant, which tend to merge together; and an overabundance of galleries, some of them with disturbingly low, neon-lit ceilings. But this is hugely surpassed by my respect and admiration for Mr Zeitz, who has collected work from around the world, including large amounts from the Venice Biennale, to return to Africa. It is like the paintings of Benin artist Julien Sinzogan, who believes in the afterlife of African souls, and that the souls of all those stolen as slaves will make a triumphant return to Africa.

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How to present an exhibition of Edvard Munch so that it will arouse in viewers the sense of seeing his work for the first time: This was the challenge the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård set himself when asked to curate this year’s summer exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo. “My guiding question,” he said, “was whether it was possible to look at a Munch today, and not know what to think.” Being a literary person, he compares it to the emotional experience of reading Dostoevsky for the first time and not being able to tell whether the work was good or bad.

But it’s not only that The Scream is possibly the artwork best known to most people, endlessly adapted for use in designs and jokes, a solid fixture in the world’s visual lexicon – and on its heels, iconic images like Puberty, Madonna, The Dance of Life, The Sick Child. It is that Munch’s distinctive “handwriting” – the fluid lines and simplified, flowing shapes, the jelly-fish landscapes, the bleeding reds and brooding indigos – make him immediately recognizable in a way a writer can’t be.

Wanting to recreate the sense of astonishment of a first encounter, Knausgård has brought together works that have seldom or never been shown. He had an extraordinary amount to choose from. Munch bequeathed his work to the municipality of Oslo after his death in 1944: 1100 paintings, 4000 drawings, 18,000 prints, several pieces of sculpture and “other objects”. This last category includes some of the more surprising exhibits, including a ragged, half completed figure, reclining on the floor, life-size and as elongated as Munch himself.

Knausgård brings a narrative approach to curating, but also the approach of a creative writer who understands the intermingling of an artist’s work and life: that painting can be like a living membrane between the artist’s inner life and worldly experience. There is a lot to read on the walls between the galleries, quotes from both Munch and Knausgård, some of it illuminating, some of it cringingly trite. I am one of those who hasn’t taken on Knausgård’s six volume autobiographical novel, while respectfully acknowledging that it must be a rewarding read, having won a list of prizes and been translated into at least fifteen languages. The style that prevented me from continuing with ‘My Struggle’ – a bit macabre, drawn out, stating the obvious – is evident in ‘Towards the Forest’, but there is a sincere desire to discover and get close to Munch that turns it into a triumph.

The exhibition takes its title from a series of woodcuts of a naked woman and formally dressed man in dark hat and suit, arms entwined and leaning towards each other as they walk away from us into a dark mass of trees. Each gallery offers a new, unpredictable hang, and there are surprises in the work, which is sometimes unfinished, experimental, or unresolved. But sometimes, just because a painting hasn’t been taken beyond the raw and naked sketch, it is all the stronger. In just a few brushstrokes on an offcut of canvas, Jealousy expresses agony in the close-up of a head and behind it, the flirting couple that has caused it.

Starting with a huge dazzling sun at the entrance, the viewer is led into and out of forests, literally and metaphorically – into psychic darkness and out again into tranquility. The sense of extremities of nature and seasons, and probably feelings, seems very Norwegian. Munch, of course, projects his emotion onto nature, but is probably more deeply affected by it than viewers who do not live with such startling seasonal changes. The exhibition takes us from sunny apple orchards into a place where trees writhe and contort themselves, branches stretching like arms or leaning backwards as if in a yoga pose. One gnarled tree looks as if it’s standing on its head.

Where there are people in the landscape, they seem to be overwhelmed, even bombarded by the vigor of nature. The formally dressed man, last seen going to the forest, is now with a girl in a white dress in an orchard where apples fly about them like missiles. The last gallery feels forest-like but is actually a hall of larger than life-size portraits – a line-up of famous characters, commissions, and family members, each one standing alone. They seem to bear down on the viewer like a phalanx of tall trees. If Munch’s trees can express human emotions, his human subjects can be wooden and impassive. Some are better paintings than others, but in each the environment exudes a vitality that is lacking in the characters. It’s as if they were oppressed and exhausted by the space around them.

Knausgård has said that he sees art as a search for solace. ‘I have this place where I’m free, and that’s in writing. And if there is a way that I can identify with Munch, it must be in this. He must have felt that paintings could be a shelter for him.’

