Suggestive sculptures, Hockney’s snaps and painterly panoramas – the week in art

Ugandan artist Acaye Kerunen supplies rich textures, Bradford’s most famous son kicks off its year as city of culture and Jake Grewal offers a queer take on landscape painting – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Acaye Kerunen
Richly textured, historically and socially suggestive sculptures and wall hangings by this Ugandan writer and artist.
• Pace Gallery, London, until 22 February

Also showing

David Hockney
As Bradford begins its year as UK city of culture, this show looks at how its most famous artist has experimented with photography.
• Science and Media Museum, Bradford, until 18 May

Condo London 2025
London’s art gallery scene kickstarts the year with a collage of collaborations between artists, enterprises and venues.
• London galleries from 18 January to 15 February

Jannis Kounellis
A look at how the revered artist of the real started out by drawing, before he worked with parrots.
• Sprovieri, London, from 17 January to 28 March

Jake Grewal
A queer painterly take on the Romantic tradition of the panoramic landscape.
• Studio Voltaire, London, until 13 April

Image of the week

When Yannick and Ben Jakober’s daughter died aged 19, they poured their grief into art. The couple transformed their small set of portraits of children into the Nins, a one-of-its-kind collection. Numbering 165 paintings of children from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it includes works by old masters such as Ottavio Leoni, Frans Pourbus the Younger and François Quesnel, commissioned to capture the offspring of European royalty and the aristocracy in their most vulnerable years. Many did not live to adulthood. Read the full story here

What we learned

A bijou, historical church is the perfect setting for a contemporary art exhibition

Items including a letter from Joan of Arc and a lethal shopping list can give us a glimpse into the everyday lives of medieval women

Oliviero Toscani, the photographer behind Benetton’s provocative ads, has died

Artists including Damien Hirst, Bridget Riley, Cornelia Parker and Antony Gormley, are choosing artworks for schools

Frank Auerbach is set to have a ‘homecoming’ show in Berlin, the city he fled to escape the Nazis

A couple poured their grief into collecting child portraits

The textile artist Diedrick Brackens makes poetry out of yarn

There were Kafka portals and concrete phalluses at this year’s New Contemporaries show

Masterpiece of the week

Susannah and the Elders by Ludovico Carracci, 1616

Susannah, close to us at the front of a compressed, shadowy garden scene, hunches over to hide herself when two voyeuristic old men surprise her as she bathes. One pulls back her blue covering, allowing the Elders and us to see her bare upper body – but not too much. In today’s terms, this painting suggests an ambivalence about men looking at female nudity. But what did it mean to Carracci and his contemporaries? Were they worried about the male gaze? More likely they fretted about the sin of lust, in an era when the Counter-Reformation was intensifying Catholic belief and making new religious demands of art. Nudity had been lavishly depicted in 16th-century art, from Titian to Michelangelo. Carracci is more careful or, perhaps, hypocritical. Yet this new religious age gave women ways to visualise their oppression, with Carracci’s contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi giving Susannah an autobiographical twist in her repeated versions of the story.
• National Gallery, London

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