Hettie Judah

Deirdre McSharry, who died aged 94, edited Cosmopolitan during its influential 1970s heyday, helping make the magazine a witty and candid forum for women’s careers, health, style and sex lives. A demanding but supportive editor, she encouraged staff and contributors to pursue ambitious work and promoted practical feminist change. After leaving Cosmopolitan following ill health, she edited Country Living, where she championed creative interiors, designers and makers. Her earlier career included theatre, fashion journalism and identifying Twiggy as “the face of 1966”. McSharry later became a prominent cultural figure in Bath and was survived by her siblings and stepchildren.

Irish artist Isabel Nolan’s Venice Biennale presentation, Dreamshook, transforms Ireland’s pavilion into a secular chapel celebrating knowledge, humanism and transformative ideas. Drawing on Christian visual language while rejecting religious authority, Nolan pays particular attention to Aldo Manuzio, the Venetian printer credited with innovations including italics, blank margins and the semicolon. Her retrospective at Southwark Park Galleries likewise honors figures such as Copernicus, Simone Weil, John Donne and Tony Soprano. Across tapestries, sculptures, paintings and drawings, Nolan uses grandeur, humor and recurring donkey imagery to challenge pompous authority and humanize celebrated thinkers.

Frida Kahlo’s image has become a global commercial brand, appearing on countless consumer goods and often reduced to a simplified symbol of resilience, identity and beauty. Tate Modern’s exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon, challenges that flattening by placing Kahlo’s art alongside work by artists and communities she influenced, while examining the contradictions between commercialized products and more communal, devotional forms of remembrance. The exhibition and its curators acknowledge Kahlo’s importance to feminist, queer, disability and Chicano movements, but the piece emphasizes that her real life was more complicated: she was politically committed, outspoken, self-doubting and sometimes hurtful, as well as a pioneering artist whose depictions of pain, illness, sexuality and heartbreak remain powerful.

Glasgow International is presented as a festival shaped by decay, institutional failure and community resistance. David Wojnarowicz’s exhibition is the standout, using paintings, photographs and films to convey rage at the AIDS-era systems that failed him and to affirm the power of artistic communities. Other highlights include Renèe Helèna Browne’s film about rural struggle and survival, Tanoa Sasraku’s exploration of militarised masculinity, Rehana Zaman’s account of migrant farm labour and climate catastrophe, and Naeem Mohaiemen’s examination of state violence and neglected Black history. Locally focused projects by Mandy McIntosh, Vincent Butler, Katy Dove and Rae-Yen Song demonstrate how art can restore damaged public spaces, preserve memory and build communal connections amid Glasgow’s increasingly inaccessible cultural infrastructure.

Austrian artist Valie Export has died aged 85. Born Waltraud Lehner, she adopted the name Valie Export in 1967 and became known for confrontational performances, photography, film and sculpture that challenged the objectification of women and patriarchal social structures. Works including Touch and Grope Cinema and Action Pants: Genital Panic made her a major figure in expanded cinema and feminist avant-garde art. She also curated exhibitions, co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, taught multimedia and performance, and represented Austria at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Her influence was increasingly recognized later in life through major awards, a 2023 Albertina retrospective and the Valie Export Center in Linz. She is survived by her sister Elisabeth and grandson Patrick.

Florentina Holzinger discusses Seaworld Venice, her Austrian Pavilion installation at the 2026 Venice Biennale, which combines naked jetski performances, aerial stunts, a human bell and a performer submerged in filtered audience urine. She explains how the work challenges taboos surrounding nudity, bodily functions, women’s bodies and different forms of labour, while using sustainability as a central artistic theme. The installation has generated intense public reaction, including intrusive filming and social-media controversy. Holzinger also reflects on Sancta, her confrontational opera about Catholicism and liberation, arguing that comedy and absurdity are essential ways to address serious existential questions while maintaining hope.

Valie Export is remembered as a pioneering feminist performance artist whose confrontational work challenged patriarchal structures, religious authority, consumer society and the treatment of women’s bodies. Performances including From the Portfolio of Doggedness, Action Pants: Genital Panic and Tap and Touch Cinema used humiliation, sexuality, danger and audience participation to expose unequal power relations. Her difficult experiences of marriage, motherhood, religion and social constraint informed her rejection of patriarchal identity and her belief that women’s art could drive social change. The piece mourns Export’s death while emphasizing the importance of documenting and honoring her legacy.

The Od art festival in Somerset brings together 24 artists under the theme “Thinking in Circles,” exploring rural and industrial life, migration, invented traditions, imperial histories and global labor networks. Highlights include Libby Bove’s deadpan Museum of Roadside Magic, Simon Lee Dicker’s ultraviolet Red Hot Haystacks, which references nuclear contamination in Orkney, and Adam Chodzko’s film installation about Romanian strawberry pickers and changing patterns of agricultural work. Other installations use archaeological fragments, ritual ceramics and fragrant textiles to connect local histories with wider questions of heritage, death, mobility and cultural exchange.

Grayson Perry’s exhibition at London’s Wallace Collection uses fictional alter egos, including Shirley Smith and the Honourable Millicent Wallace, alongside works by outsider artists such as Madge Gill and Aloïse Corbaz. The review argues that the exhibition’s shifting identities and elaborate conceptual framework become a mishmash, weakening its intended critique of status and pomposity. Perry’s more direct works, including Sissy’s Helmet and several ceramics and tapestries, are judged stronger, while the works attributed to Shirley are criticized as performative in comparison with the urgent, survival-driven art of the women who inspired them.

Mickalene Thomas’s Hayward Gallery exhibition uses monumental portraits, rhinestones, domestic settings, music and performance to explore Black women’s representation, agency, intimacy and love. The review highlights works engaging with Eartha Kitt’s experiences and with racialized depictions of heaven, while noting the exhibition’s political dimension. Linder’s concurrent show, built around photocollage, bodily transformation and feminist disruptions of fashion and erotic imagery, initially seems stylistically different but is presented as a fitting counterpart because both artists dissect feminine representation and draw on collaboration, friendship and personal experience.

The Barbican exhibition examines Indian art from 1975 to 1998, a period marked by Emergency rule, political violence, the Bhopal disaster and India’s first nuclear tests. Through painting, photography, installation and theatre-related work, it explores urban transformation, class oppression, women’s and gay rights, Indigenous cultures, protest and national identity. The review emphasizes the exhibition’s depiction of destruction and trauma while also highlighting beauty, intimacy, joy and artistic resistance. It concludes with Bhupen Khakhar’s Grey Blanket, presenting enduring love as a note of gentle optimism.

Two West Yorkshire exhibitions mark the centenary of surrealism from contrasting perspectives. Forbidden Territories at the Hepworth Wakefield explores surrealist landscapes, dreams, sexuality, gender, war trauma and the unconscious through works by artists including Max Ernst, René Magritte, Leonora Carrington and Edith Rimmington, using an immersive installation inspired by early surrealist exhibition design. The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute focuses on women artists from German-speaking countries after the second world war, showing how they transformed the movement's misogynistic assumptions and processed the intergenerational trauma of nazism and conservative gender roles. Together, the exhibitions present surrealism as not merely escapist or irrational, but also a powerful form of feminist resistance and coded dissent.