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The artist scoured asset-stripping websites for the things British companies toss out as they close. He relives his six-month journey into a country in decline

Mike Nelson is feeling his age. He’s halfway through installing his new work, in the soaring Duveen galleries of Tate Britain, and as we sit down to chat, I notice the support strapped to his arm. The artist gives me a quick run-through of all the dislocations, injuries and strains that decades of vigorous construction work, all in the name of art, have exacted on his arms and shoulders. “I’m starting to feel long in the tooth,” he mutters apologetically.

It all feels apt, given the work he’s installing. Redundancy, decrepitude and physical labour are central themes of The Asset Strippers. In preparation, over the last six months, he has amassed an array of industrial equipment from British manufacturers downsizing, closing or moving out of the country. Shelved, archived, stacked, clustered and sitting on reinforced flooring, this collection of machines large and small recasts the London gallery as a storage facility for the detritus of British industry.

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Influential architect and leading voice in the promotion of ‘shared space’ on the roads of cities, towns and villages

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who has died of cancer aged 63, was an architect whose pioneering work sought to reduce the impact of traffic in towns and villages. He became the UK’s most influential and innovative voice promoting the idea of “shared space” – that is, equal priority for all road users.

Hamilton-Baillie’s breakthrough was in adapting the Dutch principle of woonerven, or “home zones” – residential streets where traffic yields to pedestrians and cyclists in non-demarcated areas – to busier streets. Like the radical Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, with whom Hamilton-Baillie had worked closely, he challenged the status quo, criticising conventional traffic engineering for prioritising motor traffic to the detriment of places and people. He believed streets designed as places, rather than highways, could restore the balance between traffic and public life.

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From architecture to drug policy, nightlife quietly incubates ideas that then flourish in the mainstream. But, with brands moving in, club-cultural innovation is under threat

In the popular imagination, nightclubs are sweaty basements providing a soundtrack to drunken fumbles in the dark; an alien world with no connection or relevance to the more wholesome things that happen during the day. But the reality is that anyone with an Instagram account, a fashion magazine subscription or an interest in social activism is ultimately engaging with club culture. Nightlife is like an angel investor in pop culture, silently incubating grassroots movements and social moments, and since the first iterations of the disco, clubs have been a breeding ground for cultural experimentation.

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Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London
Wildly graphic and often eye-poppingly nasty, the nightmarish creations of the Chicago Imagists echo the tumult of their era

The art of the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and 70s provokes spluttering questions, and answers in a similar spirit. Incarnated as the Hairy Who, the Nonplussed Some, and various other names reminiscent of niche 60s rock groups before they made it big, the artists who came to be known as the Chicago Imagists (not a bad band name itself, come to think of it, if a bit too arty) were cartoonish and clever and possessed of a wayward graphic elan. Now at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in a Hayward travelling exhibition, this is the first UK show of their work in almost 40 years.

All alumni of, or teachers at, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fervent era of student protest, political assassinations and the Vietnam war, the Chicago Imagists were very much of their time and place. But little of the cataclysmic events surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago – with mayor Richard J Daley’s police running amok, and the air filled with teargas and Mace – got into their art, except by way of the curdled, visceral quality of many of their images.

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Bridges are often defining urban features – but what if your city had chosen one of these designs instead?

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Cocktail parties, cartoon characters and firework shows: burial mounds are back in Britain – are they the future of death?

Behind a hedge in the middle of a field in Shropshire, there is a grassy mound that looks like an overgrown spoil heap. It would be an unremarkable feature in this ancient agricultural landscape, were it not for the fact that it has a little stone doorway in its side. Step through and you find yourself in an atmospheric domed chamber where round stone pillars frame rows of candlelit niches. All that’s missing is Gandalf sitting in the corner, preparing his next spell.

More than 5,000 years after our neolithic ancestors built great burial barrows (or mounds) across the land, a Shropshire farmer is reviving the tradition – and he’d rather you didn’t mention druids. “People like to pump mysticism into this stuff,” says Tim Ashton, standing in wellies and a tweed coat outside his new barrow. “But the people who built Stonehenge and the first barrows weren’t a bunch of wishy-washy people in white robes. They were practical farmers like me.”

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From daredevil racers to Beatrix Potter’s ramshackle rowing boat, the Windermere Jetty Museum celebrates the rich history of the holiday hotspot – and the dazzling vessels that cruised its waters

As the largest lake in England, running in a 10-mile ribbon through the Lake District national park, Windermere has long inspired a particular kind of ambition. It is where Victorian tycoons built their lavish holiday homes and entertained guests on the water in extravagant vessels, with fantastical gothic boathouses to match. Its great length made it the testing ground for the country’s first seaplanes, and, later in the century, it inspired daredevil racers to attempt world records in their souped-up speedboats, with sometimes fatal results.

