Danish master Christian Købke painted empty skies, intimate portraits and melancholy landscapes. Jonathan Jones gets lost in a world of infinite mystery
When the Danish painter Christen Købke set out to depict the sprawling architectural mass of Frederiksborg castle, a dark genius seemed to possess him. The castle was a national …

National Portrait Gallery to stage exhibition of works by Hungarian-born society portraitist whose style fell out of fashion

John Singer Sargent was reputed to have said: “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.” The same could not be said of Philip de László, his successor as the leading …

Debt woes and a sprawlingly diverse programme haven’t stopped this year’s Dubai art fair from showing some exhilarating art – just don’t expect any nudity
Much more exciting than the recent completion of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (renamed at the last minute as a shout out to Dubai’s …

Artes Mundi’s rhetoric doesn’t convince – but its flashes of beauty do
The trucks roar through Kyrgyzstan, on what was once the Great Silk Road. Laden with scrap metal and heading for western China, they fill the air with dust. A lone boy on a horse chases them. A New Silk …

Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire is an expert on laughing, giggling and guffawing. He even has his own iPhone app. He’s giving a talk at the Royal Institution on Wednesday 31 March.
We also reveal the world’s funniest joke as told by people on the streets of …

V&A, LondonLost children, poverty, imprisonment: 300 years of stories both personal and political are sewn into the quilts in this wonderful show
The soldier looks peaceful but alarmingly pale. He has a metal plate lodged in his head. They’ve patched him up at the military hospital and even given him something …

John Tunnard, Chichester
Amorphous shapes dance in dream-like landscapes of seemingly infinite regress in the canvases of British artist John Tunnard. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Tunnard fused surrealism with abstraction in paintings exploring inner worlds, the Cornish vistas that surrounded his home and even space travel. Melodically composed with …

From spooky shadows in Birmingham to a rare survey of John Tunnards’s work in Chichester, see what’s happening in art around the country
Skye Sherwin
Robert Clark

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would …

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His new installation at Tate Britain sees him guiltily return a stolen stone to the Pyramid of Giza. It’s a gripping work of art
It’s unusual to see a new work of art about conscience. I mean individual conscience, not some generalised idea of political guilt. …

‘It’s like blowing the dust off buried treasure!’ David Smith revels in his discovery of township artist Ephraim Ngatane
When I lived in London, I was a sucker for the blockbuster art exhibition. Caravaggio and the Terracotta Army lived up to the star billing. Others did not. But there was an …