Mindboggling Magritte, artists respond to a world in peril and a squished Citroën – the week in art

Exhibition of the week

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte
The confounding, mind-boggling genius of Magritte is explored through remarkable loans of his paintings plus contemporary responses by Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney and more.
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, from 24 September until 12 December

Also showing

Rachel Kneebone – Metamorphoses: Porcelain Sculpture
Kneebone’s porcelain sculptures are crazed reworkings of the kind of Rococo delights that fill the Wallace Collection, so this is a match made in Versailles.
Wallace Collection, London, 23 September until 25 April

Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet
David Nash, Cristina Mittermeier and other artists respond to the natural world’s peril.
Eden Project, Bodelva, until 19 September 2027

Amar Kanwar
Films and video installations that span the modern history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Serpentine North Gallery, London, 23 September until 31 January

Gabriel Orozco: Chronotopic
A retrospective of the artist famous for cutting open and remaking a Citroën DS, from early works to his latest conundrums.
White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 8 November

Image of the week

Pollenarium by Luke Jerram. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

A new installation that gives visitors a bee’s eye view of the world is landing by the Thames in east London. Created by Bristol artist Luke Jerram the outside represents a grain of pollen, and the inside represents an insect’s compound eye. Jerram hopes it will make people think about how we need to protect pollinators, whose numbers have declined by 60% in 20 years. Read more here.

What we learned

Manchester’s Centre of Chinese Contemporary Art has a new name and a new mission

Donald Trump wants a 30ft “Colossus statue” of George Washington erected

A show about Emmett Till, whose lynching fired the US civil rights movement, invites audiences to reckon with racism

Yasmin David is the greatest British landscape painter you’ve never heard of

Magazine designers have picked their favourite ever covers

Previously unseen drawings by Moomins author Tove Jansson are to go on show in London

The Women’s Art Collection in Cambridge features some of the industry’s biggest names including Maggi Hambling, Paula Rego and Bridget Riley

Masterpiece of the week

Two Men With a Sleeping Woman by Gabriel Metsu, about 1655-60

Photograph: Alamy

Pipes play a slightly surreal part in this 17th-century Dutch painting in which objects and people interact suggestively. A woman has passed out with her white clay pipe in her hand, its stem leading the eye towards what amounts to a still life arrangement beside her: there is a richly decorated cup for spirits, presumably gin, beside a fanned out deck of cards, a mirror, another pipe and a jug of booze. The implication is pretty clear that she’s fallen asleep after a long session of drinking, smoking and card playing – but what about the mirror? It suggests vanity, and in this picture that may mean loose morals or even prostitution. The men loom and mock, and one pokes his pipe at her.
National Gallery, London

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