News
Ceramics smash against abstract art, a trans painter tells her story and crop circles get a late reappraisal – all in your weekly dispatch
Dreamachine
A hallucinatory visual experience that promises to subvert your senses. Judging by the health form you have to fill in, it’s pretty intense.
• At various locations including London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from 10 May.
For 15 years outsize developments have been making a mess of the Thames – and this South Bank scheme is among the worst
I could not imagine that London might inflict any more visual damage to the Thames than it has already done. No city on earth has made such a mess of its river. But one of its biggest and most aggressive office blocks has just been approved on the South Bank in the heart of the capital. The slab – or rather tower and slab – that was approved by Lambeth council in March is to loom over the National Theatre opposite Somerset House. Its bulk will dominate every river view. The slab replaces the old ITV headquarters and is a behemoth in comparison. It will be more than twice the height of the neighbouring National Theatre. On the horizon it will be more prominent than St Paul’s or the Houses of Parliament. It is massive.
The erection of such a building is patently an issue of civic if not national importance. It is inconceivable that central Paris or Rome would tolerate such an intrusion. Yet it has been approved on the say-so of just six members of Lambeth’s planning committee. They guiltily admitted it was likely to be “controversial and extremely unpopular” but justified it as “creating over 4,000 jobs”.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Beloved by the likes of John Waters, the Dutch painter’s installations seem frivolous – but there are deep questions about art hidden beneath their candy-bright facades
Flowers blossom in bursts of cartoon euphoria throughout Lily van der Stokker’s new exhibition Thank You Darling. In one rectangular mural they repeat like absent-minded doodles in the margins of school notebooks. The word “THANKS” is painted in the mural’s corner in an apparently simple bit of gratitude for pretty colours and shapes. That work even comes with a real red sofa to kick back on, and a vase of flowers to smell. Could art seem more easygoing?
The Dutch artist’s candy-bright installations, where murals creep up walls and round corners in psychedelic curlicues, annotated with words and fragments of conversations or thoughts, have been amassing wide-ranging fans for three decades. An early bouquet graced a Viktor & Rolf T-shirt. John Waters, the cult director of “trash” cinema, is a vocal admirer. Van der Stokker’s public art projects include painting an entire building exterior pink for the 2000 World Fair in Hanover and creating a supersized chintzy teapot that sits atop a shopping centre in Utrecht. Yet for all the works’ popular appeal, tricky questions about art and everyday being lie beneath the sugar-coating of nursery pastels, bubblegum pinks and dazzling fluoros.
Continue reading...Tate Liverpool
It has some fabulous works, from a canal by Constable to a gnarled old tree by Tacita Dean, but this show’s radical v conservative thesis gets caught in the brambles – and the climate section is catastrophic
Poor John Constable. What did he ever do except go out in the fields and paint? For that apparently harmless pursuit, it seems Tate Liverpool cannot forgive him. Its attempt to define a “radical” British landscape art keeps kicking Constable as a convenient shorthand for the “conservative” landscape tradition it rejects.
His painting Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) is shown near a looped clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. If you can shut out this insulting reduction of Berger to an intrusive soundbite, you have to contend with a lengthy wall text that tells us Constable’s “idealised image of nature and rural life” creates an idyll “in contrast to the reality for workers of the time”.
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Hormone replacement therapy | Boris Johnson and Lorraine Kelly | Murderous artists | Whips in parliament | Nature doing what comes naturally
I have been successfully treated with HRT for over 30 years, which has allowed for a full and active life (Report, 4 May). Each time it was prescribed, I was given a warning about the risks and a note that I accepted them was put on my records. During this time my husband was never warned about the probably greater risk of taking alcohol with his many medicines. I wonder about the difference.
Evie Hughes
Chiswick, London
• I’m delighted that Boris Johnson doesn’t know who Lorraine Kelly is (Report, 3 May). Johnson is, regrettably, the prime minister, a role of the utmost seriousness, especially in the current dire situation. Hopefully, he doesn’t have time to watch daytime TV. If he does, I’d be even more alarmed about him than I already am.
