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Gardener discovered Portrait of a Lady while clearing ivy at the gallery in Piacenza

Art experts have confirmed that a stolen painting discovered hidden inside an Italian art gallery’s walls is Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady.

A gardener at the Ricci Oddi Modern Art gallery in the northern city of Piacenza reported finding an artwork last month while clearing ivy. Portrait of a Lady was stolen from the gallery nearly 23 years ago.

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Alex Israel enters the surrealist’s ghostly head, Art & Language put their spin on art history, and Susan Hiller flips a coin to start her London Jukebox – all in your weekly dispatch

Art & Language
The conceptual art pioneers merge Picasso’s Guernica with Jackson Pollock’s drips in a provocative visual “essay” on the history of modern art.
• Sprovieri Gallery, London, from 17 January until 13 March.

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The London-based actress finds time for cultural enrichment between starring in “Sex Education” and “The Crown.”

Council promises to turn magnet for anti-social behaviour into ‘family-friendly’ civic space

At 5.30pm in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens, three police officers are gathered around a wheelchair parked in front of a gold postbox commemorating Team GB’s Olympic cycling success. Sitting in the chair, bent double, is a tiny woman with one leg. “Can you sit up, love?” the officers ask, coaxing her gently upright. They know her name. “We just wanted to check you were OK.” She mumbles that she’s fine. As they head off towards the statue of Queen Victoria, the woman immediately slumps forward again.

On a bench near the tram tracks, another drug casualty is frozen – a different kind of statue. He is holding a rolled-up cigarette, long extinguished in the evening drizzle. In a doorway by a branch of Greggs, three men with sleeping bags are sharing some pasties. In front of them, a preacher with a megaphone is telling commuters to repent or burn in hell. Outside Boots, two charity fundraisers working for Shelter flirt with commuters on their way up to Piccadilly station.

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More than six months after an exhibition organized as part of the Aichi Triennale in Japan was shuttered following political and violent threats, the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in Taiwan announced

This week in our series of exclusive Guardian photography we have Dan Chung’s image from north Pakistan of young girls walking in the mountains following a devastating earthquake

The then Guardian photographer Dan Chung visited Kuz Ganrshal, a remote village in northern Pakistan, in January 2006, three months after a devastating earthquake. He travelled with Oxfam and a local organisation, the Shangla Development Society. These young village girls – colourful against the almost monochrome backdrop – were intrigued by the visitor, following Chung along the snowy mountain path. The village people refused to move to refugee camps after the earthquake, which destroyed nearly 40% of their homes, preferring to cram together with up to five families, along with their livestock, into single dwellings. Oxfam, the only aid agency to have visited the village at the time, distributed blankets, plastic sheets, mats, hygiene kits and tents.

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Frieze has released the list of two-hundred participating galleries for the ninth edition of Frieze New York, which will return to Randall’s Island Park from May 8 to May 10, 2020, with preview days on

The singer resembles a Renaissance Virgin Mary but with a sexual edge in this Instagram photograph

Artist Awol Erizku’s 2017 portrait of Beyoncé pregnant with twins scored 10m likes when it landed on Instagram in 2017, the most an image had ever had on the platform.

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From Waves to Beat Horizon, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days

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The work of Josef and Anni Albers has given a bright, bold new look to a children’s intensive care unit

The role of art in hospitals rarely extends beyond hanging pictures on the wall. But for Josef and Anni Albers, art was always much more than that. Both pioneers of modernism, the couple met in 1922 at the Bauhaus school, an establishment with a revolutionary approach to art. Bauhaus blurred the boundaries between craft, design and fine art and championed the concept of gesamtkunstwerk: the complete work of art, typically in the form of a house.

But why not a hospital department? That was the thinking of the Albers Foundation which, since the couple’s deaths late last century, has worked to continue their legacy. “Josef and Anni both believed that what we experience through our eyes can divert and elate us in unparalleled ways,” explains Nicholas Fox Weber, the foundation’s director. Taking inspiration from the Albers’ geometric patterns and confident use of colour, the foundation has created a bold new look for the children’s intensive care unit at St Mary’s hospital, London.

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Rotunda at National Trust property exploits gloom from scaffolding to stage exhibition

A 200-year-old Italianate palace, hidden away in the Suffolk countryside and currently encased in more than 270 miles of scaffolding, is to hold an exhibition that is only taking place because it is undergoing £5m of conservation works.

Ickworth, a Georgian estate and one of the most photographed of all National Trust properties, will on Satuday open its magnificent but leaky Rotunda to show off world class works of art and objects which few people know are even there.

