News

Iron figures would extend four miles out to sea to celebrate shared Celtic and neolithic heritage of UK and Brittany

Stark on a hill over Gateshead, Sir Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North stands as a symbol of Britain’s northern identity. And across the country, on the Mersey estuary, the sculptor’s group of imposing solo figures at Crosby beach has become part of the landscape.

Now, on the eve of Britain’s potential departure from Europe, Gormley is planning a new and dramatic intervention on the beaches of northern France. He wants to erect a group of seven huge sculptures, made from iron slabs, on the coast of Brittany. They will look towards Britain, the lost island of Europe.

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Photographer Steven Saphore, armed with nothing more than a screwdriver and super glue, made some simple modifications to his DSLR camera. Digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to wavelengths of visible and infrared light. However, infrared light has no use in visible light photography as it cannot be seen and the camera will meter for light that isn’t there (resulting in unpredictable exposures). While something like infrared satellite imagery can accurately capture deforestation from a technical standpoint, an infrared-enabled DSLR on the ground can articulate the fragility of such lush ecosystems from a more poignant human perspective. The white tones you are seeing in leaves indicate a presence chlorophyll. The more reflectance (whiter), the more chlorophyll. The darker areas indicate a lack of chlorophyll, which could be from drier leaves, or thinner vegetation revealing rocks and soil through them

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Famous for her engaging portraits, Soames’ work is held in collections around the world

The newspaper photographer Sally Soames has died at the age of 82. Speaking on Saturday to the Observer, the newspaper that gave Soames her first assignment, her only child, Trevor, said she had died that morning at her home in north London, surrounded by her family and after a long period of illness.

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A welcome gold award, and now the RIBA has begun to recognise that what matters is the team

Some kind of congratulations are due to the Royal Institute of British Architects for choosing as this year’s winners of the royal gold medal for architecture the Irish practice Grafton. For Grafton Architects is run by two women, Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, which means that for the second time since Queen Victoria awarded the first such medal in 1848, it has gone outright to members of the same sex as the late queen-empress. On two other occasions, women have won the prize together with their husband-colleagues.

This year, the RIBA could hardly have done otherwise, given a campaign by an action group called Part W to highlight the scarcity of women among the winners of the gold medal and the world’s other top awards for architecture. It is flabbergasting that this conversation still has to be had now, in 2019. Still, baby steps. The choice of Grafton can’t be faulted, either – they are outstanding architects.

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Bath-based artist Stanley Donwood is well known to Radiohead fans as the man behind the band’s album artwork.

A new book explores his diverse career, from redesigning the covers of 21 JG Ballard novels to creating artwork for Glastonbury festival. For Donwood, regardless of the project, the process remains similar: “Everything is difficult to start with, gets harder, becomes impossible and then it ends up OK.”

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet (Thames & Hudson, £28) is out now

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Since the 1970s, William Wegman has been photographing his dogs in costumes and poses that are both funny and unsettling. It was all to do with ‘putting the ordinary out of sync’

William Wegman did not start his art career wanting to photograph dogs. But dogs, it turned out, wanted to be photographed by him. His first great muse, a Weimaraner called Man Ray, noodled around in front of the camera until Wegman decided to click the shutter. That was in 1973. Wegman had grown up in the 1950s obsessed by a droll comedy duo, Bob and Ray; suddenly he had a sidekick of his own. He and Man Ray already visited galleries and bars together. Now they started making photos and videos, too, revelling in a kind of spare and poetic slapstick. “He was a great dog for that,” says Wegman wistfully. “Really serious and so concentrated and funny.”

We are in a large sunlit room in Maine, so far north that we are practically in Canada. Wegman has been giving me a grand tour of his lakeside retreat, a converted hotel from 1889 and an Aladdin’s cave of props and costumes that collectively make for an illustrated timeline of his long career. Below us, a lake sparkles silver through the trees. Two dogs – Flo and Topper – occupy a sofa, settling into poses that demonstrate the elegant form and posture that makes them such camera-loving subjects. Aged eight and seven, they are the latest in a line of Weimaraners that have fixed Wegman in the public imagination as dog whisperer supreme. As he points out, “They like to be tall, which is why it’s easy to work with them.” There’s often something a little discombobulating about them, especially when draped in full-length gowns or suits. They have canine features, but human affectations, like mythological creatures that exist in dreams.

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Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
The American’s bold subversion of exultant Victorian kitsch charms even as it cuts to the quick of slavery and refuge denied

The American artist Kara Walker brings a bold, poetic energy to the clunky art-garage of the Turbine Hall for the annual Hyundai-sponsored installation. She presents just two pieces: a towering, faux-Victorian fountain and a smaller sculpture shaped like an oyster. Both are immediately charming, yet they tell a sorrowful story about slavery, colonisation and “merchant trade” (to use a euphemism that Henry Tate’s sugar company might itself have preferred).

