Exhibition of the week
Dreamachine
A hallucinatory visual experience that promises to subvert your senses. Judging by the health form you have to fill in, it’s pretty intense.
• At various locations including London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from 10 May.
Also showing
Photo London
Nick Knight, Frank Horvat, Polly Braden and many more feature in this cornucopia of photography.
• Somerset House, London, from 12 to 15 May.
Victoria Cantons
Sharply painted, frank self-portraits that tell the transgender artist’s story.
• Flowers Gallery, London, from 11 May to 2 July.
Malevich and Raku Kichizaemon XV
Drawings by the great abstract artist are compared with Japan’s raku tradition of high-art ceramics.
• Annely Juda Fine Art, London, from 12 May to 9 July.
Seafaring
How artists have imagined life on salt water from JMW Turner to Cecily Brown and Maggi Hambling.
• Hastings Contemporary until 25 September.
Image of the week
Initially dismissed as the work of pranksters when they first emerged and injected some wonder into the 80s, awe-inspiring crop circles are now considered stunning examples of non-profit art for all. Read the full story here.
What we learned
Paintings by Paul Cézanne are on their way to the UK for the first time
An Egon Schiele painting, missing for more than 90 years, has been rediscovered
Eccentric postmodern architect John Outram is suddenly hot
Turner nominee Ingrid Pollard is uncovering Britain’s secret shame
Artists are weaponising landscape art
Everyone’s getting into ceramics – including Brad Pitt and Serena Williams
African photography is getting a showcase at a pioneering gallery
The radical v conservative thesis got caught in the brambles at Tate Liverpool
A London exhibition focuses on three houses commissioned and designed wholly or in part by women
Mr Wanambi, one of Australia’s most respected First Nations artists, has died
Masterpiece of the week
John Constable’s The Hay Wain, 1821
Two rural workers labour to get their horse-drawn wagon across a millpond to collect hay from the fields in the distance. A woman on her hands and knees does laundry in the water. In the distance, a row of agricultural workers are cutting grass to fill the hay wain. John Constable grew up in Suffolk, and never tired of painting his childhood landscape. Yet this is not a sentimental fantasy. You can see how realistic the scenery is by visiting the still-preserved Flatford millpond and Willy Lott’s house. And the social world of the early 19th-century countryside is accurate, too. Far from concealing its harshness, Constable fills his pastoral with people doing exhausting tasks. Only the onlooking dog and the boy with a fishing rod are free.
• National Gallery, London.
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