Exhibition of the week
Paul Pfeiffer
An installation that merges Catholic religious imagery with pop to portray Justin Bieber as a suffering Christ.
• Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 7 August.
Also showing
Peter Blake: Time Traveller
Early collages by the artist who created the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – and that’s the timeless mood here.
• Waddington Custot Gallery, London, until 13 August.
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize exhibition
Cao Fei, Poulomi Basu, Alejandro Cartagena and Zineb Sedira compete for a photography prize that is more about conceptual art than camera technique.
• Photographers Gallery, London, until 26 September.
Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts
Two male artists who met at art school in Victorian Britain and spent the rest of their lives together.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 30 September.
Artangel: Afterness
Poet Ilya Kaminsky joins artists including Alice Channer and Emma McNally to explore the eerie landscape of Orford Ness and its military past.
• Orford Ness nature reserve, Suffolk, from 1 July.
Image of the week
Cara Delevingne has a “vagina tunnel” built into her Los Angeles home, created with the help of architect Nicolò Bini, where she goes to think and be creative. Might it spark a fresh wave of vulval art?
What we learned
Venice may be put on Unesco’s endangered list if cruise ships are not banned …
… while Italy recovered hundreds of illegally gathered archaeological finds
… and Liverpool is fighting to retain its waterfront’s heritage status
The UK and Australia will collaborate on a multi-arts cultural exchange
The end of Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival was celebrated with a mass skinny dip
Artists called for ‘white-run’ UK Chinese gallery to be defunded in a racism row …
… while artist Samson Kambalu is tearing a strip off Britain’s colonial legacy in Oxford
The Martin Kantor portrait prize finalists were announced
Mount Recyclemore artist Joe Rush is the world’s most outrageous outsider
Julian Opie brought empty irony to Ealing …
… while Eduardo Chillida’s sculptures clutch at air like a goalie ,,,
… and Phyllida Barlow is to unveil a huge sculpture in Highgate cemetery
Josh Cole photographed breakdancers in Papua New Guinea …
… while photographer Sebastião Salgado’s made a stunning voyage into Amazônia
London’s Royal Academy apologised to textile artist Jess de Wahls in a transphobia row …
… after she considered suing when her work was withdrawn from the RA gift shop
Banksy has legally trademarked two of his most iconic images
… while the Wellcome photography prize is focusing on some urgent global health issues
Tim Berners-Lee defended auctioning the source code for the web as an NFT artwork …
… and we met the people attempting to monetise their memes as non-fungible tokens
A new book and exhibition is putting objects shaped by maternity in focus …
… while another book celebrates Black history, culture and art in London
A Manchester viaduct could become like New York’s High Line as a ‘park in the sky’ …
… while a new exhibition highlighted the forgotten women of Manchester’s Factory Records
The Jarman award shortlist transcended the pandemic
Veronica Ryan explained how her parents’ trauma inspired the first Windrush monument
Rahim Fortune captured grief and gunshot wounds in the American south
Folkestone’s seafront has been transformed by art …
… and Madge Gill has brought flashes of colour to a landscape of grey
Masterpiece of the week
Christ Before the High Priest, c.1617, by Gerrit van Honthorst
The intensely focused light that picks out Christ from nocturnal shadow in this scene of the arrested religious leader’s interrogation is an unmissable clue that Honthorst painted it under the influence of Caravaggio. This Dutch artist made the journey from Utrecht to Rome where he saw Caravaggio’s art. His patron there, Vincenzo Giustiniani, was a banker and aristocrat who had one of the best collections of Caravaggio and had known the savage painter well. But Caravaggio’s sharp lights and darks undergo a change in Honthorst’s sombre scene. The blacks become brown, the candlelight is buttery. This warmer chiaroscuro and golden glow seem positively Rembrandtesque. Honthorst took his version of the Caravaggio style home and it caught on with Dutch painters, lighting Rembrandt’s way.
• National Gallery, London.
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