Gilbert and George go to hell and back while Marina Abramović sexes up Manchester – the week in art

Provocations from the original living sculptures, and 70 performance artists prepare to re-enact ancient sexual rituals – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Death Hope Life Fear
Provocative and personal, public yet intimate pictures created by Gilbert and George in the 1980s and 90s – including their first naked self-portraits.
• The Gilbert and George Centre, London until end of year

Also showing

Joseph Wright of Derby: Life on Paper
Drawings by the brilliant 18th-century artist who painted Derby Museum’s masterpiece The Orrery.
• Derby Museum and Art Gallery until 7 September

Sussex Modernism
Jacob Epstein and Ivon Hitchens are among the modern artists associated with Sussex in this show that tells an ambitious local story.
• Towner Eastbourne until 28 September

Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within
The realist yet mythic world of this modern sculptor of people and animals.
• Salisbury Museum from 24 May until 28 September

Impressions in Watercolour
Visionary watercolours from the Romantic age, by the likes of Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman and – you guessed it – JMW Turner.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 14 September

Image of the week

“In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography.” So says Marina Abramović, whose immersive artwork Balkan Erotic Epic will have its world premiere in Manchester this October. Seventy performers will re-enact ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals such as Women Massaging Breasts, pictured above, at Aviva Studios. Those who squirmed and cringed at her earlier interactive nude works will want to make alternative plans.

What we learned

David Hockney’s early work was hip and horny but in search of a style

A new exhibition at the Barbican uses sound to shake you to your core

Physique magazines showing finely muscled men had a gay following for decades

Nnena Kalu is the first learning-disabled person to make the Turner shortlist

Grayson Perry isn’t bothered by AI using his work

Aubrey Williams, part of the first abstract art to hit the UK, is getting a reappraisal

The joyous art of married artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely is on joint display

Eva, one half of performance art duo ‘from the future’ Eva & Adele, has died

Masterpiece of the week

A Musical Party in a Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch, 1677

The contrast between the shady courtyard in the foreground, where people chat and play music around a table, and the sunny canal seen through a dark stone gateway, gives this painting a haunting, heart-catching subtlety of mood. But it’s even more nuanced and poetic than that: a deep blue sky and bronzed clouds above reveal that we’re seeing the last gleam of the day. This explains why the courtyard is already so dark while the buildings across the canal are bright. It also gives a moral unease to the scene. There’s flirtation going on: to the sweet sounds of string music, the man and woman at the table laugh over drinks and snacks. His face is positively sinister as he looks at her from shaded eyes. Meanwhile, the man in the doorway is a devilishly dark figure against the light. It will soon be night, and all our sins will be upon us.

• National Gallery, London

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