Watercolour, Tate Britain

An exhibition so eager to overturn preconceptions that it forgets itself

Does watercolour painting suffer from an image problem? Do you think of the wild, vaporous seascapes of Turner, or Victorian ladies at their sketchbooks dabbing daintily at wishy-washy flower paintings? Do you associate the medium with radical innovation or with staid tradition? And would Jackson Pollock have appeared quite so heroic flinging thin washes of watercolour around instead of viscous oils?

Susan Hiller, Tate Britain

Visually seductive work whose meaning leaves a lot to be desired

Susan Hiller describes herself as a curator as well as an artist. She makes work out of objects that she’s collected over the years. She collates information, too, and personal testimonies. These all go toward making works whose primary aim is to question meanings and categories and belief systems. These belief systems are those that are often found on the outer fringes of mainstream norms – or, if you’re put off by the dry language of academe – which Hiller isn’t – the loopy stuff that’s a bit “out there”. Paranormal activity, alien abductions, séances, the healing power of holy water, levitation, auras. All these are dealt with in Hiller’s work.

Rachel Whiteread: Drawings, Tate Britain & Gagosian Gallery

The art of the thinker: drawings show the art behind the art

Rachel Whiteread is best known for her exploration of space, of presence and absence, of how we look at what is present – and absent – in the textures of our lives. House, her life-sized cast of a house in a derelict street in East London, first brought her to fame, and more recently Untitled (Plinth), her mockingly affectionate take on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, a resin-cast replica of the plinth itself, literally shaped a new viewpoint of that absence in the heart of the West End.

Eadweard Muybridge, Tate Britain

Trotting horses were only a small part of a fascinating story

Multiple images of silhouetted horses cantering against blank backgrounds in grids of movement are what most people associate with Eadward Muybridge. Made in the late 1880s, they have contributed to his lasting reputation as a pioneer of photography and the moving image. So it is astonishing to discover through Tate Britain’s magnificent exhibition of his life’s work, that horses were only part of a story packed with surprises.

Romantics, Tate Britain

New Blake discoveries shine out after two centuries

Everyone likes a “lost treasure” story, a story where something missing for hundreds of years turns up in an unexpected place, bringing sudden riches to the lucky finder. In the 1970s, a purchaser of an old railway timetable found, tucked inside the book, eight hand-coloured etchings, which were quickly identified as rare images by William Blake. On top of the etchings Blake had used watercolour and then tempera, then pen and ink, thus making these one-off images that had been hidden for the best part of two centuries.

Shock and awe at Tate

Two recently decommissioned fighter jets are in the incongruous setting of Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. One plane, polished to a mirror sheen, lies belly-up, like an injured animal; the other hangs suspended from the ceiling, its matt surface stripped of its combat colours and stripes, painted instead with faint feather markings, bringing to mind a giant, trussed-up bird. Its stilled presence is both powerfully majestic and inert.

Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place

Enter the colour-saturated world of an artist often compared to Matisse

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the paintings more as objects than as two-dimensional surfaces. Tate Britain’s major 2006 retrospective surveyed his work over six decades, but a new exhibition, at Modern Art Oxford, is a tightly focused affair: paintings executed by the 77-year-old artist over the last decade, including a body of new work. They offer a window on to a brilliant, colour-saturated world.

Interview: Michael Winner on collecting Donald McGill

As the seaside postcard makes it to the Tate, a famous collector explains the allure

This week a new exhibition with no pretence to seriousness opens at Tate Britain. Rude Britannia: British Comic Art is a comprehensive tour of a great national tradition: having a laugh in a line drawing. The show covers the boardwalk from Gilray and Cruikshank to Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell. It also includes the work of a cartoonist and illustrator whose world view, more than any other, now seems deliciously quaint and old-fashioned: Donald McGill. All four examples from the exhibition are included here.

Tinie Tempah and the rise and rise of black British pop

Another UK rapper makes it to number one, but is it just a fad?

A little revolution is taking place at the top of the pop charts. UK artist Tinie Tempah's rap track “Pass Out” has had two weeks at number one, and at the time of writing looks very much like it may successfully fight off Lady Gaga & Beyonce's spectacularly-hyped “Telephone Thing” to make it a third week on top.

Art Gallery: Henry Moore's Reclining Figures

Exquisite images from the Tate Britain show

Henry Moore is said to have first encountered the image of the reclining figure in Paris in 1925 in a plaster cast of an ancient Mexican Toltec-Maya figure in the Trocadero Museum. It was to become probably his most frequently explored theme, revisited hundreds of times over the following 60 years before his death in 1986. From the relatively realistic to the almost totally abstract, Moore’s reclining figures can be seen in galleries and public spaces all over the world.