What is there to know about pop art that we haven’t already seen before? One of the most iconic art movements of the 20th century, pop art is widely associated with personal and professional exuberance of Andy Warhol, or ironic, repurposed cartoon images of Roy Lichtenstein. And yet, one must wonder whether their apparent obsession with the banality of the everyday is really the only language that pop art knows how to speak. A new show at the Tate Modern in London aims to dispel the understating of pop art as a largely North American movement, instead showing how the iconographic, visual vocabulary of pop art was appropriated around the world – from Japan to Brazil, from Yugoslavia to Spain – in the 1960s and 1970, and used to tackle issues that reach beyond critical engagement with consumerism.

“The World Goes Pop” greets you with a brightly coloured room that states that “pop was never just a celebration of Western consumerism, but was often a subversive international language for criticism and public protest across the globe.” This initial statement is further explored through thematic rooms that deal with politics, domesticity, bodies, feminism and public protests, along with three sections dedicated exclusively to the work of Eulàlia Grau and Joe Tilson, Jana Želibská, and Cornel Brudaşcu. Using well-known visual devices of US-crafted pop – and sometimes even referencing its most famous works – artists gathered in this exhibition explored issues related to political dominance of the US, the position of the female body in popular culture and the role of female figure in society, the blurry relationship between censorship and propaganda, civil rights movements, or political dictatorship.

A cacophony of references, between commercial messages and overt political critique, “The World Goes Pop” shows how artists used this visual language to “critique its capitalist origins while benefiting from its universal mass appeal and graphic power” to discuss issues that were relevant to specific geographical context in a very specific historical moment. “The World Goes Pop” runs until 24 January 2016.

Has the moment finally arrived for women artists of the past century to take over the spotlight from men? Tate Modern this year seems devoted to reaffirm the role of women in art, first with a compelling exhibition on Sonia Delaunay, and now with a massive retrospective devoted to the doyen of conceptual art, Agnes Martin. Martin, known for her geometric, meticulous paintings, is put in context by exhibition curators as “one of the pre-eminent painters of the twentieth century”, thus her work is explored in relation to artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana and Lenore Tawney.

With a willingness to discover the origins, permutations and inspiration of the subtle poetics that characterized so much of Martin’s work, the exhibition reveals Martin’s lesser-known early paintings and experimental works from this period including The Garden from 1958. It charts her experiments in different media and formats with found objects and geometric shapes, before she began making her inimitable pencilled grids on large, square canvases which would become her hallmark. Even though the desire is to paint a comprehensive, elaborate narrative on Martin’s work, the show also brings together seminal examples of here signature works from the 1960s such as Friendship 1963, a gold leaf covered canvas incised with Martin’s emblematic fine grid.

From her birth in in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, to her position on the New York art scene, to her final move to New Mexico by 1940 ( following a nubbier of other artists and writers such as DH Lawrence, Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko who had all been drawn to visit the area), the exhibition challenges how we understand Martin’s work. While often associated with Minimalists and an influential figure to those artists, Martin’s restrained style underpinned a deep conviction in the emotive and expressive power of art influenced by Asian belief systems including Taoism and Zen Buddhism as well as the natural surroundings of New Mexico. But even for those who don’t feel like delving too deep into meanders of philosophy and art theory, seeing Agnes Martin’s work will be a pleasure to the eye and, more importantly, the mind. The exhibition remains on show until 11 October 2015 at Tate Modern in London.

There is something particularly special about printed word – its is both lasting and timeless, as it is fragile and of its time – which shields it from ever becoming oblivious. As Umberto Eco once said, reading books is a way of making one’s life a bit richer by living the experiences of others through books – “It’s a little reward for not being immortal”. That the world of books will not be easily dismissed (if we were to borrow the title of another Eco’s work), was made visible this weekend in London. Offprint publishing fair moved to the windy island for the first time – Offprint Paris is already a traditional annual appointment every November during Paris Photo fair – taking over the beautiful Turbine Hall space at Tate Modern.

