Artists of the future, Ghanaian kings’ robes and a tiny moth – the week in art

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Exhibition of the week

Jerwood Survey III
Well-known artists have each nominated their favourite beginner for this glimpse of the future of art, featuring Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Paul Nataraj and more.
Southwark Park Galleries, London, 6 April to 23 June

Also showing

Ted Pim
Paintings that meditate on mirrors and pastiche the Old Masters.
Almine Rech, London, 11 April to 18 May

Baltic Open Submission 2024
Artists, both professional and amateur, from across the north-east of England reveal their talent.
Baltic, Gateshead, until 1 September

Outi Pieski
The last few weeks of this captivating show about life and memory in the Arctic.
Tate St Ives until 6 May

Ibrahim Mahama
Purple fabric recalling the royal robes of Ghana’s former kings brings the Barbican’s lakeside terrace to life.
Barbican, London, 10 April to 18 August

Image of the week

Photograph: Historic England Archive 2024/PA

Where’s your favourite minotaur fireplace? This one is in Ron Gittins’s flat in Birkenhead, which has been granted Grade II-listed status. Gittins was an eccentric who could be found wearing a wig, gaiters made of newspaper and wellies, while pushing a pram around town. He died in 2019, leaving his fantasy world interiors in danger of being scrapped. Campaigners bought the whole house to save it (thanks to Tamsin Wimhurst, who read about it in the Guardian), and pushed for it to become the UK’s first example of outsider art to be nationally listed.

What we learned

The fortunes of a Ukrainian sculptor whose studio was bombed have improved

Winning a place at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague is a long way from easy

A new show reveals Rubens as the dark master of Flemish drawings

Asom Khan, the deaf and mute Rohingya boy from Kevin Frayer’s famous photo, is now a photographer himself

A photography bursary was launched in memory of the Guardian’s Eamonn McCabe

Public art’s a party – and everyone’s invited!

US war photographer Peter van Agtmael has spent decades on the frontline

Yhonnie Scarce’s glass sculptures recreate the effects of British nuclear tests on Australia’s Aboriginal people

Finger-wrestling is not the delicate art you might imagine

An Ethiopian cultural surge is making the country’s calls for restitution of looted artefacts harder to ignore, according to Lemn Sissay

Masterpiece of the week

Insects with Common Hawthorn and Forget-Me-Not by Jan van Kessel the Elder, 1654

Photograph: Alamy

This little painting comes from the northern Europe of the scientific revolution, when lenses were letting artists and researchers look at nature with closer eyes than ever before. Not that Van Kessel necessarily needed an optical instrument to observe these little creatures, flowers, leaves and berries so minutely. It’s rather that looking this closely was encouraged by the new scientific spirit. Microscopy was in the air. Dutch lens maker Zacharias Janssen had invented an early microscope by 1600 and it would be improved by another Dutch pioneer, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in the 1660s, when the English scientist Robert Hooke was also using a microscope to see and draw tiny insects. This painting manifestly belongs to that moment when insects were swarming into view, their tiny bodies analysed with awe. Its patient and precise style is highly scientific, and provides information as well as beauty, like a portable museum of nature caught in oils on a panel less than 15cm wide.
National Gallery, London