As cities emptied on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion, artist Zhanna Kadyrova’s defiant concrete sculpture began its odyssey to this year’s festival

On a perfect spring day in Paris, the deer is first visible in the distance, poised between an avenue of just-budding plane trees in the 7th arrondissement. Its head is raised, its body poised. Seen there among the trees, it really could be a wild animal. In reality, it is a concrete deer, and not even a particularly naturalistic one, since it has the distinct look of origami about it. The sculpture is a play of scale and weight, as if feather-light folded paper has been enlarged and transformed into heavy concrete.

The deer is strapped to a flat-bed truck, and it is being driven into the grand modernist headquarters of Unesco, the UN agency that looks after heritage, culture and education. It will stand there for a day in its gardens, with Alexander Calder’s Spirale for company and the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. It is the last stop on a long overland journey across eastern, central and western Europe before it crosses the Venetian lagoon and docks in Venice for the 2026 art biennale, where, from this month, it will be the most prominent component of Ukraine’s national pavilion.

A revelatory Zurbarán show proves him the equal of Goya and Picasso, Angel Otero takes up a Somerset residency and Daiga Grantina brings nature to abstraction – all in your weekly dispatch

Zurbarán
A mind-bending, revelatory exhibition packed with extraordinary loans from the Prado and other top museums that prove this painter belongs with Goya and Picasso as a Spanish great. Read the review.
• National Gallery, London, 2 May to 23 August

Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex
The late great land artist’s alfresco metal and concrete works are richly engaging and elemental – but the gallery material indoors lacks some heft

It pays to think big if you’re an artist. You know, zoom out and try to get away from the minutiae of life, the tedium of the everyday, and think on a bit more of a universal scale instead. Land artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a master at it; at using her work to place the body, and wider humanity, in a global, cosmic context. Holt and the other land artists of her generation – people like Michael Heizer, Richard Long and her partner, Robert Smithson – wanted to break out of the restrictions of paint and canvas, stone and chisel, gallery and museum. Land, nature, the world itself, was the medium.

Goodwood is a fine setting for the biggest UK exhibition of her work to date – an expansive, lush estate in the middle of the rolling West Sussex countryside. There are two big sculptural installations placed around the grounds, Ventilation System and Hydra’s Head. In the first, a huge metallic mechanism pokes out of the vegetation around the main gallery; big tubular aluminium pipes, all interconnected, snaking their way around the place and back into the building.

Highlights of this year’s international photography festival in Kyoto include Linder Sterling’s exclamatory collages, a retrospective of groundbreaking Daido Moriyama and a journey though apartheid South Africa with Ernest Cole

Kyotographie is Japan’s foremost festival of international photography. Held each spring since 2013, each edition has a different theme – and this year it is “Edge”.

It is a broad enough theme to allow for some freedom in the curation while evoking a sense of tension across the 14 exhibitions in the main Kyotographie festival.

An untitled image by Daido Moriyama that exemplifies his use of are-bure-boke. © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

What began as a tiny space above the founder’s stables became the beating heart of the city’s performing arts. Its leader Jimmy Fay reflects on recent hits and reveals what audiences can expect from the theatre’s anniversary year

‘The Lyric gives voice to everyone in Northern Ireland,” says the theatre’s boss, Jimmy Fay. “It’s a beacon.” Fay views the 2026 programme, celebrating 75 years of the Lyric, as an opportunity to showcase current creative talent, as well as honouring the theatre’s past.

One of the plays from the repertoire that Fay was keen to revive is Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, from 1983. With a cast including Marie Jones, the new production – which runs in May – is directed by Dan Gordon, who performed in the original. Reid’s play traces the daily lives of Protestant working-class women in Belfast across three decades, from the second world war to the Troubles, with humour and poignancy.

Lismore Castle Arts, County Waterford, Ireland
There are paintings of beatniks, jazz players, an African emperor and much else besides – and all of them come with a chair. So pull one up and treat yourself to a deeply satisfying viewing experience

The gallery appears to have been set for a party. Mismatched chairs are scattered through the space – ornate gothic throne, wing-backed recliner, stackable school chair. Each points towards a white window painted on to the wall, into which one of 43 equally miscellaneous paintings has been inserted. These paintings are the other party guests, and you must decide who to sit with.

