News
The Guardian
Apr 19 2019
Three decades ago, the Australian artist was told her focus on nature was too feminine. Today, it’s a matter of urgency
Janet Laurence is wearing a living plant in a glass vial around her neck. The bright pop of green stands out against her flowing white dress. It’s as if she’s just stepped out of one of her own artworks – perhaps the one in which endangered rainforest plants are grown in beakers of laboratory glass, with lines of transparent tubing connecting the plants’ roots.
“All my life I’ve been very empathetic with other species,” she says. “I have incredibly vivid memories of always being very caring of things in nature, of plants and other animals.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 19 2019
Anna Boghiguian gets her first UK retrospective and the V&A turns its attention to cars and miniskirts – all in our weekly dispatch
Anna Boghiguian
Last chance to see the Egyptian-Canadian artist’s response to the industrial history of Cornwall with Marxist papier-mache, artist’s books and paintings.
• Tate St Ives until 6 May.
The Guardian
Apr 19 2019
In our Guardian archive series this week, we have an image of horned cattle on the edge of the Howgill fells, photographed by Don McPhee
Donkeys, sheep, pit ponies … the great photographer Don McPhee captured them all in his beloved northern Britain during his long career with the Guardian. Although his portfolio encompasses virtually every subject, and he was especially interested in politics and trade union affairs, he repeatedly turned to the natural world in his photographs. This picture was taken on the northern edge of the Howgill fells, near Tebay, close to Kendal and the Yorkshire Dales national park. These horned cattle graze the lush grass around here, surrounded by dry stone walls and sweeping hills.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 19 2019
The American painter evokes a sense of narrative entwined with history, untold stories and underwater utopia
Brutal history is refashioned as ethereal fantasy in Ellen Gallagher’s painting Bird in Hand from 2006. The rum fellow at its centre combines Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab, tap-dancing star Peg Leg Bates and the untold stories of those thrown overboard on slave ships from Cape Verde, where the artist’s paternal family hail from.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 19 2019
The Game, which features about 1,000 of the artist’s Trump collectables, aims to show that he ‘didn’t appear out of nowhere’
In 2004, the New York artist Andres Serrano walked into Trump Tower with his camera to photograph Donald Trump. He spent 30 minutes shooting the president as part of his America photo series.
Fifteen years later, this portrait is the centerpiece of an exhibition in New York called The Game: All Things Trump, where Serrano has put his collection of about 1,000 pieces of Trump memorabilia on view. From a slice of Donald and Melania’s wedding cake to Trump golf balls, signed magazine covers and a Taj Mahal casino roulette table, the artist spent roughly $200,000 buying this all on eBay. It’s what the artist considers a colossal portrait of Trump.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 18 2019
Greg Funnell and Amanda Barnes ride, swim and drink mate tea with some of Argentina’s most skilled horsemen, travelling from the north-eastern wetlands to the faded gaucho heartlands of La Pampa and Patagonia
The water reaches up to my knees as a large lump rises to my throat. I clench my inner thighs tighter around the firm body of my horse and look hesitantly up at Omar in the canoe ahead. “Let go and float like a crocodile,” he instructs over the heavy grunts of the horses and the tumultuous splashing of the river underfoot.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 18 2019
The New York Times
Apr 18 2019
The New York Times
Apr 18 2019
The New York Times
Apr 18 2019
The Guardian
Apr 18 2019
‘When I knocked on the door, this is how he greeted me. I thought: “What a gift!” … It was like he was challenging me, in a comical way’
When Multistory in West Bromwich commissioned me to make a visual archive of young people’s lives in the Black Country, I knew immediately that I wanted to photograph them in their bedrooms. I wanted to capture the details of their interiors, which would become metaphors for who they were. My assistant and I found candidates in the street, at clubs or in colleges. Maurice was 17 and a student in West Bromwich. He was so theatrical, I asked if I could shoot him at home.
When I knocked on the door, this is how he greeted me: in a blue onesie, unbuttoned at the front. He wasn’t laughing; it was as if it were completely normal. Not “Look what I’ve done!” but “Oh, you’ve arrived. Here I am.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 18 2019
As France announces contest to redesign spire after fire we want to hear from design-minded readers
An international architectural competition to redesign the roofline of Notre Dame Cathedral has been announced days after fire ripped through its roof causing its 300ft spire to collapse.
