Exhibition of the week
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022
Spot the Turner prize winners of the future in this showcase for young artists fresh out of college.
• South London Gallery until 12 March.
Also showing
Monster Chetwynd
The provocative artist gets medieval on glass, in luminous sculptures that tell the tales of St Bede and St Cuthbert.
• Sadie Coles, 8 Bury St, London, until 12 January.
JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters
If you visit the Turner prize at Tate Liverpool don’t miss the excellent show of Mr Turner himself.
• Tate Liverpool until 4 June.
Dippy Returns: The Nation’s Favourite Dinosaur
A special exhibition of the glorious diplodocus cast that used to dominate this museum’s main hall.
• Natural History Museum, London, until 2 January.
Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700-1930
The Romantic artist Lady Dorothea Knighton is among the female printmakers revealed here, alongside such moderns as Gwen Raverat and Mary Cassatt.
• V&A, London, until 1 May.
Image of the week
The Turner prize winner has, for some time, been all about who can shout the loudest, with brash, sensational crowd-pleasers scooping the award. This year however, Veronica Ryan’s mature, meditative sculptures were the opposite of all that – her vital work startling in its sheer intelligent beauty. A sensational winner who made this the first Turner prize in years worth caring about. Read the full article here.
What we learned
Eight people have been arrested in Ukraine for stealing a Banksy mural
Radically unfashionable haircuts went on display at Australia’s first Mulletfest
An unsettling show of Victorian sculptures of women went on display in Leeds
The cluttered Warrington front room of painter Eric Tucker has been recreated by a Mayfair gallery
A new development by London’s Southbank threatens the area’s “beauty”
Early 20th-century Swedish painter Hilda af Klint experienced sex from “a place beyond gender”
A Birmingham exhibition is highlighting the links between modernist architecture and horror
Masterpiece of the week
Studies for the Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci, 1505–8
The genius of Leonardo bubbles and boils in this dazzling drawing. It is so much more than a “study” for a painting. This sheet of paper lets you glimpse the polymathic scope of his mind that he explored in notebooks on everything from anatomy to flying. The sketches of gear wheels show him thinking about an engineering problem at the same time as he plans a painting. But the main design is even more astonishing. It’s a frenzied, chaotic, inky smear that he seems to have done in a totally random way – only then has he gone over its dense shape to mark out faces and figures. As the art historian EH Gombrich pointed out, this resembles the almost shamanistic method he recommended to artists: gaze at a stain, said Leonardo, until you start to see faces and landscapes and battles in it. Here he has created his own stain and found forms there. Out of his dreaming emerges a close-bound family of mother, child and grandmother, like a vision from the unconscious. You can see why the surrealist Max Ernst was inspired by Leonardo.
• British Museum
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