Yoko Ono hung wishes from trees. Jeanne-Claude and Christo coated entire coastlines. But their work had one thing in common: it made us think about what we should cherish – and what we are losing

Last week, I took my five-year-old nephew to see the new Banksy in London. As we were walking, I told him it was a new, magical tree that had suddenly appeared overnight, put up by a masked man, and that it was up to us to solve the mystery. He came up with all sorts of theories.

When we got there, crowds of people were arriving by bike and on foot, or slowing down as they passed in their cars – people of all ages and backgrounds. Like us, they were marvelling at the new green splattered wall that, from some angles, looks like a tree in full bloom. People were conversing, asking each other their thoughts, spotting the stencilled outline of a person holding a pressure hose next to the tree, or imagining how the artist was able to construct it so secretly.

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Alex Lidagovsky was forced to leave Ukraine with his family when his studio was bombed during the Russian invasion

A Ukrainian sculptor who fled to the UK when his studio was destroyed has been accepted into the Royal Society of British Artists.

Alex Lidagovsky was forced to leave Kyiv with his wife, Dasha Nepochatova, and 16-year-old stepdaughter after the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.

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Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch

Unicorn
Medieval bestiaries, Renaissance art and narwhal horns make for a fascinating first exhibition in this impressive new Scottish museum .
• Perth Museum, Perth , 30 March to 22 September

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From cowboy boots to Le Corbusier armchairs, miniature sculptures made of butter are having a moment

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The Easter bunny is waiting in the wings and the hot cross buns are ready to be toasted. But have you moulded your butter into the shape of a Doric or Ionic pillar yet? Thankfully, there is still time.

Butter moulds and sculptures are enjoying a moment – the sky’s the limit and butter maestros have shared pictures of butter in the shape of cowboy boots , chateaus and Le Corbusier armchairs on social media. Late last year, influencer and consummate host Laura Jackson called it “ the trend of the moment ” – but with the butter mould showing no signs of melting from the ether, it feels a fitting time to find out what’s going on in the dairy aisle, and beyond.

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A new show brings together historic sketches from Bruegel to Rubens and more, capturing fleeting snapshots of everyday 16th- and 17th-century life

The women gather in a circle, talking intensely and unselfconsciously, their attention passing from one animated face to another as the conversation darts around the group. They seem completely unaware, from a window above the courtyard where they’re chatting, the artist Jacques Jordaens is sketching them in quick red chalk and brown ink.

It is 1659, Antwerp, and, according to Jordaens’ scribbled note at the bottom of the paper, these so-called “gossip aunts” are discussing local political “disturbances” – perhaps the recent strike of the painters’ guild. “It’s a snapshot of daily life that you don’t usually see,” says An Van Camp, the curator of Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

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In the past nine years, the musician and artist has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a shocking, deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning

Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland , who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave , came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs ( Into My Arms , Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree , Ghosteen and Carnage . He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage ), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files ), screenwriter ( The Proposition ) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

‘These losses are incorporated into the artistic flow’ … Cave’s sculptures go through the glazing process. Photograph: courtesy of Liv & Dom

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The American’s mighty masterpieces – straight, curved or set at thrilling angles – sucked everyone nearby into their mysterious gravity. Our critic pays tribute to art’s legendary man of steel

• Richard Serra – obituary
• Richard Serra – a life in pictures

What could seem more out of step or more timeless than Richard Serra’s work – with its obdurate metal blocks and curving steel walls that can feel as threatening as the side of a ship that curls above you as you flounder beneath? Serra’s sculptures are about as precarious as Stonehenge: they might last for centuries or even millennia – or fall and crush you to death in an instant. It is as if they were oblivious to human scale and the length of a human life. But without us, they are just ruins, remnants of overarching ambition. Most of them would survive our ending but there would be no one to witness them. There’s the paradox. Serra’s mighty works are nothing without us.

Le Corbusier’s architecture and early Morandi still lifes , Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of vacant city squares and Giacometti ’s figures standing still and walking; Georges Seurat’s conte crayon gradations and elegant atomised forms whose edges seem about to dissolve – they are all somewhere in Serra’s formation, created in a career that lasted more than 60 years. In many ways, he was a very European American artist. Serra, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, was a daunting, fascinating artist. He made me think differently about space and sculpture – and about looking. Serra can make us feel physically and psychologically vulnerable, even though scaring us was never part of the point. Beyond all the analysis and critique, Serra’s sculpture is just there , like a rock or a cathedral.

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Statues in St Pancras station and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea endure despite opposition from public

It was described by one council planner as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted and has attracted so much controversy that no artist has admitted to making it.

But the faceless sculpture of Prince Philip outside a Cambridge office block that is to be taken down years after it appeared is not alone as a work of divisive public art.

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For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone

To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.

Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of the country on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”

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