Durham gets lit, the States turn sick and goddesses reign – the week in art

Also, feminist block-printers in Massachusetts and the war’s toll on Gaza’s artists – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Pope.L: Hospital
This visceral installation explores illness, the body, race and the US.
• South London Gallery, from 21 November until 11 February

Also showing

Nari Ward
First British solo show by this quirky and imaginative artist of the US unconscious.
• Lehmann Maupin, London, until 6 January

David Panos
Film that connects Northampton’s Victorian gothic revival architecture with local goth legends Bauhaus.
• NN Contemporary Art, Northampton, 23 November to 20 January

Monica Sjöö
Visionary eco-feminist paintings of stone circles and the matriarchal goddess.
• Modern Art Oxford, 18 November to 25 February

Lumiere
Ai Weiwei is among the stars of this 40-site light-art festival.
• Durham and Bishop Auckland venues to 19 November

Image of the week

This familiar image of Geoff Hurst winning the final of the 1966 World Cup for England has been turned into a Spot the Ball competition with a difference: artist JJ Guest has cut a 3.5in hole into it. “That’s the standard size of glory holes in gay clubs,” he explains, referring to the openings in walls and cubicles that allow for anonymous sexual encounters. The artwork forms a part of Guest’s exhibition The Other Team, showing at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium in London.

What we learned

The Louvre has acquired a €24m (£21m) painting that almost ended up in the bin

The occult is on the rise in the art world

Not everyone who became an unlikely star of album cover art was happy about it

A memory garden has sprung up under Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North

Picasso’s painting of his ‘golden muse’ has sold for $139.4m (£112.4m) in New York

Poland’s Venice Biennale entry has defied the inclusive theme with ‘anti-European manifesto’

A painter, a poet and a novelist are among the artists being killed in Gaza

National Portrait Gallery has been criticised over its choice of sponsor to replace BP

A cheerful Lowry beach scene is expected to sell for up to £1.5m

Masterpiece of the week

The Virgin and Child by Dirk Bouts, c1465

Motherhood is portrayed with tender intimacy in this painting by a boldly realist medieval genius. Bouts worked in Leuven (Louvain), where he painted his notorious, terrifying masterpiece The Fall of the Damned as a warning against sin. Yet here he shows a gentler side. This Mary is not a celestial Queen of Heaven but an earthly mother, literally humanising Christ with her breast milk. It was believed that the milk women gave to babies influenced their entire lives: for instance, the artist Michelangelo said he imbibed his talent for carving marble from the milk of his wet-nurse, a quarryman’s wife. Not only is Mary’s milk earthing Christ’s human nature, but the scene itself is a real, recognisable interior, with a view of a gothic northern European city from its window.
• National Gallery, London

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