Alan Clark
London
Sculptures at the Walker depict members of Sandbach family, who made a fortune from slave trade
A sobering set of wrought-iron ankle shackles used to restrain people below deck as they were transported from Africa to enslavement have gone on permanent display in a room of beautiful sculptures at the Walker art gallery in Liverpool.
The shackles have been placed near sculpted portraits of the Sandbach family made in the 19th century by John Gibson, Liverpool’s leading sculptor. The family members were part of the Sandbach, Tinne and Co dynasty that made an immense fortune trading in enslaved people and their output, including sugar, rum, molasses, timber and coffee.
Continue reading...Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
This thoughtful exhibition shows how artists have utilised windows for more than just voyeuristic thrills. But it has a Vermeer-shaped hole
Who is the woman in the window? A housebound mother leaning out to gossip? A lover waiting for a letter? A sex worker summoning clients? An artist installing work in a gallery? As this tightly structured show reveals, the convention of showing women positioned at a window dates back millennia. The oldest artefact here – almost 3,000 years old – is an ivory carving from the Assyrian city of Nimrud, in which a woman gazes over a carved balustrade. She may have represented a cult goddess, or a sacred sex worker watching from a temple.
From its earliest representations, the window was presented as a space of display: a pictorial device framing an object of desire. A Greek krater (serving bowl for wine) is decorated with a scene from a comic play. Two grotesque old men complete with padded stomachs and flapping phalluses make an amorous call on a courtesan, whose head and shoulders appear framed in a window.
Continue reading...‘Once-in-a-generation’ exhibition will show 22 of his paintings for first time in Britain
Twenty-two paintings by the influential post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne that have never before been seen in the UK will go on show in a “once-in-a-generation exhibition” at Tate Modern in the autumn.
They include the acclaimed Still Life With Fruit Dish, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which confirmed Cézanne’s reputation as one of the most important modern European artists.
Continue reading...Destruction of historic buildings is considered a war crime and Kharkiv has been among worst affected
Within three weeks of the invasion, Russian forces had hit dozens of historic buildings in Kharkiv, an eastern Ukrainian city recognised at home and abroad for its rich mix of architectural heritage, including grand formal buildings and Soviet modernist structures.
Strikes on the city, many of which were carried out by Russian military planes, sent shock waves through Ukraine and prompted hundreds of thousands of terrified Kharkivians to flee. In early March the city’s train station – another architectural treasure – was packed with people trying to board trains going west.
Continue reading...Portrait last seen in 1930 will go on display in Vienna and also be part of a non-fungible tokens collection
A painting by Egon Schiele depicting the artist’s uncle and legal guardian has been rediscovered after being missing for more than 90 years, a museum has said.
Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano (1907) was found within a Viennese private collection and will go on public display for the first time at the Leopold Museum in Austria, which houses the largest and most eminent collection of works by the great expressionist.
Continue reading...Dismissed as the work of pranksters, these mysterious flattenings should now be seen as stunning examples of non-profit art for all, says this bestselling author, who recalls the wonder they injected into the 1980s
As the sun rose over Wiltshire, Hampshire and Gloucestershire in the summer of 1989, farmers discovered that their swaying fields of barley, wheat and oats had been used to host a new phenomenon: crop circles. They reached their apotheosis during those balmy months, thanks to a sudden proliferation and blanket mainstream media coverage, but the narrative was dominated by discussions of possible alien visitation or just the wilful vandalism of it all. At the time, few people thought to judge crop circles on their artistic merit but, three decades on, the time may have come for such a reappraisal.
Britain in the 1980s was a country lacking in mystery, magic and enchantment. Then, as now, it was a time of conflict, division and ideological battles – free market v unionised labour; police state v workers – all overseen by the cold pragmatism of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, as she ruthlessly pursued war on distant soil and the “managed decline” of industries such as coalmining and shipbuilding.
