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Exhibition of the week
Art of Balance
How high can you heap stones – and is it sport, science or art? Following the recent European Stone-Stacking championships in Dunbar, this exhibition celebrates a practice that seeks calm and inspiration by creating landscape monuments designed to disappear.
• Summerhall, Edinburgh, 5-13 May.
Also showing
Richard Long
Stone circles and mud drawings – Long’s art never changes because it is rooted in a primeval need for nature.
• Lisson Gallery, London, 11 May-23 June.
Bruce McLean: Garden Ware
This show highlights the ceramic sculptures with curvy shapes and pastoral designs by a veteran of conceptual and performance art.
• New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury, until 3 June.
Sublime Symmetry
Victorian ceramicist William De Morgan studied Islamic art, and his glowing tiles and pots emulate its divine geometries.
• Guildhall Art Gallery, London, 11 May-28 October.
The Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band, Part 2
Barry Flanagan, Derek Boshier, Jim Lambie and Emily Mae Smith are among the unlikely participants in this psychedelic montage of art from the 1960s onwards.
• Rob Tufnell Gallery, London, until 2 June.
Masterpiece of the week
A Horse Frightened by Lightning, circa 1813-14, by Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault
This brooding study of emotion in a horse was painted after Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia and towards the end of his rule, but before his dramatic return to fight a last stand at Waterloo. Its bleak landscape and menacing shy might even directly suggest the Russian campaign. At any event, it is a premonitory painting of doom and disaster. Géricault sees what the horse can feel, reads the foreboding in its tremulous flanks.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Colored Sculpture, 2016, by Jordan Wolfson
Creepy and vengeful, Wolfson’s puppet-boy is violently smashed to the floor at Tate Modern – then threatens to fight back. But is the controversial American artist just yanking our chain? Stuart Jeffries meets him.
What we learned
Stuffed – there’s something fishy in the world of wildlife photography …
… while insiders spilled the beans on a surprisingly murky world
Man Ray and his pioneering photographer friends taught us how to trick the light
David Shrigley revels in self-delusion
Caroline Coon paints the explicit truth
The wrong kinds of building blocks have upset the Danes
Joseph Wright of Derby is not allowed to go abroad
A little mail train could be bringing good news to the Postal Museum …
… but with pizza, heritage collections may have gone too far
It’s Marx and sparks in cartoonist Martin Rowson’s graphic novel Communist Manifesto
Noel Fielding thinks everything Dalí did was funny
Rock stars, film stars and tigers line up for Australia’s Archibald portrait prize
China’s (new) bicycle graveyards are compelling scenes of chaos
… so British artist Fuller roamed Beijing on foot
A Stanley Spencer painting has finally seen the light
RIBA’s latest show plays with perspective
John Duncan peered through a hole in a Belfast wall
Times have changed, but Paris’s streets are the same
Drug paraphernalia is now folk art
Guillaume Hebert likes to update old masters …
… while more fakes are discovered, of the fauvist kind
Franklyn Rodgers’ mother and her friends are pictures of devotion
Some stationery looks good enough to eat
We remembered Observer picture editor John Reardon …
… and Australian goldsmith Stuart Devlin
Don’t forget
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