Samurai Erotica, a Sculpture of Metal and Flesh and the Big Flare by Jenny Holzer – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Samurai
An enormous and stunning journey into Japan’s past, with samurai armor so skillfully crafted that it appears mysteriously alive, as well as magnificent landscapes, evocative art and other arts that delighted the samurai between battles. Read the review here.
British Museum, London, from 3 February to 4 May

also appear

Julia Phillips
Uneasy couplings between metal and flesh in sculptures that include casts of the artist’s body.
Barbican Curve, London, until 19 April

New contemporaries
Kat Anderson, Hadas Auerbach, Deborah Lerner and other artists at the beginning of their careers.
South London Gallery until 12 April

Jenny Holzer
The groundbreaking political artist showcases her flamboyant lyrics and scathing statements.
20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, 31 January to 13 June

Quentin Blake
Beautiful pictures and whimsical images of aviation from the beloved illustrator.
Sherborne Hotel, Dorset, until 12 April

Picture of the week

From crying miners to birthday girls to a body healer and a meatpacker, portraits of working-class heroes from Richard Avedon’s iconic Westerns series are on display in a new exhibition curated by his granddaughter. Petra, pictured on her birthday, is seen here posing with money given to her by family and friends to mark the occasion. See more photos here.

What we learned

Robert Crumb elevates sexual deviance to an art form

Photographer Don McCullen has moved away from war toward the classical world

Sibylle Fendt embodies the intimate relationship between care and death

Pierre Huyghe added uncertainty to Berlin’s Berghain techno club

FORMER YBA Sue Webster celebrates her punk past in her latest painting

Niall McLaughlin is the deserving winner of the Grand Prize in Architecture

Artist Anne Imhoff released her first album

A new £1.5 million awards program has been launched to celebrate visual arts education in the UK

Nature photography can heal the soul

Masterpiece of the week

Armenia takes refuge With shepherds Annibale Carracci District

This is a scene from a poem that had a great impact in an era when the Catholic Church was trying to revive feelings of the Crusades. Director Torquato Tasso’s The Surrender of Jerusalem is a pseudo-medieval epic of chivalry and adventure with a strong religious theme that depicts Christian knights fighting Muslim enemies in the First Crusade. So far so simple, but this painting depicts Erminia, a Muslim woman who in Tasso’s poem falls in love with the Christian Tancred. She also wears male armor as she searches for him. This painter depicts her at the end of the classics-obsessed Renaissance, with ancient Roman-style armor, rather than the chain mail worn by crusaders. She takes off her feathered helmet, revealing her long hair and revealing that she is a woman. The shepherd provides her with shelter. It’s like the scene outside Rome with the Tiber flowing through it, in this moment of peace from a war epic.
National Gallery, London

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