Exhibition of the week
Hew Locke
This artist of warm, expansive bricolage takes on the vast spaces of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.
• Tate Britain from 22 March
Also showing
Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust
Jenny Saville and Stuart Pearson Wright are among the painters commissioned by Prince Charles to portray survivors of the Holocaust.
• Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh until 6 June
Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear
Clothes maketh the man - the old adage is put to the test by exploring how fashion has defined what a man is, from Renaissance codpieces to Mods, New Romantics and contemporary couture.
• V&A, London from 19 March until 6 November
Rooted Beings
Enter the world of plants and fungi in this exhibition that features artists including Gözde İlkin, Ingela Ihrman and Patricia Domínguez as well as archival material from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
• Wellcome Collection, London from 24 March until 29 August
Tim Shaw
Grotesque and surreal sculptures that mix robotic futurism with arcane agrarian magic.
• Anima Mundi, St Ives until 4 April
Image of the week
It looks as if the universe was designed by a Romantic painter. The Pillars of Creation is the photo that made the Hubble telescope’s name. It shows a star-forming region of the Eagle nebula, 7,000 light years from Earth. The successful launch of the new James Webb telescope has eclipsed Hubble, but as it “sees” in infrared, it is unlikely to provide similarly beguiling pictures. The Hubble Age is ending but it changed our cosmic perception for ever.
What we learned
Raphael Vangelis’s street art spotlights London living conditions
Larry Achiampong brings a gamer’s pizzazz to the Turner Contemporary Gallery
Tate galleries is cutting ties with sanctioned billionaires after the Ukraine invasion
A critic argues that NFTs could well deserve to be called ‘iconic’ art
Hockney’s Eye ‘makes Constable look like a wet hanky’
Sophie Calle has a new show at the Musée d’Orsay about the ‘lost days’ when she squatted there
The Queen is joining the cultural boycott of Russia by withholding swords destined for Moscow …
… but some art world figures are still deciding if they should
Masterpiece of the week
The Annunciation by Domenico Veneziano, c. 1442-48
In this almost clinical demonstration of the art of perspective, Veneziano uses the red terracotta floor tiles to show us diagonals that recede to a vanishing point in the distance: these narrowing lines follow the diagram he will have drawn to plan the scene. The exact delineation of receding space continues into the garden where a path shrinks away from us towards a closed gate. Meanwhile the evenly spaced columns in Mary’s house, tubular solids defined by shadow, give depth and volume in the foreground. Perspective was theorised in early 15th century Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti who used medieval optical science to show how a flat picture surface can become a window on an illusory three-dimensional space. This little theatre of a painting is a fine demonstration of the method by an artist whose assistant, Piero della Francesca, would take it to sublime heights.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
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