Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 23 May 2014

  • Art Weekly

Ai Weiwei, paint ejaculations and prehistoric farts – the week in art

The Chinese artist installs a show in Yorkshire via email because his passport has been confiscated. Plus Richard Jackson's paint-splatter machines, Kenneth Clark, and the boy that pees LEDs – all in your top weekly dispatch
Richard Jackson
A riot of kitsch … detail of Richard Jackson's Pain-t. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty for Hauser & Wirth

Exhibition of the week

Richard Jackson
Paint machines, mechanical toys, kitsch sculpture and wild ejaculations of squidgy, oily, arty colours all over the place are the frolicsome style of this subversive Los Angeles-based painter. Jackson turns painting into clowning. This exhibition should be a riot.
• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S until 26 July

Other exhibitions this week

Anna Bunting Branch
This feminist artist uses painting, video and words to question history and representations of women in art. Her new project concerns the 17th-century utopian writer Margaret Cavendish.
• Jerwood Project Space, London SE1 until 30 August
La Grande Guerre
This show looks at the first world war, on the 100th anniversary of its outbreak, through French eyes, focusing on prints that reported on its first seven violent months when Europe entered a new age of warfare totally unprepared.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge CB2 until 28 September
Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow
Collaborative new works in glass by two of Britain's best-known sculptors.
• New Art Centre, Salisbury SP5 from 31 May until 6 July
Sean Lynch
In this "blow-by-blow account of stone carving in Oxford", Lynch cannibalises art from the era of Ruskin for a historical installation.
• Modern Art Oxford, Oxford OX1 until 8 June

Masterpiece of the week

VelazquezJust an innocent young peasant lad … Velázquez's portrait of Saint John the Evangelist. Photograph: The National Gallery
Diego Velázquez – Saint John the Evangelist on the Isle of Patmos (1618)
The Book of Revelation has been illustrated in terrifying ways by artists – most notably Albrecht Dürer – but the great realist painter Velázquez concentrates on its author, the figure of Saint John the Evangelist himself, as he sits writing this prophetic book. The visionary describing the last days is just an innocent young peasant lad in this painting, who transcribes the divine truth in a break from his labours.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the week

Bill ViolaTo die for ... video artist Bill Viola's Martyrs installation at St Paul's Cathedral in London

What we learned this week