Exhibition of the week
Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis
Artists including Cristina Iglesias, Hito Steyerl, Cornelia Parker and Grounded Ecotherapy face up to the planet’s peril.
• Hayward Gallery, London, from 21 June to 3 September.
Also showing
The New National Portrait Gallery
An ambitious reinvention of one of London’s familiar museums promises new ways of seeing portraiture and Britain.
• Reopens on 22 June.
Life Is More Important Than Art
Mitra Tabrizian, John Smith, Susan Hiller and more in a provocative, absorbing exploration of the real.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 17 September.
Moki Cherry
Radical psychedelic tapestries with a countercultural jazz vibe.
• ICA, London, until 3 September.
Katie Cuddon
Clay may seem a predictable medium for sculpture but the fact that Cuddon works it with her teeth is less conventional.
• De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, until 3 September.
Image of the week
The Liverpool Biennial has opened in venues across the city, with many works exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Among the works shown, our critic praised Binta Diaw’s at Tobacco Warehouse, which “uses soil to recreate the plan of the Brooks slave ship almost to scale. The plan was used by abolitionists to depict the horrors of slavery, and when enlarged to this size it is devastating.” Read the full review.
What we learned
The Moomins are taking their adventures to Paris
India Mahdavi’s colourful Bonnard exhibition is dazzling
Star architect Lina Ghotmeh’s Serpentine pavilion is less than stellar
Photographer Evelyn Hofer was an underrated perfectionist
Ayo Akingbade has captured the strange life of Lagos’s Guinness brewery
Hamad Butt’s art diced with death
Gego’s offbeat sculptures may be finding their place among the greats
Gustav Klimt’s final portrait is expected to sell for £65m
Banksy’s first solo show for 14 years will include the artist’s toilet
Masterpiece of the week
The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533
A mysterious atmosphere of melancholy hangs over this uncanny double portrait. The two men in it, French visitors to Henry VIII’s London named Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, found time to pose for the king’s painter Holbein. But the artist lets his own obsession with mortality rip through the scene in the form of a vast optically distorted human skull. Its empty eye sockets mock the men and the objects of culture and curiosity that surround them: lute and globe, mathematical instruments and Turkish rug, all will be ruined by time. It’s clear from his other works that Holbein is infecting this uneasy picture with his own anxieties rather than just obeying the clients’ instructions. His dead Christ and series of prints The Dance of Death reveal a personal horror at life’s brevity. He worked in London simply as a mesmerising portraitist yet here his larger, darker vision melts reality with its despair.
• National Gallery, London.
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