News
Adelaide residents have their eyes glued to a low-stakes whodunnit hitting landmarks across the suburbs, including a KFC sign and a colonial statue
A serial prankster has been leaving a trail of novelty oversized googly eyes across metropolitan Adelaide, from fast food and liquor store mascots to one of the city’s most recognisable colonial monuments.
The eyes first appeared in the early hours of 11 January, when a pair of suburban Dan Murphy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken stores on opposite sides of the city were found sporting matching looks of bug-eyed confusion. Management of the Port Road Dan Murphy’s store sighed and shook their head when approached for comment.
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Rachel Mars will create replica of concentration camp entrance over three days as part of Transform festival
A replica of the entrance gate to the Dachau Nazi concentration camp is to be recreated over three days in Leeds for an art project asking questions about what memorials are for and who has the right to make them.
Dachau was constructed a few miles from Munich in 1933. During the war it became a death camp where more than 41,000 people were murdered before US troops liberated it on 29 April 1945.
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Maureen Paley, London
The provocative Dutchman has made a film about artist René Daniëls, who was a celebrated artist before being left aphastic and partially paralysed
Erik van Lieshout’s films are often riotous, comic affairs. Always putting himself in the frame – along with his subjects, collaborators, antagonists and even passers-by – he’s a kind of agent provocateur. He annoys, provokes, and sometimes goes too far. How far can you go? Now 54, Van Lieshout’s latest work focuses on fellow Dutch artist René Daniëls. While retaining Van Lieshout’s talent for embedding himself in situations (often of his own making), and for all the incidental, hilarious interludes, this film, René Daniëls 2021, filmed over a year, has a largely different tenor to previous works.
In 1987 Daniëls, then an influential young Dutch painter, suffered a haemorrhagic stroke. He was 37. His career had lasted barely a decade. For a long time, Daniëls was unable to work, and still can barely speak. Slowly, he has learned to paint and draw again, using his left hand. He is now aphasic, and partially paralysed on his right side.
Continue reading...Campaign for British Museum to return antiquities boosted by support from the Times newspaper
Greece has vowed to intensify its campaign for the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures amid “optimistic” signs that British public opinion has shifted markedly in favour of returning the prized “Elgin” marbles to Athens.
The Greek government said it would step up pressure for the fifth-century BC antiquities to be enjoyed in their entirety, within view of the Acropolis, after receiving support from an unexpected quarter of the British establishment.
Continue reading...The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world
Continue reading...The New Yorker has made a virtual art show to take place within the smash-hit game – and a real-life one at London’s Serpentine with a touch of augmented reality. Can it get young gamers into galleries?
For Brian Donnelly – known as Kaws since his graffiti beginnings in 1990s New York – art has always been a communication tool. From street art to vast public commissions, he says, “it’s a chance to create a dialogue”. His desire to bring art to the masses is partly why his work spans collectable toys and streetwear collaborations, as well as paintings and sculptures that sell for millions. His new exhibition will allow him to connect with a large number of eyeballs in, he says, “a new and massive way”. The show, New Fiction, is at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and simultaneously on two free online platforms: the gaming behemoth Fortnite and the augmented-reality (AR) app Acute Art.
With more than 400m player accounts, Fortnite is massive, especially when compared with the estimated footfall of an average Serpentine show (around 35,000). While the uninitiated might dismiss Fortnite as just another shooting extravaganza, players are increasingly spending time in its more peaceful zones, such as creative mode, where they can mooch about the Fortnite metaverse without fear of elimination. “You can hang out with your friends and explore new features,” says Fortnite’s partnerships director, Kevin Durkin. This could mean honing your dance moves but also watching a film or an Ariana Grande concert (as players did in August 2021), or, as of today, visiting an art gallery.
