Turtle Mountain 2012 by Marcus Coates, from the Hauser & Wirth Somerset exhibition The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

The rural bites back, Gursky triumphs and Bridget Riley keeps it trippy – the week in art

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Capitalism’s great chronicler stuns the Hayward, it’s a carnival of the rural in Somerset, and the Bayeux tapestry is coming – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Andreas Gursky
Sublime images of the capitalist world by an epic artist of modern life. Gursky raises photography to the level of history painting.
Hayward Gallery, London, 25 January to 22 April.

Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990) by Andreas Gursky. Photograph: © Andreas Gursky/DACS, 2017 Courtesy: Sprüth Magers

Also showing

Glenn Brown
Fascinatingly decadent remakes of the history of art by one of Britain’s brightest younger painters. (Well, younger than Hockney.)
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, 24 January to 17 March.

The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind
Meditations on the rural world by a dazzling array of artists. The only time you will see the outrageous Paul McCarthy exhibit beside the cute animals of Beatrix Potter.
Hauser and Wirth, Somerset, 20 January to 7 May.

Pots With Attitude
It turns out Grayson Perry’s pots have ancestors in the satirical ceramics of Georgian Britain.
British Museum, London, until 13 March.

The Enchanted Room
An outstanding collection of early 20th-century Italian art from Milan’s Brera gallery, including Umberto Boccioni and Giorgio de Chirico.
Estorick Collection, London, 24 January to 8 April.

Masterpiece of the week

Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart (after 1638) by Anthony van Dyck
This glittering portrait of two dandified cavaliers takes us to the aristocratic heart of Charles I’s highly cultivated elite, which was dangerously ignoring the religious feelings of Londoners and other middling Britons. With their long hair and shiny silks, this pair are cruising for a Puritan bruising. And they got it: Van Dyck’s ostentatious image of upper-class magnificence becomes a tragic memorial to a bloody conflict when you know that both these young men would die in the civil war.

National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

Cascando (2015) by Bridget Riley
Five stars for the new exhibition of the painter’s current works, Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings 2013-2017, which contains a dizzying array of masterful, psychedelic images that confound the eye. Read the full review.