Exhibition of the week
Liverpool Biennial
Turner winner Elizabeth Price and Turkey’s Cevdet Erek are the stars of this mystery tour of Liverpool that’s occasionally magical.
• Various venues, Liverpool, until 14 September
Also showing
Yoshitomo Nara
You like bug eyed paintings of cute yet uncanny characters? Look no further.
• Hayward Gallery, London, 10 June until 31 August
Sea Inside
An investigation of our relationship with the undersea world, featuring Hiroshi Sugimoto, Marcus Coates and more.
• Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, until 26 October
Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive
This pioneer of art made with light and motion shows her works from the 1950s to the present day.
• Tate St Ives, until 2 November
Rudolf Stingel
Abstract paintings inspired by vineyards, leading you into worlds of matted, knotted green.
• Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, from 12 June until 20 September
Image of the week
Derek Jarman sometimes cast spells over his doomy black paintings, into which he threw his rage at society’s treatment of queer people. Alex Needham writes about the film-maker and artist’s galvanising spirit ahead of a new exhibition of his work, and the publication of an unfinished screenplay.
What we learned
Edward Burra is British art’s great unknown
The V&A’s five-star show Design and Disability is a boundary-breaking triumph
Philip Hoare has detailed how William Blake became a queer icon
Photographer Jungjin Lee’s landscapes roar with the supremacy of nature
Performance artist Allen-Golder Carpenter is spending three days in a jail cell
Banksy’s been up to his newest tricks in Marseille
Our critic wasn’t sure what Leonardo Drew’s towers of broken urban debris amount to
Trump wants to fire the first female director of the US National Portrait Gallery
Heinz Berggruen collected treasures of modernism branded degenerate by the Nazis
As Altadena begins rebuilding after the LA fires, a new show centres its creative history
The glorious legacy of Gwen John is finally outshining her flamboyant brother’s
The Serpentine’s first movable pavilion resembles ‘an expanding crepe-paper ornament’
Derek Jarman’s brooding ‘black’ paintings throw fresh light on his genius
Hamad Butt died too soon to win recognition as the most dangerous YBA of all
Masterpiece of the week
The Lincolnshire Ox by George Stubbs, 1790
A prodigiously huge ox is shown off by its owner in this typically surreal and haunting masterpiece by the Liverpool-born animal painter who captured the curiosity of his age. It was a real animal, and John Gibbons, the man in the painting, made money showing it off: at the time when Stubbs portrayed it, the Lincolnshire Ox was on display to paying crowds in London. Its growth was attributed to being fed purely on grass, proof of scientific improvements in 18th-century British agriculture. Stubbs, who anatomised horses, shares this scientific interest. He exhibits the ox as a dreamlike wonder, using its owner as scale and admiring its profound placidity as it munches grass. The other animal, much more alert and assertive, is thought to be Gibbons’s fighting cock.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
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