Because hasn’t featured Jack Bell Gallery for what will be two years in May, which is a small oversight though we do try to make a habit of showcasing as diverse as possible a collection of cultural happenings in the city.  Over the weekend, an email from Jack Bell, director of the eponymous gallery, popped into my inbox with the subject header ‘Instal. shots’ and a message saying that he thought I might like to see photographs taken of the new show on display, before its opening to the public.  Bell couldn’t have known it, but that was a massive understatement.

Opening next Tuesday is Quitte Le Pouvoir: New Paintings by Aboudia.  The 30-year old Ivorian is noted for his works of great immediacy and great power.  These are paintings as epically-inclined as Picasso’s Guernica – and no less explosive, revolting or claustrophobic.  When Laurent Gbago, former tyrant President of the Ivory Coast, was under the final throes of civil unrest in April 2011, Aboudia took refuge in his underground workshop in Abidjan.  The visceral power of armed combat between the military, rebels and the UN on the streets of the Ivory Coast capital made its way onto Aboudia’s canvas.

Largely, the works on display here were made in the aftermath of Aboudia’s self-imposed exile and show a very tense situation of what we consider ‘normal life’.  There is a very fine balance between the routine and its disruption.  These graffiti-esque landscapes fall between the politically- and racially charged work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the evil as depicted by Leon Golub.  There are very few artists working today who can accurately capture the moments of madness, chaos and its respite that define the modern world.

Quitte Le Pouvoir: New Paintings by Aboudia is at Jack Bell Gallery between 22 January – 16 Feburary.

5340 submissions showing the work of 2350 photographers, and a winner was chosen.  Spanish-born, London-based photographer Jordi Ruiz Cirera's image of Margerita, a young Bolivian woman living in a religious community, won the 28-year old the overall prize, worth a total of £12,000.  Margerita found the process of taking the picture troubling, even though she sits behind a table, her face partially obscured by a hand placed casually before it.

This is one of sixty portraits in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, which is open at the National Portrait Gallery for another month.  It is an opportunity to see exciting work by some of the most captivating and challenging photographers today.  There are images here from advertising, editorial and the fine arts and balanced smattering of interesting faces, interesting stories and contemporary icons.

There are wonderfully evocative portraits of Gillian Wearing and Mo Farah, and there is the image below. This picture of Chinese dissident/activist/artist Ai Weiwei won Matthew Niederhauser the John Kobal New Work award, an adjunct prize given to an outstanding photographic artist under the age of 30.  The very notion of celebrity was born from painting and portraiture, so this exhibition feels delightfully relevant.  Well worth your time.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize is at the National Portrait Gallery until 17 February

Header image: “Harriet and Gentleman Jack” (2010) by Jooney Woodward © Jooney Woodward

Second image: © Matthew Niederhauser

Women of London, the time is now!  Dorothy Bohm, the Grand Dame of photography, celebrates the female half of the capital in her exhibition Women in Focus, currently on display at the Museum of London.

Thirty-three colour photographs, taken between 1990 and the present day, juxtapose images of women from advertising and artworks with women living and working in the capital.  These images present the many roles of the modern woman, and provide a serious yet playful reflection on how women are seen and how they present themselves.  Bohm’s skills are to subtly weigh the contrasts with the discrepancies of the ideal with the reality.

Born in East Prussia (roughly modern-day Poland), and resident in England since 1939 at the age of fifteen, Dorothy Bohm is one of the most significant of all female photographers, with a career spanning almost seventy years.  She helped set up London’s Photographers’ Gallery and recently exhibited at Tate Britain in the show Another London.  She says, “I have been called a humanist photographer in my life.  As a woman photographing women, I hope that I have shown in my pictures that I understand, sympathise and can identify with my subjects.  I never want to take hurtful pictures…Some photographs could only have been taken by a woman.”

Women in Focus: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm is at the Museum of London until 17 February.

Women in Focus: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm is at the Museum of London until 17 February.