Continue reading...The activist, documentarian and photographer, who has died aged 87, captured the American civil rights movement while shooting the likes of David Bowie and Robert Kennedy
Continue reading...Picasso chose a Mouton Rothschild, Yoko Ono a vintage chianti. But why do artists love doing wine labels – and can they enhance the quaff? Our writer enters a world where labels are so prized, drinkers get them as tattoos
Here’s a good pub quiz question: what do David Shrigley, Tracey Emin and, er, Prince Charles have in common? The answer is they’ve all painted works of art you can order in a restaurant. Because while a wine bottle may provide only the slenderest of canvases, that hasn’t stopped some of the biggest names in the world of art from daubing something onto the label’s few square inches.
The latest to do so is Olafur Eliasson, the revered Icelandic–Danish environmental artist who created a work for the 2019 vintage of Château Mouton Rothschild – a series of ellipses that form a ring charting the path of the sun in relation to the chateau’s location in Pauillac, south-west France. If you really want to understand the bond between fine art and fine wine, there is no better chateau to start with. Since its first artistic collaboration in 1924, the roll-call of names to grace its bottles is astonishing: Salvador Dalí doodled the winery’s ram emblem for the 1958 vintage, Jeff Koons modified a first-century Roman fresco in 2010 and, four years later, David Hockney provided an empty and full glass.
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It was an unlikely choice for BBC Two to schedule against Match of the Day. But Berger’s series and book now forms the bedrock of how we interpret art and advertising
On 2 January 1972, the Sunday Times ran a short preview for a new documentary. “If you are in the least interested in art,” it began, “have your set tuned and be ready to have your eyes opened by John Berger in the first of a stunning new series.” Ways of Seeing was broadcast on BBC Two at the unpromising hour of 10.05pm on a Saturday night, the same time as Match of the Day. It had a modest audience and few reviews, and yet the anonymous critic was right. This idiosyncratic documentary, made on a shoestring budget, has been snapping eyes open for half a century.
Ways of Seeing has inspired generations of writers, artists and curators, spawning academic conferences and tribute programmes. According to the novelist Ali Smith, who watched it as a child, “even its title set me on a road where I knew there wasn’t just seeing, there were … ways of it”. It reached a new tranche of readers last year by way of the American model Emily Ratajkowski, who opened her memoir My Body with Berger’s quote: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”
Continue reading...Etinosa Yvonne recalls a chance encounter with a Fulani woman in northern Nigeria
I met this woman in Machina, in Yobe state, when I was on assignment in northern Nigeria 2020. It had taken us seven hours to get there – it’s right on the border with Niger – and it was already late afternoon, early evening.
We were waiting for people to come and collect water from a solar-powered water pump when I saw her: this extremely beautiful Fulani woman. I was particularly drawn to the marks on her face. I knew Fulani women always like to look good, but it was really beautiful to see up close. There was a bit of a language barrier as I don’t speak Fula and she didn’t speak English or Hausa, but she agreed to have her photo taken.
Continue reading...The legal battle over the painting, in the hands of a Madrid museum, has spanned more than 15 years
Depicting a rainswept Paris street, the Nazi-looted painting has long hung on the walls of one of Madrid’s top art museums. Its fate is now in the hands of the highest court in the US, in a case that has long pitted the Spanish institution against the heirs of Jewish refugees.
At the centre of the US supreme court hearing, set to begin on Tuesday, is an 1897 painting by impressionist Camille Pissarro. For decades the piece – titled Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain – graced the walls of the Cassirer family homes in Berlin and Munich after it was bought directly from Pissarro’s art dealer.
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Estorick Collection, London
Forged in the seclusion and poverty of postwar Italy, the exquisite abstract work of this little-known artist casts a spell all its own
Who was Bice Lazzari? At the Estorick Collection in north London, the curator Renato Miracco puts the case for this too little-known Italian modernist with utmost straightforwardness. On display are 40 works, offered with next to nothing by way of commentary; should you want to know something of Lazzari’s family background, for instance, you’ll just have to do your own research. But if such an approach seems, at times, on the risky side – in the gallery, it’s hard to get your bearings at first – Miracco’s confidence that Lazzari’s art will ultimately speak for itself is surely not misplaced.
