Exhibition of the week
Boyd & Evans
Fionnuala Boyd and Les Evans have been making photorealist art since the 1960s and they’ve found their perfect subject in the Ballardian townscape of Milton Keynes.
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 27 May to 17 September
Also showing
Katya Muromtseva: Women in Black Against the War
Muromtseva’s portraits pay homage to Russian women who have protested against the invasion of Ukraine by appearing in public spaces dressed in mourning, holding flowers for the war’s victims.
• Pushkin House, London, until 29 July
Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits
An ambitious survey of the fabrication of beauty and the manipulation of desire in Renaissance art.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 1 October
Sasha Gordon
Uncanny paintings of gardening and sexuality by this young Asian-American artist.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, 1 June to 22 July
Constable: The Dark Side
The savage poetry of John Constable’s rainy skies and looming storms takes you to the heart of Romanticism.
• The Arc, Winchester, until 16 August
Image of the week
Riot Girl, 1998, by Vinca Petersen is just one photo on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s newly expanded Photography Centre, which delves into the museum’s 800,000-strong collection to pick 600 photos and display them across seven galleries. Highlights from the first exhibition stretch from ghostly sciagraphs of reptiles in 1897, soon after X-rays were discovered, to the AI-driven digital art of the present. Find out more here.
What we learned
The Tate Britain rehang is worthy and dull
Photoshop’s embrace of AI raises fears of art fakery
Melati Suryodarmo turns hard labour into an art form
Tom Wood’s camera saw into the heart of Liverpool
Hurvin Anderson talked about family, roots and how he found painting
The Venice architecture biennale looks to Africa for inspiration
Moki Cherry’s psychedelic art transports you to a hippyish utopia
Nicholas Serota says Arts Council England was right to push funding beyond London
Masterpiece of the week
Colonel Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1782
Reynolds roots for the antihero in this smoky, impassioned, even tragic portrait of a British officer loathed by American patriots for his brutal reputation in the war of independence and who later defended the slave trade as MP for Liverpool. Tarleton had two fingers missing after being shot in the right hand and his disability is clearly shown here as he poses in the midst of battle, with cannon, gunsmoke and terrified horses. Clearly the spectacular setting has been concocted, for this is a studio portrait, not a war photo. Reynolds made a very good living from painting Georgian high society yet he had serious ambitions for his work, and British art in general: in his lectures at the Royal Academy, he argued that the highest genre is “history painting”. Here he shows that a portrait can communicate the grandeur of history, with a classical gravity that commands attention.
• National Gallery, London
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