Exhibition of the week
Colour and Vision
This exploration of visual experience across the natural world has everything from fossils of the first creatures to develop eyes in the ancient seas to an installation about the Newtonian spectrum. Science and art come together in what should be a mind-expanding show.
• Natural History Museum, London, 15 July-6 November.
Now showing
Liverpool Biennial
Merseyside comes alive with art, from an installation about the Large Hadron Collider to artist’s films at the old ABC Cinema and buses decorated by local schoolchildren. Strawberry art dreams forever.
• Bluecoat, Liverpool and other venues citywide, 9 July-16 October.
Facing the World
This survey of self-portraiture ranges from Rembrandt to Tracey Emin, sublime introspection to the art of celebrity.
• Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 16 July-16 October.
The Neo Naturists
Jennifer Binnie, Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson created this punk art collective in 1981 to shock the bourgeoisie with in-your-face body art.
• Studio Voltaire, London, 8 July-21 August.
David Bomberg
The art of this pioneering Jewish modernist still has a raw power.
• Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 9 July-11 September.
Masterpiece of the week
This is the masterpiece of this Florentine mannerist – just see how mannered it is! – and easily the most decadent painting in the National Gallery. It’s very much Take A Walk on Ye Wild Side as Venus is dextrously made love to by her adolescent son Cupid.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
From the mid 1970s, leftwing political figures were imprisoned, tortured and killed throughout South America as part of a dictators’ pact called Operation Condor. Photographer João Pina has tracked its legacy.
What we’ve learned
The Victoria and Albert Museum has been named Art Fund Museum of the Year
Georgia O’Keeffe’s retrospective at Tate Modern is “one long, strange trip”
The fashion and photography worlds have lost a great in Bill Cunningham
William Dobson’s haunting self-portrait sold for £1.1m – will it stay in Britain?
Ekow Eshun says black dandy style is a form of radical personal politics …
... and here are some bold, beautiful photographs to show you how
Antony Gormley says humans are building a “huge termites’ nest” of greed
The Liverpool kids who marched against Thatcher are back at the Biennial
Sydney Biennale has appointed its first Asian artisic director, Mami Kataoka
Vanessa Bell is breaking free of the Bloomsburies at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Antony Penrose has curated a new show about the man he once bit: Picasso
A giant bust of Chairman Mao has popped up in the Sussex woodlands
Boris Nzebo’s fabulous Cameroonian pop art is on show in Manchester
Edward Thompson uses infrared film to go beyond the limits of the human eye
Alison Goldfrapp is turning the camera on her fellow musician Laura Mvula
Philip Castle reveals the story behind his poster for A Clockwork Orange
These glorious photocromes show life in 1890 in glorious colour
Photographer Bence Bakonyi has recorded Haiti in the wake of its earthquake
Richard Ansett says this photo of a baby is the key to his subconscious
Could it be magick? The occult is back from the dead in the art world
And finally, the National Trust are leading walking tours of … Croydon
Watch this video
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to build a wall on the border of the US and Mexico. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar is one of the Cultrunners, a group of 10 Middle Eastern artists exploring the ideological boundaries between the US and the Middle East, as show in this short film.
You can also watch the film in Spanish and in Arabic.
Get involved
A-Z of readers’ art – your art on the theme of illumination
J is for juxtaposition: share your new artwork now
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