News
For the first time in its 33-year history, Australia’s richest art prize has been awarded to three artists, after its judges – artist Tim Storrier, Daniel Thomas of the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Doug Moran’s son Peter Moran – were split down the middle. The portrait prize, which skipped a year last year, invites original works from Australian artists ‘capturing Australians from all walks of life’, with the prizewinner usually taking home $150,000. This year the three winning artists got $100,000 each: they were Michael Vale for a self-portrait; Vincent Fantauzzo for a painting of his ‘muse’ and wife, actor Asher Keddie, and Andrew Greensmith for his portrait of twin survivors of Auschwitz, Annetta Able and the late Stephanie Heller.
- The Doug Moran prize-winners and full list of 30 finalists are viewable in an online gallery. Below is just a selection
Artist would sell stencil used to paint mural depicting what was thought to be Oscar Wilde on listed building
Banksy has offered to raise millions of pounds towards buying Reading prison, where Oscar Wilde was once held, so that it can be turned into an arts centre.
The street artist has promised to match the jail’s £10m asking price by selling the stencil he used to paint on the Grade II-listed building in March, a move campaigners hope will prevent it from being sold to housing developers.
Continue reading...While her blue artworks can fetch up to $60,000, the prolific Yolŋu artist is known for giving them away – with Julia Gillard at the top of her gift list
The prolific Yolŋu artist Dhambit Munuŋgurr has been waiting a long time to get Julia Gillard’s attention.
On 10 July 2013 Australia’s first female prime minister was scheduled to visit the north-east Arnhem Land community of Yirrkala to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the bark petitions, which sparked the Indigenous land rights movement. Munuŋgurr had prepared a bark painting in Gillard’s honour, hoping to present it to her. But a fortnight before the visit Gillard was toppled in a Labor leadership spill and the victor, Kevin Rudd, made the journey to Yirrkala instead. Munuŋgurr is too polite to publicly take sides but, suffice to say, the painting remains in her bedroom on Gunyaŋara, the tiny island in the Arafura Sea some 25 minutes’ journey away.
Dhambit Munuŋgurr travels to the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala three times a week to paint large bark canvases and larrakitj (hollow log poles)
Continue reading...Tate Britain, London
Seventy years of tumultuous to-and-fro between grey Britain and the golden Caribbean, belonging and exile, power this crucial, enthralling show
Exhilarating, mighty, radical, tender, as disturbing as it is beautiful, Life Between Islands is a revelation from first to last. It follows 70 years of tumultuous history through art. Agonising departures and brutal arrivals, kindness, cruelty and community, uprising, oppression and unceasing injustice: all are carried in powerful films and photographs, spectacular sculptures and paintings, portraits sketched on police stop-and-search reports, even a walk-in front room where Joyce, the imaginary inhabitant, recreates her old home down to the crocheted doilies and velour map of Saint Vincent.
Playing on the vintage telly is Horace Ové’s 1976 classic Pressure, the first feature film by a black British director, following the teenager Tony, born in Britain to parents from Trinidad, through the cycle of educational deprivation, poverty, racism and eventual unemployment that grinds on today. The Notting Hill setting appears throughout the show – 60s photos of black-white couples snogging outside the Piss House pub, and carnival in full flourish, until its violent suppression by police in the 80s – depicted in Tam Joseph’s stark painting of black helmets and riot shields closing in on a single costumed man, hunted to oblivion.
Continue reading...Spend six years in the Amazon with Sebastião Salgado, five decades with Helmut Newton, long months on the road in America, and a year in Covid world
In colonial times, Brazil’s European settlers referred to the malarial, snake-infested jungle of the Amazon as a “green hell”. Sebastião Salgado’s superb Amazônia (Taschen) sees it as a black and white heaven, or as a paradise in the process of being lost – not closed to unworthy human beings but whittled away by farmers and churned up by mining. Salgado mythologises the landscapes he photographs, and his documentation of six years in the Amazon looks like a reprise of the first week in Genesis. As drenching rainstorms retreat from the steaming, apparently molten earth, dry land solidifies; tribal people clamber out of the river and begin to increase and multiply; the creator’s covenant with his biodiverse creation is renewed by a rainbow that arches over the mountains.
Salgado depicts the indigenous Amazonians as noble savages, innocent but startlingly elegant with their feathered headdresses and patterned face paint. Ejected from Eden, their latter-day descendants perform eroticised war dances in Helmut Newton’s Legacy (Taschen). Newton, who enjoyed reducing his sophisticated female subjects to a primitive state, saw clothes as fetish wear that revealed the body rather than covering it. Models were stripped nude after the catwalk parade ended, then ordered to reassume their strutting poses: is their bare skin also a disguise? Jerry Hall squeezes a slab of bleeding beef against her face, and another model shows off the Bvlgari jewels on her wrists and fingers while chopping up an uncooked chicken. In Newton’s perverse tableaux, beauty is an act of violence, an armed assault on nature.
Continue reading...For this Charlie Chaplin-inspired shot, photographer Sarah Moon worked with stylist Caroline Baker to reimagine film nostalgia through a female lens
In 1967, Caroline Baker, who had been working as a secretary to Shirley Conran on the Observer, took a job with the fashion editor Molly Parkin at Nova, the iconoclastic women’s magazine. Parkin left soon after Baker arrived, and Baker took over, having never done a fashion shoot in her life. Over the following years she developed a distinctive look that rebelled against the stereotypes of the industry. “I didn’t want to be this pretty girl, this toy for men,” she writes in an introduction to a new book celebrating her career, Rebel Stylist: Caroline Baker – The Woman Who Invented Street Fashion.
