19 hours ago
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Exhibition of the week
Andy Goldsworthy
Captivating retrospective of this countryside conceptualist who makes art with substances including sheep fleece, fern leaves, barbed wire and hare’s blood. Read the review.
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November
Also showing
Virtual Beauty
The human body and self in the AI age, explored by artists from Orlan to Qualeasha Wood.
Somerset House, London, until 28 September
Pablo Bronstein
The artist’s fascination with architectural history is unleashed on the Temple of Solomon.
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 2 November
Monster Chetwynd: Thunder, Crackle and Magic
Radical utopian art for the kids as Chetwynd creates this summer’s Tate Play installation.
Tate Modern, London, until 25 August
Darwin in Paradise Camp
A queer take on evolutionary theory and Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, by Japanese-Samoan artist Yuki Kihara.
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until 3 August
Image of the week
A disagreement over this painting, Trans Forming Liberty, in which American painter Amy Sherald poses a trans woman as the Statue of Liberty, has led to the artist cancelling her hit exhibition American Sublime from showing at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.
In March, Trump signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian, claiming it had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and the administration would restore it “to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness”.
The artist said she was told that the painting might be removed from the show to avoid provoking President Trump. The gallery later proposed an accompanying video of people discussing both the painting and transgender issues at large. She said this decision would have “opened up for debate the value of trans visibility” which she rejected. Read the full story.
What we learned
A Norfolk woman handed over a 16th-century painting that was on Interpol’s most-wanted list
The Guardian’s head of photography had her favourites at Arles photo festival
The salty nooks of Folkestone were the setting for a bleakly brilliant coastal festival
A pioneering female Renaissance artist got her due
A visionary Australian artist got her first retrospective aged 90
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In the US, Black Girls in Art Spaces is bridging the cultural gaps
You don’t need a car in Los Angeles
An exhibition is interrogating white-dominated AI
Masterpiece of the week
Stormy Landscape With Ruins on a Plain by Georges Michel, c 1830s
Nature is an unforgiving, awe-inspiring power in this French Romantic painting. Just like his British contemporaries Constable and Turner, Georges Michel worked in the open air. He mostly painted landscapes near Paris. He had a lot of imitators, hence the uncertainty about his attribution. You can see why this approach was popular. Even though the countryside spread out under those massive clouds is ordinary, even a bit nondescript, the artist finds sublimity in two archetypally Romantic themes: ruins and storms. The raised hill in the foreground is bleak and barren, and it’s crowned with the shattered, eroded shell of a great house that time has reduced to little more than a fireplace and stumps of walls. Above it, low, dark storm clouds whip up to unleash brutal rain. It’s an exciting blast of bleakness to hang in a cosy room.
National Gallery, London
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