Continue reading...Winners of this year’s LensCulture portrait awards use intimate images to explore complex ideas about technology, identity and climate change
Continue reading...From a cruise missile Constable to a rampaging neon giant, artists have always used rural settings to confront the uses and abuses of land. We go behind the scenes at a riveting new Liverpool show that captures their rebellious spirit
It used to be pretty clear what landscape art was. Within the British tradition, it was artists such as Gainsborough, Constable or Turner who provided the default images of rural settings, and from them a line could be traced to the present day taking in a range of artists such as Paul Nash or Eric Ravilious. It was the accepted view well into the 20th century that this tradition – especially the masterpieces of the 18th and 19th centuries – represented something that was somehow safe, fixed and broadly reflective of the natural way of things.
Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool, which, true to its title, has adopted an expanded and inclusive view of what landscape art is, unsurprisingly doesn’t include Gainsborough’s famous c1750 double portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews on their grand estate. But it does include a video clip of John Berger critiquing the painting in his 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing.
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New Zealand-born artist Claus Stangl wins prize decided by gallery staff with painting of Academy Award-winning director
- Archibald prize 2022 finalists – in pictures
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New Zealand-born Sydney-based artist Claus Stangl has taken out one of Australia’s top art honours with his portrait of Academy Award-winning director Taika Waititi.
Stangl was on Thursday announced as the winner of the packing room prize, a sub-category of the Archibald prize for portraiture.
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Dan Nanamkin would show up at the Standing Rock pipeline protest in full regalia every day. On the other side of the blockade was a massive armed force – but he sang all the time
In the United States, there have been hundreds of treaties made with Native peoples and not one – not a single one – has ever been upheld. Reservations were created, and it was said: “This land will be yours for time immemorial”, but then it always shrinks and shrinks.
In 2016, there was a massive protest against the Dakota Access pipeline. The original plan was for this pipeline to run from the oil fields up in the north-west corner of North Dakota through Bismarck, the wealthy state capital, and then down to wherever it was going. But someone in Bismarck said, “That won’t do. That’s dangerous,” because they knew it’s not a question of if, but when a pipeline will leak.
Continue reading...A sepulchral maze of dark, asbestos-lined corridors, the palace of Westminster is dangerous and dysfunctional
A few years ago, I spent several months visiting the Palace of Westminster, where 56 MPs are now reportedly accused of sexual misconduct and one has admitted watching porn on his phone. It was eye-opening. I explored its roofscapes and back offices; I stood in the secret domed space above the central lobby; I picked my way through the labyrinth of tunnels below the high-tide level of the Thames, seeing its tangles of ageing pipework, its electrical cables and its groaning Victorian sewage tanks.
Not least because of its tight security, the palace feels like a place unto itself: a tiny city-state cut off from the world outside. Aside from MPs and Lords, there are 6,000 passholders: caterers, clerks, contractors, political correspondents, administrators, cleaners. It (notoriously) has its own bars; it has its own hairdresser and nursery. It even had a firing range, in which, until 2015, members could take shooting lessons from special branch officers. There are other workplaces that envelop workers in a sort of shadow of a real life – but even the office-playgrounds of US tech companies won’t serve you eclairs and stewed tea in a panelled dining room or make available boxes of snuff, such as are placed outside the debating chambers in the mother of parliaments.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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His cartoon mashup style – full of wit, colour and fun – is suddenly hot, with his stunning buildings even gracing T-shirts and mugs. Our writer enters a world of blitzcrete, shoppertainment and pyramidal glass fireplaces
‘Our beginning was a worm,” says John Outram. “It had light-sensitive cells at one end that later turned into eyes.” He is standing in the bathroom at the top of his house in London’s Connaught Square, explaining the symbolism of the patterns that line the walls of his shower.
