Filthy fossil fuels, a dizzying debut and the ominous side of the moon – the week in art

7 hours ago 6

Exhibition of the week

Extraction
This ominous exhibition takes a look at the filthy world of oil, gas and petroleum, all seen through the lens of artists such as biomorphic sculptor Marguerite Humeau and digital wizard John Gerrard.
Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, 11 April to 26 July

Also showing

Thérèse Oulton: Holding Patterns
Thick, gloopy, heavily textured semi-abstract paintings of landscapes by one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize (in 1987).
Vardaxoglou, London, 11 April to 29 May

Michaela Yearwood-Dan: The Practice of Liberation
Painting, ceramics, sound, poetry, post-colonial theory and diaristic writing get mashed together for this young artist’s dizzying debut UK museum exhibition.
The Whitworth, Manchester, 17 April to 18 October

Paula Rego: Story Line
An intimate, museum-quality look at how important drawing was to this hugely important Portuguese artist’s practice, focusing on sketches, studies and archival material.
Victoria Miro, London, 16 April to 23 May

Jack O’Brien: Leisure
The wrap star – and winner of the 2023 Frieze emerging artist prize – continues his conceptual adventures in binding everyday materials together.
Maureen Paley, Hove, 11 April to 20 June

Image of the week

Earth setting over the Moon’s curved limb as seen from the Orion spacecraft.

Images taken by astronauts generally tend to induce feelings of awe and stunned amazement, a sense of humanity’s smallness and transitoriness in the face of geological time and galactic vastness. Many images taken from Artemis II this week – humanity’s first trip beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972 – bring up those same feelings. But this photo, of Earth setting over the moon, is different, more ominous and threatening, more terrifying and desolate. Forget the doe-eyed pale blue dot-isms of the rest of Artemis II’s photos, this is the photo for our times. Bleak, grim and incredibly scary.

What we learned

Cult 1950s comic hero Dan Dare is being rebooted

The architect behind the Tokyo Olympic stadium has been chosen for the National Gallery, London’s new wing

Spanish politicians are not happy about a request to move Pablo Picasso’s Guernica

The Mexican artworld is not happy about plans to send Frida Kahlo works to Spain

Iconoclastic musician Arca has taken to painting to combat burnout

Pet Shop Boys have a huge career retrospective book coming out

A nifty Japanese printing gadget is uniting artists worldwide

South Korea’s rapidly evolving architectural highlights are jaw-dropping

Masterpiece of the week

A painting of a man standing by a lake, with shrubbery and trees in the background

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998
The lake in cult slasher flick Friday the 13th represents the trauma of grief, the pain of loss, and the way a calm surface can hide a vast world of darkness. And here it is in one of the most important paintings of the 1990s. British painter Peter Doig saw the film in the 1980s and couldn’t let it go, painting various scenes – distorted, twisted and reimagined – throughout the early part of his career. In this jaw-droppingly bleak and stunningly painted nocturnal image, a policeman tries to spot a figure on the lake. That figure is you, the viewer, looking back at him. Doig has always used his painting to process the past, to make sense of how memories falter and fade but ultimately shape you. It’s a kind of emotional processing, where he takes an image, a memory, a place, and works and reworks it over and over. Not for the sake of nostalgia, but to deal with it. In this painting, he’s dealing with the way pop culture can act as a marker of innocence and youth, two things we all lose, and for ever.
Tate Britain, London

If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.