This week’s exhibition
Edinburgh Arts Festival
Edinburgh’s festival season offers an incredible range of artistic productions, with stunning shows from Ibrahim Mahama and Chris Ofili standing out, and pastoral settings from Hayley Barker and Sir John Lavery.
9th-25th August, various venues in Edinburgh
Showing
Money Talks: Art, Society, and Power
An exploration of art and money, featuring work by Andy Warhol, Banksy and Grayson Perry.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 9 August – 5 January
Pirate
A children’s dream summer exhibition, the history of maritime crime will fascinate adults too.
National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, until 6 January
Collecting Contemporary Art: From David Hockney to Cornelia Parker
A survey of contemporary printmaking, showing that etching, engraving and other techniques are still going strong.
British Museum, London, until 29 September
Turn Up the Volume: The Power of Music
An interactive exhibition about the science and technology of music, fun for all ages.
Science Museum, London, until 1 September
Picture of the week
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Art for Change has partnered with When We All Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded by Michelle Obama, to increase voter participation. Sprinkled with pieces like Charis Reed’s playful interpretation of the word “VOTE” against a starry sky background and Rico Gatson’s colorful tribute to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, each piece in the collection takes on a new context. Read the full story
What I learned
Jamie Hawkesworth’s photographs offer a surprising vision of Britishness
Rachel Cusk and Hari Kunzru have written some of the best novels about art.
Sculptor Hany Armanius is the perfect artist to reopen the Henry Moore Institute
Henry Orlik, the once-respected Surrealist painter, is holding his first exhibition in 50 years.
Piero della Francesca was one of the most charismatic artists of all time.
Buckingham Palace opens blockbuster exhibition of Renaissance paintings
The fourth new Banksy work to appear in London this week was stolen within hours
Sefton Samuels, photographer who captured life in the North of England, dies aged 93
Nori Richter won the Natsia Prize for Indigenous Art for her “truly awe-inspiring” painting.
This week’s highlights
Vermeer’s “Young Woman at a Virginal,” c.1670-72
If any work by Vermeer supports the theory that he used some kind of early photographic equipment, it is surely this painting. The room in which the young woman stands playing the keyboard is boxy and uncluttered, like a set in Vermeer’s studio. Perhaps he captured the image in a brightly projected camera obscura, traced its shapes, and then filled them in with paint. But why? It would still require extraordinary skill to transform such a view into this scene, with its subtle colors and textures and the enigmatic expression of the woman gazing at us. No, this is not a photograph. This is a work of genius, and beneath its simplicity lies a deep poetry in every subtle shadow.
On loan to the National Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
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