Myths, dangerous ideas and the best of the Bluecoat

Myths, dangerous ideas and the best of the Bluecoat – the week in art

Cally Spooner’s Warm Up, part of the Speak exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Photograph: Roberto Marossi/courtesy the artist and Zero, Milan

Exhibition of the week

Speak
Artists of the 21st century respond to the iconoclastic legacy of the late British conceptual visionary John Latham. Douglas Gordon, Laure Prouvost, Tania Bruguera and Cally Spooner prove that his dangerous ideas live on.
• Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2 March-21 May

Also showing

John Latham
While contemporary artists respond to this radical artist in Speak (see above), you can see a selection of his own works here.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, 2 March-21 May

Jim Dine
One of the gutsiest American artists of the 1960s shows works on paper.
• Alan Cristea Gallery, London, until 11 March

Public View
A survey of artists who have shown at this arts centre over the years, including Jeremy Deller, Yoko Ono and Mark Leckey.
• Bluecoat, Liverpool, until 23 April

GF Watts: Monumental Murals
Mythological wall paintings by this energetic and occasionally memorable Victorian artist.
• Watts Gallery, Guildford, 28 February-5 November

Masterpiece of the week

David Teniers the Younger, An Old Peasant Caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable, about 1650.

David Teniers the Younger, An Old Peasant Caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable (c 1650)

Gross! An elderly man pays creepy attentions to a young woman in this glimpse of rural life more than 350 years ago. Teniers used to be the most famous by far of all painters of “genre scenes”, as paintings of the everyday were called. Now he is forgotten compared with Vermeer, whose tender realism moves us more. Teniers reflects a contemptuously hierarchical age when the lower orders were to be laughed at, but his paintings do show what peasant villages looked like before the industrial revolution.
• National Gallery, London

Image of the week

Francis Kéré’s design for the Serpentine pavilion. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Francis Kéré was named as the first ever African architect of the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavilion this week, for his tree-like design that references African textile patterns. “The tree was always the most important place in my village,” he told Oliver Wainwright. “It is where people come together under the shade of its branches to discuss, a place to decide matters, about love, about life. I want the pavilion to serve the same function: a simple open shelter to create a sense of freedom and community.”