Related: France announces contest to redesign Notre Dame spire
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 18 2019
Illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme has imagined how great painters would have fared on social media – and the trolling their work might have received
Let’s revisit history for a minute and pretend that Jean Genet, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh and their ilk had been #blessed with the ability to share #dailyinspo with their presumably voracious online fans. Would Claude Monet have uploaded #wanderlust shots of the landscapes he was busy abstracting with his dappled brushstrokes? Would users have binged on #foodporn from 1890s Aix-en-Provence, by way of Paul Cézanne’s still-life feed? And would macho surrealist ringmaster André Breton have indulged his followers in a torrent of bare-chested #thirsttraps? Luckily for us, Jean-Philippe Delhomme has imagined the answers to such questions with the cartoon book Artists’ Instagrams: The Never Seen Instagrams of the Greatest Artists.
It’s full of tender parodies of artistic A-listers. There’s the geometrically inclined Piet Mondrian flaunting his Ikea kitchen collab. Jackson Pollock eager to reveal a canvas he’s barely poured or dripped anything on to. Andy Warhol thrilled to promote his soon-to-go-viral Mark Zuckerberg portrait series. And notorious chauvinist Gauguin sharing problematic #AboutLastNight snaps of young Polynesian lovers.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 18 2019
Digital 3D models made for archaeologists and conservationists of at-risk heritage sites are now online so anyone can walk through them
After a major earthquake rocked Mexico City in 2017, the authorities wanted to assess the damage it had caused to the city’s cathedral, the largest and arguably most spectacular building of its kind in Latin America.
Rather than have to rely on ladders and winches like its 16th-century builders, they could call on technology for answers. US-based digital scanning experts were invited to survey and digitally record parts of the cathedral, including the retablo dos reyes, the spectacular gilded screen that stands behind the high altar, allowing the cathedral’s restoration team to inspect it for cracks or other damage.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
Photographer Richard Jones has captured the memories and faces of the last generation of Welsh miners for his installation The Coal Face, which runs in Cardiff until 30 April as part of the Diffusion festival
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
From a rescued flamingo in Curaçao to young people in the Outer Hebrides, here’s a selection of winners at the world’s largest photography competition
• The Sony world photography awards exhibition is at Somerset House, London, until 6 May
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 17 2019
The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
Italian earns Sony World Photography Awards prize for showing climate change impact
The Italian photojournalist Federico Borella has won the top prize in the Sony World Photography Awards, including a $25,000 (£19,000) cash prize.
His photo-series Five Degrees was commended by judges for sensitively documenting a little-known but tragic side-effect of climate change: male suicide among Indian farmers.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 17 2019
The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
The physical state of the Palace of Westminster – its confusing warrens of corridors and staircases, its arcane rituals and atmosphere, its leaking roofs, its dreadful plumbing – has become bound up with a general dissatisfaction with the state of British politics. The metaphors pile up without effort: there is an urge, understandable at times, to write off the building as well as the parliament that sits within it, condemning both as worthless and outmoded.
This is unfair, not only to the public-service ethics of the vast majority of parliamentarians, but to the building itself. The palace is a Unesco world heritage site, an architectural masterpiece and a historical locus of almost inestimable value. Though most of the Gothic structure was designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin in the 19th century, the palace also contains the 11th-century Westminster Hall and the 13th-century Saint Stephen’s chapel, sole survivals of a catastrophic fire in 1834 that tore through the rest of the buildings.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
Museum will feature 15 vehicles from the Ford Model T to the Patent-Motorwagen No 3
One is a rackety motorised horseless carriage with a top speed about the same as a fit human runner, the other purports to be a “self-driving, self-flying” taxi which some would like to believe will be the future of cars. Both vehicles will be part of a major exhibition later this year telling the story of the automobile, the V&A has announced.
The museum said the show would position the car as the dominant design object of the 20th century – one which accelerated the pace of progress like no other.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 17 2019
The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
PM says rebuilt cathedral could reflect ‘techniques and challenges of our times’
France will launch an international architectural competition to redesign the roofline of Notre Dame Cathedral after a huge fire gutted the oak-beamed structure and sent its spire crashing into the nave, the prime minister has said.
Édouard Philippe said the competition would give the 850-year-old building “a spire suited to the techniques and challenges of our time”. He said an estimation of the cost of rebuilding the cathedral had yet to be made. French billionaires, multinationals and private citizens have so far raised €880m (£762m) for the restoration.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
Ubisoft Montréal, which built a huge-scale virtual cathedral for its game Assassin’s Creed Unity, will donate to restoration efforts
Video game creators at Ubisoft Montréal – the development studio that rebuilt 18th-century Paris in its 2014 historical action game Assassin’s Creed Unity – have joined the global outpouring of grief in the wake of Monday’s devastating fire at Notre Dame Cathedral.
