Unleashing Junk Monuments, Guitar Player Buildings, and Horrific Rigo – Art Week | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

A memorial to the unimportant
With the birth of modernism, artists shifted their outlook from the heroic to the “unimportant.” This interest in everyday life continues, as Rachel Whiteread, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Guber and others demonstrate.
Pace Gallery, London, until 14 February

also appear

Lasting impressions
A century of publications by women including Faith Ringgold, Laura Knight, and Kathy Kollwitz.
V&A, London, until 27 September

Humphrey Ocean
Tranquil architectural views designed by former Kilburn guitarist and highways.
Gainsborough House, Suffolk, until 22 March

Tree performance
The great George Shaw appears in this survey of tree images in art.
The Whitworth, Manchester, until 4 April 2027

William Nicholson
Paintings of the Golden Summer before 1914 by a prominent British artist whose life spanned two centuries.
Palant House Gallery, Chichester, until 10 May

Picture of the week

When great artist Paula Rego saw Martin McDonagh’s shocking play about child torture, she struck up a heated correspondence with him and asked for more dark stories. She ransacked his basement to find them, and it was these cruel tales that inspired some of her best work. Read the full story.

What we learned

A previously unknown Renoir painting has sold for €1.8 million in Paris

Tate staff have begun a week-long strike over wages amid reports of workers using food banks

Turner Prize-winning sculptor Tony Cragg is good at dealing with selfie-takers

An exhibition in London will explore mental health and social connections in “polarised” times.

Artists go to great lengths to recreate trash

Three provocative works by Caravaggio raise the question: Who was the inspiration for the anarchist artist?

Tala Madani uses artificial intelligence-generated robotic babies to critique how women who give birth are treated

Actress Frances McDormand has put together a cradle-sized art project for adults

Together, Onyeka Igwe and Morgan Quaintance won the Jarman Award for Artists Working in Motion Pictures

Tom de Freston’s paintings of his pregnant and nude wife helped the couple through an emotional journey

Masterpiece of the week

Still life: A glass of wine, oysters and lemon by Jan van de Fieldy, 1656

Still life has attracted artists for thousands of years. Ancient Greek artists competed in drawing the most accurate bunches of grapes and depicting the food items that decorated homes in Pompeii. The genre was revived around 1600 by artists including Caravaggio and Jan Bruegel the Elder. By the time this painting was painted in Amsterdam in the 17th century, there was a thriving market for images that had neither story nor symbolic meaning—just finely focused attention on the yellow of a lemon peel, the way a wine glass holds light, and the silvery luster of open oyster shells. This humble arrangement of food and drink is actually humble pride: oysters may not have been hard to come by in sea-ringed Holland, but lemons were luxurious in northern Europe four centuries ago, and this is not a common wine glass but an expensive wine glass. Thus, with quiet peace of mind, the merchant can contemplate the picture of fleeting pleasures and earthly wealth, and look forward to supper.
National Gallery, London

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