The elegant tiers, sweeping ovals and prettily pattering water of the huge fountain make for a fine pastiche of Victorian memorials. Public monuments were built by the victors of history to celebrate their feats, legitimise their abuses, exult in their spoils and anchor their power. Walker’s monumental rebuke rises up palely: white supremacy built on black degradation. She makes visible the black women, children and men who were exploited and erased, and does so in a sardonic reclamation of the perpetrators’ own visual language.

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Reportage from Angola, Gaza City and Sicily, portraits of Jonathan Van Ness, Gillian Anderson and Renée Zellweger – the best photography commissioned by the Observer in September 2019

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Protests in Hong Kong, Paris fashion week and Dina Asher-Smith at the World Athletics Championships – the past seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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Some gems from the life’s work of people remembered in obituaries in The New York Times.

The M Woods Museum in Beijing has hired Victor Wang as its new artistic director and chief curator. Wang will oversee the programming for both the institution’s original location in the capital’s 798

The artist’s sculpture unveiled in the French capital shows ‘the vitality of the human spirit’

New York-based pop artist Jeff Koons has unveiled his long-awaited giant sculpture titled “Bouquet of Tulips” in Paris, commemorating the victims of terror attacks that rocked France in 2015 and 2016.

Controversy over the placement of the sculpture stalled its installation for years after Koons announced the gift in November 2016. It was finally unveiled on Friday in the gardens of the Champs Élysées — between the Petit Palais and Place de la Concorde.

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The expanded Museum of Modern Art reopens this month, putting Picasso and Monet next to more recent, diverse artists. Will audiences embrace its new vision?

The Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan is planning a massive reorganization that would involve laying off 25 percent of the staff, cutting back the number of exhibitions it organizes from five or six per

The Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) is protesting an exhibition at the University of Pretoria’s Javett Art Center that includes work by Zwelethu Mthethwa—a South African photographer

Strong gallery shows and a weak pound attracted plenty of international visitors to the event.

The centerpiece of Zimbabwean artist Gareth Nyandoro’s exhibition, Musika WaBaba VaMike (Mike’s Father’s Market, all works 2019), is an installation comprising a swath of hanging raw canvas with

After British school students and activists signed an https://ukscn.org/blog/2019/09/25/youth-letter-to-the-royal-shakespeare-company/ open letter threatening to boycott the Royal Shakespeare Company

East River–adjacent ferry queens like myself, who take New York City’s commuter boats up and down the coastlines, will recognize the fat mooring bollards—posts that ships get tied to when docked—in Sam

Jeff Koons dedicated his controversial Bouquet of Tulips sculpture at a ceremony today at the Champs-Élysées gardens in Paris. The forty-one-foot bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel work-depicting a

The London-based gallery White Cube, which also has a location in Hong Kong, will open a new office and viewing rooms on Avenue Matignon in Paris in the coming months. Other galleries on the street

Paul Klee’s late paintings; Anni Albers’s rhythmic textiles; Sean Donnola’s films and photographs; Marcus Jahmal’s latest works; Stephen Prina’s lithographs.

Ebony G. Patterson’s slow and monumental video installation …three kings weep…, 2018, debuted in her solo exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami last year and is on view at the Speed Art Museum in

Islamic art’s global impact is laid bare while Hogarth is revealed in all his hilarious horror – all in your weekly dispatch

Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art
Five-hundred years of European admiration for Islamic art are revealed in a fascinating perspective on global art history.
• British Museum, London, 10 October to 26 January.

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The colorful installation pays homage to the victims of terrorist attacks.

Téa Leoni is president in her series’ final season; and the Shakespeare veteran Corey Stoll tackles the Scottish king.

Our weekly series of exclusive Guardian print sales is a photograph of Durham Cathedral and the Old Fulling Mill on the River Wear, shot by Denis Thorpe

This classic view of the Unesco world heritage site of Durham Cathedral and the Old Fulling Mill was captured in moody monochrome by the Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe. The cathedral rises above the treetops – caught half in sun, half in shade – like a northern Notre Dame, while, below, kayakers paddle about on the meandering River Wear just beyond the rushing weir. The shot is beautifully framed by the tree in the foreground, which is rendered almost black in shadow. During his 23-year career at the Guardian, Thorpe covered assignments across the globe – from the Soviet Union to Japan – but returned again and again to his native northern England.

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The German artist portrays a night out at the women’s club in 1920s Berlin

In the aftermath of the first world war, 1920s Berlin emerged as a place of high spirits and anguish. Or, as the taboo-busting androgynous nude dancer Anita Berber put it in one of her most famous expressionist routines, “Vice, Horror and Ecstasy”.

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Thierry Noir says his work is a warning not to be complacent about hard-won freedoms

When Thierry Noir moved to west Berlin in the early 1980s, he found himself living next to the Wall, a menacing and at the time dreary three-metre barrier dividing the two halves of the city. “It was a melancholic place, day by day, nothing happened really. That life was putting me in a kind of isolation, and I began to think, I have to resist that because I am going crazy. So I had a need to paint the wall, just to do something against it.”

