Exhibition of the week
Polly Morgan
Great slithering serpents – Morgan takes her surrealist reptilian taxidermy to new heights of strangeness with this exhibition and public sculpture exploring natural camouflage.
• Royal Society of Sculptors, London, 27 February to 29 April
Also showing
The Van de Veldes
The story of a father-and-son duo of Dutch maritime painters who had a deep influence on Britain’s nautical artists, including Turner.
• Queen’s House, Greenwich, London, from 2 March
Hew Locke
Locke’s acclaimed Tate Britain work The Procession comes to the north-east of England.
• Baltic, Gateshead, until 11 June
Lynda Benglis
This renowned American sculptor of gooey, floppy anti-formal shapes lets it all hang out.
• Thomas Dane, London, 3 March to 29 April
Daisy Parris
Visceral, passionate paintings with a theme of mothering and love.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, 26 February to 16 April
Image of the week
Installation artist Mike Nelson opened a major exhibition, Extinction Beckons, at London’s Hayward Gallery which left our critic Adrian Searle distinctly uneasy. He wrote: “You don’t enter by the usual door or take a familiar route around Nelson’s show. This adds to the derangement of a show in which we scurry through ill-lit and dismal labyrinths of small rooms and dingy corridors, and then find ourselves confronted by the glare of an indoor desert, where a broken-backed shack sits half-buried in a sand dune strewn with shredded car tyres and abandoned oil drums. The interior of the shack feels like the show’s epicentre, a final redoubt.” Read the full article here.
What we learned
Nyugen E Smith has made fascinating use of found objects
James Cook uses typewriters to recreate masterpieces by Vermeer, Kahlo and more
An art fair visitor shattered a $42,000 Jeff Koons sculpture by tapping it
Two new London footbridges are ‘ingenious and life-affirming’
Three of her sitters recalled how Alice Neel made her portraits so revealing
A lost sketch for the Sistine Chapel fresco by Michelangelo has been rediscovered
David Hockney led us round his huge new immersive show
A mobile gallery of works from the Tate collection is touring the Liverpool region
A Lucian Freud portrait of his daughter Isobel is expected to fetch £20m at auction
A rare Frank Lloyd Wright house on the California coast has sold for $22m
Ai Weiwei is leading a dip into witchcraft and weird nature in the west country
Masterpiece of the week
The Aldobrandini Madonna by Titian, about 1532
Look at the passionate woman in yellow as she leans in to contemplate baby Jesus. Is she a saint or the “donor”, that is, a portrait of someone who commissioned a religious painting? Either way, this vibrant figure has been painted from life and her performance as a close friend of Mary, even the child’s loving aunt, breaks the fourth wall. She links the Madonna and Child with real life through her openly emotional relationship with Christ. But this is a painting loaded with rich effects. The brightness of the woman’s dress is set against luscious aquatic blues, from the garb of Mary to the rain-filled sky and looming mountains. The pastoral setting merges this religious moment into the art of rustic escape that Giorgione and Titian pioneered in Renaissance Venice. It also may recall his own childhood in the Dolomites – as if he was the little boy here, surrounded by loving women.
• National Gallery, London
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