"Caravaggio"
Painting from the past turned out to have extraordinary eloquence in 2005. The National Gallery staged the Old Master show of the year: Caravaggio's final years, when he was on the run after killing an opponent in a duel. Before his death aged only 38, this restless revolutionary gave western art a mesmerising new vision. Displaying a tragic awareness of mortality, he pioneered an extreme language of intense light and blackness which now looks uncannily cinematic.
"Kuba"
The memorable events of 2005 didn't only take place in galleries. The ever-enterprising Artangel enabled Kutlug Ataman to take over a derelict postal sorting office in New Oxford Street, London. Here, in a vast open space, he installed 40 television screens, all transmitting interviews with inhabitants of Kuba, a ghetto area of Istanbul where life can be desolate and gruelling. But the people were bent on surviving, and their will to overcome privation gave the whole installation a stubborn defiance.
The Writer
Other artists managed to ambush us with spectacular surprises in the open air - nowhere more arrestingly than on Hampstead Heath, where Giancarlo Neri erected a colossal sculpture called The Writer. Consisting of an outsize table and chair, it celebrated writing's limitless ability to gain inspiration from the entire world. And everyone walking across the heath seemed to become involved with this monumental presence. Crowds gathered round it, and plenty of ambitious young mountaineers managed to climb right up to the top.
"Self-Portrait"
Revealing self-portraits by a whole range of western artists, from Jan van Eyck right through to Jenny Saville, give the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition (which ends on 29 January) its compelling fascination. Nothing here could be more vulnerable than Van Gogh's exposure of his own lethal loneliness. Anyone dazzled by the range of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits at Tate Modern's death-haunted Kahlo retrospective could discover another of her pictures in the National Portrait Gallery survey. The only notable absentee is Edvard Munch, whose neurotic images of his traumatised mental states had a show of their own at the Royal Academy.
A trio of British sculptors
Richard Wentworth produced a powerful show at Tate Liverpool to prove that anything - a real bale of hay, coat-hangers, or even a ping-pong table - can be transformed into witty, inventive and unsettling sculpture. Then, during the summer, Tony Cragg installed an outstanding range of his recent work in a newly transformed Chalk Pit at the Cass Sculpture Foundation in Goodwood, West Sussex. And the year ends on a hugely invigorating note: Richard Deacon's show of new work at the Lisson Gallery in London (continuing until 28 January). One of our very best sculptors, he moves from seductive, richly glazed clay to stainless steel, working with such vigour and unpredictable inventiveness that we find his art impossible to resist.
