News
The Guardian
Dec 14 2018
Following a campaign by the Royal Photographic Society to highlight modern female photographers in a male-dominated profession, a list of a Hundred Heroines was announced on 14 December, 100 years since British women first voted in a general election
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 14 2018
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
An exhibition celebrating female artists is always welcome – yet most aren’t given the space here to explore issues beyond femininity
In 1967, artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth persuaded the Beatles to dress in fluorescent marching band outfits and stand among a collection of historical figures – the result was the iconic album sleeve for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Blake was applauded as one of the great British pop artists and later knighted. Haworth fell into obscurity. This is not the only tale of the art world forgetting to value the work of a female artist. It was the same story when Margaret Harrison’s first solo exhibition was closed down for indecency (the indecency of Hugh Hefner posed as a Bunny Girl). Susan Richardson encountered similar hostility when she was trying to balance motherhood with her art in the 1970s.
In an attempt to buck the trend, all three of these once sidelined women are now celebrated in Women Power Protest, with 57 others, at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The sizeable exhibition takes the three colours of the suffrage flag as its starting point, splitting the works into hope, dignity and activism. Dignity invites women to reclaim the presentation of the female form. Activism replaces the aged sentiment of “purity” in the original suffrage flag and focuses on the fight for equality. Hope nods towards the increased visibility of women’s issues in the art industry.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 14 2018
The Austrian figurative painter brings raw sexuality and a nervy human anxiety to the surface
Unlike the models posed as lofty goddesses and nymphs that dominate “the nude” in western art history, Schiele’s women work a nervy, very human sensuality. It speaks to our time, as much as it did the sex-conscious intellectual circles of the artist’s fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 13 2018
Against all odds, the 1940s pioneer of Sri Lankan modernism become one of the world’s most famous women architects. So why are her buildings not celebrated today?
The second house designed by Minnette de Silva, once one of the most famous female architects in the world, stands in Alfred House Gardens, a leafy street in Colombo, Sri Lanka, tucked away from the fumes of nearby Galle Road.
Raised on columns, the house shelters within a limestone boundary wall, its iron gate patterned with leaf shapes. A yellow oleander tree and red bougainvillea spill over the gate, almost entirely obscuring the house, that was built for family friends the Pierises in 1952. Inside are De Silva’s trademark features: open courtyards and verandahs alive with trees, shrubs and a pond; a walled garden; a parking space that once doubled as a play area; and a staircase sweeping up to the second floor, where the bedrooms and kitchen are located.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 13 2018
The theme of this year’s festival is ‘the wind of time’ and it features visionary work from some of the world’s most renowned photographers. The striking images, from fashion shoots to food factories, can be seen at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography in southern China until 3 January 2019
Tucked away in a remote corner of southern China lies the small city of Lianzhou, the unlikely but charming host of a critically acclaimed annual celebration of photography. Now in its 14th year, the Lianzhou Foto festival, founded by the Chinese photography expert Duan Yuting in collaboration with the French curator François Cheval, was created to showcase the work of contemporary Chinese artists as well as renowned international photographers.
This year’s theme, “the winds of time”, is open to broad interpretation, attracting projects on social, political and environmental themes. The work of Erwin Blumenfeld, one of the most influential and experimental fashion photographers of the 20th century, provides a historical anchor for the event, which is being held at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography, China’s first publicly funded museum of its type.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The Guardian
Dec 13 2018
Nat Randall and Anna Breckon take endurance theatre to cinema, with a film that quotes dialogue from hundreds of others in a quest to redefine femininity
“The Second Woman is disgusting,” says artist Anna Breckon. It’s not what you expect the creator of an acclaimed work of theatre to say about their own piece – particularly when that work has played in festivals around Australia, received rave reviews, and just had its international debut.
“It’s quite gross to watch, and you just feel quite gross after it,” she continues.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The Guardian
Dec 13 2018
From the 1990s onwards the artist Carol Rhodes, who has died aged 59 from motor neurone disease, created in her paintings a unique style of landscape, both traditionally beautiful and unsettling in subject. She painted imaginary places, seen from some near but airborne altitude, as if from a balloon or from the window of a plane approaching an airport – close enough to show large objects but too far away for much detail. These new places are convincing topographically and show an elegant pictorial structure, but are elusive, with nothing in them seeming at all clear.
