Sarah Lucas’s scandalous sculptures, a new slant on Rubens and Abramović’s RA takeover – the week in art

There’s a Constable in the living room, the Turner prize in Eastbourne and a sensual statuette at the Wallace – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Rubens and Women
The rich, heady paintings of Peter Paul Rubens are seen from a fresh perspective.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 27 September to 28 January

Also showing

Julie Mehretu
Complex, multilayered paintings that use abstraction to engage with contemporary crises.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 5 November

Sarah Lucas
One of the edgiest of the Young British Art generation continues to deconstruct sculpture.
• Tate Britain, London, from 28 September until 14 January

Marina Abramović
A survey of the renowned performance artist, with films, live action and nudity.
• Royal Academy, London, from 23 September until 1 January 2024

Turner prize
Ghislaine Leung, Jesse Darling, Barbara Walker and Rory Pilgrim compete for this year’s award.
• Towner Eastbourne from 28 September

Image of the week

Reproductions of Constable’s The Hay Wain are common in living rooms and hotels across the UK. But a lost Hay Wain, painted from another angle, was discovered hanging on the wall of Willy Lott’s terrace house in Guernsey earlier this month. After the locals popped round to see it, the painting reached double the guide price at auction on Thursday.

What we learned

Marina Abramović is high on survival after a near-death experience and her vital retrospective has broken a 255-year-old glass ceiling

Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp just can’t throw anything away

You can almost smell the elephant dung in a new exhibition

Comic collectors have been raiding the bins

A Danish artist splashed the cash but came up empty

There is an outsider at the heart of Polish art

Art colleges are closing their doors

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami got deep into crypto

Masterpiece of the week

A Youth, attributed to Barthélemy Prieur, c1600

This exquisitely sensual statuette once brought homoerotic passion to a Renaissance study. It’s just over 21cm tall, yet compresses years of gazing at the human figure into its charged beauty. In fact it is a homage to the most openly queer statue ever carved by the greatest sculptor of 16th-century Europe: Michelangelo. The Italian artist carved the Dying Slave, a marble man swooning in death or ecstasy, for the tomb of Julius II but it ended up in France, where you can see it today in the Louvre. Prieur emulates the sexual tension of Michelangelo’s masterpiece on a much reduced scale in this wicked souvenir.
• The Wallace Collection, London

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