Exhibition of the week
Radio Ballads
Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Ilona Sagar and Rory Pilgrim collaborate with people from Barking and Dagenham to create socially engaged artworks.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, from 31 March.
Also showing
Phantasmata
Artists including Amanda Baldwin, Greer Lankton, Hamish Pearch and Vanessa da Silva explore the nature of hallucinations and other imaginary phenomena.
• Public Gallery, London, 31 March to 30 April.
Gregor Wright
Mutating digital images that create a punk landscape of modern life.
• The Modern Institute Aird’s Lane, Glasgow, 25 March to 7 April.
Rana Begum
Ethereal works that explore the magic of light and colour.
• Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, 25 March to 11 September.
The Witch’s House
Ilona Szalay offers a sensual exploration of autonomous female space in her frank introspective paintings.
• Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, until 17 April.
Image of the week
A procession of figures, on horseback and foot, walk the Tate Britain in an explosion of colour. Their costumes and flags bear images of decaying Guyanese architecture, evidence of rising sea levels, cargo and sail boats, tropical prints and slave ships. Hew Locke’s installation takes as its starting point the architecture and history of the gallery itself, and its founding benefactor, the sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. “Sugar has a dark and difficult history,” says Locke. “The piece is tailored for this space. if I was showing in another venue, I may be showing something slightly different.” Read our five-star review of the exhibition.
What we learned
Grimsby central library is a place of surreal and uncommon beauty
Folkestone is home to the world’s first multistorey skate park, with a price tag of £17m
As a schoolboy, artist Mohammed Sami painted propaganda murals for Saddam Hussein’s regime
The LSE’s new £145m architectural project The Marshall Building is “stonking”
The jury is still out on the “festival of Brexit”.
Masterpiece of the week
Bronzino’s The Madonna and Child With Saints, c.1540
This brilliant, hard-edged painter pays homage to his fellow Florentine artists Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci in this mannerist painting. To us, mannerism sounds like something bad – affected, pretentious … mannered. In later Renaissance Italy, however, maniera was meant as praise: an artist with a manner was one who had a distinctive, unique take on things. But here, Bronzino quotes the manners of his heroes. The boy Jesus and John the Baptist are consciously Michelangelesque, almost like sculptures in paint. Yet the idea of putting them together like this comes from Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. The sad face of Saint Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, looks like Leonardo’s St Anne in the National Gallery’s Burlington Cartoon. Bronzino mixes up the manners in a painting that may be more about the religion of art than the worship of God.
• National Gallery, London
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