Press

"Francisco de Zurbarán was a "genius" of the Spanish baroque, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Zurbarán (1598-1664) "comes between El Greco and Velázquez"; he is "as wild as the former, as profound as the latter". Based mainly in Seville at the moment of the city's greatest prosperity, he was lauded for his "electrifying" paintings of religious subjects, "hyper-real" down to the last fold of cloth and "pinprick of congealing blood", and for his "radiant still lifes"."

"Spring is in full swing and the new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, "In Bloom: How Plants Changed our World", has been perfectly timed for the season, said Tim Adams in The Observer. It's "a celebration of the ways that plants have sprouted and unfurled in our artistic and scientific imaginations". With a series of artworks and other items sourced largely from the collections of Oxford University – from 17th-century flower paintings to preserved plant specimens to works of contemporary art – it also provides a potted history of this country's horticulture."

""If you didn't know that David Hockney was 88, you might think he was in his prime," said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The veteran artist has lately been producing and exhibiting work at a prodigious rate, and less than a year after his "colossal" retrospective in Paris, he has returned to the UK for a "magical, moving" exhibition, "A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting", at London's Serpentine North Gallery."