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A Grolier Club exhibition explores 500 years of women as scientists, midwives, writers, activists, undertakers and more.

The mayor’s remarks come after a former Philadelphia Museum of Art boss was forced to resign from his Erie Art Museum post following a New York Times report.

The Carnegie Museum of Art (CMoA) in Pittsburgh announced four new senior leadership hires. The institution named Chris Fry as director of finance, Stefanie Mohr as director of marketing and engagement,

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

Following a https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/joshua-helmer-philadelphia-museum-art-erie-art-museum.html New York Times investigation that brought to light sexual harassment complaints

I FIRST MET CARLA HERRERA-PRATS in the summer of 2008. I was invited to contribute an essay for her solo show at New York’s Art in General gallery, back when it was still just west of Chinatown on

The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles makes unflinching art about violent death and its aftermath. Her newest photographs and installations are now in New York City.

The National Endowment for the Arts announced the first grant recipients of the 2020 fiscal year. The federal agency will award $27.3 million to 1,187 projects in all fifty states, the District of

Andrew LaMar Hopkins celebrates the rich contributions of 19th-Century New Orleans in his folk art style (and drag).

A new series of projects by international artists will be shown in five cities across the world.

The American Museum of Natural History’s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth.

At events across the city, you can commemorate King’s achievements or follow his example of activism and service.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, the 1991 film L.A. Story was hands-down the best satire of Los Angeles as told from the perspective of a man experiencing a possible psychotic break. Harris K. Telemacher—a TV

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is awarding $3.93 million to forty-six organizations from nineteen states for its fall 2019 grant cycle. The funds will support visual arts programs,

Nicky Nodjoumi’s dreamy serial paintings; Albert Oehlen’s “mirror paintings”; Clarity Haynes portraits of breasts; Kim Tschang-Yeul’s abstract brand of Pop Art

He’s written letters to the prime minister, joined the Black Panthers and spent a lifetime on art that can provoke, delight and be climbed on. Now, at 84, Araeen has opened a restaurant

• Warning: contains an image some may find disturbing

‘You won’t find anything interesting in my life. I’d rather talk about the work,” says Rasheed Araeen. It is quite the understatement. The 84-year-old Karachi-born artist is no stranger to incident. “My life in Britain has been my struggle against the establishment. It took many forms – within art, outside art, in writing, in performances, in writing letters to the prime minister,” is his own pithy summation.

He first wrote to Tony Blair after “there were ugly things spoken about the Muslims” following the July 2005 bombings in London. “One of the points they kept making was that Muslims were against modernism. They were backwards, uncultured, uncivilised. I wrote and said, ‘Here is an example of what Muslims have contributed to British modernism’.”

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New Orleans and Cuban musicians join in Havana’s annual jazz festival, defying Trump’s efforts to weaken US-Cuba relations

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Jean-François Fourtou, known for his sculptures of animals, has channeled his creative energy to his 25-acre property in Morocco.

At an expansive new exhibition in New York, the director’s defining science fiction opus is explored in detail with help from those who made it with him

Though the calendar reads 2020 we’re still waiting for the future promised in 2001. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, created concurrently with Arthur C Clarke’s novel, is recognized as one of the most influential motion pictures ever made, endlessly scrutinized from both a story and production point of view. Both avenues are open to New Yorkers and visiting tourists from 18 January through 19 July at the Museum of the Moving Image adjacent to the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens.

Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is an in-depth examination of how the New York-born director’s desire to make “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction film” (as Kubrick wrote to Clarke in a letter preserved under glass in the exhibit) led to “the ultimate trip”, as MGM’s marketing department called the movie once young people seized upon the heady, ambiguous film that exploded into sound and light to go “beyond the infinite” in its most notable sequence.

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French photographer Larry Niehues has been capturing life in the US on 35mm film, from motels to diners and gas stations, to evoke the past by showing ‘all the beauty and destruction, the tradition and innovation, the loud cities and the quiet little spaces’. His work is published in the book Nothing Has Changed

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‘The chapel was built by enslaved people in 1896. The area had been a hotbed for fishing but the rivers are empty now and money is moving to the city’

In October and November 2017, the American writer Sala Elise Patterson and I travelled to the Low Country in Georgia. In recent years, politics has forced people to be polarised, but we figured that there would be a lot more contradictions, even in somewhere like rural Georgia, a place that was probably leaning Republican. We set out to interview people from both sides of the political tracks, and look for continuities, and the paradoxes of everyday life.

