A mind-bending Spaniard, an imagistic Puerto Rican and a lush Latvian – the week in art

2 hours ago 14

Exhibition of the week

Zurbarán
A mind-bending, revelatory exhibition packed with extraordinary loans from the Prado and other top museums that prove this painter belongs with Goya and Picasso as a Spanish great. Read the review.
National Gallery, London, 2 May to 23 August

Also showing

Our George Crompton
Gilbert & George pay homage to their late homeless friend who appeared with them in their art and shared their life.
The Gilbert & George Centre, London, 1 May to 2027

Lynn Chadwick
Outdoor sculptures that teeter between abstraction and expression by this post-second world war British artist.
Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2 May to 4 October

Angel Otero
Thickly built up, imagistic paintings by a Puerto Rico-born artist who has had a residency at this gallery in Somerset.
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2 May to 18 October

Daiga Grantina
A Latvian sculptor based in Paris reveals her enigmatic abstract art with unexpectedly lush evocations of nature.
Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, 2 May to 28 June

Image of the week

A statue depicting a man holding a flag which obscures his face, and signed ‘Banksy’ at the base of the plinth in central London.

First spotted on Wednesday, with the artist’s signature scrawled at the base of the plinth, the elusive artist Banksy later confirmed a new statue in central London was one of his works. The sculpture depicts a man marching forward off a plinth while carrying a large, billowing flag that obscures his face. A video Banksy posted on social media shows the statue being towed to Westminster in the dead of night. Read the full story

What we learned

An 8ft statue of screen boxer Rocky is the centrepiece of a show about monuments

The director who succeeds Maria Balshaw at the Tate galleries has a tricky job ahead

Johnnie Shand Kydd, famed for photographing the YBAs, is focused on his lurchers

Our correspondent and her son took a child’s eye look at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Loie Hollowell’s anatomical abstractions draw on Georgia O’Keeffe – and hormones

Paulo Nimer Pjota began graffiti art at 13. Now he’s taken over a London gallery

Francisco de Zurbarán had extraordinary supernatural visions

The roots of Nancy Holt’s spectacular land art can be found on a small sheet of paper

Artist and DJ Linett Kamala has reinvented maypole dancing with dancehall and drum’n’bass

The billionaire Spurs owner is selling off his Klimts, Matisses and Freuds

Masterpiece of the week

Saint Mary Magdalene by Guido Reni, 1634-5

A woman wearing a red robe with flowing, golden wavy hair looks upwards in a painting.

Bold and passionate images of women often appear in 17th-century art of the “baroque” age. It’s not a coincidence that Artemisia Gentileschi was able to express herself in this style, for it seemed open to women being centre stage. But why, in such a patriarchal period, was that possible? Guido Reni, a fervent, often very haunting artist of suffering saints and scenes from Greek myth, here depicts the penitent Magdalene, who in medieval folklore was a reformed prostitute, identified by her fiery red robe and long sensual hair. She’s sorry for her sins and stares up at heaven, praying for God’s forgiveness. So far, so misogynistic, you may say. But the purpose of baroque religious paintings like this is to elicit empathy and identification. Sinners – and who doesn’t sin from time to time – are invited to put themselves in Mary Magdalene’s place, to share her longing for absolution. So she is not an object seen from outside, but a vessel for subjective religious feeling and mystical transports. The onlooker, female or male, melts into her sorrow.
National Gallery, London

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