Exhibition of the week

Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today
Jim and Helen Ede, founders of Kettle’s Yard, cared almost as much about the fresh cut flowers in their gallery as the art. This show looks at artists who share that floral passion, from Henri Rousseau to Lubaina Himid.
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 25 April to 6 September

Also showing

Billy Childish: This Is The Universe… Big Isn’t It?
Garage-rock superstar does his hazy, expressionistic thing with new paintings of the California desert.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, 26 April to 14 June

Katharina Grosse: I Set Out, I Walked Fast
The master of giant, building-sized paintings returns, with yet more enormous site-specific interventions, and some smaller works too.
White Cube Bermondsey, London, 22 April to 31 May

Les Krims: Fictcryptokrimsographs
Ultra-weird, super-surreal staged Polaroids from the mid-1970s that undermine any idea of photographic truth.
Graces Mews, London, until 23 May

Racheal Crowther: Liquid Trust
Scent-based installation art about bodies and the military-industrial complex in this young artist’s debut institutional show.
Chisenhale Gallery, London, until 14 June

Image of the weekThe flowers of Grenada, from Steve McQueen’s book Bounty. Photograph: Steve McQueen

The flora of Grenada is beautiful: colourful, lush, intense, tropical. But Oscar-winning film-maker and Turner prize-winning artist Steve McQueen saw something else in the Caribbean nation’s flowers when he went to photograph them in 2024: markers of historical trauma and colonial pain. They are “constant witnesses of turmoil and upheaval. In a landscape of flux in population, they have been a constant. Sometimes the most horrific things happen in the most beautiful places. That’s the perversity of life.” See more images from Bounty, his new book of photography, here.

What we learned

Someone in Paris won a Picasso in a raffle

A Bridget Jones statue in Leicester Square has been made permanent

The new V&A East collection is dazzling and its architecture isn’t too bad either

A new exhibition at Compton Verney showcases the incredible needlework of Elizabeth Allen

Abidjan’s art week shows that the Côte d’Ivoire’s art scene is flourishing

A celebrated art historian spent 46 years sitting for Frank Auerbach

The gay art of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek was groundbreaking

The 93-year-old artist Joan Semmel wanted her work to be shameless

Masterpiece of the weekCeal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White), 1999. Photograph: © Ceal Floyer, courtesy Lisson Gallery, London.

Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White), 1999
Sometimes, all you need is an idea. And in 1999, British conceptualist Ceal Floyer – who sadly died at the end of last year – had a brilliant one. What if she could make a colour appear in your brain, paint a painting in your mind, without picking up a brush or camera, without even making an artwork. All she had to do was go shopping. Every item listed here in this 2009 version is white. Read through it and your brain pictures flour, cream cheese, eggs, rice – the images appear as if you’re looking at photos; whiteness fills your head. What an amazing trick. But the work also tells the story of its own making. It tells you that she did this shopping in Camden, London, that the manager on duty was a bloke called Jim Donovan, and because your mind is already thinking of all these white items, you’re now thinking about Camden Road, about the weather on the 9 June 2009, about Jim in his tie. This artwork isn’t just an idea. It’s not even a mental painting being conjured by a concept. It’s a whole world contained in a single Morrisons receipt.
Tate Collection. Currently on loan as part of YBA and Beyond: British Art from the 90s from the Tate Collection at National Art Centre, Tokyo.

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