The Air of Ideas brings together artists from Kate MacGarry Gallery in an 18th-century house in Rye, East Sussex, for a quirky summer group show featuring Lisa Milroy, Marcus Coates, and Francis Upritchard. The exhibition runs until 31 August at 301/2 High Street, Rye.
Also Showing
Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz – Close to Home presents Murtha’s moving photographs of working-class life in Elswick, Newcastle during an era of dereliction and decline, complemented by contemporary responses from Ryniewicz. The exhibition is at Baltic, Gateshead, from 4 July until 4 April.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, reveals the renowned French photographer’s experiments with colour from the 1930s to 1980s, a departure from his famous black-and-white work. Runs until 4 October.
Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal at the Freud Museum, London, extends its run, allowing more time to explore the British surrealist’s knowingly Freudian fun. On view until 10 August.
Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep at the Natural History Museum, London, offers a family summer blockbuster diving into seas crowded with lethal ancient reptiles including pliosaurs and mosasaurs. Runs until 3 January.
Image of the Week
Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! exhibition opened in Manchester featuring skeleton chandeliers, a real-life temple, and tonnes of buttons. The massive, ambitious takedown of colonial history, warfare, and the migrant crisis sees the Chinese artist at his most monumental.
What We Learned
- Artist Lydia Wood is on a mission to sketch every pub in London.
- A valuable Spanish painting thought stolen was found on the street by a man who liked its frame.
- People are queueing online for up to nine hours for tickets to see the Bayeux tapestry in London.
- Ana Mendieta’s art triumphs 30 years after her troubling death.
- The £1.3bn revamp of London’s Olympia is an Aztec-tinged, tiara-topped triumph.
- A David Bowie archive featuring saxophones, song charts, and a rejected Simpsons script is to tour the UK.
- John Hutton’s glass engraving at Coventry Cathedral has been damaged during the set-up for a music event.
- There’s plenty of free medieval art around if you know where to look.
Masterpiece of the Week
Saint Francis of Assisi with Angels by Sandro Botticelli, about 1475-80, at the National Gallery. It was genuinely hard for the young Botticelli to restrain his feeling for beauty. At the time he painted this homage to Francis, the medieval saint who preached poverty and reverence for nature, he was mingling with the Medici and absorbing their cult of pagan gods and lush love affairs. That sophistication threatens to destabilise this early work. Francis is a harrowed ascetic figure in brown robes, contemplating the cross with an intense, inward face resembling drawings by Botticelli’s rivalrous friend Leonardo da Vinci. The angels are pure Botticelli, with poetic, heavy eyes and wavy locks that would have entranced a Victorian aesthete. Even in a painting of the patron of poverty, Botticelli delights in precious courtly fashion.
