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The “Dark Matter” exhibition at White Cube is really beautiful. In the huge, intensely white space, Annushka Shani has curated a show of black-colored and darkness-themed works from 14 artists, ranging from Andy Warhol’s One Grey/Black Marilyn (Reversal Series) from 1979/86; to new works by Gary Hume (Black Door with Sash, a vibrant swirl of black and yellow); to Damien Hirst’s fly painting, Infanticide.

In his accompanying essay on the show, “The Void That Matters,” Donald Kuspit quotes Freud’s 1925 theory that “negation is a way of taking cognisance of what is repressed,” and he goes on to cite Malevich’s Black Square (1915) as signalling the negation of painting: its reduction to “dark matter,” as it were, as a way of taking cognisance of painting.

The various responses to the void in this exhibition ("dark matter" is also a term astronomers use to refer to the invisible expanses between points of visibility) are beautiful and rich; and, curiously, when one comes out of this black-and-white world, one feels one has been seeing great works in Technicolor, so vivid are these pieces.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lake Superior, Cascade River is a masterful black horizon piece. Cerith Wyn Evans shows two glorious black-neon pieces, and there is even some surrealist black humour in the form of Gavin Turk’s Waste, a bulging black trash-bin bag of painted bronze.

"Dark Matter" is on view at White Cube through Sept. 9.

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At Gagosian Gallery, there is a fascinating double exhibition, “Francis Bacon: Triptychs” and “Damien Hirst: A Thousand Years & Triptychs.”

The first small room as you enter the gallery contains Hirst’s triptychs in homage to Bacon, an artist to whom he has acknowledged a debt; these works absorb Bacon’s visceral images and give them three-dimensional existence in sculptural form with works like A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative works, in which maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a glass vitrine.

But in spite of the extraordinary power of works by Hirst, Bacon’s huge triptychs steal the show in their majesty, their power and their paint. The largest gallery contains three huge triptychs; smaller, more intimate studies are housed in another room.

“Triptychs are the thing I like doing most, and I think this may be related to the thought I’ve sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases. So far as my work has any quality, I often feel perhaps it is the triptychs that have the most quality,” Bacon rightly said in 1979.

Does this pairing of art-world giants work? Yes it does, in its sheer power and scale. But the old master clearly wins.

The exhibitions are on view at Gagosian through Aug. 4.
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At Kenny Schachter’s raw, new space ROVE, opposite Gagosian, Danny Moynihan has curated a summer blockbuster: “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Stone in Art,” is a fascinating scamper through the history of art with early Chinese scholar rocks; an uncharacteristically dark work by Andre Derain; and a Courbet landscape.

Other well-known artists with work in the show include Olafur Eliasson, Nick Waplington, David Hockney and Keith Tyson. A Delacroix painting and Brancusi photograph are also included.

Managing the neat hat trick of having work in all three galleries, Damien Hirst is also in this show with a cabinet piece from 2003, Creation Explored, Explained and Exploded (don’t you just love Hirst’s titles?), in which the cabinet is a Victorian chemist’s display with crystals bolted upside down on its shelves.

“Rock” is a brisk and exhilarating canter through the history of Eastern and Western art from Scroll Painting of a Stone by Lan Ying (1585-c.1664) to Study for Misty Landscape with Wreckage (2005) by Jonathan Wateridge (I’ll be interviewing this fascinating young artist previewing his first one man show this autumn).