They are also complex in design, edgy and disturbingly unreal, however familiar they might feel. The colours are typically murky, as much like a sickly skin as the surface of the Earth, sometimes suggesting a close view of abrasions on a body. Rhodes said that sometimes the pictures began with a choice of colours, apparently allowing her to find the pictorial activity that could be manipulated within that harmonic range.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 13 2018
The Guardian
Dec 12 2018
In the summer Burgess Park, in London, comes alive as the diverse community gets together for barbecues, dancing, sports, and parties
- Max Miechowski has been exhibited at the Palm Photo Prize, Portrait of Britain and the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize
- See his work on display at the theprintspace 13-21 December
The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The Guardian
Dec 12 2018
Her non-Indigenous partner claimed credit for her most prized work – but the artist, born and raised out bush, bounced back and travelled the world
The artist Kwementyaye “Kathleen” Petyarre (c. 1938 – 24 November 2018) has died in Alice Springs, surrounded by family and loved ones, at about the age of 80. Alhwarrpe.
About that age, because Petyarre was born out bush, delivered by Anmatyerr midwives at Atnangker on Anmatyerr country in Australia’s north-east Central Desert. Petyarre’s birth was not recorded in any official birth register, although it is believed to have taken place between the late 1930s or early 40s.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The New York Times
Dec 12 2018
The Guardian
Dec 12 2018
Prestigious and daunting task handed to an artist best known for his huge, immersive installations
Mike Nelson, an artist known for his labyrinthine installations that visitors enter and then wonder how to exit, has been asked to transform the huge central galleries of Tate Britain.
The annual Tate Britain commission is both prestigious and daunting. Artists have been expected to respond to the architecture of the vast, echoing neo-classical Duveen sculpture galleries in a similar way to those who have been commissioned to fill the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 11 2018
From Adam Ant to Julian Cope, the pop stars of the 80s were bold, brash and big-haired. Photographer Peter Ashworth realised their wildest visual fantasies
- Mavericks, a photographic exhibition by Peter Ashworth is at the Lever Gallery, London, until 20 December
The Guardian
Dec 11 2018
Arthur Jafa says his celebrated short offered only a ‘microwave epiphany about blackness’
Just days after the US presidential election in 2016, Arthur Jafa debuted his seven-minute film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, which won acclaim as a hugely impactful portrayal of American life.
Set to Kanye West’s anthemic homily Ultralight Beam, the film oscillated between clips of ordinary black life and extraordinary violence inflicted on black bodies.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 11 2018
The New York Times
Dec 11 2018
The New York Times
Dec 11 2018
The Guardian
Dec 11 2018
He has photographed his dad’s furniture, teenage shoppers and even vegetable peelings. Now Nigel Shafran has tackled homelessness – by asking rough sleepers to take photos of him
‘Homelessness is now so visible on a day-to-day level that that it’s becoming hard to ignore,” says photographer Nigel Shafran. “I just felt the need to address it in some way that wasn’t cliched or exploitative.” To this end, The People On the Street is a photobook about homelessness, but without a single picture of a homeless person in it. Instead, it comprises 52 snapshots of Shafran taken by various homeless people he encountered in London and Paris. Each has a simple caption – Daniel from Leytonstone, Charing Cross, WC2; Sherinne, Old Street, EC1.
“The big problem with the subject is how do you photograph a homeless person without it becoming a picture of a victim?” asks Shafran over coffee in Soho, where evidence of just how chronic the problem has become is all around us. “The book is my perhaps peculiar response to that question and I’m sure I’ll get a bit of criticism for it, but there you go. My approach came from a genuine place and I stand by it.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 11 2018
The Scandinavian artist is tackling climate change by transporting centuries-old Greenland icebergs to the banks of the Thames – allowing people to smell and taste the earth’s air before it was polluted
Olafur Eliasson is putting the chill into climate change. The revered Scandinavian artist has placed 24 large blocks of centuries-old ice, harvested from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, in a circle outside the Tate Modern in London, with another six on display in the City.