What an exhibition! Down the years, I find that I’ve grown pretty weary of a certain kind of abstraction; whatever it might have meant at first, it seems ever more etiolated to me. Yet here is Lazzari, making the case for it all over again. Out of discord, whether internal or external, she creates a harmony so exquisite, her work seems at moments almost to vibrate. However fiercely suggestive it is of the “obscure forces” that drove her as an artist – primal instincts that would not let up even towards the end of her life, when she lost her sight – it’s also deeply and enduringly tranquil. Under their spell, I came to think of her paintings as answers to questions I did not know had even been asked.
Continue reading...A house with a face down a West Country lane is the playful, richly complex work of David Kohn Architects – and owes a debt to FAT’s pioneering Blue House in Hackney
Twenty years ago an architectural bomb went off in Hackney, east London. It was a small and charming bomb, with no reported casualties, in a colour somewhere between baby blue and sky blue, with curious shapes – old Dutch gables inspired by a postcard of Amsterdam, the outline of a tree, a child’s idea of a house – cut into its boarded exterior. But it performed an act then outrageous in architectural circles, of reviving postmodernism, the decorative style tainted by its association with the bloated office buildings and shopping malls of 1980s corporate excess.
The Blue House, as it is called, helped to bring some fame though not much fortune to its architects, Fashion Architecture Taste, or FAT, until they announced their breakup in 2013. It didn’t, though, greatly alter the trajectory of architecture. It didn’t launch a revolution of what you might call postpostmodernism. Its big idea was that architecture could be like pop art, that it could combine artistic sophistication with a direct appeal to everyday culture, that it could riff on themes from notable architects of the past while offering imagery that a child might get. So the gable and tree shapes came with a layered and complex interior that owes something to Adolf Loos and John Soane. The world somehow wasn’t ready for this.
Continue reading...Perhaps bravely, the BBC is making a drama series about Jimmy Savile, exploring how its former favourite managed a double life as a star and paedophile, dying before being unmasked in an ITV documentary.
Savile’s victims have, it’s reported, been involved in a production likely to show how his extraordinary status, giving him opportunities for years of attacks, derived from a doting state broadcaster. The series will inevitably remind audiences how BBC executives subsequently suppressed their journalists’ attempts to expose his crimes.
Continue reading...Musician-photographer Edgar Ortiz captures the rain-slicked days and urban energy of his city in lyrical images
Sometimes, Instagram feeds find a language of their own. Our editor came across Edgar Ortiz’s work while scrolling. Ortiz, 38, is a hobbyist photographer and musician. He specialises in streetscapes like this one, in which the city can seem on fire. He gives each of his pictures a moody soundtrack – this one comes with Better Believe as a backing, an epic rap by Belly, the Weeknd and Young Thug.
Music came first for Ortiz – he’s been involved in that since he was 16. He has only been taking pictures seriously for a couple of years. You don’t really need the soundtrack to catch the emotion of this picture, though. It was taken from a train platform in downtown Chicago, the city in which Ortiz has always lived. Like nearly all of his pictures it is a lyrical hymn to the urban energy of his city. Sometimes, he focuses on faces, but these long drive-by vanishing points recur as backdrops, giving the pictures an ambiguous intensity and possibility, one part Mean Streets, one part Yellow Brick Road. His pictures are included in the feed of the influential street art community, BCNcollective, which showcases emerging talent.
Continue reading...Batman, Spider-Man and many others lost parents when young. A new exhibition explores their complex stories
Spider-Man, Batman, Black Panther and Superman, stars of the strip cartoons printed in comics and at the bottom of newspaper pages, have gone on to inspire film franchises or, in the case of Little Orphan Annie, who started in a syndicated strip, a popular stage and film musical.
Celebrated in popular culture across the world, these fictional characters are all children who lost their parents at an early age. It is a tried and tested, tragic narrative formula that efficiently releases them into the wider world, as well as exposing them to danger.
Continue reading...Rural architecture has moved far away from the knocked-up tin shed to embrace the land and sustainability
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Australia is the ultimate canvas for architecture that boasts wide open spaces and rooms flooded with light. While urban centres play with streetscapes and how to maximise space in terrace-lined streets, bush architecture is embracing the land, and booming.