Towards the Forest: Knausgård on Munch was at the Munchmuseet, Oslo, June 5 to August 10, 2017

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There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

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Hilma af Klint: ‘Painting the Unseen’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London until May 15, 2016

A hundred years after they were made, the paintings of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) are dazzling viewers and perplexing historians. Convinced they were too far ahead of their time to be understood, af Klint stipulated that her work should be kept secret for twenty years after her death. As well as thousands of pages of notes and texts, 1,200 paintings – many of them enormous – hibernated for decades in an attic but have reappeared looking fresh and new, and perfectly at home in the 21st Century.

Predating the pioneers of abstraction by at least ten years, af Klint’s geometric structures and floating forms seem closely related to Kandinsky, Malevich, Miró, Mondrian, both Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Klee and others, none of whom knew of her. But the physical size and eclecticism of her work, and somehow its artlessness – the flat, chalky surface of the paint, the impersonal line drawing – make it appear more contemporaneous than theirs. A precursor also of Surrealism, af Klint brings in figures, diagrams, symbols and automatic writing. It is as if her paintings have leapfrogged Modernism and landed neatly in front of today’s receptive audience.

The difficulty for art historians and curators is where to position this hitherto unknown, who never exhibited, taught, or wrote manifestos, and therefore had no influence on her peers. Was she the inventor of the most important movement in modern art? Or was she an outsider artist whose work is out of the mainstream and therefore, in art history terms, too weird to take seriously and essentially irrelevant? But as a painter who loves looking at painting, the question is of little concern to me.

Af Klint was very much a child of her generation at a time when evidence of the unseen was popping up everywhere, with the discovery of x-rays, electromagnetic waves, and evolution; and in the fashion for conducting séances. Like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, she was influenced by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical movement, and by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, where meeting points between spiritualism, symbolism and geometry led to new ways of thinking about painting. But according to her own records, it was direct dealings with the occult that impelled the five-foot-high Swedish spinster with piercing blue eyes to make the extraordinary body of work she has left us.

After a solid academic art education in Stockholm, af Klint set herself up as a painter of conventional landscapes, portraits and botanical watercolors. Increasingly, however, she was taken over by what was happening in the séances she ran with a group of women calling themselves The Five. Af Klint never exhibited the work that she said was made under the guidance of spirits. Describing her most important series, “The Paintings for the Temple” (193 abstract works made between 1906 and 1915), she wrote: “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict: nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”

Af Klint died penniless at the age of 81, on a farm outside Stockholm, leaving her estate to a nephew Erik af Klint, whose son Johan has inherited it. It took them longer than the stipulated twenty years, but after the work was eventually shown for the first time in 1986, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, interest started developing in other parts of the world. Af Klint was shown at London’s Camden Art Center, the Pompidou in Paris, and at PS1 and the Drawing Center in New York, but significantly excluded from “Inventing Abstraction, 1910 – 1925” at MoMa in 2012 on the grounds of her isolation from the avant-garde. It was in 2013 that, appropriately, the Stockholm Moderna Museet mounted a blockbuster survey of af Klint entitled “Pioneer of Abstraction”, which reportedly had viewers weeping with emotion, and established her as an artist of international importance.

Af Klint’s influence is beginning to be seen and acknowledged by a new generation of artists, some interested in the underlying geometry of the work, others attracted by its spiritual, mystical and occult dimensions: both turning away, perhaps, from postmodernist irony and cynicism and finding in her something fresh and authentic. For the New York painter Suzan Frecon, seeing Hilma af Klint at PS1 in 1989 was a turning point. “It helped give me the guts to return (to geometric painting) and go further.” The Swedish artist Fredrik Soderberg, who uses geometric symbols with a magical purpose in mind, and the Polish painter and photographer Agnieszka Brzezanska, whose aim in her work is to “draw back the veils on unseen worlds”.

But, as yet unencumbered by knowledge of the back-story, when I walked into the Serpentine exhibition, I was free simply to feel the impact and enjoy the grave beauty of the three monumental works in the first gallery. How much can you tell about a painting just by looking? They did seem strange, as well as strangely familiar, these imposing abstract compositions, glowing with pastel colors and offset by black. Before reading the titles – Altarpiece 1, 2 and 3 –something ritualistic and liturgical could be intuited. Each has a complex and detailed geometrical structure, with ever-finer details to be discovered, but the complexities fit together so elegantly that the result seems simple.

I was with fellow painter Ansel Krut who said admiringly, when we first arrived, “If a spirit told me to do this, I’d do it.”

Further paintings contain bulbous flower and butterfly shapes in oranges and pinks; strange words in curly writing and decorative curlicues that might be snails; Leonardo-style humans within diagrams; swans and dogs, discs, chains of what we might now think of as DNA, and the word “evolution”. A study of af Klint’s many volumes of tightly written notes may – or may not – explain everything, but the task would be formidable.