Ubisoft will be donating €500,000 to help with restoration efforts, and is also making Assassin’s Creed Unity available free on PC for the next week, “giving everyone the chance to experience the majesty and beauty of Notre Dame the best way we know how”, said a studio spokesperson. “We hope, with this small gesture, we can provide everyone an opportunity to appreciate our virtual homage to this monumental piece of architecture.”
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 17 2019
The New York Times
Apr 17 2019
The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
Restored paintings go on view in Amsterdam, bringing story of infamous art heist to a close
Seventeen years after being snatched from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, two of the artist’s works have been put back on public display, bringing the story of one of most infamous postwar art heists to a close.
View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen by Vincent van Gogh were stolen in the dark of a December night in 2002.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
The Bauhaus was born in Weimar, but was forced to flee the conservative city. Now it’s back with a centenary museum – as Germany’s far right rises again
The German city of Weimar has long bathed in its historic cultural heritage, boasting such illustrious former residents as Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Liszt. Its quiet cobbled streets are lined with creamy stuccoed piles where great men of letters convened, and stately theatres where premieres were performed. But, while it is happy to wallow in the völkisch annals of its distant past, the city has never much cared for the fact that it spawned the most influential art school of the 20th century, perhaps of all time.
“People here are still a bit unsure about the Bauhaus,” says Wolfgang Holler, museum director of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the city’s foundation for classical heritage, which has opened a new Bauhaus museum to mark the school’s centenary. “It is still very much a backward-looking place.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 17 2019
The flames leaping above the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, as crowds of dazed onlookers sung hymns in the twilight, looked apocalyptic, a sight from the end of days – or at least the climactic scene of a Dan Brown novel. The destruction of a building so iconic, so symbolic of a nation, is deeply unsettling. And so it should be, for this irreplaceable loss of 800-year-old heritage is tragic. But setting the calamity in historical context shows us how unusual our age is in investing so greatly in the veneration of ancient buildings – and how accustomed we have become to thinking they can be frozen in time.
Happily, Notre Dame seems to have emerged less ravaged than was initially feared. The main fabric of the church has survived, and the relics and other holy items inside were, largely, rescued. It was easy to forget as smoke and flame belched heavenwards that the roof, made from a forest’s worth of medieval timber, was separated from the interior by the high, arching stone vaults. Some of those have collapsed, but most seem still in place. The glorious stained-glass rose windows, dating from the 13th century (when the cathedral was completed), have been mercifully spared too.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
From nightlife-fuelled provocateur to Rembrandt-inspired portraitist, Erwin Olaf – 60 this year – continues to approach his subject with theatrical flair
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
Crossing Lines will feature more than 300 works by the quintessentially 1980s artists
One of the most expensive US paintings ever sold, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), will headline the exhibition season at the National Gallery of Victoria this summer.
Related: Is this Basquiat worth $110m? Yes – his art of American violence is priceless
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
Invasive species served at a high end banquet? Luxury goods made from vermin fur? The US-born artist’s new exhibition is confronting – and typically Mona
Kirsha Kaechele receives Guardian Australia in Cinemona, the plush cinema in the basement of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art. The artist is reclined on a velour sofa, dressed in a canary-yellow suit with hot pants and heels. Guardian Australia has been fashioned with a gin and tonic.
It’s an odd vibe when we’re here to talk about sustainability, but then, Kaechele doesn’t believe environmentalism need equate to slumming it, as evidenced by her deluxe new food and art compendium, which retails at $277.77.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 16 2019
The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
My friend Graham Keen, who has died aged 82, was a photographer of 1960s bohemia who seems to have attended every street protest and happening during that decade, his Pentax camera capturing the icons of swinging London.
His subjects included Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg, Bertrand Russell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ronnie Scott, Francis Bacon, William Burroughs and Alberto Giacometti.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
Edifice joins long list of culturally significant buildings with history of destruction
The history of beloved, culturally significant buildings is inextricably connected to a history of destruction – and very often fire. Less than a century after building of the present Notre Dame began in 1163, fire damage is thought to have prompted the remodelling of parts of the cathedral. The Gothic structure replaced an earlier church that had been built on the site of a Roman temple to Jupiter. By the 19th century the building was in a state of deep neglect: almost a ruin and lacking its spire.
Related: Notre Dame Cathedral fire – a visual guide and timeline
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
The beautifully simple design is everywhere following the protests of Extinction Rebellion – but why are its origins still shrouded in mystery?
