Exhibition of the week
Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons
A party of psychedelic balloons by the veteran pop artist makes a fitting first art show in the huge new venue of Manchester’s Factory International.
• Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 28 August.
Also showing
Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes
This celebration of Peckham’s strong links with Nigeria features artists including Victor Ehikhamenor, Adeyemi Michael and Yinka Shonibare.
• South London Gallery, London, from 5 July to 29 October.
Ryan Gander: The Find
As part of Manchester international festival, Gander has created a citywide treasure hunt for hidden glittering tokens.
• Across Manchester until 16 July.
Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
Powerful prints by one of the first geniuses of mass media art, who circulated his multiplied images more than 500 years ago.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 10 March.
Sam’s Eden
Artists Yarli Allison, Michaela Razafima Nash and Suds McKenna explore the idea of queer sanctuary.
• CCA Derry-Londonderry from 1 July to 9 September.
Image of the week
A new bronze statue at Rotterdam Centraal station by British artist Thomas J Price, Moments Contained, depicts not a man who did something, a naked white sylph or a colonial hero but an ordinary-looking black woman. Price said, in a video for his gallery Hauser & Wirth, that Rotterdam’s image is a fictional character intended to connect. “There’s this sense of containing oneself and psychological tension,” he added. “The scale is to challenge our current understandings of monuments, to critique this idea of status and value within society: who gets to be seen, to be represented. It’s trying to make viewers more aware of what we’ve been told about power, materials and value.” Read the full story.
What we learned
Gustav Klimt is record-breaking
The man who ate a $120,000 artwork fessed up
Vermeer’s Guitar Player was considered too fragile to travel
Paul McCartney’s photographs showed the world change overnight
The new National Portrait Gallery is a breath of fresh air
Jarvis Cocker and Colm Tóibín are among Artangel’s famous fans
Two street artists have claimed responsibility for hoax Banksy in Glasgow
Erwin Wurm’s sculptures twist the everyday into the hilariously abstract
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating the work of the city’s public school students
Masterpiece of the week
The Birth of Venus by Peter Paul Rubens, c1632-3
This is a design for a silver basin for Charles I of England – but it survives as a painting in its own right because the baroque genius Rubens has filled it with realistic, plump fleshy details and had fun creating the glinting appearance of a shining three-dimensional object. It imagines one of the most beloved themes in mythological art. Venus, goddess of love – the Roman version of the Greek divinity Aphrodite – was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Her aquatic origin in which she arises, adult, from the waves was depicted by the likes of Titian and Botticelli. Rubens draws on that tradition to create an erotic bowl, where nymphs robustly cavort, that would have added a sensual flash of silver when the finished artefact was used at banquets in Charles I’s Whitehall Palace.
• National Gallery, London.
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