Dirty fossil fuels, the astonishing debut and the ominous side of the moon – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

extraction
This ominous exhibition takes a look at the sordid world of oil, gas and petroleum, all seen through the lens of artists like bio-sculptor Margaret Humeau and digital wizard John Gerrard.
Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, from 11 April to 26 July

also appear

Therese Oulton: Holding Patterns
Thick, opaque, heavily textured semi-abstract landscape paintings by one of the first women to be nominated for a Turner Prize (in 1987).
Vardaksoğlu, London, from April 11 to May 29

Michaela Yearwood Dunn: Editing Practice
Drawing, ceramics, sound, poetry, postcolonial theory and memoir writing are brought together in the first museum exhibition by the young artist in the UK.
The Whitworth, Manchester, from April 17 to October 18

Paola Rego: Story line
An intimate, museum-quality look at how important drawing was to the practice of this momentous Portuguese artist, focusing on drawings, studies and archival materials.
Victoria Miro, London, April 16 to May 23

Jack O’Brien: Free time
The packaging star – and winner of the 2023 Frieze Prize for Emerging Artist – continues his conceptual adventures in tying everyday materials together.
Maureen Paley, Hove, from 11 April to 20 June

Picture of the week

Photographs taken by astronauts generally tend to evoke feelings of awe and amazement, a sense of humanity’s smallness and transience in the face of geological time and the vastness of the galaxy. Many of the images from Artemis 2 this week — humanity’s first flight beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972 — evoke the same feelings. But this picture, of the Earth setting over the moon, is different, more ominous and threatening, more terrifying and desolate. Forget the pale blue, doe-eyed blobs of the rest of the Artemis II images, this is one for our times. Dark, depressing and incredibly scary.

What we learned

Cult 1950s comic hero Dan Dare is being rebooted

The architect behind the Tokyo Olympic Stadium has been chosen for the National Gallery, London’s new pavilion

Spanish politicians are unhappy with the request to transfer Pablo Picasso’s Guernica

The Mexican art world is not happy with plans to send Frida Kahlo’s works to Spain

Rebellious musician Arca turned to painting to combat burnout

Pet Shop Boys has a huge retrospective book on their career

An elegant Japanese printing instrument that unites artists around the world

South Korea’s rapidly developing architectural landmarks are amazing

Masterpiece of the week

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998
The lake in Friday the 13th represents the shock of grief, the pain of loss, and the way a calm surface can hide a vast world of darkness. And here she is in one of the most important paintings of the nineties. British illustrator Peter Doig saw the film in the 1980s and couldn’t put it down, painting various scenes – distorted, twisted and re-imagined – throughout the early part of his career. In this dark, stunningly drawn nighttime picture, a policeman tries to spot a figure on a lake. This figure is you, the viewer, looking back at it. Doig has always used his paintings to process the past, to understand how memories falter and fade but ultimately shape you. It’s a kind of emotional processing, where you take an image, a memory, a place, work on it, and rework it over and over again. Not for nostalgia, but to deal with it. In this painting, he addresses the way popular culture can act as a sign of innocence and youth, two things we are all losing, forever.
Tate Britain, London

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