Exhibition of the week
Leigh Bowery!
The performance artist, alternative fashion icon and all-round iconoclast gets a retrospective that should be an emotional encounter.
• Tate Modern, London, 27 February to 31 August
Also showing
Luminous
A multicoloured light show by Luxmuralis turns Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpiece into an immersive artwork.
• St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 22 February to 28 February
Resistance
Steve McQueen selects his favourite photos of protest in Britain, from the 1900s to the 21st century.
• Turner Comtemporary, Margate, 22 February to 1 June
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
A celebration of the renowned style magazine and its impact on the postmodern age.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 18 May
Verena Loewensberg
Hard-edged, strong-coloured paintings by this Swiss “concrete” abstractionist.
• Hauser & Wirth, London, 25 February to 17 April
Image of the week
From the late 1950s, South African photographer Ernest Cole chronicled the horrors of racial segregation for publications such as the New York Times. He fled his home country in 1966, arriving in New York at the height of the American civil rights movement. He was initially impressed by the advances the country had made, but he soon became disillusioned by the reality of racial division in the US. His works, which were recently rediscovered and are now the focus of a new documentary, focused on the parallels between apartheid in his native country and segregation in the US.
What we learned
Staffordshire firms are fighting to keep the county’s ceramics tradition alive
A workshop producing fake Picassos and Rembrandts has been found in Rome
Artists in the US are urging the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back Trump’s restrictions
Indigenous art is coming to London after the Venice Biennale backlash
The political street artist Peter Drew is posting his workouts in the name of narcissism
A German court has ruled in a copyright case that Birkenstocks are not works of art
Masterpiece of the week
Ulysses after the Shipwreck by Jean-Charles Cazin, circa 1800-84
The Odyssey by Homer is not just a very early literary masterpiece but a precociously modern one. Its hero Odysseus, often known, as here, by the Latin version of his name Ulysses, is driven from one peril to another as he tries to get home from the Trojan war. Meanwhile, his wife, Penelope, and son Telemachus are persecuted by suitors seeking to take over his house. There are deep psychological resonances that make it more like a novel than a string of magic tales. In this painting, a French artist from the era of Zola homes in on that realism to portray Ulysses plunged into introspective thought on a sunny but bleak beach. The harshly lit rocks and low hills covered in sparse grass add to his solitary mood as he contemplates a shipwreck that killed his crew, stranding him far from home. This painting’s blend of prosaic reality with Greek myth may seem eccentric – yet the same idea structures James Joyce’s great modernist work Ulysses.
• National Gallery, London
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