A Dutch art detective has returned two priceless stone reliefs stolen from an ancient Spanish church after tracing them to an English nobleman’s garden where they were displayed as ornaments. Arthur Brand, dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the art world”, said he handed over the centuries-old carvings to the Spanish embassy in London at a private ceremony on Monday. It was the culmination of a long search for the artworks, which were snatched in 2004 from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern Spain, believed to be at least 1,000 years old. They turned up in the garden of an aristocratic British family who had unwittingly bought them, and it was there that Brand found them covered in mud and leaves. “These artworks are priceless. To find them in a garden after searching for eight years is just incredible,” the art sleuth told AFP.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Mad Meg is back home at the Mayer van den Bergh Museum in Antwerp after a two-year absence. The painting will be back on show as one of Mayer van den Bergh’s star attractions from 22 January onwards. Having undergone thorough restoration at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels, the painting first travelled to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna for the major Bruegel exhibition there. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Mad Meg has come home. Visitors can renew their acquaintance with the work from 22 January at the home of its discoverer, Fritz Mayer van den Bergh, where it will be on prominent display once more as one of the museum’s star attractions. Previously known as a dark and weird landscape, with a deep-red sky and touches of brown, the painting looks considerably fresher since its restoration. The yellowed layers of varnish and later overpainting have been removed and the splendid original colours are back. T

Ed Atkins is one of the most distinctive and important artists of his generation. Following on from major exhibitions at The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Serpentine in London, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Atkins’ first exhibition in Austria, and his largest solo presentation to date. Atkins is an artist who makes videos, writes and draws, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery (CGI) to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed. Atkins’ works often centres on an unidentified figure, a kind of surrogate for the artist, who is animated by Atkins’ own performance. The figure is to be found in situations of everyday despair, anxiety, frustration and pitch comedy. Atkins’ works

Bauhaus, the design school that left its mark on everything from teapots to tower blocks and iPhones to Ikea, marks its centenary this year, touching off a politically charged debate about its lasting impact. The influence of Bauhaus, created during the turbulent period between the world wars and finally chased out of Germany by the Nazis, can hardly be overstated. Its radical “form follows function” and “less is more” tenets have become so commonplace that the aesthetics of the modern world are unthinkable without them. Weimar, with its winding cobblestone alleys and primly restored historical buildings, might seem like an unlikely ground zero for the bombshell launched by Walter Gropius with the school’s founding on April 1, 1919. But the small city 250 kilometres (150 miles) southwest of Berlin has

Born in 1974, Jitish Kallat is one of the best known and respected artists from India on the international scene. For over 20 years his wide-ranging and deeply reflective work has drawn an imaginary map connecting the everyday to the cosmic. Phase Transition is Jitish Kallat’s third solo exhibition in Paris and marks the artist’s return to painting after close to a five-year hiatus from the medium. For the past five years, Kallat’s long-standing engagement with the ideas of time, transience, sustenance and the cosmological took the form of large elemental drawings, and investigative animation videos, photo-works and sculptures. Kallat’s newest works, titled Palindrome/ Anagram Paintings, draw upon insights from his varying artistic explorations, as well as his work from the mid-nineties, to produce a radical linguistic renewal accomodating a wide array of his recurring preoccupations. A hand-drawn graph undergirds the paintings as well as the Untitled (Emergence) Drawings a suite of sm