Exhibition of the week
Pope.L: Hospital
This intense evocation of Pope.L’s provocative performances, which included sitting on a toilet nearly naked, eating the Wall Street Journal, has become a memorial after his death during the Christmas holidays.
South London Gallery until 11 February
Also showing
Project Art Works: Residential
Work by neurodivergent artists, presented by an organisation shortlisted for the 2021 Turner prize.
Baltic, Gateshead, until 25 February
Rosemarie Castoro: Carving Space
A survey of this New York sculptor who subverted the sterility of minimalism.
Mostyn, Llandudno, until 24 February
Christiane Baumgartner: There Goes the Sun
Eerie contemporary woodcuts of wintry suns glowing through bleak trees.
Strawberry Hill House, London, until 10 April
Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass
Films that both celebrate and question the classics of 20th-century cinema, including a radical new version of The Thief of Bagdad.
Dundee Contemporary Arts until 24 March
Image of the week
The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is unusual not just for its beauty but for its near-intact survival. In 1661, it was given to Trinity College Library, where it is on permanent display – and now forms the centrepiece of a mind-blowing immersive experience. Read the full article
What we learned
The immersive Book of Kells show reveals its psychedelic pages’ full glory
Yoko Ono and Frank Auerbach are among this year’s most anticipated exhibitions
A new museum dedicated to the art of illustration will open in 2025
Dante Gabriel Rossetti blamed tummy trouble for not delivering a painting on time
Giant pink rabbits and ball pits fill the Instagrammable Balloon Museum
The young woman in Robert Doisneau’s 1950 Paris kiss photo has died aged 93
Masterpiece of the week
The Morning Walk by Georges Seurat, probably 1885
We’ve got used to seeing the world in broken ways. Pixellated on TV screens or glimpsed from a car, reality is understood by us as molten chaos. But when Seurat painted this bright yet disintegrating scene in the 1880s, to see like this was utterly new and strange. He takes an almost classical theme, a calm, formal depiction of a woman walking by the River Seine, yet subjects what he sees to a pounding, scintillating analysis. Life becomes a field of potent but separated colours, a Brownian motion of energy-emitting atoms. Art, Seurat shows us here, is not just a pretty decoration. It is philosophy and it is science.
National Gallery, London
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