As we made our way through the exhibition, our amazement continued but the enthusiasm began to wane. Something pedantic in the work was irritating, we agreed, and something silly about the orange balloons; there was a certain kind of hollowness, a feeling that something was missing.

At a large retrospective, you expect to get a sense of an artist, through seeing what she is grappling with and how she develops over time. Here, nothing is grappled with, the work is serenely presented. Indeed, the artist declares herself absent. So many artists report the feeling that something else takes over when they are at work. For af Klint, it was a specific personage from “the other side” called Amaliel who told her what to do. But looking at a large collection of her work, I felt the same sense of absence as with de Kooning’s late paintings, when he was suffering from dementia. For me, that missing human or rational element turns out to be exactly what I hope to find in a painting.

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Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first privately funded art and culture center in the country dedicated to promoting Russian art, sponsoring research and publication, educating art viewers, and globalizing the local art scene. It was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova — who combines stylishness and seriousness, as does the museum — and has the backing of her husband, Roman Aronovich, an oligarch and owner of Britain’s Chelsea Football Club.

Named after the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage where it was first housed, Garage moved to its permanent home in Gorky Park in midsummer, designed by the thought-provoking Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, out of the burned shell of a huge 1968 Soviet Modernist restaurant, Vremena Goda (“Seasons of the Year”). Gorky Park was built by Stalin in 1923, the first park in Russia not intended for royalty, and until recently was strewn with abandoned structures — including an old space shuttle.

Koolhaas has retained the character and history of the building, leaving evidence of the fire and preserving some of its unfashionable original features — such as a partly destroyed mosaic mural, showing a female personification of Autumn — while giving it new beauty. The building is wrapped in an insulating layer of polycarbonate, as if ready for the freezer, which gives it a silvery, ethereal presence, and creates a reflective transparency between inside and outside.

The first exhibitions to launch Garage fulfill all of its promises, but there is a scarcity of new Russian art. To see contemporary and 20^th Century Russian painting, sculpture and video art, you must leave Gorky Park and cross the road to Tretyakov Gallery, where there is a satisfying display of it, spread across three generous floors.

At Garage right now, however, is a series of exhibitions focusing on the 1960s, looking at life and art, and the effects of politics. They are quietly, even staidly, presented, and require time and study, but the content, at least for a foreigner, is mind-blowing.

One ongoing project has students create fictional 1960s characters, based on old films and archives in Garage’s collection, in order to investigate how life really was for their uncommunicative grandparents. The life and history of each character is described on video. The Working Mother whose job depended on her being able to leave her child with an older neighbor free of charge; the Inspector who checked on the cleanliness of communal homes; the Scientist, kept in isolation, prohibited from traveling, and obliged to live in one of the closed cities known as “boxes”; and the Nonconformist, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment.

The model gadget-filled American kitchen, scene of the famed 1959 Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and Nixon, is recreated. Together with the “Family of Man” exhibition and a painting by Jackson Pollock, it was part of “Face to Face,” the only cultural exchange between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War. Russians were then beginning to move into “Khrushchevkas,” tiny flats with the privacy, for the first time, of their own kitchen, a place to talk without fear of the neighbors. They became the center of culture and debate.

The same long lines wait patiently at Garage as they do in New York, London, or anywhere else people to immerse themselves in the sparkling mirrored installations of Yayoi Kusama, who has also covered the trees outside the museum with spots. Or to participate in a game of ping-pong or meal of Russian dumplings in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition, which turns the museum into a social hub, as the 1,200-seat restaurant originally was. Katharina Grosse’s spray-painted environment offers yet more opportunities for selfies and Instagram.

Eric Bulatov is one Russian artist who gets a good showing with two nine-meter-tall paintings at the entrance, telling the public in a slogan reminiscent of advertising posters from the 1920s by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Come to Garage!” It’s also a reminder of the banners that were hung from the gigantic gates of Gorky Park when it first opened: “Life has become better! Life has become more cheerful!”

An atmosphere of teaching and learning and eagerness is somehow generated throughout, both in the local, introspective displays and the high profile international art. But a young couple I was speaking with told me: “Garage feels as if it’s not yet ready. It’s very cool, but it’s like a baby. Let’s see what it will look like in a couple of years.”