Not much of this dynamic past is evident if you visit today. In summer, the area teems with ice-cream-licking holidaymakers, either on the trail of Beatrix Potter, or enjoying sedate cruises around the lake (a 10mph speed limit has been in force since 2005). But the colourful history of life on the water now has the place it deserves in a handsome new home.

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London-born curator remembered for leaving ‘a lasting impression on Australia’s cultural landscape’

Edmund Capon, the curator and longtime director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, has died at the age of 78.

Capon, who led the gallery for 33 years between 1978 and 2011, died on Sunday. He had had melanoma for many years, and reports in December indicated his condition had deteriorated.

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The architects who designed the London Eye have now created a beautiful, approachable and eco-friendly new place of worship in Cambridge

A mosque, points out the architect Julia Barfield, has no fixed appearance. It varies with location: in Egypt, in Andalucía, in Turkey, in Indonesia, on the Arabian peninsular, wherever Muslims need a place to pray, the building takes on the characteristics of the local style. In China it might be a series of pavilions with pagoda-like roofs; in sub-Saharan Africa it might be built of mud bricks or rammed earth. It might be covered by a single dome, or many, or by a flat roof supported on multiple columns. It might be made of stone, or timber, or concrete.

In Britain, mosques go back to the late 19th century, when one was hollowed out of an existing terrace in Liverpool and another was purpose-built in the Surrey town of Woking. Yet it is still not entirely clear what the typical style of a British mosque might be: the most common approach, often driven by the demand to serve as many people as possible within limited budgets, is to build a plain box that is then decorated with motifs referring to the main country of origin of the congregations – Ottoman for Turks and Cypriots, Moghul for people from the subcontinent – or from which the bulk of the funding came.

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National Gallery, London
There is no doubting Sorolla’s love of light and the way it plays on all kinds of surfaces. But does anything lie beneath?

Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) – pronounced Soroya – is not a name on many people’s lips. Insanely popular in his day, to the extent that New Yorkers queued in heavy snow to view his large and florid paintings, he is almost forgotten in ours. Or at least he might be, if not for his virtuoso effects and his singular reputation as the master of Spanish sunlight.

Sun seen through the rising wave, the billowing sail and the gauzy muslin veil. Sun dancing across spring lawns, igniting summer blossoms and striking the golden beaches of his native Valencia. Sun reflected in cool ponds, flickering between the trees in Sorolla’s sumptuous garden, and sparkling through the fountains of the mighty Alhambra. It is hardly possible to stand before these enormous canvases, thick with paint, without feeling at least something of their appeal, a combination of the obvious and comfortable relish in their making, and the irreducible beauty of sunlight itself. Sorolla is, in every respect, a sunny painter.

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Photographer Maurice Broomfield catches the boom of postwar British industry at its most glamorous

Established immediately after the second world war, the British Nylon Spinners factory in Pontypool, south Wales, at one time employed 8,000 people and had the monopoly on production for the UK. Maurice Broomfield, whose own war as a conscientious objector had involved driving an ambulance in the blitz, spent the 1950s and 1960s primarily taking pictures of Britain at work. This photograph of a woman preparing a warp was taken in 1964, when the Pontypool factory was the heartbeat of the town, with a clubhouse and a ballroom, a restaurant and several bars.

Broomfield, in his photographs, attempted to capture the spirit of innovation that Harold Wilson described in 1963 as the “white heat” of British technology. The photographer had started his working life as a lathe operator at Rolls-Royce in his native Derby, and retained an eye for the pride of production-line workers, captured here in the court shoes and briskly rolled sleeves and headscarf of the woman working in concert with her machine. His pictures, of bottling factories, car plants, and newly industrialised agriculture were about the closest Britain got to the Stakhanovite propaganda photographs of the Soviet Union; Broomfield’s work represented the UK at the World’s Fair in New York in the same year this picture was taken.

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The man, an art dealer, wants to trade the work for compensation for land he says Poland confiscated from his mother, a Jew who fled the Nazis.

In 2017, Hong Kong-based photographer Jimmi Ho was struck by one of his old pictures showing a man drying his clothes in a playground. The juxtaposition of the colourful laundry and stark buildings piqued his interest, and since then he has walked around the city in search of the inventive ways residents dry their laundry. “It’s hard to dry clothes in the wet season,” says Ho. “In Hong Kong, every square metre is exploited to the maximum.” Drying clothes in public spaces is illegal, but that doesn’t stop locals trying. “Some people create clotheslines by using ropes and lamp posts. There is endless ingenuity.”

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• Woman-Ochre to be shown on Sunday before restoration
• New Mexico couple hung the oil in their home for years

More than 30 years after it was stolen from an Arizona museum, a painting by Willem de Kooning reportedly worth $100m is going on display back where it all began.

