Petal Passion, Ultra-Surreal Polaroids, and Billy Childish’s ‘California’ – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Handpicked: Flower Drawing from 1900 to Today
Jim and Helen Eddy, founders of Kettle’s Yard, cared as much about the cut flowers in their gallery as they did the art. This show highlights artists who share a passion for flowers, from Henri Rousseau to Lubina Hamid.
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, from 25 April to 6 September

also appear

Billy Childish: This is the universe…big, isn’t it?
The garage rock star does his hazy expressionist work with new paintings of the California desert.
Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate, from 26 April to 14 June

Katarina Gross: I set off, I walked fast
The master of giant building-sized paintings returns, with more massive site-specific interventions, and some smaller works as well.
White Cube Bermondsey, London, from April 22 to May 31

Les Karim: Fictcryptokrimsographs
Very strange and very surreal Polaroid photographs produced in the mid-1970s that undermine any idea of ​​the reality of photography.
Grace Muse, London, until 23 May

RushElle Crowther: Liquid Trust
Scent-based installation art about bodies and the military-industrial complex in this young artist’s first institutional show.
Chisenhall Gallery, London, until 14 June

Picture of the week

Grenada’s flora is beautiful: colourful, lush, intense, tropical. But Oscar-winning film director and Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen saw something else in the Caribbean nation’s flowers when he went to film it in 2024: signs of historical trauma and colonial pain. They are “constant witnesses to turmoil and upheaval. In a landscape of population change, they have been constant. Sometimes the most terrible things happen in the most beautiful places. Such is the perversity of life.” See more images from his new photography book, Bounty, here.

What we learned

Someone in Paris won a Picasso prize in a raffle

The Bridget Jones statue in Leicester Square has been made permanent

The new V&A East collection is impressive, and its architecture isn’t too bad either

A new exhibition at Compton Verney showcases the stunning embroidery works of Elizabeth Allen

Abidjan Art Week shows that the art scene in Côte d’Ivoire is thriving

The acclaimed art historian spent 46 years sitting with Frank Auerbach

The gay art of Peter Hujar and Paul Thicke was groundbreaking

93-year-old artist Joan Simmel wanted her work to be sassy

Masterpiece of the week

Sil Fleur, Monochrome to Receipt (white), 1999
Sometimes, all you need is an idea. In 1999, British thinker Sil Floer – who sadly died at the end of last year – had a brilliant idea. What if she could show color in your mind, and paint a picture in your mind, without picking up a brush or a camera, without even creating a work of art. All she had to do was go shopping. Every item listed here in this 2009 edition is in white. Read it and your mind will picture flour, cream cheese, eggs, and rice – the pictures appear as if you were looking at the pictures; Whiteness fills your head. What an amazing trick. But the work also tells the story of its making. He tells you that she did this shopping in Camden, London, and that the manager on duty was a man called Jim Donovan, and because your mind is already thinking about all these white items, you are now thinking about Camden Road, in the weather of June 9, 2009, about Jim in his tie. This work of art is not just an idea. It is not even a mental canvas conjured by a concept. It’s a whole world contained in one receipt for Morrisons.
Tate Collection. Currently on loan as part of YBA and Beyond: British Art from the 1990s from the Tate Collection at the National Arts Center in Tokyo.

Subscribe to our weekly arts newsletter

If you don’t already receive our regular art and design news roundup via email, please subscribe here.

Enter touches

If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters, please email newsletters@theguardian.com