Play-Doh photos, Emin’s studio show and Munch-drunk love – the week in art
Exhibition of the week
We Do Not Sleep
Tracey Emin and friends in a group show at her Margate studio complex and school. Lindsey Mendick and Vanessa Raw are among the artists exhibiting alongside Emin.
• TKE Studios, Margate, until 19 May
Also showing
Picturing Childhood
Captivating portrayals of the young by artists from Raphael to Lucian Freud in a grand sweep through 500 years of childhood history.
• Chatsworth, Derbyshire, 16 March to 6 October
Guercino
Paintings by this baroque zealot of the Counter-Reformation including his King David.
• Waddesdon, Aylesbury, 20 March to 27 October
Love Will Come Back
A lyrical triangle of artistic passions as Ann Craven shows her paintings with works by Mohammed Z Rahman and Robert Mapplethorpe.
• Phillida Reid, London, until 13 April
The Taotie
Resident artist Gayle Chong Kwan responds to Compton Verney’s collection of Chinese bronzes from the Shang to Ming periods.
• Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 21 March until 2026
Image of the week
Eleanor Macnair made this Play-Doh recreation of Gillian Wearing’s I’m Desperate while her son slept. “Sometimes I remake a photograph in Play-Doh just because I love the original so much that I want to have it on my wall – yet I can’t afford the original print” she says. “This was the first image I made for my exhibition Signs – and is still my favourite by a mile.” See Macnair’s other Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh here.
What we learned
Vincent van Gogh has taken a trip from Paris to Cardiff
The next sculptures to sit atop London’s Fourth Plinth have been chosen
A Lagos gallery is helping children sell their art around the world
Artist mothers struggle to be taken seriously – a new show is redressing the balance
A new Frida Kahlo documentary brings the fearless artist’s voice back to life
Keith Piper has defended Tate Britain’s display of ‘racist’ Whistler mural
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt by Max Pechstein, 1910
You can see the darkness of Edvard Munch in this 15-year-old’s eyes. The influence of the Norwegian artist haunts this portrait, not only in Charlotte Cuhrt’s black gaze but the eeriness of the room she’s in, with its green wallpaper and yellow wardrobe. Hanging in the National Gallery’s post-impressionist rooms, alongside many French paintings, the anxiety, trembling and even deliberate ugliness of this German expressionist work hit you in the eye. Max Pechstein was a member of the Dresden art movement Die Brücke (The Bridge) and this portrait is typical of their agitated, perturbing modernity. The colours scream, and although Cuhrt herself appears confident and comfortable in her skin, the artist puts his own Munch-drunk angst into her eyes.
• National Gallery
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