Echoes of empire, a million rabbit holes and a close look at a cave – the week in art

Hew Locke interrogates the British Museum, Rirkrit Tiravanija interacts with the tense US election and a ‘library cave’ spills its secrets – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Hew Locke: What Have We Here?
The Guyanese-British artist investigates echoes of empire in the British Museum’s collections.
• British Museum, London, 17 October to 9 February

Also showing

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Million Rabbit Holes
This renowned interactive artist turns an eye on the tense US presidential election.
• Pilar Corrias, London, until 9 November

A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang
A closer look at the Library Cave of Dunhuang whose wonders are a highlight of Silk Roads at the British Museum.
• British Library, London, until 23 February

Lauren Halsey: Emajendat

Sculptures that emerge from the artist’s life and activism in south central Los Angeles.
• Serpentine, London, until 2 March

Narcissister
This Brooklyn artist and performer takes on heteronormativity, racism and the politics of gender.
• Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, until 16 November

Image of the week

The annual Frieze art fair in London has had a redesign. You now have to walk to the farthest tent to reach the grandest galleries. My colleague Hettie Judah’s highlights include Danish artist Benedikte Bjerre’s inflated penguins and Jenkin van Zyl’s sexy go-go dancing monsters. Read more here.

What we learned

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has vowed to move the national art collection ‘into communities’

Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce are inviting London gallery-goers to have fun and break taboos

Zurich’s new hospital for kids is staggering and revolutionary

A glittering museum dedicated to Sufi art and beliefs has opened just outside Paris

The Bloomsbury group’s Famous Women Dinner Service is the centrepiece of a new exhibition

Henry Moore went down a storm in Greece

Engineer Hanif Kara makes architects’ dreams come true

A beer-can artwork was accidentally binned at a Dutch museum

Godmother of performance art Marina Abramović has a new show

Masterpiece of the week

A Knight of St John by Rosso Fiorentino, c 1523-24

This painting holds you with its seductive contrast of shadowy recessive blacks and browns, and the knight’s huge, floppy bright red hat. It’s the kind of daring, obviously anti-realist colour game we might associate with modern art – but Rosso Fiorentino lived long before Matisse. In fact this portrait is a perfect, almost textbook example of the mannerist style that emerged in early 16th-century Florence, when artists inspired by Michelangelo broke with the rules of realism that their Renaissance predecessors had laid down. The point of colour and shadow here is not to depict reality but to create an atmosphere, a feeling. It’s poetic and elusive – and enhanced by the fact that the unknown man is a bit more than lifesize. His identification as a knight of St John comes from the cross of this Christian military order that he wears: his intense gaze and ready sword show he’s serious about fighting for its cause.
• National Gallery, London

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