Intense photographic visions, a journey to Rome and a dealer-turned-painter – the week in art
Exhibition of the week
Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings
Absorbing trip from Flanders to Rome and back with northern Renaissance artists whose drawings have a buttery richness.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 23 March until 23 June.
Also showing
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In
Two great artists of the camera who both created intense visionary worlds.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 16 June.
Landscape Into Art
Anya Gallaccio meets JMW Turner, and others, in this spacious survey of the landscape imagination.
• Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 16 June.
Betty Parsons
The art of Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollock’s gallerist is rediscovered at last.
• Alison Jacques Gallery, London, until 27 April.
Acts of Resistance
Nan Goldin, Teresa Margolles and many others feature in a survey of feminism, protest and the camera.
• South London Gallery, until 9 June.
Image of the week
Banksy’s new mural of a tree painted in north London was defaced with white paint two days after it first appeared. The artwork in Finsbury Park features rough brushstrokes in green paint on a wall behind a severely pruned tree, giving the impression that it still bears foliage, with a stencilled image of a person holding a pressure hose next to it. Read the full story here.
What we learned
A Piero della Francesca altarpiece has been reassembled after 450 years
A new sculpture park traces the memory of 10 million Black people enslaved in the US
A new neighbourhood in Lewes sounds almost too good to be true
The FBI has returned centuries-old looted artefacts to Japan
Sharon Stone has swapped acting for art
A new London gallery is bringing African artists and Yoruba culture to a global audience
Damien Hirst’s backdated art did not impress the Guardian’s critic
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger has brought a cosmic odyssey through feminism, botany and frisson to Oxford
Masterpiece of the week
Landscape: A River Among Mountains by Imitator of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, about 1600
You seem to have chanced on a lost country of the imagination if you stare into this addictive painting. You can lose yourself for ages in its timeless vista of abstract, unreal rock formations and glassy, still water. It is apparently by a north European artist working in Italy, under the influence of Bruegel, but you can also see strong echoes of Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian polymath wrote that an artist can get ideas for paintings by staring at a stained wall until they start seeing landscapes, faces and other images from the unconscious. This painting genuinely looks as if it could have surfaced as such a surreal vision, it is so dreamlike and uncanny: a place for the mind’s eye to inhabit.
• National Gallery, London
Don’t forget
To follow us on X (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.
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@theguardian.com
