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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jonathan Jones

A walk-in wedding cake, Kiefer’s impossible task and a Bloomsbury master – the week in art

Wedding Cake by Joana Vasconcelos at Waddesdon Manor.
Sensational … Wedding Cake by Joana Vasconcelos at Waddesdon Manor. Photograph: © Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

Exhibition of the week

Joana Vasconcelos: Wedding Cake
A giant wedding cake that you can walk inside, by this visionary and surrealistic artist, should make for a truly sensational summer experience.
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, from 18 June to 26 October.

Also showing

Anselm Kiefer
James Joyce’s impossible novel Finnegans Wake provides the inspiration for the great German artist’s new show.
White Cube Bermondsey, London, from 7 June to 20 August.

Beatriz Milhazes
Wheels within wheels, chains of stars and kaleidoscopes of colour from the celebrated Brazilian abstract painter.
Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 10 September.

Stephen Tomlin
This little-known sculptor of the Bloomsbury Group created busts of Virginia Woolf and others. Is he a neglected modern great?
Philip Mould Gallery, London, from 5 June to 11 August.

Gruppenausstellung
Martin Creed and Cindy Sherman are among the artists celebrating this gallery’s Zurich origins in a summer show, Swiss style.
Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, from 3 June to 1 January.

Image of the week

Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder at the Baltic, Gateshead.
Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder at the Baltic, Gateshead. Photograph: Reece Straw © 2023 Baltic

Circularity is the means, the message and the ruminative shape of Larry Achiampong’s films. The British-Ghanaian artist, born in London in 1984, is perpetually roving through time and place: the past and the present, land mass and ocean, colonial and social history. He once projected an animation on a giant screen at Piccadilly Circus that could stand as his personal avatar: a figure in a helmet and suit who might come from outer space, the boy who fell to unjust Earth. You see variations on this figure all through his new show at the Baltic in Gateshead. Read the full review.

What we learned

A Florida art dealer has been jailed for selling fakes of Warhol, Matisse and others

Galleries are wrestling with the changing politics of art

Flaming June is returning to her London home

Portraits were an integral part of the marriage market in Renaissance Europe

Women’s art has been crowded out of galleries and public spaces

Katie Cuddon’s sculptures explore the ‘incredibly physical’ mother-baby relationship

A reverend was saved from heroin and sex work by sculpting

A playground of sexual fetishism came to London

Hurvin Anderson brought barbershops to life

The devil is everywhere in Chris Ofili’s Seven Deadly Sins

Masterpiece of the week

Avarice by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1556

Avarice, study for a print; 1556 Drawn by: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder channels the fantastic world of an earlier artist, Hieronymus Bosch, in this visual romp with a moral message. Bosch died in Brabant in 1516 after establishing a reputation all over Europe for his delirious altarpieces in which demons and monsters overrun every day reality. Bruegel was born a decade or so later (the date is uncertain), in the same region of northern Europe. This drawing shows him lay claim to Bosch’s outrageous territory. The bizarre sci-fi architecture and crowds of peasants and demonic beings echo such triptychs by Bosch as The Last Judgment and Temptation of Saint Anthony. But while many artists merely imitated these works, Bruegel is learning and thinking as he forges his own original genius.
British Museum, London.

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