Windrush heroes, knotted ropes and Macca’s Beatles snaps – the week in art

Leonor Antunes gets knotted, Carrie Mae Weems questions Black representation and Paul McCartney shares his early adventures with the Fab Four – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Leonor Antunes
This Portuguese sculptor who lives in Berlin presents knotted ropes and a cork floor in a minimalist meditation on women’s artistic traditions.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from 24 June to 8 October.

Also showing

Carrie Mae Weems Reflections for Now
Four decades of questioning the representation of Black people in America through photography and video.
Barbican, London, until 3 September.

Gabriel Massan and Collaborators: Third World: The Bottom Dimension
Brazilian artists use digital surrealism to examine the colonial legacy.
Serpentine North Gallery, London, until 22 October.

Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation
Portraits of the Windrush generation commissioned by King Charles from artists including Honor Titus and Amy Sherald.
Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, until 18 September.

Paul McCartney photographs 1963–64 – Eyes of the Storm
McCartney’s photos of the early adventures of the Beatles are intimate and funny.
National Portrait Gallery, London, from 28 June to 1 October.

Image of the week

Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, anonymous.
Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, anonymous. Photograph: Compton Verney

A “highly unusual” painting has been saved for the UK in recognition of its “outstanding significance” for the study of race and gender in 17th-century Britain. The anonymous artist’s portrait of two women – one black and one white, depicted as companions and equals with similar dress, hair and jewellery – has been bought by Compton Verney, an award-winning gallery in Warwickshire. Titled Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, the work, part of the English school dating to about 1650, appears to be a moralising picture, criticising the use of cosmetics in altering a person’s natural appearance. Read the full story.

What we learned

Zinzi Minott will show her Windrush film every year until there are reparations

Françoise Gilot was a truly great painter whose legacy should be recognised

Tracking glasses reveal our eyes are drawn to Bosch’s hell

Ordinary life can make for sublime art

Tracey Emin’s doors welcome you to the new National Portrait Gallery

Nicholas Blair captured gay joy and defiance in 80s America

Footballer Juan Mata is trying his hand at performance art

A whole neighbourhood was destroyed to make way for the Pentagon

Brian Aris has photographed all of British society, from rock icons to royalty

Masterpiece of the week

St Jerome in a Rocky Landscape by workshop of Joachim Patinir, about 1515

St Jerome in a Rocky Landscape by workshop of Joachim Patinir, about 1515

You can lose yourself enjoyably in this fantasy landscape of towering blue rocks, a cave, a little village poised picturesquely on a mountain ledge, with a castle in the distance and a storm over the sea. It clearly doesn’t look much like Belgium where Patinir lived. Where did he get his ideas? He was friends with the Antwerp artist Quinten Massys who adopted his two daughters after he died in around 1524. Massys definitely knew about the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci because he based his painting An Old Woman (“The Ugly Duchess”) on one of them. Did he and Patinir also look at the Italian polymath’s dreamlike visions of rocks and mountains? This definitely has a resemblance to Leonardo’s surrealistic imagination, as you can see by comparing it with his Virgin of the Rocks in the same museum.
National Gallery, London.

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Contributor

Jonathan Jones

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