3rd May – 27th July 2013

Trade routes have connected the major centres of civilisation in Europe and Asia since antiquity. These routes not only made the exchange of goods possible, but also fostered cultural exchanges between distant regions. The group exhibition, ‘Trade Routes’, on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery from 3 May, presents a diverse picture of where these trade routes stand in today’s globalised society through the lens of 15 artists.

The exhibition features video installations, sculptures and two-dimensional works by artists based in Africa, China, Europe, India, and the Middle East including Adel Abidin, Fatima Al Qadiri & Khalid al Gharaballi, Alighiero Boetti, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Subodh Gupta, Gülsün Karamustafa, Bharti Kher, Rachid Koraïchi, Lee Xe, Maha Malluh, Bettina Pousttchi, Hassan Sharif, Wael Shawky and David Zink Yi.

For more info, please visit Hauser & Wirth

Romanian artist Dan Voinea uses his classical and realist style of painting to capture figures in a peculiar performance like state. The Gallery notes ‘Yet while technically realistic and anatomically correctly proportioned, the works are characterized as much by their apparent lack of realism: their fantastical tendencies, collapsing or nondescript environments and preference for magic realist narratives.’

‘A Momentary Rise Of Reason’ is on show until May 18th 2013. For more info, please visit Beers.Lambert Contemporary

1st May – 7th July 2013

This is Mehretu’s first major solo exhibition in London and will feature new and recent paintings. Her large-scale paintings, which are built up in layers, employ a broad lexicon of drawing techniques together with a precise, muscular abstraction to investigate the intersection of politics, architecture and history and the way these forces shape the formation of our social identity.

This exhibition, which features five new works, centres around ‘Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts’, The ‘Mogamma’ works, which were completed in 2012 shortly after the time of the Arab Spring revolutions, have evolved out of Mehretu’s investigations into how architecture and geographical space, particularly within urban centres, become sites for political and mythological projection. ‘I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power’, Mehretu explains.

For more info, please visit the White Cube Bermondsey

During the Oxford Art Weeks, which runs throughout May, Sanders of Oxford will be showing a collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

Yuki no Mukojima (Snow at Mukojima) featured above left, by Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) is known for his exquisite landscape prints. Hasui was one of the most prolific and talented shin hanga artists of the early twentieth-century. He designed over six hundred woodblock prints, mainly for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, although he also briefly worked for several other publishers. Many people feel that Hasui’s most original work was done at the beginning of his career. Unfortunately, the blocks for Hasui’s earliest prints were destroyed in the devastating 1923 Kanto earthquake and they were never reprinted. Consequently, Hasui’s pre-earthquake prints are among the rarest and most sought-after shin hanga.

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