Cinderella by Ericka Beckman at FACT Liverpool

It is hard to believe this video installation is 30 years old. Perhaps this is because we are used to seeing retro-style use of early computer games imaging and re-emergence of Punk.  The Cinderella story is told as a kind of 20-minute musical in which images of Cinderella as a real person and as a puppet dominated by her industrial environment. Intriguing. ❤❤❤❤

Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

A major 150-year retrospective of the artchitect and artist's work. A lot of items that have not previously been displayed together, including sketches and paintings and detailed plans for unbuilt projects.  Most interesting was the display of some of the recovered Chinese Room from the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, Glasgow and the detailed information about it.  I remember peering into the empty building at the corner of Ingram Street around 1967 and seeing the blue-painted lattice screens lying in the derelict space.  I realised that this was the site of one Mackintosh's tearooms but assumed that his screens had been painted blue when they had been used for some other purpose when the tearoom closed. In fact that was their original colour.  It was a shocking story that Glasgow Corporation were unwilling to take responsibility for the contents of the building and that it had to be rescued by a charity. Only recently we saw much of the remainder of the tearoom structure and furniture, which is now installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee and now forms part of a small and precious archive of his work. As for the Glasgow School of Art, his masterpiece: it is too tragic to think about. ❤❤❤❤

Joaquin Sorolla, Spanish Master of Light at The National Gallery, London

I remember being impressed by Sorolla when we visited his house in Madrid  This UK exhibition of his work is overdue.  His recognised mastery lay in portraying light in oils, in a very different way from the contemporary French Impressionists, while simultaneously showing a glimpse of middle class Spanish life at the start of the 20th century. The best of his work is the unconventional subject matter of light on human skin; less interesting, although beautifully executed are the many portraits of his own family -- always in sunshine. ❤❤❤

Is this Tomorrow?, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London

63 years on from the gallery's famous exhibition This is Tomorrow, in which the relationship between architecture and art in the buildngs of the time were explored, this attempts to recreate some of the concepts that were being examined at the time. A BBC film of the 1956 exhibition (https://youtu.be/nJFuDhgcH1I) shows how attitudes to "modern" art and the expectations of the establishment media on how 'ordinary' people would respond to it have changed.  Today's version is the expected mix of bizarre, thought-provoking and pretentious installations that the Whitechapel does so well: e.g. the perforated coloured metal strips of Mariana Castillo Deball's Mind Garden, Heart Garden (see photo) "reflects on our relation to time and how spaces are inhabited and can be designed for living based on conviviality and shared activities". ❤❤❤❤❤