Exhibition of the week

Linder: Danger Came Smiling
This promises to be an exciting show as Manchester’s punk and dada genius Linder Sterling gets her first London retrospective.
Hayward Gallery, London, from 11 February until 5 May

Also showing

Turner: In Light and Shade
The great artist’s 250th birthday celebrations kick off with this fresh look at his compendium of landscapes, the Liber Studiorum.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 2 November

Henri Michaux
What was Michaux on when he drew the hypnotic squiggles in this show? Mescaline, apparently.
Courtauld Institute, London, from 12 February until 4 June

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker
Survey of the radical artist who had sickle cell anaemia and made it part of his vision. Read more about Rodney here.
Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 12 February until 4 May

Gladiators of Britain
A British Museum touring show that reveals the brutal secrets of the Romans in Britain.
Dorset Museum and Art Gallery, Dorchester, until 11 May

Image of the week

The Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery shocked 1980s London with his surreal outfits, outlandish lifestyle and collaborations with Lucian Freud, dancer Michael Clark and others. As a major exhibition opens, family and friends talk about Bowery’s larger-than-life legacy. Read the full story.

What we learned

The British Council will trash a precious national asset if it sells its art collection, says Jenny Waldman

Larry Clark’s images of addiction are still as shocking as ever

Noah Davis retrospective shows the restless invention of an artist who died aged 32

Artist John Lyons uses folkloric imagery of Trinidad to examine notions of identity

Japanese masters of minimalism, Sanaa, win a RIBA gold medal

The Royal Academy’s grand survey of Brazilian modernism misfires badly

Photographer Peter Hujar hauntingly captured New York’s gay life in the 70s and 80s

Ithell Colquhoun’s surrealist paintings have a ravishing, hypnotising sensuality

Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim has found compelling new ways to depict silence

Masterpiece of the week

Landscape with Satyrs, possibly by Marten Rijckaert, about 1626

This gloriously weird painting fuses the real and fantastic, homely and exotic. It is a perfectly real-seeming landscape, somewhere in northern Europe. A peasant supervises flocks in a field. There’s a view of a little town in the distance. We see that ordinary European vista through the trees from a shaded, wild, mountainous wilderness where a sparkling waterfall crashes through looming rocks. And at this point it all gets very odd. Instead of human rustics with fishing rods, or a haywain fording the river, we see a community of satyrs – half-human, half-animal creatures who epitomise lust in Greek and Roman mythology – making their way home to their camp. They are painted with the same realism as everything else. Yet this does not seem to be an illustration of any specific myth. Nor are the satyrs behaving in their usual drunken orgiastic ways. Instead they embody the “savage” or “wild man”, outside the limits of cultivated, “civilised” society. They are, surely, being used here to suggest the peoples encountered and, by this time, partly subjugated by Europeans in the new world. Leave them alone, pleads the artist, and celebrate their difference.
National Gallery, London

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