Yahoo Movies Fluid bodies, decadent fables and a rescue for Gormley’s iron army – the week in art
Exhibition of the week
Christina Quarles: In Likeness
Paintings of furiously entwined, fragmentary, fluid bodies by this hot American artist.
• South London Gallery until 29 August
Also showing
Helen Frankenthaler: Imagining Landscapes
Sensual yet authoritative masterpieces by one of the greatest abstract expressionist painters, beautifully presented in a show that’s like a trip to New York. Read my five-star review here.
• Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until 27 August
Gustave Moreau: The Fables
Illustrations of animal fables by this marvellously decadent French genius, who is overdue a big exhibition in Britain.
• Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury until 17 October
Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life
A survey of the pioneering Yorkshire-born sculptor who sought a secret music in nature.
• The Hepworth, Wakefield until 27 February
Yorkshire Sculpture International
As the birthplace of Hepworth and Henry Moore, Yorkshire can claim a special relationship with sculpture, and makes that claim here with shows across several spaces by local and global talents, including Akeelah Bertram and Ashley Holmes.
• At various venues in Yorkshire until September
Image of the week
Antony Gormley says he hopes his “iron men” on a Merseyside beach will still exist in at least 1,000 years as “industrial fossils”, after helping to excavate 10 that had been subsumed by Irish Sea mud. One hundred cast-iron statues modelled on Gormley were installed in 2005 at Crosby beach, spread across 3km of the foreshore and stretching almost 1km out to sea. The installation, Another Place, was only supposed to last 16 months in Crosby, and the men were almost sent packing early amid safety complaints, including cases of the coastguard being called out to “rescue” them. Sixteen years on, the artwork has become a tourist attraction and a beloved local institution. Read the full story here.
What we learned
Yinka Shonibare argued that ‘cultural appropriation is two-way’
Work begins soon to swathe the Arc de Triomphe in blue fabric a year after artist Christo’s death
Two artefacts taken by British colonial forces in Ethiopia have been pulled from auction
Sumayya Vally’s Serpentine Pavilion is a chimera of light
The V&A’s new 20th and 21st Century gallery has been refitted for the social justice era
Art created by people shielding during the pandemic will go on display …
… and Cardiff’s Artes Mundi 9 prize will be split six ways because of Covid
Madrid’s Reina Sofía is celebrating Latin America’s artistic boom
A new film tries to untangle the truth behind Leonardo da Vinci and the disputed Salvator Mundi
Sotheby’s is to auction a non-fungible token representing Tim Berners-Lee’s source code for the web …
Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint is being celebrated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Kathryn Martin captured the beauty of British wildflowers …
… while Guardian readers pushed the architectural boundaries of garden sheds
Writer Emily Rapp Black told how Frida Kahlo helped her come to terms with amputation
Touching images caught the boom in gay US couples having babies
Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid gave us his world on a plate
Dan Wood’s photographs captured the remarkable story of the unremarkable Ogmore river
Street photographer Paul McDonough caught the heat of 1970s US sidewalks …
… while we celebrated album sleeve artwork, from Pink Floyd to Fleet Foxes
German architect Gottfried Böhm, famous for the brutalist Mariendom church, died aged 101
Masterpiece of the week
Pieter Pourbus: An Allegory of True Love, c1547
A rehang at the exquisite Wallace Collection means this eccentric Renaissance work is now displayed near Fragonard’s saucy frolic The Swing. The comparison is instructive. Both are provocative and funny. This painting’s moralising title and the symbolism attributed to it – contrasting, we are told, wise chaste love with carnal sin – have almost nothing to do with the experience of looking at it. Either Renaissance courtiers were incredibly hypocritical, enjoying this scene of an unbuttoned picnic while pretending to tut, or they were in on a game in which the real meat was, and is, a Rabelaisian delight in the sensual.
• Wallace Collection, London
Don’t forget
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