Related: New York art dealer says he found six De Koonings in New Jersey locker

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Space exploration, tragedy, conflict and beauty – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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As Germany celebrates the centenary of the influential art movement, we tour the cities where it started, flourished and, ultimately, proved too ‘degenerate’ for the Nazis

Under a leaden winter sky, the low-rise residential blocks in Berlin’s Hansa Quarter couldn’t be called pretty. Built in the late 1950s to revive a district razed during the second world war, they’re boxy and unadorned. The trees are skeletal, the gardens bare. But when I look up, I see upkeep and pride. Smart furnishings are visible through large windows. My eyes wander to a sleek, white edifice by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and then down to ground level and some single-storey atrium houses by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen. A bold pillared building by Oscar Niemeyer is about light and space as much as housing.

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This week in our series of classic Guardian photographs, the exhibits go to a man’s head at an installation at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, as captured by photographer Murdo MacLeod

In July 2006, shortly after Murdo MacLeod took this photograph, Glasgow’s magnificent Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum reopened following a £28m makeover. This display was created by the designer Sophy Cave and features dozens of white, sculpted “floating” heads, all pulling different faces that demonstrate the full range of emotions. It was installed amid the Victorian splendour of the east court of the Expression wing – where it still hangs today. To take the shot, MacLeod lay in wait for a member of staff to descend the stairs at exactly the right spot, and he had his picture. It is all the more amusing for being unstaged.

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Elba drives up with both a film and a Netflix series that revisit his other life, that of a D.J.

Tipped off that thieves were ogling a work by Brueghel the Younger in an Italian church, the carabinieri switched the painting with a copy, and waited.

Their home is filled with works by artists like Patricia Piccinini and Brook Andrew, so why not build a public gallery next door?

In a room on the ground floor of Jaqlin Lyon’s home stands a fleshy, grotesque and naked ape-like man.

Hair sprouts from his drooping belly and back, and furrows his sunken eyes. Behind him he carries an old lady in an ankle-length dress, who sits primly on his fur-knuckled hands.

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Officials say the pact will ensure that objects taken from former colonies are returned to their rightful owners. But critics say German museums have a long way to go.

The giant housing estate has seen highs and endured lows, as captured in the new show Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which has impressed those who know the place best

Residents of Sheffield’s Park Hill estate have been giving their verdict on a new musical that tells the story of the gigantic brutalist complex with songs by local troubadour Richard Hawley.

Written by Chris Bush, Standing at the Sky’s Edge – which shares the name of Hawley’s 2012 album – intertwines his lamenting love songs and screeching guitar solos with the stories of three families on the estate through three generations in the 1960s, 80s, and 2000s.

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Deller winds back the years, Sorolla celebrates Seville’s garden, and Mike Nelson shows off his Borgesian wizardry – all in our weekly dispatch

Mike Nelson
Architecture and storytelling are the stuff of Nelson’s imaginative and absorbing installations. A Borgesian wizard.
• Tate Britain, London, 18 March-6 October.

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To celebrate the opening, the library has issued limited-edition library cards featuring an image of the rocker.

Realising the potential of marketing in the 16th century, the painter engraves his details into the meticulous print

In the centuries that preceded the Renaissance, artists hardly ever depicted naked bodies. If they did, it was in finger-wagging, guilty scenes. Dürer’s celebrated print of 1504 straddles these two worlds, exulting antiquity’s pursuit of the perfect nude, but with plenty of medieval symbolism.

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More than 140 artists will take over the Truman Brewery in London’s East End for the 34th edition of the Other Art Fair this weekend. The fair offers an opportunity to view works by emerging artists – more than half of them women – from 18 different countries

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Exhibition reveals experiences of boys who attended a Catholic school in Worcestershire

The poignant and often harrowing stories of life at a boarding school run by Catholic nuns for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are being vividly told through an exhibition of childhood “treasures” at the country house where the institution was based.

Men who attended St Joseph’s school for boys, which operated at Croome Court in Worcestershire for three decades, have provided objects loaded with meaning that represent their time there.

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“The World Between Empires,” linking present and past, celebrates the distinctive art from all the cultures of the Middle East.

From March 13-23, look for auctions, objects and exhibitions from all epochs, from Chinese bronzes to contemporary Indian painting.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

The Museum of Modern Art takes a euphoric dive into the Spanish artist’s early years.

The artist’s large, site-specific works are slightly diminished in this midcareer museum retrospective, though his found-object aesthetic remains moving in his smaller sculptures.

Here are the details on dozens of exhibitions all over the country and a few in Europe.

National Gallery, London
He was the global face of Spanish art, a quirky and flamboyant painter of a sun-kissed country. But this sensual Spaniard could never paint more than he could see

Luis Buñuel called the first chapter of his autobiography “Growing up in the Middle Ages” because he remembered Spain at the start of the 20th century as a country barely touched by the modern world, dominated by the Catholic church and near-feudal poverty. If you want an eyeful of that archaic Spain, stand in front of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s almost three-metre-wide 1899 canvas, Sad Inheritance.

