Beuys keeps swinging and Brazil burns bright – the week in art

The visionary artist’s most powerful sculptures go on show while a new landmark floats on a London lake and Newcastle surveys Bomberg – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Beatriz Milhazes: Rio Azul
Dazzling abstract explosions of colour that update the modernism of Sonia Delaunay to 21st-century Brazil.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, 18 April-1 July.

Also showing

Joseph Beuys: Utopia at the Stag Monuments
Some of this visionary artist’s most powerful sculptures are brought together in an exhibition curated by his collaborator Norman Rosenthal.
• Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Ely House, London, 18 April–16 June.

Sony World Photography Awards
German artist Candida Höfer gets a special display within this survey of the global photography scene.
• Somerset House, London, 20 April-6 May.

Bomberg
A welcome survey of one of the most powerful British artists of the early 20th century.
• Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, until 28 May.

Somewhere in Between
Explorations on the frontier of art and science by Martina Amati, Daria Martin, Maria McKinney and John Walter.
• Wellcome Collection, London, until 27 August.

Masterpiece of the week

Landscape With a Footbridge (c 1518-20) by Albrecht Altdorfer
This eerie painting transports us to a wild medieval German landscape where you could easily encounter a werewolf, witches or death – at least, it can inspire such daydreams if you let it. That is because Altdorfer leaves the meaning of his painting open. He creates what feels like a real place, with its colossal fir tree dripping colour over a time-worn bridge. But he does not include a story or people. This is landscape as free imaginative space, a world for the eye to roam in – and as such an entirely new idea in European art when Altdorfer painted it.
• National Gallery, London

Image of the week

Tracey Emin combined a travellers’ love letter with a Brexit protest in her new installation I Want My Time With You at London’s St Pancras International railway station.

What we learned this week

Irish artists are making a stand in the abortion referendum debate

One ‘war artist’ infiltrated the strange world of arms fairs

Unseen early Diane Arbus photos went on show

Christo is building a new London landmark – made of oil barrels

Cathy Wilkes will be Britain’s artist in Venice

Canadian police are chasing a Yoko Ono thief

Rowan Moore considered the changing fortunes of two London landmarks

We looked forward to the Design Museum’s Azzedine Alaïa fashion show

Hobart’s Mona is helping to design a dementia-friendly village

The shortlist for the BP Portrait award 2018 was announced

Tom Hammick takes a lunar voyage ...

… while Serbia is forced to rethink its monument to space flight

Yang Fudong deals in modern Chinese allegories

In Chicago, Otobong Nkanga casts an African eye on western attitudes

… while Afrofuturism lands elsewhere in town

A Sydney hotel has designs on influential women

We took another look at Seydou Keïta’s portraits from Mali

Photographer Chloe Dewe searched for Frankenstein in Switzerland

European galleries are booming

And we remembered abstract painter Gillian Ayres

Don’t forget

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