The 1960s counterculture had the peace symbol, 1980s rave culture had the smiley face, and now 2019 has its own ubiquitous logo: the extinction symbol, signifying the mass movement against climate breakdown and destruction of the natural world.
Following the recent, successful actions of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in London, across the UK and globally, the extinction symbol has been everywhere: on coloured flags and banners, on clothes, spraypainted on to buildings (such as Shell’s London headquarters). People even lay down and arranged their bodies in its shape. It has appeared as far afield as Ghana, New Zealand and Hong Kong. It has featured in artworks and tattoos. It has arrived.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
It mesmerised Proust, terrified Homer Simpson and gave us the Hunchback – Guardian critics celebrate Paris’s gothic masterpiece at the heart of the modern imagination
As Notre Dame Cathedral’s majestic spire tumbled into the inferno on Monday night, live newsreaders around the world decried the tragic loss of this 12th-century marvel. The great timber roof – nicknamed “the forest” for the thousands of trees used in its beams – was gone, the rose windows feared melted, the heart of Paris destroyed forever. What few realised in the heat of the shocking footage was that much of what was ablaze was a 19th-century fantasy. Like most buildings of this age, Notre Dame is the sum of centuries of restorations and reinventions, a muddled patchwork of myth and speculation.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
After Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed by flames on Monday, work has begun to assess the damage to the 850-year-old building
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
Palace of Westminster caught fire 40 times between 2008 and 2012
MPs are warning the Palace of Westminster is at critical risk of a fire that could prove as devastating as the blaze at Notre Dame Cathedral unless rapid action is taken to update parliament’s crumbling interior.
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said the blaze should be a wake-up call that major work would have to be done. “I’ve been in Notre Dame Cathedral several times. It’s absolutely stunning and beautiful and you can see the whole history of France before you there,” he said.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
Museum ‘immensely grateful’ for significant donation from singer and his husband
Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, are to have a photography gallery at the V&A named after them after a significant donation.
The singer became a passionate and prolific acquirer of photography after he stopped drinking and taking drugs nearly 30 years ago, building one of the world’s finest private collections containing an estimated 7,000 photographs from Man Ray to Cindy Sherman.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 16 2019
As part of a new exhibition, Carlos Javier Ortiz has brought his camera into Chicago neighborhoods that often get overlooked from the aftermath of a shooting to shopping for caskets
In the early 2000s, Chicago photographer Carlos Javier Ortiz had a dream of becoming a photojournalist. But after working at a local newspaper, he quickly learned that it just wasn’t for him.
“I worked at a newspaper because I wanted to cover my communities,” he said of his time in Camden, New Jersey, where he wanted to cover the day-to-day lives of the city’s Hispanic and black communities. “I was told I couldn’t do that.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 15 2019
The Association of Photographers’ awards celebrate the captured image, including still lifes, photojournalism and portraits. Here’s are a selection of photographs – from a mass vape in London to a squalid camp of migrants in Belgrade – of the 250 on show
• The AOP awards exhibition is at One Canada Square, London, until 31 May
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 15 2019
Barack Obama among those to express their sorrow as French president vows to rebuild
As Notre Dame burned, world leaders, millions of people around the world publicly expressed their sorrow at the damage wrought by the fire and expressed solidarity with the French people at the devastation of a national symbol.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was “sad to see this part of us burn”, later tweeting that the cathedral would be rebuilt and announcing an international fundraising campaign to pay for reconstruction.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 15 2019
The Guardian
Apr 15 2019
Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed in flames on Monday afternoon, causing its main spire to collapse and raising fears for the future of the 850-year-old building and its precious artworks
Continue reading...The Guardian
Apr 15 2019
The masterpiece of Gothic architecture has been a symbol of French capital for 850 years
Notre-Dame de Paris – Our Lady of Paris – has been one of the most enduring and symbolic monuments of the French capital and among the most celebrated cathedrals in Europe.
To many Parisians, the 850-year-old landmark is quite simply the heart of their city, its two Gothic square towers rising above surrounding buildings along the river Seine.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Apr 15 2019
The New York Times
Apr 15 2019
The Guardian
Apr 14 2019
For nearly 40 years, Iranian women have been banned from watching stadium football matches. The photographer Forough Alaei, a World Press Photo winner in the sports category for her Crying for Freedom series, describes following the story of Zeinab, one of the first women to disguise herself as a man to watch matches
It takes Zeinab about 15 hours to travel from Ahvaz to Tehran by train to watch Persepolis, her favourite football club. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, women have been banned from attending stadium football matches. Despite the ban, female football fans have never given up and have tried different methods to enter stadiums, including disguising themselves as men.
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