Exhibition of the week
Acaye Kerunen
Richly textured, historically and socially suggestive sculptures and wall hangings by this Ugandan writer and artist.
• Pace Gallery, London, until 22 February
Also showing
David Hockney
As Bradford begins its year as UK city of culture, this show looks at how its most famous artist has experimented with photography.
• Science and Media Museum, Bradford, until 18 May
Condo London 2025
London’s art gallery scene kickstarts the year with a collage of collaborations between artists, enterprises and venues.
• London galleries from 18 January to 15 February
Jannis Kounellis
A look at how the revered artist of the real started out by drawing, before he worked with parrots.
• Sprovieri, London, from 17 January to 28 March
Jake Grewal
A queer painterly take on the Romantic tradition of the panoramic landscape.
• Studio Voltaire, London, until 13 April
Image of the week
When Yannick and Ben Jakober’s daughter died aged 19, they poured their grief into art. The couple transformed their small set of portraits of children into the Nins, a one-of-its-kind collection. Numbering 165 paintings of children from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it includes works by old masters such as Ottavio Leoni, Frans Pourbus the Younger and François Quesnel, commissioned to capture the offspring of European royalty and the aristocracy in their most vulnerable years. Many did not live to adulthood. Read the full story here
What we learned
A bijou, historical church is the perfect setting for a contemporary art exhibition
Oliviero Toscani, the photographer behind Benetton’s provocative ads, has died
Frank Auerbach is set to have a ‘homecoming’ show in Berlin, the city he fled to escape the Nazis
A couple poured their grief into collecting child portraits
The textile artist Diedrick Brackens makes poetry out of yarn
There were Kafka portals and concrete phalluses at this year’s New Contemporaries show
Masterpiece of the week
Susannah and the Elders by Ludovico Carracci, 1616
Susannah, close to us at the front of a compressed, shadowy garden scene, hunches over to hide herself when two voyeuristic old men surprise her as she bathes. One pulls back her blue covering, allowing the Elders and us to see her bare upper body – but not too much. In today’s terms, this painting suggests an ambivalence about men looking at female nudity. But what did it mean to Carracci and his contemporaries? Were they worried about the male gaze? More likely they fretted about the sin of lust, in an era when the Counter-Reformation was intensifying Catholic belief and making new religious demands of art. Nudity had been lavishly depicted in 16th-century art, from Titian to Michelangelo. Carracci is more careful or, perhaps, hypocritical. Yet this new religious age gave women ways to visualise their oppression, with Carracci’s contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi giving Susannah an autobiographical twist in her repeated versions of the story.
• National Gallery, London
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