Alien landscapes, Arctic artists and pioneers of pleasure – the week in art

Georgia O’Keeffe and David Hockney enjoy the air, the British Museum looks to the far north, and the Folkestone Triennial gets under way – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Folkestone Triennial: How Lies the Land?
Dorothy Cross, Katie Paterson, Cooking Sections and many more take part in a sprawling seaside summer art special.
• Various venues, Folkestone, Kent, from 19 July until 19 October

Also showing

Alien Shores
A landscape-themed group show with Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney and Glenn Brown among the artists enjoying the fresh air.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 7 September

Panorama: New Views of a City
A recreation of Robert Barker’s 18th-century panorama of the Edinburgh skyline, with contemporary responses by Lucas Priest and Amanda Thomson.
• Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until 21 December

Arctic Expressions
The art and material culture of Arctic peoples is celebrated by this British Museum touring show.
• Kirkleatham Museum, Redcar, until 28 September

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s
Works on paper by the revered artist record her inner life of dream and memory.
• Courtauld Gallery, London until 14 September

Image of the week

John Knuth’s striking paintings aren’t made by the artist putting in hours with a pointillist brush. His works are created using flies regurgitating a mixture of coloured paint and sugar water on to canvasses. After he lost his home and entire archive in the California wildfires earlier this year, his work has taken on a new perspective. Read more here.

What we learned

The Bayeux tapestry is the most engaging depiction ever made of a mighty battle

AI, social media and virtual identities are transforming our understanding of beauty

A new 10,000 sq ft London arts centre aims to spotlight global majority voices

A show of tactile art curated by blind people aims to challenge ‘ocularcentrism’

Plans for the corporate rebranding of a London tube line dismayed our critic

Podcaster George the Poet joined an initiative to make masterpieces more accessible

Jean-François Millet’s masterpiece The Angelus electrified modern art

Photographer Paz Errázuriz’s tender images outraged Chilean society

A new art trail through the City of London is full of echoes of ancient ritual

Masterpiece of the week

The Shore at Egmond-aan-Zee by Jacob van Ruisdael, circa 1675

Seaside views from the 17th century are rare. It shows how precocious Dutch art and life were in the 1600s that Van Ruisdael depicts people visiting the shore for fun – strolling on the sands, enjoying the strong sea breeze, flirting to the splash of the waves. Of course, they don’t strip off and swim – the figures in the water are fishing folk. Sea bathing wouldn’t become fashionable until about a century later, and the hedonism of modern beach life would gradually appear in art, from impressionist Normandy to Picasso and Matisse on the Riviera. All of that lies in the future here – and to be honest those looming clouds don’t augur well for a day at the seaside. But these beachgoers are pioneers of pleasure.
• National Gallery, London

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