Exhibition of the week
Lubaina Himid: Lost Threads
The Turner prize-winner explores and reconstructs history’s complex webs.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 21 April
Also showing
The Time of Our Lives
Drawings by women including Claudette Johnson, Sonia Boyce and Sutapa Biswas with new work by Kate Davis and Jade de Montserrat.
• Drawing Centre, London, from 25 January until 21 April
Condo London
Is it a fair? Is it a biennial? No, it’s a “collaborative exhibition” with 50 galleries sharing 23 spaces across the capital.
• London venues from 20 January until 17 Feb
Shuvinai Ashoona: When I Draw
Graphic art about Inuit life and heritage in the Canadian far north.
• The Perimeter, London, from 24 January until 26 April
Charlotte Keates, Margaret R Thompson and Frida Wannerberger
Three very different figurative artists explore subjects from fashion to architecture.
• Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, until 11 February
Image of the week
Stephen Leslie has spent the past 25 years taking candid, unposed street photos now collected in a new book, Mostly False Reports, available through his website or Instagram. He says of this photo, taken in London in 2015: “I like to think that he has no idea that the tattoo is there. That, as he has gone bald, this yin-yang symbol has slowly been revealed, like a birthmark or a sign that he is a chosen one. I could be right, maybe?” See more of the photos here.
What we learned
South African photographer Peter Magubane fought apartheid “with my camera”
Frank Auerbach’s intense charcoal sketches are a deep excavation of humanity
“They are architectural gems”: Rowan Moore wants us to save Britain’s cooler towers
Curt Bloch’s magazine lampooned the Nazis while he was in hiding in Amsterdam
Stolen paintings by Chagall and Picasso were found in an Antwerp basement
Architect David Chipperfield was not “supporting a regime” by working for China
Steve Birnbaum obsessively re-photographs iconic musical locations
Architect and racy novelist Lesley Lokko has won the RIBA gold medal
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of Piero de’ Medici (‘The Gouty’) by Bronzino, c 1550-70
This is a very fresh, intimate portrait when you consider that its subject had been dead for at least 80 years, and perhaps a whole century, when Bronzino painted it. In 16th-century Florence the Medici family established a Grand Dukedom, suppressing the city’s long history of republican politics, turning its government building into a private palace – and employing artists to glorify their family tree. Piero the Gouty was a short-lived but respected and fondly remembered early Renaissance banker, political broker and art patron. Here he is depicted by the brilliant Bronzino who also glamorised the living Medicis of his own time. He tries to get Piero right, by drawing on images done in his lifetime such as a moving marble bust by Mino da Fiesole, suggesting as it does both fragility and strength, steel and sadness.
• National Gallery, London
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