Van Gogh v the ’gram, word sculptures and Japanese ceramics – the week in art

The great masters’ Instagrammable portraits, Ian Hamilton Friday’s poetic visions, the folk craft of Mingei and more – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Art of the Selfie
Self-portraits by the likes of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, seen alongside the 21st-century selfie.
• National Museum, Cardiff, until 26 January

Also showing

Strata
The imagery of geological layering explored and teased out by artists Dorothy Hunter, Marie Farrington and Amy Stephens.
• CCA Derry/Londonderry, until 21 September

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Works from the Artist Rooms collection reveal the singular vision of the Scottish poet and conceptual artist.
• Tate Modern, London, until 8 December

Alison Wilding: Sculptor’s Drawings
Drawings by Wilding, from the Karsten Schubert bequest, lay bare this abstract sculptor’s creative process.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 12 January

Art Without Heroes
The Japanese Mingei movement in the arts and crafts gets its first proper show in Britain.
• William Morris Gallery, London, until 22 September

Image of the week

Bad Ischl, Austria, is the first alpine town to be awarded European capital of culture status, bringing nudity and surreal sculptures to a rural area more in tune with classical music and mountain pursuits. Read more here.

What we learned

Victoria Siddall is the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director

Naked gallerygoers are encouraged at exhibitionist exhibition Naturist Paradises

Our art and design experts have rounded up the best shows this autumn

The exhibition Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites pairs perfumes with its paintings

A sculpture of a cowrie shell has been chosen as a slavery memorial for London

Photographer Peter Bialobrzeski is ‘inspired by very dull German documentary images’

Artists are exploring AI’s possibilities – and its precarities

Masterpiece of the week

Self-Portrait, Jan Lievens, early 1650s

The nearly man of Dutch golden age art looks back at us warily. Jan Lievens was a youthful friend and rival of Rembrandt when they both worked in Leiden, possibly sharing a studio. Like Rembrandt, he was mercurial and gifted and as this painting suggests, deeply ambitious. But while Rembrandt would make self-portraiture into the most revelatory and tragic of arts, this is a more guarded, formal performance. Lievens doesn’t transfigure himself into a Lear-like everyman as his youthful peer would. But he gives a very realistic, undramatic picture of his own individuality, tinged with sadness.
• National Gallery, London

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