Two years into the pandemic, people around the world have been forced to reassess their way of life and the importance of the space they inhabit.
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Continue reading...Jordan Nassar was born and raised in New York by his Palestinian-American father and Polish-American mother. “The fight for Palestinian equality is very important in my family,” he says. “My father, a psychiatrist, spent his life helping people there.” Nassar was a crafty child, into origami and kirigami, and then he progressed to embroidery. “It’s the most recognisable element of Palestinian culture, something I had grown up around in our house and almost all of the other Arab homes I’ve been to.”
To create the works, he collaborates with embroiderers in Palestine. “I love that my artistic process brings business to Palestine,” he says, but his beautiful vistas are very much diasporic. “The land in my works manifest the imaginations of Palestinians outside Palestine... In our dreams, there is no occupation, no anguish – our Palestine is beautiful and serene.”
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The Nigerian photographer on an unusual encounter on the roadside in Morocco
As a professional photographer, Stephen Tayo’s usual reason to travel is for work. Since visiting Marrakech solo in 2019, however, he had been raving to friends about how much they all needed to go. Bored after a year under Covid restrictions, he eventually rallied five friends from his home town of Lagos, Nigeria, to join him on a mini road trip. The group began in Tayo’s beloved Marrakech, then decided to head to the beach to slow the pace a little.
“We hired a bus and headed for Essaouira on the coast, but stopped any time we saw something interesting. Shortly after a roadside coffee break, we saw this tree filled with goats taking shelter and resting,” Tayo says.
Continue reading...This year’s rally once again returned to Saudi Arabia where 750 competitors in 430 vehicles traversed more than 8,000km over 12 stages. The rally started and ended in Jeddah, going through canyons and cliffs in the Neom region, passing by the Red Sea coastline, into stretches of dunes surrounding the capital Riyadh.
Click here to check out images of the rally from yesteryear
From Jeddah to Riyadh and everywhere in between, this has been a visually spectacular year at the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen days of dunes, fast straight tracks, rocky sections, and cliff backdrops. Titles have been contested and first-time entrants have been broken in. All of the contestants were hoping for glory in the vast desert landscape where mistakes are rarely forgiven, but few claimed it.
The dust settles on the world’s toughest rallying event and a variety of stories emerge from the Saudi desert. Nani Roma, the seasoned veteran who has won the Dakar on both a motorbike and in a car, showed us how far biofuels have come in recent years.
Bahrain Raid Extreme driver Nani Roma and co-driver Alex Haro Bravo drive their Prodrive Hunter T1 on Stage 7 from Riyadh to Al Dawadimi. Photograph: Marian Chytka
Continue reading...Richly patterned wallpaper layered with portraits and antiques define this 1920s clapboard kit house in the Hudson Valley
The White House doesn’t often provide interior design inspiration – remember Melania Trump’s 2018 Christmas decorations? – but Tyler Lory and Michael Rauschenberg’s grey-painted clapboard home in New York state’s Hudson Valley reflects 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in one specific way. “As a kid I was always impressed by the rooms at the White House: the blue room, the red room, the green room,” says Lory. “I wanted our rooms to each have their own identity.”
Here, the mono effect is achieved with a different mood and richly patterned wallpaper for each room. Papers are layered with atmospheric portraits and rooms are full of antiques gathered over a lifetime.
Continue reading...A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modern
At 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.
He has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.
Continue reading...Whether it’s nostalgic screen terror or Mark Rylance’s stage return, our critics have your plans for the week covered
Scream
Out now
New year, new Scream. Back after a gap of 11 years (if you don’t count the so-so TV show), this sequel/reboot combines a nostalgia fix – in the form of re-appearances from surviving original Scream characters – with modern anxieties such as: what if Ghostface hacked into the smart home apps linked to your mobile?
Memoria
Out now
An arthouse essential, Memoria follows Tilda Swinton’s Jessica Holland as she attempts to trace the source of a mysterious noise in the jungles of Colombia. Fans of Apichatpong Weerasethakul will thrill to this unique director’s typically confident and singular approach, but this is also a great starting point for those new to his work.