Held in the occasion of Photo London, Offprint London was a vibrant and lively meeting with, mostly, art and photography publishers. Strikingly, the event has shown how much the world of ‘independent publishing’ has changed in the past couple of years, swiftly moving from rebellious photocopied-zine producers to elaborate, sophisticated volumes whose physical appearance and rich materiality is as important as their content. With more than 50 publishers filling the tables laid out within Turbine Hall’s rough concrete walls, this gradual change in focus, style and intent of contemporary independent publishing couldn’t have been more striking. If rebellion against digital technology gave way to exaggeratedly polished books, what does its say about the very scope of the movement? How do we judge its shift into a (very) profitable industry? Is there even room to make such a judgement?

Perhaps what Offprint London pointed to most vividly is precisely the vibrant plurality of independent and not-so-independent publishing today. Established publishing houses like MIT Press or Semiotext(e) perfectly coexisted with Nieves’ cult zines or student publications amassed on overcrowded tables. In the same way, visitors to the fair ranged from obvious young hipsters to older art lovers, in a perfectly apt mix of point of views, interests and ideas. What brought projects like sticker-tattoos, produced within Self-Publish Be Happy project space, and retired college professors together during four days of publishing exuberance, was nothing less than the particular magic of the printed word.

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colourful work spanned painting, fashion and design. A new exhibition at Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of her vibrant artistic career, from her early figurative painting in the 1900s to her energetic abstract work in the 1960s. This exhibition offers a radical reassessment of Delaunay’s importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth century. Born in Odessa and trained in Germany, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern, then Terk) came to Parisin 1906 to join the emerging avant-garde. She met and married the artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed ‘Simultaneism’ – abstract compositions of dynamic contrasting colours and shapes. Many iconic examples of these works are brought together at Tate Modern, including Bal Bullier 1913 and Electric Prisms 1914. Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay shows how the artist dedicated her life to experimenting with colour and abstraction, bringing her ideas off the canvas and into the world through tapestry, textiles, mosaic and fashion. Delaunay premiered her first ‘simultaneous dress’ of bright patchwork colours in 1913 and opened a boutique in Madrid in 1918. Her Atelier Simultané in Paris went on to produce radical and progressive designs for scarves, umbrellas, hats, shoes and swimming costumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Clients included the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson and the architect Erno Goldfinger, as well department stores like Metz & Co and Liberty. The exhibition reveals how Delaunay’s designs presented her as a progressive woman synonymous with modernity: embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage, and creating daring costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The diverse inspirations behind Delaunay’s work are also explored, from the highly personal approach to colour which harked back to her childhood in Russia, to the impact of her years in Spain and Portugal where she painted The Orange Seller 1915 and Flamenco Singers 1915-16. The show also reveals the inspiration provided by modern technology throughout Delaunay’s career, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the aeroplane, and from the Eiffel Tower to the electric light bulb. It also includes her vast seven-metre murals Motor, Dashboard and Propeller, created for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and never before shown in the UK. Following her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia Delaunay’s work took on more formal freedom, including rhythmic compositions in angular forms and harlequin colours, which in turn inspired geometric tapestries, carpets and mosaics. Delaunay continued to experiment with abstraction in the post-war era, just as she had done since its birth in the 1910s, becoming a champion for a new generation of artists and an inspiring figure for creative practitioners to this day.

Richard Tuttle (born in 1941 in New Jersey) came to prominence in the 1960s, combining sculpture, painting, poetry and drawing. He has become revered for his delicate and playful approach, often using such humble, everyday materials as cloth, paper, rope and plywood. Two major art institutions in London – the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern – are currently showing a comprehensive survey of Tuttle’s work through a retrospective exhibition, a specially commissioned project and a new publication, titled “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language”.

Taking textiles – the material that is most commonly associated with craft and fashion, yet lies hidden behind many of the world’s most acclaimed works of art – as the starting point of the project, the exhibition investigates the importance of this material throughout history, across Tuttle’s remarkable body of work and into the latest developments in his practice. The Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition surveying Richard Tuttle’s career from the 1960s to today: showcasing works selected in close dialogue with the artist the exhibition centres on his use of fibre, thread and textile, all positioned in a formal relationship with each other and in direct response to the architectural framework Whitechapel Gallery’s historic exhibition spaces.

