arts and design

Haunted portraits, a lost church and the mystery of colour – the week in art

[ad_1]

Exhibition of the week

Love’s Labours Found
Haunted portraits to spook the imagination – or, as the gallery has it, important new discoveries in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture. As commercial galleries open before museums, this is your best bet for a historical show this month.
Philip Mould and Co, London from 21 April until 29 May

Also showing

Mat Collishaw
An ambitious permanent film installation by this intelligent and thoughtful artist, projecting a digitally created image of a lost Saxon church that weaves together histories of Englishness and photography.
Riverside Walk, near All Saints Church, Kingston, Surrey.

Idris Khan
New paintings inspired by Vivaldi’s music and the mystery of colour.
Victoria Miro Gallery, London until 15 May.

Damien Hirst Takeover
The original Young British Artist may not be that young now but he is certainly productive, and has undertaken to fill Gagosian’s space near King’s Cross for a year.
Gagosian Britannia Street, London through 2021.

Rachel Eulena Williams
Bright and dynamic, explosive abstractions that exist somewhere between painting and sculpture.
Modern Institute, Glasgow ongoing.

Image of the week

Banknote artwork.
Banknotes as political art. Photograph: Stacey Lee Webber

American artist Stacey Lee Webber has embroidered money for more than a decade. She started as a way to question the value of work by meticulously stitching patterns on to worthless dollar bills. The latest incarnation – the Insurrection Bills – is a response to the US’s febrile political climate. See more images here.

What we learned

Tracey Emin has been given a cancer “all-clear”

We gave five stars to Rachel Whiteread’s Internal Objects

and she spoke to us of her radical new direction

Five stars too for video artist John Akomfrah challenging the legacy of colonialism

The Sony world photography award winners were announced

How big tech has weaponised design patents

Why pioneering land artist Nancy Holt never got her due

and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is attempting to redress the balance for other female artists

Damien Hirst took over the Gagosian

Mystery over the origins of Howard Hodgkin’s Indian art collection could see it lost to the UK

A new documentary explores the life of ‘the greatest artist you’ve never heard of’, Bill Traylor

Indigenous artists in Australia reflect on the climate crisis with striking works

Eat, drink, shop, swim – England reopened from lockdown

Jo Ractliffe’s images show the legacies of South African apartheid

Emma Thompson stars in a biopic about John Ruskin and Effie Gray

A new documentary offers hypnotic glimpses of folk art in the making

while Willy Spiller’s photographers capture a bygone New York

Magdalena Wosinska’s photo essay has intimate portraits at a South Dakota Indian reservation

The Great British art tour led us into a cave, found an alternative girl with a pearl earring and witnessed an aerial dogfight

Masterpiece of the week

Guercino, The Cumaean Sibyl With a Putto, 1651.
Photograph: National Gallery, London

Guercino: The Cumaean Sibyl With a Putto, 1651
Fans of Artemisia Gentileschi will know how this great artist, who’s finally getting her due, used biblical stories of heroic and suffering women to put her own perspective into high art. Fascinatingly and mysteriously, her male contemporaries also painted and sculpted strong images of women. Here the intense Catholic artist Guercino portrays one of the Sibyls, female prophets from ancient Rome who were reimagined as harbingers of Christianity, as a characterful enthroned presence. She is very real and human as she turns to chat to the putto – also a classical myth Christianised into an angel. Guercino’s monumental, static scene is brought to life by his deep and moving sense of colour.
National Gallery, London

Don’t forget

To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.

Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter

If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.



[ad_2]

READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.  Learn more