Exhibition of the week
Konrad Mägi
You mean you haven’t heard of “Estonia’s greatest modernist painter”? Who knows, this exhibition may put his name in lights.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 24 March to 12 July
Also showing
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press
Banner takes conceptual art into the poetic heights with her intense word-pictures.
• The Common Guild, Glasgow, from 21 March to 25 April
Hurvin Anderson
Lyrical, lovely and nuanced figurative paintings by this artist shortlisted for the 2017 Turner prize.
• Tate Britain, London, from 26 March to 23 August
Leonora Carrington
Where better to see this wild surrealist’s work than in the last home of Sigmund Freud, the movement’s unconscious inspiration?
• Freud Museum, London, from 25 March to 28 June
Rehana Zaman
Two films that follow seasonal migrant workers through a world of poverty and survival.
• Site Gallery, Sheffield, until 17 May
Image of the week
A mythologised painting school in Brussels is unlike any other arts education institution in the world. Run by the same family since it was founded in 1892, it has taught aspiring painters the technique of trompe l’oeil. It’s brutal work, the artists say – so why do people travel from all around the world to master it? Read the full story here.
What we learned
A Whitworth exhibition charts how two Japanese masters reinvented art
David Hockney’s opera sets will be showcased at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall
Oscar nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos has a sideline in absurdist photography
Graphic designers took on the Reagan administration during the Aids crisis
An Oxford museum is disturbing and delighting in the history of botanical adventurers
A mysterious art school has been keeping a forgotten style alive since 1892
An exhibition in Ghent is celebrating female artists of the baroque
Ukrainian photographer Arthur Bondar fled Russia with a huge haul of unknown second world war images
Edvard Munch’s formative influence on Paula Rego was revealed in an unearthed painting
Masterpiece of the week
The Tempest by Peder Balke, c.1862
A world in black and white is plunged into crisis in this vision of sailors in peril off the coast of 19th-century Norway. It probably wasn’t rare to see a moment like this in the icy northern seas: two boats teeter and totter in roiling waves just off shore, close to savage black rocks, under a sky full of swirling grey where cruel birds hover. But it is not a realist scene. Instead, Balke distils an image of turbulent, unforgiving nature in a way that anticipates the expressionism of Munch: he makes the stormy sea, painted in a bleak subdued palette, what TS Eliot called an “objective correlative” for his inward state. So this is less a seascape, more a self-portrait as the artist unveils his despair and dread.
• National Gallery, London
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