Alongside this exhibition, Tate Modern presents a newly commissioned sculpture in its iconic Turbine Hall. Principally constructed of fabric, it is be the largest work ever created by the artist, measuring over twelve metres in height. It will bring together a group of specially-made fabrics, each of which combines natural and man-made fibres to create different textures in bright colours. These will be suspended from the ceiling as a sculptural form, contrasting with the solid industrial architecture of the Turbine Hall, to create a huge volume of joyous colour and fluidity.

For the third time in twenty years, Tate Modern devotes an exhibition to Sigmar Polke (1941-2010, Germany), a master by many considered one of the greatest artists of all times. Titled Alibis, the huge retrospective organized by the London-based museum pays tribute to and retraces the extraordinary career of an experimenter who was able to play with a wide range of subjects, media and materials. Starting his artistic path in the ‘60s, when Pop Art was taking over the United States, Polke used the image of widespread symbols and characters of mass culture as a source of inspiration for his artworks, reinterpreting them in a personal and unconventional way. His work is more than a mere reproduction; it is a process of layering of mechanical and manual reproductions, which can be added in order to exploit most of the diverse options at the painter’s disposal.

Painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture and drawing were just some of the vehicles employed by the German artist to dissect the differences between reality and its appearance. With a mocking, always clever, humour, Polke put on unpredictable parodies of political, social, moral and religious issues, as well as of their forms of authorities. In Alice in Wonderland (1971) we see the patterns of banal commercial fabrics stretched on the canvas and showing the movements of vigorous soccer players over which is painted a silhouette of a volley ball player put side by side to an image of Alice, accompanied by the caterpillar smocking a mushroom with its distinctive hookah. The reference to Alice’s growing and shrinking is connected with drugs experimentation (apparently figment of the artist’s experience) as well as the physical power and elasticity. While in the evocative series Watchtower (initiated in the ‘80s) there is a clear remark to the barbarities of the Nazism with its concentration camps and observation posts, symbols of past often denied and rejected.

Topical facts are ingredients of an art – an undisputed example of conceptual painting – which wondered about its own nature, the perception of mass produced objects and the meaning of stealing or appropriating other artists’ identity, overlaying images with other images. Creating canvases that range from small to large scale, Sigmar Polke treated painting as a hybrid, which carried established conventions and innovations, figuration and modern abstraction, high and low culture.

The exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York with Tate Modern in London will run until 8th February 2015 and it is a must-see!

Panorama is much more than an exhibition. It is the first chronological and comprehensive retrospective arranged, thanks to the collaboration between three of the main European art institutions, to retrace Gerhard Richter‘s entire career and celebrate his 80th birthday.

After Tate Modern in London and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the traveling show covering fifty years of Richter’s oeuvre – accompanied by an unmissable book with essays and interviews of international critics and curators -, is now on view at Centre Pompidou in Paris and will run until the 24th September.

The versatile artist, born in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1932 and moved to the West during the 60′s, is widely regarded as one of the most important painters at work today. Well known for his ability to reinvent and transform his art, Richter has worked with traditional and new media. With sculptures, drawings, photographs and by painting over photographs, he is still – and unconventionally – remaining loyal to painting as a timeless way of expression: «painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human».

Many previous exhibitions have been devoted to the German Master until today with the aim of plumbing the depths of his work and focusing on different aspects of his research, but, as stated by the title in itself, this show wants to go beyond. Including the so-called Photo-paintings, figurative and abstract works, land and seascapes, glass sculptures and mirror works, drawings and photographs, portraits, Greys and Colour Charths, Panorama encompasses the whole archive of Richter’s achievements.

Gerhard Richter’s retrospective helps to underline his artistic transitions: producing paintings through the use of an episcope on the basis of his own photographs, erasing figurative paintings by covering them with a layer of gray paint or using painting as a way of inheriting a tradition and revealing his own intimacy and historical experiences. From the 60’s to today the artist has been placed in the camps of minimalism, conceptual and political art, passing through the emergence of abstraction, always following his idea of letting a thing come, rather than creating it.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Centre Pompidou is curated by Alfred Pacquement, Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesatane, with colleagues in London (Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey from Tate) and Berlin (Udo Kittelmann and Dorothee Brill at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)