Bawdy Beryl, slick Seurat, titanic Tracey and the glory of Gaudí: the best art shows and architecture in 2026

Art

Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy

For her centenary year, The Box presents the largest ever show of self-taught painter Beryl Cook. Her work may not be great art, but it is a bawdy slice of Plymouth and postwar British life. An unlikely pairing with Tom of Finland, at Studio Voltaire in 2024, recast Cook’s reputation as a queer ally. There will be drinking and smoking and ogling and people getting up to all sorts. Adrian Searle

The Box, Plymouth, 24 January to 31 May

Gwen John: Strange Beauties

Silence and solitude pervade the visionary art of this quiet hero of modernism. John didn’t take on the British art establishment – she simply ignored it. This graduate of the Slade ploughed her own route, living in France with almost no money, having a steamy affair with Rodin, for whom she also modelled, and painting simple, clear, spiritual images of women alone, and free like her, at a cost. Wales is right to be proud of her. Jonathan Jones

National Museum, Cardiff, 7 February to 28 June

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting

One of the greatest British portrait artists of all time can’t have enough exhibitions. This one delves into his creative process, exploring how his drawings grew into paintings – although he also demanded his models be there right through the work of painting. He wanted the subject present, even when he was painting floorboards and background. Freud’s drawings reveal the exactness of his eye, and are so precise they can be painful to look at. JJ

National Portrait Gallery, London, 12 February to 4 May

Seurat and the Sea

View image in fullscreen The Beach at Gravelines, 1890, by Georges Seurat Photograph: Courtauld

This may sound soft but, if so, take a closer look at Seurat. This restless, deep-seeing artist followed his elders, the impressionists, to the shores, ports and seaside towns of northern France but his pointillist fragmented views – a rock towering over the sea; an eerily still and unpopulated harbour; a long lonely channel connecting Gravelines, near Dunkirk, with the sea – are brilliant and achingly desolate visions of modernism. JJ

Courtauld Gallery, London, 13 February to 17 May

Beatriz González

Depicting tabloid crimes of passion and political murders, Latin American feminism and social commentary, the Colombian painter and sculptor Beatriz González developed during La Violencia, the decades-long civil war that gripped the country. Her simplified, brightly coloured paintings, assemblages, furniture and installation, are a kind of vernacul