Exhibition of the week
Dreamachine
Your own brain creates the colours and shapes you see in this hallucinatory art experience that everyone experiences differently. Relax and accept the sublime.
• Murrayfield Ice Rink, Edinburgh international festival, until 25 September
Also showing
Nothing’s Guaranteed
An introduction to “Bosno-futurist” art from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 September
Arabella Ross and Carrie Stanley
Two painters who dive into semi-abstract colour and spontaneity.
• Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, until 29 January
Walter Sickert
There is still time to be shocked and impressed by this radical, strange pioneer of modern art.
• Tate Britain, London, until 18 September
Cancer Revolution
A survey of how treatment and knowledge of the feared disease has changed and is changing.
• Science Museum, London, until January
Image of the week
The Windrush legacy is not just a London story. In celebration of Jamaica’s 60th anniversary of independence, the Leeds West Indian community have chosen to mark their contribution to the city’s culture with a string of arts and cultural events in the Out of Many festival. Opening with the Rebellion to Romance exhibition, curator Susan Pitter celebrates the 1970s and 80s, gathering family portraits and ephemera from that era to show “that every time we keep something – a ticket to a show, a poster, whatever – it helps us tell a story. And nobody else can tell our story the way we can.” Read the full story here.
What we learned
Architects are leading a global movement towards ‘creative reuse’
Veteran photographer of Americana Henry Horenstein took inspiration from a surprising source
The annual iPhone Photography award winners were announced
Johnny Depp is planning a film about Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani
The Marble Arch Mound architects have moved on to Albania
Trevor Mathison is making music out of a London art gallery
Robert Parks photographed the oil-workers who fuelled America
Masterpiece of the week
Christen Købke: The Northern Drawbridge to the Citadel in Copenhagen (1837)
The cold clear pink sky gives what seems at first a carefully realistic scene a dreamlike power. It is as if Købke sees this place perfectly in his mind’s eye but with an electrifying, hallucinatory addition of fantastic light. In fact Købke is depicting his childhood home in a part of Copenhagen that was previously a fortress. For him this drawbridge and these buildings are deeply familiar and meaningful. Just like John Constable, who depicted his “boyhood scenes” all his life, this Danish artist immerses himself in his past to create a curiously intense landscape. His observation slides into abstract colour effects as the strong red of the bridge’s frame doubles the force of the rosy sky while reacting with the green foliage. This is not outer nature but inner fire, a jewel of Romanticism.
• National Gallery, London
Don’t forget
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