The purpose of Ice Watch London, a collaboration with award-winning Greenlandic geologist Minik Rosing, is to bring the effects of climate change closer to home, putting people in direct contact with its effects so that they can feel – and even sniff and lick – the ice as it slowly melts away.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 10 2018
Lyon’s Fête des Lumières is the world’s largest visual arts festival. It takes place over four nights every December and attracts millions of visitors from all over the world. Our photographer Alicia Canter visited the city twice to see the remarkable transformation
Reflets by Damien Fontaine
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 10 2018
A new book, East London Photo Stories, combines the work of 14 acclaimed photographers to bring a vibrant area of the capital to life
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 10 2018
The New York Times
Dec 10 2018
The Guardian
Dec 10 2018
My friend Ian Jarman, who has died aged 63 of a heart attack, was an artist who captured the changing urban face of Manchester as well as the timeless rural landscapes of East Anglia and the Hebrides.
Painting was the centre of Ian’s being, and through artistic adventures in his mind he responded to the landscapes around him by producing powerful images and evoking a real sense of place – in oil, mixed media and watercolour.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 10 2018
Photographer Andrew Moisey uncovered ritual hazing, extreme drunkenness and toxic masculinity on one college campus – from men destined to be America’s future leaders
Last year in the US, four freshman students died as a direct result of hazing rituals during college fraternity initiation ceremonies. All the deaths occurred during or just after drinking bouts in which the victims consumed vast amounts of spirits in a short space of time while older students egged them on. One of the deceased, Maxwell Gruver, 19, a student at Louisiana State University, was found to have had a blood-alcohol level over .49 g/dl at the time of his death – just .31 is considered life-threatening.
“Nobody can physically drink that much ... You have to be forced to drink it,” his mother told ABC news. “It’s senseless. I mean, how is making your brother do all these things, and humiliating somebody, a brotherhood?”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 10 2018
Guardian picture editors pick a selection of photographers who have stood out over the course of 2018. An overall winner will be announced on 21 December
The Guardian receives millions of images each year from news agencies. Here are some of the photographers whose body of work over the course of the year has stood out to the picture desk.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 09 2018
The artist has battled surveillance, underground exile and even irate Berlin taxi drivers. He thinks the world has forgotten what human rights mean, which is why he has designed a new flag
The wallpaper image on Ai Weiwei’s mobile phone is a black and white photograph showing the entrance to an underground home in Xinjiang. It was here where the Chinese activist artist and his family were exiled for five years when he was a boy. “We were put underground here as a punishment,” he says. “This is where I grew up. Now they put the Uighurs in these kind of camps.” He enlarges the picture showing a bunker-like structure jutting out of the ground in an arid, inhospitable landscape.
Ai’s father, Ai Qing, was a poet and political radical who, although no activist, was seen as a threat to society. “So I’ve always been involved with human rights issues, not initially out of choice but out of personal experience,” he says.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 09 2018
The Guardian
Dec 09 2018
The gallery, priced out of New Bond Street after 142 years, is auctioning more than 300 works
An art gallery that pioneered the idea of solo exhibitions and staged the first “white cube” show is to sell more than 300 works to mark its relocation after 142 years on New Bond Street in London.
The Fine Art Society (FAS) left the five-storey Mayfair townhouse it had occupied since 1876 earlier this year, blaming rising rents and business rates. Its London branch (it also has a gallery in Edinburgh) is in temporary offices in Chelsea while it searches for a new permanent location.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 09 2018
Ikon, Birmingham
Mixing sights and sounds in often beautifully confounding ways, Haroon Mirza is on a mission to rewire our brains
Haroon Mirza is the electricity man. Kilowatts are the main medium of his art. His twinkling, zapping, glowing, crackling, pumping and frequently eye-popping sculptures and installations live or die by the switch.