Cow
Out now
Director Andrea Arnold is probably better known for fiction than documentary (see: American Honey, Red Road, Fish Tank …) but her fiction always has a bracing, documentary feel. It makes sense then, that her new documentary about the life of a dairy cow has lyrical, fictive qualities.
Catherine Bray
The aftermath of the protests in Kazakhstan, floods in Brazil, fire in the Bronx and Novak Djokovic supporters in Melbourne: the most striking images from around the world this week
Continue reading...The misfit Catalan, who has died aged 82, dedicated his life to wild postmodern buildings which formed the backdrop to The Hunger Games, and inspired the aesthetic of Monument Valley and Squid Game
A dazzling pink castle perches atop the coastal cliffs of Calpe, near Alicante in southern Spain, its pastel turrets standing like a coral outcrop above the shore. The high fortified walls hide a vertical maze of staircases and terraces within, painted in shades of baby blue, lilac and red, opening out on to the sparkling waters of hidden rooftop pools.
This candy-coloured citadel of holiday apartments is the work of Ricardo Bofill, the maverick Catalan architect who has died aged 82. He spent a lifetime conjuring otherworldly buildings, which now stand like monuments from some future-primitive sci-fi civilisation. Half a century after their construction, his fantastical creations have inspired a whole new generation, being used as futuristic film sets and influencing the aesthetic of everything from the Monument Valley video game to the cult TV show Squid Game.
Continue reading...A group of 31 men started a 10-week intensive training program to become members of the Taiwan navy’s elite amphibious reconnaissance and patrol unit. It involved sleep deprivation and intense physical training, all while soaking wet. Only 15 finished
Continue reading...Alison Katz gets autobiographical , the V&A recovers images cut from medieval manuscripts and Emily Speed sees life in two dimensions – all in your weekly dispatch
Wang Gongxin: In-Between
Multimedia installations that explore by modern means the ancient painterly problems of light and shadow.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, from 19 January to 26 February.
‘It’s like a museum,’ says princess caught in inheritance feud over one of the world’s most expensive homes
As legend goes, tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain guarantees a return visit to Rome. When, as a 16-year-old American tourist, Rita Carpenter participated in the ritual and made a wish to one day marry a Roman and live in the Italian capital, little did she know that almost five decades on she would return to marry a prince and home would be a 16th-century villa stuffed with history, including the only ceiling mural ever painted by Caravaggio.
But now Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi is facing the prospect of having to move out of the sprawling Villa Aurora, and the vast treasures it contains are at risk of being closed off to the public.
Continue reading...Max Fordham, who has died aged 88, changed the way that buildings in Britain are heated, lit, powered and ventilated more than any other engineer of his generation. Trained in the sciences, he brought a new creative and intellectual rigour to the problems of plumbing and wiring, bringing the disparate building services trades together in a single holistic approach. Tackling problems from first principles, he founded his practice on the idea of engineers embedding scientific knowledge in the art of building design, in a way that has since become ubiquitous.
He always instructed colleagues to “start with the edge of the universe as a boundary and quickly narrow down to the specific problem”. While other engineers might reach for the ventilation grille catalogue, Fordham began by asking how air should enter a room, and why. At a time when heating and lighting was usually an afterthought, he worked with architects from the very beginning of the design process, developing practical, elegant, low-energy solutions, pioneering sustainable design long before the term was coined.
Continue reading...Guardian photographer Sarah Lee describes her experience as a stills photographer on the set of the joint British-German Netflix production starring Jeremy Irons
Munich, based on the Robert Harris novel, is a German-British TV production that was filmed in Germany and subsequently in England in late 2020. I was invited to join the crew as an on-set stills photographer for the UK leg of shooting.
We started in Liverpool, which was doubling for 1930s London. The historic Liver Building, which stood in for Gotham city in the forthcoming Batman movie, made a very convincing Whitehall. The production later moved south to Amersham in Buckinghamshire where we shot in historic houses used as sets for Chequers and Downing Street.
Liverpool doubled for 1930s London – with the historic Liver Building making an impressive substitute for Whitehall
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