Jenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
• The best design and architecture of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

This year’s highlights include the remodelling of a Richard Seifert brutalist ‘corncob’ tower, a celebration of Japanese carpentry and a wearable hot-water bottle
• The best art and photography of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly shoehorned into the gargantuan hangar that was originally the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympics, it’s an Amazon warehouse crammed with global treasures, setting visitors off on an odyssey of “curated transgression” through an immersive cabinet of curiosities.

New Africa Hub confronts colonial-era silences by asking visitors to share insights on 40,000 objects

It’s a rare thing for a museum to talk about what it doesn’t know. But unanswered questions and archival silences are at the heart of the new Africa Hub at Manchester Museum, north-west England, which is inviting people around the world to help fill the gaps.

The museum holds more than 40,000 items from across Africa, many of which were traded, collected, looted or preserved during the era of the British empire.

The health and fitness coach on his difficult childhood, why he’s never been single – and doing his first YouTube workout with a broken hand

Born in Epsom in 1985, Joe Wicks is a health and fitness coach and author. He studied sports science at St Mary’s University and started posting recipes and workouts on social media in 2014, while working as a personal trainer. His Lean in 15 videos went viral, leading to a bestselling publishing career. During the pandemic, Wicks hosted daily livestreamed PE lessons, raised more than £1m for charity and earned an MBE. His 13th book, Protein In 15, is out now.

I was always covered in food as a kid – a real messy eater. This was probably readymade spaghetti from a tin. Our family didn’t have the greatest diet – we were on benefits, a lot of our money went on Dad’s heroin addiction, and Mum was young and didn’t know much about nutrition.

Public exhibition, featuring billboard-sized portraits projected onto buildings, calls attention to Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties

Each evening, drivers on the busy 101 freeway in downtown Los Angeles pass billboard-size portraits of Angelenos that flash across the side of a building with a simple message next to their faces: Am I Next?

Three Los Angeles institutions have teamed up to launch a response to federal immigration raids in the nation’s second-largest city, projecting illuminated images of everyday LA residents in support of the thousands of community members who have been detained this year.

A sci-fi playscape at an exhibition in Gateshead had the photographer’s granddaughter entranced

Anne Rayner was enjoying a day out with her husband, Bob, and two-year-old granddaughter Phoebe when she took this photo. The three of them had headed into Newcastle city centre to find some fun, while Rayner’s daughter-in-law was caring for Phoebe’s siblings, six-month-old twin boys, at home.

Walking along the quayside and crossing the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, they pointed out landmarks to Phoebe as they went: the Tyne Bridge, the Glasshouse International Centre for Music. They arrived, eventually, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, where Harold Offeh’s exhibition The Mothership Collective 2.0 was showing (it’s on until 18 January).

The Bondi beach terror attack, the Brown University shooting, ICE in Chicago and a fallen Statue of Liberty: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

First prize was won by Elise Blanchard, who documented the lives of girls and young women in Afghanistan. Second prize was won by Natalya Saprunova, who captured the how children in Mongolia are affected by air pollution. Third prize was awarded to Sourav Das, who documented childhood in Jharia, home to one of India’s largest coal mines. Honourable mentions went to seven other photo series from Afghanistan, Gaza, South Africa, Ukraine and the UK

• An exhibition of the work will run until the end of January 2026 at the Haus der Bundespressekonferenz in Berlin, and then at the Willy Brandt Haus, also in Berlin, from 30 January to 26 April 2026

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

In her day job, the ‘first lady of Croatian avant garde’ sliced up cadavers at Zagreb’s anatomical institute. In her studio, she used the same medical instruments to make art that surprises to this day

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says David Crowley, curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work at Muzeum Susch, in eastern Switzerland. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes Marika Kuźmicz, the museum’s curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

A renowned Kabul cinema that for decades attracted the city’s film fans is being demolished to make way for a shopping mall

From aerial footage of an Indian pilgrimage to portraits of Romanians in bear costumes, this year’s awards featured stunning images from the streets of 23 countries

Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
The birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different story

In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”

Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun”, as a passerby observes. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.

‘I wanted to make a perfect square with my body. My back hurt for days afterwards. People often want to know if the kitten is real’

I’ve thought a lot about the time I made this image. In my 20s, I was living in New York. Then I broke up with my long-term partner in 2019 and I sort of didn’t really know how to cope any more. I didn’t feel creative – my whole experience of living in New York was tied to that relationship, and I felt I needed to go somewhere else and start over. I moved to Austin, Texas – I thought I’d give it a go for a bit.

I was doing a lot of tinkering at home, and I started doing a lot more self-portraits and let my psyche run wild. At this point, in 2021, one of my friends, Mike, was living in a 1940s building in East Austin, with old popcorn ceilings, really cool mouldings and outlet covers and original details, including the fireplace. It was inspiring to be there.

David Gentleman’s brilliant career spans eight decades, from watercolour painting to tube station murals to drawing the Tottenham riots. Here his daughter, the Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman, dispenses his invaluable advice

When we were children, my father, the painter David Gentleman, never offered much advice to me or my siblings. If we wanted to draw, he would hand out pencils and let us get on with it. He was encouraging, but never gave us instructions. If we were enjoying ourselves, more paper was available; but if we wanted to go and do something else, that was fine too. The idea of teaching people how to do things still makes him uncomfortable, so his latest book, Lessons for Young Artists, has come as a surprise to us all. At 95, he has attempted to distil everything he has learned about working as a painter since the late 1940s into clear advice. These lessons are not aimed exclusively at art students, or even at older people who want to paint, but are for anyone wondering how to build a life and career as a creative person.

I haven’t inherited his artistic talents, but I have picked up other important things from growing up with someone who has managed to spend the past eight decades earning a living from what he enjoys doing most. Over the past two years, as he wrote this book, I’ve spent hours in his Camden studio, talking about painting and drawing and helping him search for pictures to illustrate his ideas. Here are 10 things I’ve learned from a lifetime watching him work.

Moving from one avant garde movement to another during the 1920s, the American photographer’s work helps tell the story of the birth of modernism

Peter Hujar captured a queer Manhattan demi-monde that is now lost to Aids. Whishaw reveals what he learned playing the photographer in a minimalist film being hailed by some as a masterpiece

On 19 December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz went round to her friend Peter Hujar’s apartment in New York, and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He talked in great detail about taking Allen Ginsberg’s portrait for the New York Times (it didn’t go well – Ginsberg was too performative for the kind of intimacy Hujar craved). He also described the Chinese takeaway he ate and how his pal Vince Aletti came round to have a shower. And he fretted about not being paid by Elle magazine.

So what did Ben Whishaw, who plays him in the new film Peter Hujar’s Day, do himself the day before? The actor, on a video call from his home in London, rubbing his hands through his hair in a worried manner, says he could probably describe it in “about five sentences”, but after some persuasion attempts to give a flavour. “I got home from filming and I got the chicken that I’d cooked the previous day and eaten half of and I finished it. Well, not finished it but continued eating it and then had a glass of wine and fell asleep at half past nine. Boring. But, um, maybe there’s no such thing as boring.”

From tender coming of age stories to images that question the meaning of home, Ed Alcock’s photography blurs the personal with the political