Exhibition of the week
Oceania
This is a stupendous odyssey through the superb art and fascinating culture of the Pacific, with masterpieces that inspired Picasso, bear witness to history and are simply mesmerising to behold. A blockbuster and then some.
• Royal Academy, London, 29 September-10 December.
Also showing
Tania Bruguera
Politics in the Turbine Hall from an artist whose radical interventions have previously involved everything from police horses to lie detectors. Read our interview with the artist.
• Tate Modern, London, 2 October-24 February.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters
Money, money, money, must be funny, in a rich man’s art world ... There are lots of things to do and look at, if you can swallow the mercantile nonsense at London’s two art fairs embracing art from antiquity to now.
• Regent’s Park, London, 4-7 October.
Mantegna and Bellini
Some of the most beautiful paintings of the Renaissance are in this exhibition, though its claustrophobic layout and introverted arguments make it harder to feel their power.
• National Gallery, London, 1 October to 27 January.
Mat Collishaw
This intelligent and provocative artist imagines what Queen Elizabeth I really looked like without her makeup and flattering portraits. Could be a shocker.
• Queen’s House, Greenwich, from 3 October.
Masterpiece of the week
Georges Seurat – The Channel at Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe, 1890
With its empty foreground, silent buildings and flat sky, this is a truly disconcerting image of nothingness. The fields of coloured pointillist specks for which Seurat is famous create here not so much a scientific study of perception as a disturbing sense of reality dissolving into dots. In other paintings he uses his method to construct very solid objects – a human body, a hairbrush, a tree – and the resulting play between solidity and immateriality can be joyous or comic. Here, however, he depicts a nondescript, unmemorable place whose dull architecture and insignificant view, reduced to a network of points of light, seems to be vanishing before our eyes. This is a modernist masterpiece.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
The Whitechapel Pool, by Elmgreen & Dragset
With its air of municipal failure, Elmgreen & Dragset’s swimming pool show makes an unlikely cruising spot. Elsewhere in their show, the Scandinavian duo revel in the opportunity to confuse the viewer.
• Elmgreen & Dragset: This Is How We Bite Our Tongue is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 27 September-13 January.
What we learned
Sir Nicholas Grimshaw was awarded the RIBA gold medal
There are no painters or sculptors in the Turner prize, only film and digital artists … and it’s the best lineup in years
… but we present a piece of blazing contradictory evidence
The Instagram photography awards shortlist contains no avocado toast or group selfies
Santiago Serra planted a black flag at the South Pole
Artificial flowers, flock wallpaper and lace doilies will adorn the walls of UK embassies worldwide
Told to ‘go home, Polish’, photographer Michał Iwanowski walked for 105 days from Cardiff to Poland
Thomas Gainsborough was set on the path to success by his uncle’s murder
Artist Kazim Rashid is asking ‘Where did all the brown people go?’ in culture since 9/11
The Cottingley Fairies are up for sale
Logos at dawn – BBC Two and Channel 4 unveiled new idents
Alastair Thain’s best shot captures Joseph Beuy’s facing mortality
Damien Hirst has given his gallery over to callous exercises in brutal pornography
A nuclear sub surfacing through ice has won the Peregrine trophy for photography
The London Stone has returned home – and is hoped to reverse Brexit
Van Gogh was inspired by Hokusai
The Distracted Boyfriend meme is sexist, say the Swedes
Semi-finalists for Australia’s Doug Moran portrait prize have been chosen
The Photobox Instagram photography awards revealed its shortlist
Don’t forget
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