The Low Country is sprawling swamp land along the Ogeechee River, or Blackwater River as it is known. We spent months researching beforehand. One of the places we reached out to was St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in the hamlet of Burroughs. St Bartholomew’s is the last standing chapel of the Ogeechee River Mission and the oldest African American congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. The chapel was built by enslaved people in 1896.

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Filmmaker George Lucas’s new museum of narrative art, which is currently under construction in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, has acquired a significant collection of film posters, photographs, scripts,

The New Museum in New York and the Onassis Foundation are teaming up to create a new space for artists, filmmakers, and designers working in mixed reality. An initiative of the museum’s cultural incubator

In this case, the art-lovers own storage and shipping centers that meet all their needs to rotate, hang and pack away their pieces.

Thirty-five artist projects centered on topics such as migration, surveillance, sexual abuse, and how to make museums agents of change have been named 2020 Creative Capital awardees and will share a

Photography was Andy Warhol’s secret weapon — the architecture of his oeuvre. A new show highlights many of his rarely seen images.

THROUGHOUT SRI LANKA’S ART HISTORY, the people have been the keepers of knowledge. In place of national institutions and collections, artists, collectors, scholars, and gallerists have acted as repositories

Frieze, the media and events company which runs an eponymous magazine as well as four international art fairs—Frieze London, Frieze Masters, Frieze New York, and Frieze Los Angeles—announced today that

Today, the extraction of both narratives and material resources is deeply intertwined with a seemingly indefatigable drive toward technological development. In the Danish artist Anne Haaning’s multimedia

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has gifted the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH) with $4 million, which, coupled with a matching grant of $1 million from the dance organization’s board of directors, brings

He’s been targeted by George Christensen and accused of advocating terrorism, but the Perth-born artist just wants to provoke critical thinking

As an artist, Abdul Abdullah wears his humour on his sleeve, but also on his skin. His tattoo of the Southern Cross encircles an Islamic crescent moon and star, and he got it for the purpose of Them and Us, his photographic self-portrait that won the 2011 Blake prize for human justice. In his 2013 work, Self-Portrait as an Ultra-nationalist, he wears a “Fuck off we’re full” T-shirt and an Australian flag. The same year, he made It Doesn’t Matter How I Feel, in which he’s painted black except for his hands, one of which is held in a thumbs-up, the other extending the middle finger. I could go on.

“I’m a seventh-generation Australian and I’ve got the Australian sensibility of relentlessly giving people shit,” he says innocently.

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Joshua Helmer was removed at the Erie Art Museum after a New York Times article about complaints during his tenure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

American conceptual artist who cremated all his paintings in 1970 and later effaced the images of public figures with stick-on dots

A recent episode of The Simpsons saw America’s favourite dysfunctional cartoon family take a step back in time. In one scene, the young Marge Simpson, a reporter on the Springfield Shopper, interviews a local conceptual artist about his change of subject from mouths to noses. “So,” rasps Marge, “you’ve moved into painting giant schnozzes.” “Marge,” the artist replies, “the mouth has had its day. It’s time to find out what the nose knows.” The artist in question, who voiced his cartoon character himself, was John Baldessari, who has died aged 88.

Unusually for a conceptual artist, the maker of the (real) series titled Noses & Ears, Etc. (2006), was known for his sense of humour. His Wrong series (1966-68), of intentionally faulty snapshots – one showed a palm tree apparently sprouting from the artist’s head – each incorporated (and broke) a rule from a photographic manual.

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Despite the perils, Afghan artists have consistently portrayed their country and its many facets.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will distribute $30.9 million to 188 humanities projects in forty-five states and the District of Columbia as part of its latest grant cycle. NEH chairman

My friend Jak Kilby, who has died aged 72, was a freelance photographer who documented the early years of the free jazz and free improvisation scene in London with great diligence and empathy. Following his mid-life conversion to the Muslim faith and his adoption of the name Muhsin, his camera was also trained on the Islamic world: its buildings, its people, its struggle.

Born to Leslie Kilby, a bus driver who later worked as a manager in a TV company, and Dorothy (nee Gossett), John (Jak) was educated at Malory school in Lewisham, south London. By the late 1960s he was a familiar figure at the Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden and at other places, where young musicians were developing a new musical language.

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The National Gallery of Canada announced today that the Vancouver and Los Angeles–based artist Stan Douglas will represent Canada at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Known for his installations, films,

The artist on the Oklahoma roots of his new show, that $52.5 million painting, and meeting Walt Disney.