Hopper, Kvareli and Merz: three art stories across Europe

This week begins with Edward Hopper. Louis Shadwick’s Edward Hopper: A Life has just been published in the United States and will appear in the UK on 24 November, bringing together new material in an effort to get closer to an artist who, as Shadwick puts it, has become more myth than man in the popular imagination. That matters for anyone interested in painting, because Hopper’s work is built on close looking: ordinary places, pauses, and the spaces between people.

In Georgia, the Kvareli Foundation for Contemporary Art opens on 2 November. The new private museum, set in the countryside around 150km east of Tbilisi, adds another site where contemporary art can be seen outside the usual major-city circuit, and where the shape of a collection and an exhibition programme can influence how work is read locally.

Turin and Marisa Merz

In Turin, Marisa Merz’s E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare (1980) is the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli. It is one of three presentations in the city marking the 100th anniversary of Merz’s birth, on view until 4 April 2027 at the Castello di Rivoli, Fondazione Merz and GAM.

For artists and lovers of painting and drawing, the common thread is the act of looking. Hopper, Merz and the new foundation in Kvareli all suggest that an artwork’s force lies not only in what it depicts, but in how it organises attention, space and material presence.