If you squint your eyes and look only at the turquoise sea rippling into light blue waves, it’s a vivid seascape reminiscent of Manet. The scene on Sorolla’s beach, however, is a far cry from the parasols and picnics of impressionist art. A black-robed monk towers over a crowd of naked disabled boys as they head into the sea for a therapeutic swim. They are the victims of hereditary syphilis, implies the title. Sorolla, an artist of immense style, juxtaposes blue sea, pale bodies and the raven-like priest to truly unsettling effect.

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Anarchic Italian designer whose work for Alessi helped shape the look of the 1980s

Playful is the word most often used to describe the work of Alessandro Mendini, the Italian designer, architect and editor, who has died aged 87. It is the quality you see in the apparently childlike simplicity of his drawings, with their bold, spiky ink lines, in his exuberant use of colour and in the way he turned household objects into whimsical anthropomorphic creatures, such as his smiling Anna G corkscrew, one of Alessi’s bestsellers. Even in his architecture he sometimes seemed to be trying to create lifesize dolls’ houses. His best-known piece of furniture, the Proust armchair, is a baroque fantasy decorated with brushstrokes borrowed from the French pointillist painter Paul Signac.

But given the important part that he played in Italy’s “radical design” movement, anarchic, rather than playful, might be a better description of Mendini’s intentions. Even though he wore the green Loden overcoat that was the uniform of the Milanese bourgeoisie, Mendini loved to subvert conventional wisdoms about what we mean by design. He wanted to rescue it from the cult of functionalism, and show that objects could have more complex layers of meaning than simply signalling their purpose, or hinting at how new or expensive they were.

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The largest private real estate project in the US makes its debut Friday on Manhattan’s west side – but some critics are billing it a ‘mall for the wealthy’

A glittering new development in New York, billed as the largest private real estate project in the history of the United States, makes its debut this week on Manhattan’s west side.

Related: New York's Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City | Hamilton Nolan

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Maurice Broomfield’s spectacular photographs of men and women at work in British factories in the 1950s and 60s capture a time of optimism and endeavour

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‘It took five seamstresses two weeks to make the dress. Then, two minutes into the shoot, the model said she was cold and wanted to go home’

Growing up, our house was always full of storybooks. I would come home from school and my mother would have some incredible eastern European volume. “Look at this one,” she’d say. “I need to show you.” We’d sit together on the sofa. I’d rest my head on her chest and she’d read to me.

In April 2008, while living in France, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died seven months later. Her decline was so fast that she wasn’t able to come back to England. Her funeral – had it been in the UK – would have been a celebration of her legacy. As a schoolteacher she had inspired so many with literature and imagination. When I got back, I knew I needed to do something.

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Rodrigo Moura will lead the museum’s curatorial department as it undergoes an expansion.

Forty new dealers will replace some longtime participants, with the greatest change taking place in the Modern section.

More than 500 works by the filmmaker, including paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures, are part of a retrospective in the Netherlands.

One of Madrid’s top museums carries Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza’s family name, and now his gallery of antiquities is making its full-fledged debut at Tefaf Maastricht.

At Tefaf, a peek into rebuilt state apartments soon to open, decades after the German city was destroyed by Allied bombs.

The fair has changed its system for vetting artworks, starting with the Maastricht show, and is using more independent experts.

Once used to attract a spouse or consolidate power, the evolution of royal portraiture reflects the changing face of the monarchy

Long before the Kardashians perfected the art of the image for their own financial benefit, another family introduced the very concept for propaganda and PR purposes.

The Tudors, the most famous of all of England’s monarchs, were one of the first to realise the power of the image, and used their portraits to advance their political power across Europe in the 16th century. Henry VIII, who is infamous for having married six times and executing two of his betrothed, was instrumental in reshaping the political purpose of the portrait. They were used to arrange advantageous marriages, impress foreign monarchs and dignitaries and evoke his own God-given right to rule.

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Masterpiece by 17th-century artist Brueghel the Younger was swapped to foil heist

The heist appeared to have gone entirely according to plan. The thieves broke into the display case in an Italian church on Wednesday morning and made off with a €3m painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

But police revealed that night there had been one hitch – the snatched artwork was a copy.

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Art has been the consuming passion for Mr. Rivers since he left football, and he plans to make a deep dive into it when he moves to Paris.

Twenty artworks will be on display at Rockefeller Center starting April 25 through an arrangement with the company that runs the Frieze New York art fair.

University and college museums run the gamut from those featuring contemporary art and ancient relics to world-class collections.

The Getty Center will begin conservation on the painting, “Woman-Ochre,” but first — a party on Sunday