Glorious art from a dreadful king and the cosmos in a plastic cup – the week in art

The RA’s perverse Charles I show opens, Tara Donovan makes the ordinary extraordinary and Velázquez paints a nobody – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Charles I: King and Collector
Great paintings by Mantegna, Titian, Rubens, Holbein, Durer and Tintoretto feature in this perversely hagiographic homage to a king who drove his subjects to rebel. Read our review.
• Royal Academy, London, 27 January to 15 April.

Also showing

Transvangarde
West Africa’s celebrated magician of found stuff, El Anatsui, is the star of this survey of global art now.
• October Gallery, London, from 1 February to 3 March.

Tara Donovan
Ordinary objects such as plastic cups create images of the cosmic in Donovan’s sprawling installations.
• Pace Gallery, London, until 9 March.

Raqs Media Collective
This is a stimulating bombardment of ideas and images, including black bread from the Paris Commune and surreal parodies of colonial statues.
• Whitworth, Manchester, until 25 February.

Bridget Riley
Riley returns to the optical black-and-white trickery of her 1960s roots in scintillating new paintings.
• David Zwirner Gallery, London, until 10 March.

Masterpiece of the week

Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver (1631-32) by Diego Velázquez
It was a visit to the Spanish court that made Britain’s Charles I start his own spectacular royal collection, and inspired him to employ Anthony van Dyck as a court painter. Yet Van Dyck never matched the strange profundity of the portraits his Spanish opposite number Velázquez painted of royals, whom he often made look sad, stupid and ill. This early royal portrait by Velázquez is one of his most flattering, yet even here there is a sense of the nullity of the man inside the brilliant costume.
• National Gallery, London

Image of the week

Event Horizon by James Turrell
Stunning light installations by the influential US artist are the centrepiece of a dramatic new A$32m (£18m) wing at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania. Called Pharos, the wing has specially commissioned works by James Turrell, as well as pieces by Jean Tinguely, Randy Polumbo, Charles Ross and Richard Wilson. Guardian Australia’s Brigid Delaney went to see.

What we learned

Nan Goldin has spoken frankly about her addictions

The Guggenheim offered the White House a gold toilet

Glenn Brown thinks art should be repellent

… and Jeff Koons has raised a stink by giving Paris a bouquet

Goats won’t play ball with exhibition curators, and artists go wild in the country

Offices of the future will look like this …

A compelling new one-woman play brings Peggy Guggenheim back to life

The Observer’s Rowan Moore gave us a blueprint for British housing

Wild west barmen are hard to faze

Washington’s black history museum has won design of the year

… while London’s skyline is offered a giant golf ball

Aerial photography is booming on Instagram

Outdoor photographer of the year winners are announced

A broken heart produced some of the most famous pictures of the Beatles

Roma Agarwal’s new book highlights how women helped shape our built environment

A Dutch museum is wrestling with the country’s colonial past

The jazz age brought musical enlightenment and racist reaction

Don’t mention the civil war at the Royal Academy

LGBT Muslim artists are challenging perceptions

London’s Hayward Gallery has reopened

How artists remade the record sleeve

High Kinsella Cunningham captures portraits of hope in Liberia

Food is in fashion

With a few million spare, you could get your hands on an Arts and Crafts house

A new exhibition will trace the history of hairdressing

We remembered art historian Nicola Gordon Bowe

Don’t forget

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