It is a ragtag bunch, and so I decide to start with the people I recognise. But on my way to meet a portrait by Denzil Forrester of the young Haile Selassie, its surface resembling scuffed and polished stone, I am distracted by the glitter of light from a small work by Andrew Cranston. It comes from a young woman who seems to have been transplanted from Dumbarton into a glamorous late Vuillard, her coat shimmering like the scales of a fish caught by late summer sun. So I take the leather-backed chair in front of it, and become engrossed in its story of a beatnik couple living a tarnished late-summer dream, the woman looking straight out at me, over her seated partner, through a veil of shadow.

The artist started with graffiti at 13 in São Paulo. Now, he samples motifs from mythology and his vast, fantastical paintings have taken over the walls of the South London Gallery

Paulo Nimer Pjota was 15 when he sold his first painting and already a three-year veteran. “I don’t really know what life is like without painting,” the 37-year-old Brazilian artist tells me. “It is in everything I do, the movies that I watch, the books that I read. They might not have anything to do with art, but I can find something in them that I might be able to use.”

Pjota’s studio, which once served as his bedsit before he got married and had a son, is in a quiet neighbourhood of São Paulo: there are shelves lined with gourds, skulls, postcards and other trinkets, a pair of skateboards hang on the wall and a desk overflows with tubes of paint. A pile of sketches he made when he was a teenager, discovered at his parents’ house, sit among this productive clutter.

In the early 20th century, books became a meaningful symbol of freedom and democracy for the US, UK and their allies. A new exhibition in New York showcases colorful posters encouraging the public to donate and help supply soldiers with reading material. Reading Under Fire: Arming Minds & Hearts During Wartime is on display until 1 November at Poster House. All words and images from Poster House and curator Molly Guptill Manning

They’ve been imprisoned, tortured and spied upon. Now dissidents from Europe’s last dictatorship are bringing the sights, sounds, smells and even tastes of brutal repression to the world’s biggest festival of art

In a studio down a residential road in west Warsaw, a group of former political prisoners are cutting golden stems of wheat to 90cm lengths and stacking them, ready to be shipped to the Venice Biennale. A giant ball made of books banned in the neighbouring country of Belarus – Harry Potter, Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an illustrated history of kink – rests on the claw of a bulldozer. There is the sound of laughter, organ music and an angle-grinder, as surveillance cameras are attached to a towering iron crucifix.

This is Official. Unofficial. Belarus., the first major art project by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT). Unusually, this work by the exiled troupe has no performance element but has instead been created by painters, sculptors, composers and even the man recently voted world’s best chef. Rasmus Munk has been concocting a dish at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen that will taste of detention under an authoritarian regime, the subject of the entire installation. A scent has been commissioned, too: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, laid with rotting flowers.

As the library turns 200, lead curator Elise Edmonds and her team have picked out 200 objects from the 6m in its collection for a new exhibition

Equally inspired by childbirth manuals, Georgia O’Keeffe and her own hormones, pregnancy and motherhood, Hollowell paints beautiful anatomical abstractions. She opens up about her cosmic birth and out-of-body experience

‘It’s magical,” says Loie Hollowell. “It’s such good timing!” The artist, speaking via Zoom from her studio in Queens, New York, is referring to the Artemis II moon mission. Little did she know, when she named her latest painting series Overview Effect, after the term used by astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space and the profound feelings of awe and interconnectedness it provokes, that she’d be coinciding with this space odyssey. But she is not surprised anyone would want to leave Earth for a while. “We’re having so many problems here,” she says.

Overview Effect, currently at London’s Pace Gallery, features large-scale canvases combining twin concave and convex sculpted circles. If you folded the canvasses in half vertically, the halves would fit perfectly together. The works, which radiate outwards in rings of glorious colour that are both vibrant and soothing, are a continuation of earlier works focusing on pregnancy and birth through abstraction. Her Split Orb paintings and Dilation Stage series of pastel drawings responded to the difficult birth of her son in a New York hospital. Overview Effect is a result of her daughter’s easier arrival: a “cosmic” home birth that she found far more empowering.

Show curated by Edward Enninful will highlight era’s ‘do it yourself’ attitude and shift focus away from Cool Britannia

Steve McQueen’s first major film, a Chris Ofili painting in tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence and images of clubbers at the Haçienda will be exhibited at Tate Britain as part of its 90s exhibition.

The show will explore art and fashion during a decade that reshaped Britain’s cultural identity and “established conditions that are still with us”, said Edward Enninful, the former editor of British Vogue who is curating the exhibition.