More than four decades after the Frenchman became one of the first artists to paint the infamous barrier, he is preparing to decorate another section of wall in Britain to mark next month’s 30th anniversary of its fall. He and Stik, a London-based street artist who paints often enormous, expressive stick figures, will paint and install two original sections of the wall, which for a month will greet visitors outside the Imperial War Museum in south London.

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Tembe warriors in Brazil wear colourful headdresses of macaw and other feathers, and wield bow and arrows to hunt and protect their homeland, which is constantly under threat in the globally vital Amazon region. Like their ancestors, the Tembe plant trees to teach their children the value of preserving the world’s largest rainforest, which is a critical bulwark against global warming

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Returning for its eighteenth London edition, the Other Art Fair is a platform for artists to present and sell their work directly to the public. The works by a diverse range of emerging contemporary artists span all media. There are guest exhibitions, installations, workshops and curated projects addressing the fair’s global 2019 greener future theme

• 3-6 October at Victoria House, Southampton Row, London WC1A 2QP

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The artistic evolution revolution, with chimps in the role of members of the House of Commons, set an auction high for the artist.

ENCOUNTERS, BY DEFINITION, occur unexpectedly. Woven within the fabric of everyday life, like a tear, an encounter cracks the familiar. But how do you prompt this experience when the “encounters,” as

STATISTICS TELL US THAT, at any given time, someone in our immediate vicinity has been raped—someone in our classroom, our office, someone ahead of us in line for coffee, or next to us on the subway.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

Deborah Marrow, a pillar of the Getty Foundation who dedicated more than three decades of service to the organization, died on October 1. She was seventy years old. The veteran arts administrator served

With a museum retrospective that looks back at her four decades in fashion, the designer recalls the early influences in her storied career.

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania announced today that Meg Onli has been promoted to associate curator, a position endowed by alumna Andrea Berry Laporte, effective

Devolved Parliament reaches just under £9.9m at auction at Sotheby’s in London

A Banksy artwork depicting MPs in the House of Commons as chimpanzees has been sold for close to £10m, in what organisers say is a record for the artist.

Devolved Parliament, which is four metres wide, was first unveiled as part of the Bristol artist’s exhibition Banksy vs Bristol Museum in 2009.

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The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) has announced that its Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park will reopen to the public, following the completion of a major $56 million renovation and expansion, on Saturday,

The seventeenth edition of Frieze London kicked off on Thursday, October 3, with more than 160 galleries from thirty-six countries. According to a release, this year’s fair marks “the most international

Designed for maximum energy efficiency, a weekend home looks nothing like the neighbors’. But an entomologist might feel at home.

A recent protest at the Whitney that drummed out a vice chairman exposed the symbiotic, but potentially problematic, relationship that museums have with some trustees.

The artist’s photographs, a major act of urban historical preservation, are on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

PROJECTIONS, now in its sixth year, remains the most eclectic sidebar of the annual New York Film Festival, now in its fifty-seventh year. While at first the series seemed the heir of “Views from the

National Gallery, London
In a gallery that is elsewhere stuffed with naked white women, this exhibition’s avoidance of Gauguin’s unclothed Tahitians feels like an act of prudery – and even censorship

Paul Gauguin was the first European artist to find brown skin more beautiful than white. He makes that plain in his 1902 painting Barbarian Tales, a highlight of the National Gallery’s ultimately frustrating exhibition. Who is the “barbarian” of the title? The gnome-like European who squats like Rumpelstiltskin, or the two serene Pacific women he is next to? It’s not quite right, however, to call the male colonial interloper who gloats over the pair’s unabashed bodies “white”. His flesh is a horrible bright pink.

Gauguin painted this self-excoriating work just a year before his death in the Marquesas Islands in 1903. The grotesque European voyeur is surely a guilty expression of his own appetite for “exotic” female flesh. In 1891, aged 43, he set sail for Tahiti with funding from the French government. He lived in and painted the Pacific world for the rest of his life, apart from a short return to France. More particularly, he portrayed Oceanian women, naked as often as not.

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Fatima and Eskandar Maleki host 150 collectors and creators at a time in their London home.

Copy of short-lived Vienna venue is star of exhibition on artistic role of cafes and clubs

For fun-loving aesthetes in early 20th-century Vienna it was the place to be, a venue for expressionist dance, absurdist puppetry and experimental theatre, perhaps enjoyed with a “cabaret smash” from the cocktail menu.

More than a century later there are no drinks on sale but the wildly colourful bar of the short-lived Cabaret Fledermaus has been recreated for an exhibition exploring the artistic role of cafes, cabarets and clubs around the world.

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From climate activists to orangutan babies, these images capture peace efforts around the world

These international awards for the best images of peace celebrate professional photographers who visualise what inspires hope. In short, the Alfred Fried Photography Award honours the ability of people to be caring and supportive.

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The first recipient of the $100,000 prize will be announced in 2021, the centennial of Ms. Oberlander’s birth.