Aussie dots, Tudor pots and nudist shots – the week in art

Modern abstract painting from the Dreamtime, a ceramic deep dive into a Tudor power struggle and a celebration of body art – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Emily Kam Kngwarray
A survey of this revered Australian painter who combined modern abstraction with maps of the Dreamtime.
• Tate Modern, London, 10 July until 11 January

Also showing

Lindsey Mendick: Wicked Game
The flamboyant ceramicist takes a dive into the world of the Tudors with an installation in a castle once visited by Elizabeth I.
• Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, 9 July until 31 October

Figure + Ground
Martin Creed, Sonia Boyce, Paul McCarthy and more in a group show of film and video art.
• Hauser and Wirth, London, until 2 August

Movements for Staying Alive
Yvonne Rainer, Ana Mendieta and Harold Offeh star in a participatory celebration of body art.
• Modern Art Oxford, until 7 September

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
This Roma-Polish artist portrays her community in bold and colourful textiles.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 7 September

Image of the week

It’s a marvellous night for a moondance – with the pink dolphins tripping the light fantastic with the local mermaids – in the Amazon. Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani creates his works by applying paint prepared from pigments, seeds, leaves and roots, to large sheets of llanchama, a cloth made from the bark of the ojé tree. His works are often inspired by the hallucinations brought on by the ritual ingestion of tobacco, coca, ayahuasca and mushrooms – substances long used by the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon when in search of help, knowledge or revelation. His show, The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, as part of Manchester International festival. Read our interview with him here.

What we learned

Sam Cox AKA Mr Doodle is the million-dollar artist who almost lost himself to his alter ego

Not all statues of footballers are as terrible as the infamous Ronaldo bust

Jenny Saville’s raw, visceral portraits are inspiring a fresh generation of schoolkids

Indigenous art from around the world is sweeping galleries across the UK

A once derelict district of Medellín, Colombia has has been rebuilt as a green haven

Khaled Sabsabi will show at Venice Biennale after controversial sacking was rescinded

Masterpiece of the week

An Allegory, by an anonymous Florentine artist, about 1500

This painting celebrates childbirth and motherhood, but subversively. Mothers were often depicted as the Virgin Mary nursing Christ in medieval and Renaissance art. It was a form of religious manipulation, associating a typical female experience of the age with piety and love of Christ. This woman however lies powerfully and calmly in a meadow while her babies play around her. It is a pagan scene, shorn of Christian symbols. In a pose apparently inspired by Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, a strong, even divine maternal figure, who resembles Venus, holds sway over the onlooker.
• National Gallery

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