On September 25, a comprehensive exhibition of Louise Bourgeois: “Structures of Existence: The Cells,” will open at Garage, and on September 22. And an exhibition of sculpture by Anish Kapoor, “My Red Homeland,” will open at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which is located at Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, the original venue of Garage Museum. Both exhibitions will coincide with the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

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Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

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Living in a land where every year the light veers from one melodramatic extreme to the other has to play havoc with the senses, especially of a painter. The Finnish artist Rafael Wardi expresses an almost greedy desire for light and color in his paintings, making some of them look as if they might glow in the dark. Wardi’s emotional response to light is clearly the real subject of his work, giving it life and strength. He is a painter of people, places and objects that look as if they matter to him — brooding individuals, moody landscapes, personal things scattered on a table — and yet everything seems a flimsy excuse to get his hands on color, the whole spectrum of it, especially yellow. Wardi has said that if he could, he would like to throw yellow into the world, and he lavishes it on his paintings. But instead of his subjects looking as if they were bathed in sunshine they seem, more interestingly, to be suspended in a kind of suffocating miasma.

Encrustations of intense chrome, lemon and lime pervade the work, seeming to coat the canvas in solid heat. Neon yellows and oranges isolate figures, or link them, creating a liquid, mobile environment in which everything seems to float or swim. And at the other side of the spectrum, when Wardi takes a subject like the midwinter sun hovering fleetingly on the horizon, or a figure standing in the gloom, the darkness seems electric and menacing. In a recent series of self-portraits, he shows himself as a vulnerable presence trying to hold its own against blackness that presses down on all sides.

Born in 1928, Wardi is eager, youthful and spontaneous in his creativity as only the best old painters can be. I met him at his gallery in Helsinki, an unrehabilitated old-fashioned space, where his gestural pastel drawings seemed to flicker with their own light in the grey day. He reminded me of a haunted pixie, all eyes and cheekbones, dressed in black, his face alight with enthusiasm as he spoke about the artists he loves. Bonnard, Morandi, Poliakoff, Turner. But the artists whose catalogues he pores over these days are Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and I recognised a similar scribbling, investigative line in the pastels I was looking at. Strands of color mesh and intertwine in his work like ravelling and unravelling tapestries. And the colors themselves have a gleeful quality that reminded me of being given a bumper box of Crayola as a child. Wardi gives simple, unfussy explanations of his work: this is where he lives, this is what he found.

Nothing could be further from Rafael Wardi’s tentative, quirky, investigative way of working than Marimekko, the famous Finnish fabric company whose clear-cut designs, mostly based on abstracted plants and flowers, are widely familiar. And yet there are connections. The color taken to extremes – you could call it a hectic enjoyment of color — is defiant in the local context. It has a different character, for instance, from the intense colors used easily and naturally in African art and craft. Marimekko was launched in 1951, which is the same time that Wardi emerged as an abstract painter, one of the first in Finland. It was in the aftermath of World War II when there must have been feelings of escapism and bravado, and a need to brighten things up.

In 1961 Wardi was invited to be part of an exhibition of local and international art held in Helsinki, which had the clear aim of introducing modernism to the Finns and bringing them up to date. But by then he had moved on to figurative painting believing it was a better way to capture light. He remains an artist true to his own vision. In the 1990s his wife became ill with Alzheimer’s and was moved into a care home, where Wardi would spend days drawing her and the other patients. This is when he turned to using pastels. Again there is an affiliation with the gaze of Kossoff and Auerbach, and also with Giaccometti, with portraits that seem always to be in a state of approaching the subject while never quite settling the matter; and where a solid personal presence is established while the surface drawing remains alive and searching, as if still in process.

Wardi is famous in Finland and Sweden but still almost unknown to the rest of the world. This year he was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, Finland’s national gallery, which spanned 60 years of his painting while focusing on current work. In April he will be showing new work at Konstsalongen Backsbacka, Helsinki, and he has an important exhibition coming up at the Edsvik Konsthall, Stockholm in 2015.

Wardi has great — even loving — support from his community, and every reason to feel settled and secure as an artist. But the fact that he relates to artists in other countries rather than his own shows a certain isolation. He lives and works on an island that is part of Helsinki, connected by a bridge, having returned to the place where he grew up. He is the opposite of smug, with the wondering openness of someone always on the lookout for a new adventure.

Wardi’s exhibition at the Ateneum National Art Museum took place December 12, 2013 to February 3, 2014

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Palestinian artist Jawad al Malhi watches the activity on the street from his balcony in the Shufhat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, where he was born and still lives. At times it mirrors what he sees in television coverage of events across the Middle East, and it reminds him of his own fervent engagement with politics in the past. Young men on the street, mostly adolescents, stand around nervously waiting for something to happen, for an encounter that will set off an action in which they can participate. When it does, individuals who may not even know each other suddenly come together as a group, expressing their passion and acting as one. But when the event is over the solidarity disappears and they drift apart, uncertain and without purpose.

