Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700
National Gallery, London

Sometimes the shock of the old can be more intense and disturbing than the shock of the new. This is certainly the case with The Sacred Made Real – religious paintings and rarely seen carved and painted sculpture from Spain. It was a period in which the Roman Catholic Church sought to assert its authority with fearful images to shock the senses and stir the soul that highlight suffering and death with gruesome reality. All were intended to be seen in the intense gloom of churches as devotional images against a background of liturgical music, meditations and reminders of the suffering seen as part of the Christian faith, their context in which they were displayed an intrinsic part of their meaning.

Seize The Day
Tricycle Theatre, London

Since 2008, few weeks have gone by without various newspapers parading a new Barack Obama to their readers. From obscure parts of Russia to London, black candidates have been anointed or cursed with the presidential epithet. So it was perhaps inevitable that this fascination and obsession would transfer itself into the artistic world. Kwame Kwei-Armah’s engaging Seize the Day is one of the first of these offering, telling the rise and fall of a black London mayoral candidate. It forms part of the Tricycle Theatre’s excellent “Not Black and White” season.