Exhibition of the week
Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence
An atmospheric look at how high modernist architecture was reinvented as the style of postcolonial Ghana and India in the 1950s and 60s.
• V&A, London, until 22 September
Also showing
An Idea of a Life
Group show investigating the all-female community at medieval Barking Abbey.
• Women’s Museum, London, from 9 March until 21 December
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Sculptures inspired by the radical books of Toni Morrison and Jean Genet.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 24 March
Vija Celmins
Sublime and ethereal works on paper by this Latvian-American visionary, from the Artist Rooms collection.
• Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, until 4 May
Gwen John
John’s stilled portraits hold you in her female subjects’ introspective solitude.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 14 April
Image of the week
Sethembile Msezane’s live performance works are among the exhibits at South London Gallery’s new show Acts of Resistance. A photograph by Msezane, called Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell, is a celebration of the day a statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town. This is staged at the show, providing a dramatic entry point to the exhibition. In the work, a masked female figure dressed in a black leotard, with her extended arms adorned with elaborate wings, stands in a majestic pose on a plinth, rising from a crowd who lift their phones in the air to capture the moment, while in the background, a statue is lifted by a crane. Read the full article.
What we learned
Galileo may have taught Artemisia the science of gore
Basquiat is known as a New Yorker, but many of his works were made in LA
Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau paintings have gone on show near the former death camp
Moroccan art star Soufiane Ababri eschews easels and paint to work from bed
Martin Boyce’s new show sweeps you to heaven on a tide of tat and elegant craft
Spanish police claim to have smashed a ring of forgers making phoney Banksys
Aged 80, Pauline Caulfield is returning to the art career she dropped in 1968
Masterpiece of the week
The Magdalene, Workshop of the Master of 1518, before 1524-6
Mary Magdalene was one of the most frequently painted of the revered female figures who were part of the mythic world of medieval Christianity. She appears in scenes of Christ being mourned, where her worldly character complements the more sacred and maternal grief of Christ’s mother, Mary. Here, however, she is portrayed as a goddess, standing front of a holy mountain in southern France, where she was said to have lived in seclusion. She holds the pot of oil with which she bathed Christ’s feet. But a surprising artistic quotation stresses that she is imagined here as a divine being in her own right: she’s got the same hairstyle as one of Botticelli’s depictions of the pagan deity Venus.
• National Gallery, London
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