Exhibition of the week
Forest: Wake This Ground
Artists including Eva Jospin, David Nash and Ai Weiwei try to reconnect with Earth’s forests.
• Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, until 2 October
Also showing
Sokari Douglas Camp
Slavery, gender and the climate are addressed by the British-Nigerian artist’s sculpture Europe Supported by Africa and America.
• V&A, London, until 14 May 2023
Refractive Pool: Contemporary Painting in Liverpool
Frances Disley, the Singh Twins and many others feature in this survey of contemporary painting from Merseyside.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 8 January
Radical Horizons: The Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth
Imagine Derbyshire is Nevada with this show of colossal sculptures from the Burning Man festival.
• Chatsworth, Derbyshire, until 1 October
Gold
Gold Qur’ans and The Golden Haggadah feature in this survey of manuscripts enriched by the coveted yellow metal.
• British Library, London, until 2 October
Image of the week
Transgender Mexican artist Manuel Solano lost their sight to an HIV-related illness – and their art blossomed. As a major exhibition opens in Dundee, they explained their defiance of illness and gender norms to Hettie Judah. Read the full story here.
What we learned
Dulux scientists are figuring out Rembrandt’s thick-paint recipe
Samey new London vernacular architecture is catnip to planners
Christian groups complained a sculpture in Cornwall was “offensive to God”
A mini-Acropolis will be built in Melbourne
There was an outcry at the destruction of Manchester’s Ian Curtis mural
Two artists are set for a court battle over who first taped a banana to the wall
The Autonomous Design Group create anonymous political street art
A lost vorticist masterpiece by Helen Saunders has been found under a portrait by Wyndham Lewis
The great US artist Bill Lynch never had a show in his lifetime
Damien Hirst is setting his art on fire
Masterpiece of the week
“Viking” figurehead, about fourth to sixth century AD, Roman or Germanic (detail above)
This fearsome carving from an ancient ship’s prow seems to symbolise a savage threat from the sea. No wonder it was long imagined to come from a Viking longboat. In his classic 1969 TV series Civilisation the art historian Kenneth Clark wondered what terror this monster must have inspired when it came gliding your way with a shipful of Norse warriors behind it.
Yet carbon dating has shown it to be not only pre-Viking, but very likely Roman. So instead of being a “barbarian” artwork it probably symbolised classical Roman “civilisation”. Yet it truly is a primal, nightmare image: in the dying Roman empire there was no longer a line between the classical world and the dark Germanic imagination.
• British Museum, London
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