Bruce Asbestos unleashes a mischievous monster, Alan Charlton shows off 50 years of monochrome mastery and Lady With a Guitar gets a fresh perspective – all in your weekly dispatch

Bruce Asbestos: Bootleg Shreg 2
The guy who put a huge inflatable snail in Tate’s Turbine Hall brings his wacky comic style to Exeter for a show about Shreg, a green ogre that breaches absolutely zero copyright rules.
• Exeter Phoenix Gallery, from 25 April to 20 June

The 1980s band are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year – but why does singer Sade Adu’s pared-back look still resonate in 2026?

Earlier this month it was announced that Sade, the British group fronted by Sade Adu that found fame in the 80s and 90s, would be inducted into the 2026 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And although the music is indisputably worthy of such a distinction, if there were a similar accolade for style, Adu would have been inducted a long time ago.

With her scraped-back hair, red lipstick, hoop earrings and penchant for simple black dresses or denim and polo necks, she has become the last word in understated – but somehow unattainable – style.

While the population of southern Lebanon have sometimes felt abandoned by their own state, a show in London told their stories and celebrated their resistance

In one room of London’s Palestine House, a large screen plays looped news footage from southern Lebanon. Tanks and armoured vehicles plough their way through a rural landscape of hills and villages, amid frequent interruptions of mortar fire. As a person turns away from the screen, she says that “it’s like watching the news now”.

For all its similarities to current events, the archival video actually dates from 2000 – the year of Israel’s withdrawal from the region, following an 18-year-long military occupation. Another corner of the room plays host to broadsheet pages from newspapers of the time, including a front-page report from the Guardian’s then Middle East correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg.

In the 1980s ‘the Antwerp Six’ put Flanders on the fashion map. Now a major new exhibition celebrates the designers’ legacy and provides the perfect excuse to visit Belgium’s vibrant second city

You know you’re in a city that takes its fashion seriously when even the Virgin Mary is dressed head to toe in couture. A short walk from Antwerp’s old town, with its ornate medieval guild houses and cobblestone streets, is the baroque church of St Andrews. Like many of the city’s Catholic churches, it has beautiful stained glass windows, an exuberantly carved wooden pulpit and more artworks by Flemish masters than you can shake an incense stick at. But we’re here to pay homage to an art form of a different kind.

In a quiet chapel, an elegant 16th-century wooden statue of the Madonna is clothed not in her usual blue cloak, but a dress of pale gauzy fabric, trimmed with a collar of white pigeon feathers, custom made by renowned Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester. It’s a bold statement but one that’s entirely in-keeping with a city where a love of fashion seems woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Portraits of South African activists and the enigmatic silhouettes of Bill Brandt join a selection from more than 70 galleries at Aipad: The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from 22-26 April

The acclaimed author has spent two decades taking pictures of the Pink Floyd guitarist on tour and in the studio – an experience that still gives her chills

Jeu de Paume, Paris
The peerless chronicler of everyday absurdity did not live to see this exhibition, but it is a dazzling final chapter, showing his irresistible good humour growing darker

I didn’t know Martin Parr very well, but the last time I spoke with him, two months before he died in December last year, he told me about his forthcoming exhibition at Jeu de Paume. He wasn’t subtle in adding that the Guardian never reviewed his exhibitions. I wonder now if he knew that the exhibition, titled Global Warning, would be his swansong. I wonder whether he knew he’d never get to see it.

Parr was always popular in France. It might be because the French loved his ability to mock the English, but in the end Parr mocked everyone, including himself. When his work was criticised in the UK as classist or sneering, Parr could cross the channel and seek refuge in a nation where no one seemed to read his work that way. The show at Jeu de Paume is set to be the museum’s most visited on record.

Museum says The Music is Black is part of a push to reposition scene as central to UK’s cultural history

Jacqueline Springer is standing in the middle of the V&A’s new exhibition space looking wistfully at a pair of drainpipe trousers, a tailored suit jacket and a porkpie hat, which create the unmistakable silhouette of Pauline Black, lead singer of the 2 Tone group the Selector.

Springer is the curator of the V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black, a landmark survey of Black British music, which opens this weekend. It starts with the early drumbeats in Africa and takes us right up to the latest innovations in pop and drill via jungle, grime, garage and two-tone.