Sound precedes every work. Even in the foyer of the Ikon Gallery, two floors below his show, you can hear the feedback howling upstairs. Moving from one room to the next is like navigating an audio storm, from light rain to thunder to the sound of chopping, sizzling, pattering, the shattering of ice, the scratch of needles on old turntables and the weird, teeth-aching noise of recording equipment broadcasting itself. But to all of this Mirza brings light.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 09 2018
London’s Illuminated River, a long-term light installation taking in 15 historic bridges along the Thames, is a magnificent idea – but will it simply colonise five miles of shared space with the egos of its designer and benefactors?
“I want to take the inspiration from the artists who have been inspired by the Thames,” says the New York-based artist Leo Villareal, “by Turner, Whistler and Monet.” Which, to be honest, puts his finger on the greatest hazard of the Illuminated River, the grand project to relight 15 Thames bridges to a scheme by Villareal, which will start next summer with a first phase consisting of London Bridge, Cannon Street railway bridge, Southwark Bridge and the Millennium Bridge.
The hazard is this: those great artists were attracted to painting the river precisely because they found it as it was, open to their interpretation, not framed by the viewpoint of others. This is how the spaces of a city should be, and not just for artists. Its citizens and visitors should be free to imagine their own version of these spaces. If an artist comes along and washes the bridges with mauves and pinks from the palettes of those famous dead painters, he risks creating a filter that will narrow and edit all future experiences of the Thames.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 08 2018
The Observer and Guardian photographer Neil Libbert’s winter shot of Central Park remains one of his favourites decades on
Neil Libbert, who has worked for the Observer and the Guardian for nearly 60 years, took this photograph of ice-skaters in Central Park in December 1960. It appeared on the front page of the Guardian on the last day of that month, referencing a long cold snap in New York City that ran beyond John F Kennedy’s inauguration the following January.
Libbert took the photo at the very end of a four-month trip across the country, starting in Oregon, accompanying the celebrated Guardian journalist WJ Weatherby. The photographer was 22 years old. He stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for $5 a night and walked the streets most of the day, up to Harlem and back to Greenwich Village, enthralled by what he saw.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 08 2018
In her elaborate self-portraits, Cecilia Paredes hides within colourful, patterned fabrics. Based in Philadelphia, the Peruvian-born artist started the series in 2005, when she moved to the US from Costa Rica and was trying to “blend in”. “I wanted to really get along in my new environment and literally become part of the landscape,” she says. The materials she chooses have a personal connection: a pattern involving orchids, for example, the national flower of Costa Rica, symbolises her past life there. Paredes is then painstakingly painted by her assistants. “The day of the shoot is very precise,” she says. “You don’t want any disturbances. I cannot move, and the painting can be from 7am to 3pm, so it’s a very long process.”
Portfolio Series: Cecilia Paredes is at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, until 30 December
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 08 2018
For more than 20 years the Belfast-born artist’s cleverly constructed portraits have captured the gestures of everyday female experience – and tried to find new ways of seeing women
• See a gallery of Hannah Starkey’s photography
‘When I first started out, photography was very male and not really considered art,” says Hannah Starkey. “I didn’t set out to have a feminist agenda, it was more that my interest in making work about women comes from the simple fact that I am one. That commonality of experience is at the heart of what I do as an artist.”
Now 47, Starkey has been making images of ordinary women for more than 20 years, her complex, cleverly choreographed portraits blurring the lines between portraiture, documentary and staging. A new book, Photographs 1997-2017, is a selective survey of an artistic career that started in spectacular fashion when her MA show in 1998 caused quite a stir in the London art world and has since settled into a quiet, consistently attentive exploration of female experience that also implicitly questions how women are represented elsewhere in our profligate image culture.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Dec 08 2018
For more than 20 years, Belfast-born Hannah Starkey’s artfully constructed portraits have captured the gestures of everyday female experience. Here we show highlights from a stunning new monograph published by Mack
Photographs 1997–2017 by Hannah Starkey is out now (Mack, £40)
• Hannah Starkey: ‘I wanted to create a space for women without judgment’
Continue reading...The New York Times
Dec 08 2018
The New York Times
Dec 08 2018
The Guardian
Dec 08 2018
The gilets jaunes’ protests in Paris, the migrant caravan in Mexico, the aftermath of the wildfires in Paradise and the funeral of George H W Bush – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists
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