Anish Kapoor at prayer and a giant pumpkin in the park – the week in art

A master of colour fills Liverpool Cathedral and Yayoi Kusama lands outdoors – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Anish Kapoor
The intense colours and spatial paradoxes of Kapoor’s art find a fitting home in the grand gothic spaces of Liverpool Cathedral.
• Liverpool Cathedral until 15 September

Also showing

Yayoi Kusama
A giant pulsing dotted orange and black pumpkin brings Kusama’s art into the open air.
• Kensington Gardens, London, until 3 November

Looking for Leonardo
The story of how this gallery’s founders desperately sought their own Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 26 January 2025

Phyllida Barlow
A retrospective of the acclaimed sculptor’s works, from sprawling monuments to dinky maquettes.
• Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Bruton, Somerset until 5 January 2025

Revealing Nature
Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines are remembered here as artists, lovers and creators of an art school that nurtured Lucian Freud.
• Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk until 3 November

Image of the week

In their dreamlike strangeness, Anastasia Samoylova’s FloodZone images are neither documentary nor art photography but possess elements of both, while evoking the unsettling atmosphere of a world where life attempts to continue as normal in the face of impending existential catastrophe. A new book, Adaptation, is a chronological survey of her career to date, and her photos are on show at the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Met in New York this autumn.

What we learned

A new show traces the relation of money to art from ancient Rome to Joseph Beuys

Not everyone is delighted to find a Banksy artwork on their property

The words of artist-activist Margarida Tengarrinha ground a new film, Clandestina

Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay is reimagining her Indigenous heritage

Painter Alan Gouk, who has died aged 84, held a lifelong commitment to modernism

A new documentary focuses on the Ukrainian artists making their stand against Putin

Masterpiece of the week

The Virgin and Child with Musical Angels by the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece, circa 1485-1500

The visible and invisible, everyday and supernatural worlds fantastically intertwine in this north European medieval masterpiece. Look at how real and ordinary the Virgin Mary’s face is, a million miles from the classical perfection Italian artists were giving her at this time. As she offers Jesus her breast milk, the artist fills this lifelike moment with celebration as flowers bloom and tiny angels play musical instruments in a heavenly orchestra. A rich mixture of skill and crudeness enhances this painting’s joyous charm. It leads you, not into elevated theological concepts, or art for art’s sake, but rather the mentality of devotion to the Virgin Mary only a few decades before the Reformation began. Probably commissioned for private use, it provided its pious owner with a Virgin Mary who is both a woman next door and a heavenly intercessor. Soon Martin Luther would condemn such consoling idolatry.
• National Gallery, London

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