This fleeting moment after an event — the atmosphere, the body movements, the gestures and facial expressions —is what al Malhi seeks to capture in his paintings, viewing the crowd as if through a wide-angle camera lens, and using large canvases with minimal colour. It must be rather like trying to paint the sea after a wave has crashed, when for a moment the waters seem to have no clear direction.

There is hardly a hint of the environment in these paintings, and a powerful absence of architectural space, just the dust and glare of an exposed public space. The boys seem to be wandering around nowhere. This is in total contrast to Al-Malhi’s previous body of work, a series of panoramic long-distance photographs that show the buildings of Shufhat packed claustrophobically close, and with no sign of people. Entitled “House No. 197,” they were exhibited at the recent Helsinki Photography Biennial, and at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

The youths depicted in his current exhibition, “Measures of Uncertainty,” could be hanging out near the Israeli checkpoint a short distance from al Malhi’s house, but in conversation the artist says that they are not necessarily Palestinian: they could be in Cairo, or Istanbul, or anywhere in the Middle East. Dressed in the generic t-shirts, hooded jackets and jeans of kids anywhere, they live in what he calls “Coca-Cola time,” perhaps meaning a mixture of expectation and emptiness, a mood as international as their clothes.

Coming into the elegantly renovated Al-Ma’mal gallery, a former tile factory, in Jerusalem’s Old City, the bleached, creamy colours of the paintings almost merge into the stone walls and there is a general sense of stillness, suggesting peace and harmony. At first sight, you could be looking at all-male scenes on the fringe of a football or cricket field. But a closer study shows the deep, naked unease in the expressions and body movements of people caught in suspense, floating in a toxic, anonymous haze.

There is a pervading sense of watchfulness. The characters watch each other and us. They seem aware of being watched — by the artist, by television cameras, by the international community. Sometimes a gaze catches the viewer’s eye and creates an emotional link. We find ourselves watching rather than viewing them, but with all this attention, they don’t know what to do. Many of the characters are portraits of people al Malhi knows — boys who work in a local garage or tire factory, for instance — which invests a strong, contemporaneous reality to the work. The characters express confusion and bafflement; they scratch their heads and look around, seem lost, stunned, mildly indignant, filled with trepidation. Each one seems isolated in his own restless dream.

But the dream, says al Malhi, doesn’t exist. What does exist is the huge potential energy, even power, within the crowds on the street. “They are looking for answers,” he says, “but perhaps should be trying to find questions.”

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Jon Imber, who died April 17, left the Boston art community startled by the prolific output and freedom of his late work.  The achievement was all the more startling as he lived with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) that claimed his life at age 63. ­I was lucky enough to know him, and in his emails up until days before “exiting” (as he put it) he expressed with his usual laconic wit how it felt getting to the point where the paintings just flowed.

Imber was a vigorous, committed, lifelong painter and like Willem de Kooning, who was a haunting influence on his work, went on painting when ALS ravaged his body rather as dementia had de Kooning’s mind.

Painting continued as a vibrant language of discovery for Imber even as he lost the use of his limbs. Somehow, with limited physical means and no time or energy to waste, but surrounded by loving help and extraordinary gadgets, his last work achieved the looseness and pungency for which he had always been striving.

Speaking to a group of art devotees in Maine, he said that before he was ill he had wanted his work to be “surprising, risky and full of potential doom” but that now he didn’t have to worry about that as he had “a shitload of doom”. The meeting was filmed as part of “Jon Imber’s Left Hand,” directed by Richard Kane in the Maine Masters series, which premiered at the Independent Boston Film Festival on April 26. [View a six-minute segment here.] Imber’s family life is at the heart of the film, as it was at the heart of his life: there are paintings to document his relationship with his wife, the talented painter Jill Hoy, and the coming of age of their son Gabriel.

As Phillip Guston’s favourite student, Imber inherited not only his paints and brushes but also the master’s strong, opinionated presence in the studio. It created more of a dialogue for Imber than a struggle, visible in the large, clumsy but sensate, cartoonish but painterly characters with which he explored personal stories. But also in the way Imber isolated himself from the rollercoaster worldview on painting that he lived through. In his last year he painted numerous portraits of friends and visitors that are very different from those earlier figures. I am reminded of Emil Nolde’s “snapshot” portraits of South Sea Islanders: fast, intuitive, lyrical painting that knows its job and goes straight to the point. The color is luscious and unexpected, the personalities distinctive and alive.

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