Exhibition of the week
Emeka Ogboh: Song of the Union
A sound installation of Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne, sung in the languages of the EU, to protest and mourn Britain’s departure.
• Burns Monument, Edinburgh, until 29 August
Also showing
Joan Eardley and Catterline
This powerful painter’s tough, soulful landscapes from in and around the Aberdeenshire fishing village of Catterline are masterpieces of modern Scottish art.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until 9 January
Joy
David Shrigley, Harold Offeh and Amalia Pica contribute installations to this timely exhibition on happiness.
• Wellcome Collection, London, until 27 February
The Galloway Hoard
One of the most amazing Viking discoveries in the British Isles, a collection of treasures found by a dectectorist in 2014 that iluminates the true nature of these raiders and traders.
• National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, until 12 September
Ben Nicholson: From the Studio
Abstract paintings from the 1920s and 30s by an artist some see, a bit optimistically, as Britain’s answer to Mondrian.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 24 October
Image of the week
It’s now a nature reserve, but for much of the 20th century, Orford Ness in Suffolk was forbidden territory, sealed off for military purposes from the village whose picture-book church and castle can be seen from its desolate shingle beach. Three of the latest crop of artists to be drawn there – in a collaboration between Artangel and the National Trust, which bought the site from the Ministry of Defence in 1993 – have filled its spooky derelict buildings with installations. Here, Tatiana Trouvé has imagined the leavings of some survivalist community mouldering away in the puddles of a roofless laboratory. Read more here.
What we learned
The US will return 17,000 ancient artefacts smuggled out after the 2003 invasion to Iraq
Bryan Adams photographed Cher, Grimes and Iggy Pop for the 2022 Pirelli calendar
The Observer art critic called Orford Ness the eeriest headland in England
England’s cathedrals are hosting art from Sheffield steel to a model moon
Brian Clarke’s spirit-lifting watercolours offered a visual diary of the pandemic
Neanderthals painted on to stalagmites in Spain, 60,000 years ago …
… while relics of prehistoric Doggerland are on show in the Netherlands
East Londoners have concerns about a proposed glowing architectural globe
Edinburgh art festival resurrected Frederick Douglass and engaged with 21st-century trauma
Historic England is relisting nine sites to mark 70th anniversary of Festival of Britain
Calls to close Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel in New York have grown after a fourth death fall
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness explores the fate of Hitler’s “degenerate” artists
An exhibition in Exeter responded to global efforts to future-proof nature with the humble seed
The US’s national parks have inspired glorious poster art
… while Hannah Bailey captured the moves of female and non-binary skateboarders
Portraits of Holocaust survivors are on show at the Imperial War Museum
Alessio Mamo has photographed the decaying brutalist villas built by the mafia in southern Italy
More than 100 Hemingway lookalikes descended on Key West
Young photographers are reimagining “Englishness” at various heritage sites
Photographer Rankin has supplied new covers for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books
Rhik Samadder had a go at mindful painting
Minimalist photography finds a wealth of feeling in the smallest of things
Self-taught photographer John Alinder shot compelling portraits of his Swedish neighbours
A bride with a flag was a potent symbol in Beirut
An underwater sculpture park in Cyprus explored our relationship with nature
We remembered painter and etcher Bernard Kay …
… as well as revolutionary 60s sculptor Phillip King
Masterpiece of the week
Richard Parkes Bonington, A Sea Piece, probably 1824
This breezy painting of sailing boats in the Channel is alive with sea spray, grey waves, misty clouds and glimpses of blue. It is a spontaneous response to the restless play of sea and weather that looks as if it was painted on a boat – it puts you there so directly you can smell salt and hear seagulls. Richard Parkes Bonington lived and worked between two European art traditions. Born British, he moved to France at 14 and shook up French art with his robust, spontaneous eye so like those of his contemporaries Constable and Turner. By popularising that British freshness in France he helped pave the way for impressionism. But four years after making this painting he was dead, aged 25, from tuberculosis. This little seascape is part of the small deathless legacy of a doomed Romantic.
• Wallace Collection, London
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