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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jonathan Jones

Romantic aliens, talking hills and riddling rhododendrons – the week in art

a detail from Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Metapanorama at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Alien encounter … a detail from Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Metapanorama at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Photograph: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Exhibition of the week

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Alienarium 5
A futuristic installation that brings this artist’s style of image overload to bear on the pressing question: what if aliens fell in love with us?
Serpentine South Gallery, London, until 4 September.

Also showing

Nathan Coley: Tentative Words Change Everything
The Scottish artist puts uneasy neon signs into the skies of south-east England. I DONT HAVE ANOTHER LAND, declares the work at Bloomsbury Group hangout Charleston.
Sussex locations including Charleston until 29 August.

Warhol does the Rolling Stones … at For the Record.
Warhol does the Rolling Stones … at For the Record. Photograph: The Photographers’ Gallery

For the Record: Photography & the Art of the Album Cover
Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Hipgnosis are among the creators of album covers, classic and lesser-known, in this survey of pop’s own art.
Photographers’ Gallery, London, until 12 June.

Walead Beshty: Addendum
Folded sculptures that are reminiscent of early 20th-century constructivist reliefs, made from photographic printing papers, with a tender, elegaic feeling.
Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 28 May.

Rhododendrons: Riddle, Obsession, Threat at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Floral essence … a photograph by Sally Jubb at Inverleith House. Photograph: Sally Jubb Photography 2022. All rights reserved.

Rhododendrons: Riddle, Obsession, Threat
Turner winner from 2005 Simon Starling is among the contemporary artists investigating the history of this famous flower genus alongside Victorian botanical art.
Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until 5 June.


Image of the week

A still from A Dream of Wholeness in Parts by Sin Wai Kin.
A still from A Dream of Wholeness in Parts by Turner prize contender Sin Wai Kin. Photograph: Sin Wai Kin/Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London

The non-binary artist Sin Wai Kin, who grew up in Toronto, is one of the four artists on this year’s shortlist for the Turner prize, along with Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Veronica Ryan. The environmental crisis and our relationships to the natural world are, in different ways, persistent themes across the shortlist, as are questions of identity and belonging. Read our feature, Breadfruit, cherries and drag: this is a lip-smacking Turner prize shortlist.

What we learned

Warhol is now worth more than Picasso

David McKee, creator of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant and Mr Benn, has died

Ukrainian artists are responding fast to the war with poignant new work

A gallery at Tottenham Hotspur’s ground could be a game changer

Young cartoonists have been having a laugh

Anonymous artist Foka Wolf put Boris Johnson on a prank billboard

Art forgers got a kick out of fooling experts

A lost portrait of actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson will go on show

Walter Sickert painted himself in many roles … but not Jack the Ripper

Doris Derby, the photographer who chronicled the US civil rights movement, has died

NG781 Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio Tobias and the Angel about 1470–-5 Tempera on wood 83.6 x 66 cm © The National Gallery, London

Masterpiece of the week

Tobias and the Angel, workshop of Andrea Verrocchio, c 1470-75
A youth dressed in the height of fashion, with curly hair, short cloak and red hose, walks arm in arm with an angel on a job for his blind father, Tobit. As they go, the angel explains that the ointment in a wooden container, made from the guts of the fish Tobias carries, will cure his father’s blindness. With its fairytale charm and elegant style this is typical of the paintings and sculptures that emerged from Verrocchio’s busy workshop in 15th-century Florence. But there’s a more compelling interest. Verrocchio’s pupil Leonardo da Vinci quite obviously painted the little dog that scurries beside them, its long flowing rivers of fur so delicately touched into ethereal shimmers that it seems like a ghost dog. It is the spectre of Leonardo’s youthful genius.
National Gallery, London.

Don’t forget

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