Exhibition of the Week
Superflex
The latest superhero in the Marvel universe becomes fantastically bendy after an industrial accident and is soon signed up by the Avengers … No wait, it’s a socially engaged intervention by Denmark’s coolest art collective, your friendly neighbourhood Superflex.
• Tate Modern, London, 3 October to 2 April.
Also
Frieze London and Frieze Masters
The colossally cool art fair and its more scholarly sibling return to define the art of now, and sell it.
• Regents Park, London, 5 October to 8 October.
Waqas Khan
This brilliant abstract artist of sublime visionary imagination creates worlds and galaxies that verge on absolute nothingness with the magic of his pen.
• Manchester Art Gallery, 30 September to 28 February.
Raqs Media Collective
Hilarious meditations on history and power that use 3D printing as well as video, sculpture and word games to explore the shattered wreckage of the modern world.
• The Whitworth, Manchester, 30 September to 25 February.
Everything at Once
The Lisson Gallery celebrates 50 glorious years with a blockbuster, featuring artists from Richard Long to Ryan Gander and installed off site at the Store Studios.
• The Store Studios, London, 5 October to 10 December.
Masterpiece of the Week
The Ansidei Madonna (1505) by Raphael
The fantastical trompe l’oeil architecture and wooden furniture steal the show in this painting. The Virgin’s throne is a magical illusory structure, utterly convincing in its fictive depth because of the brilliance of Raphael’s perspective technique. The fact that it looks so unreal, as well as so real, adds to the fun. Raphael is one of the greatest painters of architecture. The seductive space he creates here is reminiscent of his 1504 painting The Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera, Milan, and looks forward to his masterpiece The School of Athens in the Vatican with its great vaulted panorama.
• National Gallery, London
What we learned this week
Waqas Khan draws entire galaxies, with a fine-tipped pen
Joseph Highmore’s controversial Angel of Mercy is exhibited for the first time in the UK
The Guatemalan avant garde arrives in LA disguised as an egg…
… and the Guggenheim pulls three Chinese artworks featuring animals after threats of violence
Thomas Ruff’s agenda-setting oeuvre lands him a major retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery
We mourn the passing of award-winning Lebanese-Armenian artist Marc Balakjian
Jasper Johns’s early works are immensely moving, 40 years on
The Turner prize makes a powerful political statement with the most diverse shortlist to date …
… and oldest nominee to date, Lubaina Himid, persists in her quest to make black lives visible
Spanish masterpieces by Goya and El Greco travel from Barnard Castle, Co Durham, to London’s Wallace Collection
Jean Nouvel defends the treatment of workers on his Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi
Pablo Bronstein celebrates pseudo-Georgian architectural tat
Art dealer Jemma Hickman shows off her Peckham Rye domestic gallery
A lost Rubens turns up in a Glaswegian country pile
Basquiat charms with immediacy and verve at the Barbican
Katharina Grosse’s new exhibition torpedoes the limits of painting
Denmark’s new Lego House is a building of brick-tastic brilliance
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