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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jonathan Jones

Monet in Lego, modern art’s birth and Hockney’s bigger leash – the week in art

To See the Guts by Daisy Parris.
Eerie emotional depths … To See the Guts by Daisy Parris. Photograph: Daisy Parris/Sim Smith, London and Carl Freedman Gallery

Exhibition of the week

Daisy Parris
Paintings that dredge eerie emotional depths from sensual layers of abstract colour, with visceral scrawled messages pointing to the sources of their longing. The biggest are the best.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, until 16 April.

Also showing

After Impressionism
An exhibition that includes Munch, Klimt and Picasso along with heroes of French art from Degas to Matisse can’t fail to fascinate. Read our review.
National Gallery, London, 25 March to 13 August.

London Original Print Fair
Tracey Emin and David Shrigley show new prints while Rembrandt exhibits older ones, in this festival of the reproduced image from the 15th century to now.
Somerset House, London, 30 March to 2 April.

Ian Kiaer
New works by this poetic and suggestive, minimal artist that meditate on modern architecture.
Alison Jacques Gallery, London, until 29 April.

Portraits of Dogs
Artists including Thomas Gainsborough, David Hockney and Leonardo da Vinci portray their furry friends.
Wallace Collection, London, 29 March to 15 October.

Image of the week

Monet’s Water Lilies, in lego, by Ai Weiwei.

About 650,000 Lego pieces, in 22 colours, comprise this 15-metre-long recreation of Monet’s Water Lilies, which is at the centre of Ai Weiwei’s biggest UK show in eight years, opening next month. The show explores tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless – and also includes a sculpture of an iPhone that has been cut out of a jade axe head. Read the full story here.

What we learned

Police found an unknown Jackson Pollock painting worth up to £44m

The Met is reclassifying Russian art as Ukrainian – but not everyone is convinced

Artists are fighting back against AI

Booker winner Ben Okri is swapping his pen for the canvas

The public are socking it to Westminster Abbey’s Cosmati pavement

Gilbert and George are opening a shrine to themselves

A Finnish artist goes undercover at big corporations and creates toe-curlingly awkward situations

Andy Warhol’s lesser-spotted textile designs are getting a rare show

A Sudanese artist named his exhibition after his bill collector

Masterpiece of the week

Camille Pissarro, The Côte des Bœufs at L’Hermitage, 1877

Pissarro, The Côte des Bœufs at L’Hermitage, 1877.

The ideal of the impressionist movement was to see everything instantly, in a glimpse that catches life on the move. But, in this painting, one of the movement’s founders is aiming for something stranger: the opposite of a view. Our vision is blocked by trees like bars across a window. They just appear randomly, as stuff does, getting between us and any sense of an all-encompassing vista. The houses through the trees don’t look that special, even if we could fully see them. Pissarro suggests the world is full of objects, none of them necessarily more important or meaningful than others, in this unmistakably modern painting.
National Gallery, London

Don’t forget

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