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The German-Australian photographer plays with domination and submission in this high-art fashion shoot
This signature 1979 Helmut Newton shot casts the 19-year-old gay supermodel Gia Carangi with Robin Osler, who leans over her like an elegantly lecherous lizard in Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tux.
Continue reading...Designers, jewellers and artists are turning northern Australia’s noxious pests into handbags, high heels and even fetish masks
Lia Tabrah, who runs the fashion label Vermin with Perina Drummond, didn’t realise how strongly Australians feel about cane toads.
The designer started creating handbags made from the pest’s skin a few years ago, assuming “it would be a niche thing – maybe tourism, maybe [for the] European market”. Now she and Drummond have curated a toad-themed exhibition for Melbourne design week. Covid-19 precautions have now closed the show, but Tabrah says Vermin has a waiting list of orders for “handbags, man bags, wallets and stubby coolers”.
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Public invited to create own exhibitions from 216,000 paintings and sculptures
For anyone who feels they could do a better job than the art professionals who choose what we see at exhibitions comes a game-changing project: curate your own show.
The charity Art UK, which lists every publicly owned oil painting on its online database and is in the process of adding every sculpture, has announced details of a new curation tool.
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From a rocket in flight to a life-sized recreation of a ski chalet, the late designer will go down in history as the creator of epic moments of visual fantasy
All pictures: Simon Procter
From bridges to flowers, from cities to gorges, Teresa Eng spent four years exploring her ancestral roots in China, capturing a country modernising at breakneck speed
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My friend William Burke, who has died of a heart attack aged 71, was a distinguished gallerist and collector whose passionate love of the arts led to close associations with many notable cultural figures. As an American in Paris, he was also an anglophile, who nurtured friendships and professional relations between New York, London and Paris.
Born in the small Bible belt town of Marianna, Arkansas, William was the adopted son of Robert Burke, a post office clerk, and his wife, Sarah (nee Stevenson). He grew up in a modest home, built by his father, in what was a poor community during the American civil rights era.
Continue reading...Alan Caiger-Smith, who has died aged 90, was the founder of Aldermaston Pottery, which employed an average of eight co-workers over 38 years, some 60 men and women passing through the pottery in a village more usually associated with atomic weapons. Caiger-Smith was the first among equals, his employees guided by his distinctive earthenware forms, evolved through the process of throwing and his understanding of historical Islamic ceramics.
His bowls, plates, teapots, goblets, albarelli, jugs and majestic tall jars, some over 4ft in height, were all tin-glazed white and decorated with brushwork that looked both abstract and calligraphic, often reduction fired to achieve lustre effects, in wood-fired kilns he designed and built himself. Aldermaston Pottery ran from 1955 until 1993, proof that a collaborative group of creative craftspeople could achieve economic success and artistic recognition alongside the economies of scale inherent in industrial production.
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Kay Rufai’s portraits of smiling black boys from south London came out of an initiative that investigated the lack of mental health provisions for black teenagers. The photographs will be on display at Brixton Village
Continue reading...Carlos Pérez Siquier captured a changing Spain. Switching from poetic black and white to joyous colour, his pioneering work chronicles barrio life and the freedoms of the beach
Continue reading...New York artist Arina Voronova has created a street art project aimed at promoting love and support at a difficult time
At a construction site on the Lower East Side, there’s a set of posters far different than the rest: they show photographs of people kissing while wearing surgical masks. Art in the age of Covid-19? Perhaps. But also a call for unity as the nation faces pressure living under the weight of pandemic.
Related: Plague visionaries: how Rembrandt, Titian and Caravaggio tackled pestilence
Continue reading...Kay Rufai’s images of smiling 13-year-olds are one project confronting damaging stereotypes of black boys and men
In terms of challenging stereotypes and representations of black boys this was so powerful for me … because it’s not an image that you’re used to ever seeing, and you question why it has such an impact on you,” says Kay Rufai. He is talking about the 16 large-scale colour photographs of teenage boys that went on display at City Hall in London last autumn. They are distinctive in that each of the 13-year-olds is smiling, captured in moments of happiness, relaxation and vulnerability.
Related: 'They think I'm a gangster': the young black men caught in joblessness
Continue reading...18 March 1898 The artist showed a feeling for the value of line and an ingenuity in devising striking patterns that were unusual in so young a man
The death is announced, at Mentone, of Mr Aubrey Beardsley, the young designer whose black and white work has gained so considerable a vogue during the last five years. He was born in 1874, educated at the Brighton Grammar School, and placed in an architect’s office at the age of fifteen. Disliking the profession, he left it in 1890 to become a clerk in a London insurance office, where he stayed a few years. Meanwhile he had begun to draw, and some of his designs, it is said, had gained the approval of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and M Puvis de Chavannes. He was, indeed, a disciple of the English painter, as the illustrations which he made for the Morte d’Arthur published by Messrs Dent in 1893 and 1894 showed plainly enough. In any case, the sometimes morbid originality of his work soon attracted attention, and he was able to devote himself entirely to design.
Continue reading...From a film club on Twitter to Spotify playlists and a covers concert making its way through Instagram, creatives are finding ways to keep you entertained
What’s quarantine without a fun way to pass the time? As pandemic-induced social distancing pushes more and more people to the solitude of the home, self-isolators have started coming up with ways to entertain themselves, their neighbours and strangers around the world through social media.
Related: Coronaviral: the best memes, tweets and cartoons to get you through – open thread
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