News
The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 05 2019
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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Oct 04 2019
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
Continue reading...The New York Times
Oct 04 2019

artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
The Guardian
Oct 04 2019
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.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Oct 04 2019

artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
The New York Times
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
The New York Times
Oct 04 2019
artforum.com
Oct 04 2019
The Guardian
Oct 04 2019
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.
The New York Times
Oct 04 2019

The New York Times
Oct 04 2019

The Guardian
Oct 04 2019
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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Oct 04 2019
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”.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 04 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 04 2019
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
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 03 2019
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
Continue reading...The New York Times
Oct 03 2019

artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
The New York Times
Oct 03 2019
artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
The New York Times
Oct 03 2019

artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
The Guardian
Oct 03 2019
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.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
The New York Times
Oct 03 2019
The New York Times
Oct 03 2019

The New York Times
Oct 03 2019

artforum.com
Oct 03 2019
The Guardian
Oct 03 2019
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.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Oct 03 2019

The Guardian
Oct 03 2019
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.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Oct 03 2019
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.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Oct 03 2019