Three white worms wiggle their way across a background of blue mosaic tiles at the base of the cubicle, while a black I-shape floats against a band of red tiles above, denoting “the emergence of the ego”. A third yellow band at the top marks the realm of light, where the figure of “thought” appears between two triangles, signifying the parted halves of the “heap of history”. It’s a lot to digest before breakfast – and we haven’t even got on to the symbolic ceiling (the “raft of reason”) or the hexagonal serpent-skin floor tiles.
“I stand here every morning to do my exercises,” says Outram, breaking into an infectious giggle. “A good dose of metaphysics sets one up for the day.”
Continue reading...The painter, film-maker and Mulka Project founder died on Sunday, leaving behind a legacy of boundary-pushing art and an archive of cultural knowledge
The art world is mourning the loss of one of Australia’s most respected First Nations artists, Mr Wanambi, with one of his mentees saying “his passing has changed our entire landscape”.
The Yolngu painter, film-maker and curator died in Darwin on Sunday, more than 1,000km from his home in north-eastern Arnhem Land. He was just 59 years old. His family have requested his first name and image not be published.
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Continue reading...A new exhibition centres itself around Black girlhood and features work by photographers and film artists ranging from eight to 94 years old who have explored the theme in a sustained way
Continue reading...Yelena Yemchuk spent five years capturing the city’s bohemian, irrepressible young at a time of protests and attacks. It turned into a powerful record of Ukraine’s agonising slide into war
Yelena Yemchuk was 11 years old in 1981, when her family emigrated to the US from Ukraine. “I understood enough to know I’d never see anyone there again,” she writes in the short, evocative afterword to her new photobook, Odesa. “My heart broke. That was the end of my childhood.”
Yemchuk’s parents grew up in the aftermath of the second world war and lived though the Soviet era, which they assumed would also define and constrict the lives of their children if they remained in Kyiv. Ten years after they left, though, the unimaginable happened and, in the dizzying aftermath of perestroika, Ukraine declared independence. On returning there in 2003, Yemchuk travelled to Odesa for the first time and experienced at first hand the wonderful “chaos of a new nation”. She recalls going to the beach and “everywhere I looked it was like a Fellini movie – beautiful kids having a birthday party, a crazy woman walking with a pink balloon, a girl dressed as a mermaid. I had brought three rolls of film and, after five minutes, I had to run back and get more.” At that moment, she says, “my photographic language was born.”
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In Belgium, regional authorities are empowered create their own futures, writes Dr Nicholas Falk, while Richard Tippett relates praise of its fine buildings
Oliver Wainwright suggests how the public sector could build a much better Britain by adopting the sort of rules used in Flanders to create beautiful buildings (The Flanders phenomenon: how Belgian buildings went from joke to genius, 28 April). However, a much deeper reason why northern Belgium has outpaced the UK in economic as well as environmental terms is that local and regional authorities have the power to create their own futures without relying on central government. To achieve a similar renaissance in the UK, we need to learn from new town development corporations. Local authorities could create renewed towns if they had the powers to assemble land and raise funds for projects that restore hope.
Dr Nicholas Falk
Executive director, the Urbed Trust
• Oliver Wainwright’s article says that Belgium was once derided as “the ugliest country in the world”. This would have puzzled the publishers of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide. I have a 1913 edition that says: “Belgium offers great attractions of noble medieval architecture … the town halls and other secular buildings are the finest of their kind in Europe.” And the bars aren’t bad either.
Richard Tippett
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Subtly and without neat punchlines, this exhibition slowly drags into view an embedded history of the African people who came to Britain
With detailed studies of flaking, iron-blooded rock, printed at monumental scale Ingrid Pollard directs our thoughts to the bigger picture. The title of her show, Carbon Slowly Turning, might describe the motion of the spinning Earth, with you, me, the trees and other carbon-based life upon it.
But Pollard’s urge to revisit and remix art made across four decades also makes me think of a compost heap – in a good way. The show concludes with some of her oldest work – body shots from 1991 articulating lesbian experience – alongside her most recent, looking at pride, propaganda and national identity. It’s as though Pollard is constantly turning her pile of leaves, pulling old material through new, to see what mycelium it might generate.
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