Exhibition of the week
Martin Boyce: Before Behind Between Above Below
The Turner prize winner continues his meditations on 20th-century modernism and 21st-century life.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from 2 March to 9 June
Also showing
Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace
Photography at its most noble in the war reporting of this Picture Post legend.
Photographers Gallery, London, until 2 June
Angelica Kauffman
Hugely successful in her time, can this 18th-century painter hold modern eyes?
Royal Academy, London, from 1 March to 30 June
Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s
Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica are among the stars in this survey of the mid-century Brazilian art scene.
Raven Row, London, from 7 March to 5 May
Aesthetica Art prize
20 international artists compete for York’s award, across media from photography to installation.
York Art Gallery, until 21 April
Image of the week
Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, has curated an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs opening this week at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris. He spoke to the Guardian about his long career in the fashion world, the difficulty of choosing just 46 pictures from Mapplethorpe’s vast oeuvre, and the qualities he admires in his photographs: “I loved the way Mapplethorpe used light. It was so powerful you wanted to touch the picture. There was a feeling that something new and incredible was happening in his work.”
Read the full interview here.
What we learned
Visionary women are shaking up architecture despite being shunned by the profession
Photographer Dmitry Markov, who has died aged 41, was ‘Russia’s Cartier-Bresson’
Marina Abramović spoke about the showcase of long-durational performance art she is curating at the Adelaide festival
Ghanaian architects transformed colonial architecture after independence
A new show turns the position of Black figures in western art on its head
Art shows the surreal reality of wartime Ukraine in a way the news never could
Impressionism still looks fresh as France celebrates its 150th birthday
A new William Blake exhibition shows off other artists to better advantage
Palm husks have become prize-winning Moroccan art
Masterpiece of the week
The Dead Christ Mourned by Annibale Carracci, about 1604
The pale body of Christ is displayed as a totally human, pitiable corpse as his closest family and followers make gestures of anguish and grief in a harrowing, yet dignified, painting. The theme of the Pietà, meaning a depiction of the dead Christ mourned by his mother Mary or, as here, a small intense group of his nearest and dearest, evolved in medieval northern Europe, where it was often gory and horrific. It was made famous in Italy by Michelangelo in his sculpture of Mary with Jesus on her lap that’s still in St Peter’s in the Vatican. Carracci makes Christ’s dead body powerfully affecting and impeccably Christian: his own sincere faith is obvious. This allows him to share authentic pain while keeping the scene free from the kind of troubled sensationalism his rival Caravaggio brought to religious art.
National Gallery, London
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