Your weekly art world low-down: news, ideas and things to see Psychedelic monks, subversive sculptures and paper-eating Pope.L’s final show – the week in art | Art and design | The Guardian
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| | | | | | Psychedelic monks, subversive sculptures and paper-eating Pope.L’s final show – the week in art | | A memorial to the performance artist who once ate the Wall Street Journal, eerie woodcuts and the immersive Book of Kells – all in your weekly dispatch | | | | Pope.L: Hospital, South London Gallery, 2023. Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy of the Artist. Photograph: Andy Stagg/Courtesy of the Artist | | | | | Exhibition of the week Pope.L: Hospital
This intense evocation of Pope.L’s provocative performances, which included sitting on a toilet nearly naked, eating the Wall Street Journal, has become a memorial after his death during the Christmas holidays.
• South London Gallery until 11 February Also showing Project Art Works: Residential
Work by neurodivergent artists, presented by an organisation shortlisted for the 2021 Turner prize.
• Baltic, Gateshead, until 25 February Rosemarie Castoro: Carving Space
A survey of this New York sculptor who subverted the sterility of minimalism.
• Mostyn, Llandudno, until 24 February Christiane Baumgartner: There Goes the Sun
Eerie contemporary woodcuts of wintry suns glowing through bleak trees.
• Strawberry Hill House, London, until 10 April Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass
Films that both celebrate and question the classics of 20th-century cinema, including a radical new version of The Thief of Bagdad.
• Dundee Contemporary Arts until 24 March Image of the week | | | | | | The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is unusual not just for its beauty but for its near-intact survival. In 1661, it was given to Trinity College Library, where it is on permanent display – and now forms the centrepiece of a mind-blowing immersive experience. Read the full article What we learned The immersive Book of Kells show reveals its psychedelic pages’ full glory Yoko Ono and Frank Auerbach are among this year’s most anticipated exhibitions Cats can fly The artist behind one of the biggest shows of 2024 sent a 3.5-ton block of ice from Alaska to the Bahamas A new museum dedicated to the art of illustration will open in 2025 Dante Gabriel Rossetti blamed tummy trouble for not delivering a painting on time Giant pink rabbits and ball pits fill the Instagrammable Balloon Museum The young woman in Robert Doisneau’s 1950 Paris kiss photo has died aged 93 Masterpiece of the week The Morning Walk by Georges Seurat, probably 1885
| | | | | | | We’ve got used to seeing the world in broken ways. Pixellated on TV screens or glimpsed from a car, reality is understood by us as molten chaos. But when Seurat painted this bright yet disintegrating scene in the 1880s, to see like this was utterly new and strange. He takes an almost classical theme, a calm, formal depiction of a woman walking by the River Seine, yet subjects what he sees to a pounding, scintillating analysis. Life becomes a field of potent but separated colours, a Brownian motion of energy-emitting atoms. Art, Seurat shows us here, is not just a pretty decoration. It is philosophy and it is science.
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| | | John Crace | | Guardian columnist |
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| | Well, 2023 didn’t exactly go to plan, did it? Here in the UK, prime minister Rishi Sunak had promised us a government of stability and competence after the rollercoaster ride of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Remember Liz? These days she seems like a long forgotten comedy act. Instead, Sunak took us even further through the looking-glass into the Conservative psychodrama.
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