Artistic unicorns, protest ceramics and queer art from Morocco – the week in art
Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch
Horn of plenty … a tapestry fragment from Flanders, c1500. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum
Enzo Mari The playful artist and designer who helped shape the look of Italy’s postwar economic miracle. • Design Museum, London, 29 March to 8 September
Anwar Jalal Shemza There is a boldness to the early portraits by Shemza in this show, done after he moved to Britain from Pakistan in 1956. • Hales Gallery, London, 4 April to 18 May
Image of the week
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Richard Serra, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, was a daunting, fascinating artist. When I first met him in 1992, I was extremely nervous. Like his art, Serra emanated seriousness. Both had gravity and gravitas. However obdurate and physically imposing, his art has great subtlety and a complexity that only emerges when you spend time with it. It has the capacity to slow us down, engaging us physically but also psychologically. It is always in the here-and-now but begs the idea of timelessness. It is direct, but invites misreading. Read Adrian Searle’s appreciation in full here.
The Dead Christ and the Virgin by Neapolitan follower of Giotto, probably 1330s-40s
The death of Christ became central to European art in the middle ages. It was a mystery that absorbed entire communities in the religion which both bound and ruled them: they marvelled at how God’s own son was born to die as a mortal human. This painting is a highly emotive rendering of the grief that the holy corpse evoked – a grief explicitly depicted here as that which any mother might feel for her child. It’s influenced by Giotto, the Tuscan artist who made art more human, intimate and characterful in the 1300s. But this painter is technically naive in a way that makes it all the more moving and raw. • National Gallery, London
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Horn of plenty … a tapestry fragment from Flanders, c1500. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum 
