Exhibition of the week
Ingrid Pollard
Subversive perspectives on the British landscape, and who it belongs to, are at the heart of Pollard’s thought-provoking work.
• Milton Keynes Gallery from Saturday
Also showing
David Hockney
New portraits and self-portraits as well as older works feature in this examination of Hockney’s experiments with technology.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from 15 March
Wayfinder: Larry Achiampong and JMW Turner
A film set in a pandemic-struck Britain in which a young traveller encounters landscapes of inequality. Plus the artist’s choice of Turner.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, from Saturday
Kyōsai
A rare exhibition of a master who kept Japanese art’s great wave rolling into the late 19th century.
• Royal Academy, London, from 19 March
Robert Indiana
A survey of the pop sculptor and printmaker who put the word LOVE into public space.
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park from Saturday
Image of the week
The people of Odesa in Ukraine have placed hundreds of sandbags around the city’s bronze statue of Duke de Richelieu as they prepare for a Russian attack. The monument, unveiled in 1828, is regarded as a symbol of the city. The duke was governor of Odesa, which greatly increased in size and importance under his administration. The statue sits at the top of the famous Odesa Steps, or Potemkin Steps, the formal entrance to the city. The 200 steps were made famous in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin. Read more about Ukrainians’ efforts to save their cultural heritage here from the destruction of war here.
What we learned
Damien Hirst’s works in formaldehyde, including a shark and a decapitated cow, are on show
A feud over an ‘antisemitic’ Wailing Wall painting closed an Israel museum
Surrealism has bounced back a century after its birth with international events and exhibitions
The National Portrait Gallery has five new self-portraits of women who helped shape British culture
Turner paintings not seen in UK for 100 years are to go on show at National Gallery
Masterpiece of the week
Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian, 1571
This powerful, shocking masterpiece is as upsetting today as when it was painted in the Renaissance. Usually, the old masters, and mistresses including Artemisia Gentileschi, portrayed the ancient Roman heroine Lucretia preparing to kill herself after she was raped by the tyrant Tarquin. She is conventionally pictured raising a knife to herself rather than live in shame. But Titian takes us to the truth of what happened, as he imagines it, a terrible confrontation in which a naked woman is assaulted by an armed man in a virulent frenzy. Titian captures the rush and force of the attack as Tarquin grabs his victim’s arm and puts his knee between her legs. Her nudity is vulnerable, his armour unyielding. His face is flushed with rage, her expression beseeching as she tries to connect with some hidden layer of humanity in her rapist. It leaves you troubled, as this great artist wants you to be.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.
Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter
If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@theguardian.com
