Exhibition of the week
Scandal ’63 Revisited
Artists depict Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair that rocked 1960s politics, with Caroline Coon, Marguerite Horner, Stella Vine and more.
• De Montfort University, Leicester, until 15 April
Also showing
Catherine and Anne: Queens, Rivals, Mothers
Art and documents unravelling the very fraught royal relationship between the first and second wives of Henry VIII, at the castle where Anne Boleyn lived as a child.
• Hever Castle, Kent, until 4 June
Ian Cheng
Experiments in digital art and AI creatures by this pioneer of the post-human.
• Pilar Corrias, London, until 6 April
The Other Art Fair
This event claiming to make art culturally and commercially democratic has a suitably groovy Shoreditch setting.
Truman Brewery, London, from 9 to 12 March
A Slash of Blue
Open exhibition inspired by a painterly poem by Emily Dickinson.
• Gerald Moore Gallery, Eltham, until 8 April
Image of the week
Ukraine has issued a postage stamp with a reproduction of a Banksy mural depicting a boy defeating a grown man in judo, to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion. It was painted by the British street artist on a demolished wall in the town of Borodianka, north-west of Kyiv, where many buildings were reduced to rubble by Russian aircraft at the start of the invasion. The image, riffing on Vladimir Putin’s much publicised martial arts prowess, depicts a young judoka representing Ukraine bringing down a much larger opponent. The phrase “FCK PTN” in Cyrillic has been added to the lower left part of the stamp.
• Read the full story here
What we learned
The Twentieth Century Society is battling to save a Bristol car park from demolition
A Moma show in New York focuses on projects for so-called public-facing spaces
Olafur Eliasson is planning a sky mirror for the Cumbrian coast
A museum showcasing forgotten Victorian architect Decimus Burton is planned
Eco architecture aims to help save Los Angeles from megadrought
A last-minute loan has saved a palace of outsider art in Birkenhead
In a new exhibition in New York, artists explore identity through alternate worlds
An Edinburgh show is challenging the idea that art is just for the middle class
Anthony Green, renowned for his unsettling domestic paintings, has died aged 83
Masterpiece of the week
Caryatid from the Athenian Acropolis, 421-406 BC
This dreamlike figure is one of the wildest inventions of ancient Greek art: a woman who is also an architectural column, designed to balance a building on her head. The five sisters of this statue still support part of the Erechtheion, a small temple on the craggy hill of the Acropolis overlooking Athens. You lose a lot of the fantastical effect by removing such a figure from its architectural context - but that’s what Lord Elgin did when he brought this masterpiece to Britain in 1816. It caught the imagination of the Romantic age and homages range from a replica of the Erechtheion built into St Pancras church, near the British Museum, to the living caryatids in Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête. But while controversy rages today over Elgin’s more notorious acquisitions from the Parthenon, crowning glory of the Acropolis, this other loot lives quietly in the BM’s Greek galleries. Its removal was arguably Elgin’s most arrogant act.
• British Museum, London
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