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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Exhibition features more than 120 sculptures by Romanian who revolutionised the art form

A rare retrospective of Constantin Brâncuși, who revolutionised sculpture in the early 20th century but whose works can be extremely tricky to transport, opens in Paris on Wednesday.

Born in Romania in 1876, Brâncuși arrived in Paris at the age of 28 and soon after joined the workshop of another historic sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

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£150,000 abstract sculpture described as worst ever submitted had been erected without planning permission

A faceless sculpture of Prince Philip, once described by a council planner as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted, will be taken down years after it was erected without planning permission.

Standing outside a drab Cambridge office block, the 4-metre bronze statue depicted the late queen’s husband in academic robes with an abstract face resembling a twisted owl mask.

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The Californian artist, who died of pneumonia, was known and eventually loved for his massive rusting steel structures now housed in museums around the world

Richard Serra, the American artist known for bending the boundaries of sculpture, has died at the age of 85.

Serra died at home on Tuesday at his home in New York. The cause of death was pneumonia, his lawyer John Silberman confirmed to the New York Times.

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In creating sculptures backdated to the days when his art electrified the world, the former YBA has cast doubt on his youthful legacy and destroyed our belief in his creative future

Perhaps we should have pity for Damien Hirst. Artistic decline is a terrible fate, even if you have immense wealth to cushion the blow. What artist, what person, wants to think all the good stuff, the fireworks and inventiveness, is in the past? But Hirst apparently does think that. He could hardly confess it more clearly than by pre-dating formaldehyde animal sculptures made in 2017 to the 1990s, as whistleblowers have revealed to the Guardian .

The young Damien Hirst lived fast and thought constantly about death. At 16 he posed for a photo with a severed head in a Leeds morgue. As an emerging artist he came up with a totally new spin on the ancient theme of the memento mori by putting dead animals, including a 14ft-long tiger shark, in tanks of formaldehyde and exhibiting them as art. Dry, dusty disputes over whether ready-made objects can be art paled into irrelevance before Hirst’s reminders of our fleshy fragility – and for a generation that had grown up with Jaws it was a nightmare come to life.

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The artist, who took lockers from a gay sauna into galleries, has turned the former home secretary’s speech about the illegal migration bill into a sinister sonic maelstrom

Prem Sahib ’s most disconcerting sculptures include a giant flea, a pair of hoodies suspended in the jaundiced glow of a sodium street lamp, and a cracked obsidian mirror which emits real-life hate speech recorded in a gay chatroom. His latest work is inspired by a figure arguably more sinister than anything he has previously confronted: Suella Braverman.

Alleus – the title is “Suella” spelt backwards – is a sound sculpture which aims to “send back” one of the former home secretary’s speeches, making her eat her words. Taking as its starting point a recording of Braverman addressing the House of Commons about the illegal migration bill, Sahib slows down her voice, isolates incendiary phrases, then reverses the audio until it becomes a tangle of nightmarish noise and backbench braying. In doing so, he seems to dredge up some primordial toxicity from within Braverman’s words.

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The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is an expansive new experience that aims to pay an honest tribute to courage and resilience as an American equivalent to a Holocaust memorial

“The morning after our whipping, we all had to go to work, as if nothing had happened. I was so sore I could hardly do anything,” recalled James Matthews, who, like many enslaved people after a severe whipping, ran away into the woods. “I have known a great many who never came back; they were whipped so bad they never got well, but died in the woods, and their bodies have been found by people hunting. White men come in sometimes with collars and chains and bells, which they had taken from dead slaves. They just take off their irons and then leave them, and think no more about them.”

This quotation from Matthews’s Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave (1838) appears on a panel in the woodland setting of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, a seamless blend of art and history opening on the banks of the Alabama River on 27 March. It is one of many first-person accounts that serve as a rebuke to historical amnesia, to deletion by indifference, to those who “think no more about them”. The park’s artefacts and sculptures and its climactic monument are a radical act of remembrance rooted in a sense of place.

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