Instead of using clothes from design houses, Baker started searching elsewhere for the material for her fashion pages, using oversized menswear from secondhand shops, fitted with belts and braces, army surplus, leg-warmers and tights from ballet suppliers, chefs’ clothing, school blazers, hospital gowns and pyjamas. Her street style set the tone for punk fashion – Baker went on to work with Vivienne Westwood – and the liberated androgyny of the 1980s and beyond.
Continue reading...From a sustainably built luxury hotel to a home among the sand dunes, New Zealand Institute of Architects jurors tell why these projects deserve recognition
Continue reading...The statue, once on sale at Sotheby’s, was recovered amid claims it was part of a precious trove of stolen artefacts
For more than 20 years, those who lived in and around the village of Lokhari in Uttar Pradesh, India, have prayed for the return of an important statue of a goddess that was stolen from a local temple. Now those prayers have been answered. The 8th-century goat-headed deity has been discovered thousands of miles away – in an English country garden, covered in moss.
The sculpture will be formally given to the High Commission of India in London. It is a case that shames Sotheby’s, which offered the statue for sale in 1988, a few years before the auctioneer was to face serious allegations of having encouraged looting of ancient Indian religious sites.
Continue reading...From the 1910s to the 1960s, after the political and social unrest of the Mexican revolution, art and graphic design were used as a tool to create a shared vision of a united Mexico. Artists including Diego Rivera, Saturnino Herrán and Carlos Mérida created works that would adorn posters, stamps, books, magazines, tourist guides and postcards. A new book, Mexico: The Land of Charm (RM Publications, £30), brings together 350 such artworks, celebrating the country’s rich history of art and design as well as the bicentenary of Mexican independence from Spanish rule.
“The book gathers illustrations and prints that represent ‘what is Mexican’,” says its author, Mercurio López Casillas. “They are recreations of a heavenly and colourful idealised Mexico, inhabited by people who are always happy.”
Continue reading...His proposed link from Scotland to Northern Ireland has finally been sunk by cost. No surprise there
An architect who was invited to design a kitchen extension for a married couple spent an evening with them to discuss their (conflicting) needs and aspirations for the work. At the end, he gave them this valuable advice. “You don’t need a kitchen,” he said, “you need a divorce.”
This story brings us to the announcement that Boris Johnson’s idea of building a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland would be, at £335bn, absurdly expensive. Such was widely suspected as soon as the plan became public given, among other things, that it would have to cross the 300m-deep Beaufort’s Dyke, which is filled with up to a million tonnes of dumped munitions. But it has required a government feasibility study by a team of “world-renowned technical advisers” to conclude that bears do, after all, shit in the woods.
Continue reading...The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art
Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963 and grew up in Wickwar, Gloucestershire. A veteran stage actor, she starred in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and in the title role of an all-women of colour production of Richard II at the Globe in 2019. On TV, Andoh plays Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, which returns next year, and she will appear in season two of The Witcher on Netflix from 17 December. She lives in south London with her husband, the novelist Howard Cunnell, and their three children.
Continue reading...To mark the release of a new book about the master sports photographer Gerry Cranham, we asked co-author Mark Leech to choose his favourite images and recall some of Cranham’s anecdotes from the 60s and 70s.
- Buy a copy of This Sporting Life
- Order prints from £55 via The Guardian Print Shop
‘The ibex couldn’t care less about me. He was just there, magnificent, on his stage’
As so often, says Eric Bouvet, the stage was set, the actors ready. “You get this amazing orchestra,” he says, “and you’re the conductor. You decide your point of view, your frame, you hit the button. A second either way, it wouldn’t have worked.”
A five-time World Press Photo winner, Bouvet has covered conflicts from Afghanistan to Sudan, Iraq to Somalia, Chechnya to Lebanon. His Fujis have recorded the fall of the Wall, the release of Mandela, Tiananmen Square, for Time, Life, Paris Match.
Continue reading...Cherry Kearton popularised nature like a Victorian David Attenborough – using bold techniques to get close to his subjects, as a new exhibition shows
In 1909 two wildlife safari expeditions arrived by ship in Mombasa, Kenya, within days of each other. One party was enormous and led by the adventure-loving US president Teddy Roosevelt; the other consisted of just two men and was headed by Cherry Kearton, a young British bird photographer from Yorkshire.
Over several months on safari the trigger-happy president and his son Kermit killed 17 lions, 11 elephants, 20 rhino, nine giraffes, 19 zebra, more than 400 hippos, hyena and other large animals, as well as many thousands of birds and smaller animals. By contrast Kearton, the first man in the world to hunt with a camera and not a rifle, killed just one animal, in self-defence.
Continue reading...11 May 1914: The British wildlife photographer tells the Guardian about filming animals ‘unmolested and unharassed in their native wilds’
I found Mr Cherry Kearton, who has just returned from crossing Africa with a kinema camera for the third time, in the private room of his London office (writes a representative of the Manchester Guardian).
He was endeavouring to conduct a business conversation on the telephone. Round him stood half a dozen merry friends, whose joy at welcoming him home was so ebullient that they refused to be serious. The author of several standard books was giving lifelike imitations of a roaring lion, while the others were laughing loudly at his performance.
Continue reading...Whether you’re after a big old bug invasion, the return of Carrie Bradshaw or Kehinde Wiley’s takes on grand European landscapes, our critics have your plans for the week covered
Encounter
Out now
Well-regarded British director Michael Pearce (Beast) directs the always likable Riz Ahmed in a close encounter of the traumatic kind, as a military veteran with issues attempts to save his kids from a big ol’ bug invasion, in a drama harking back to cold war paranoia era of 1950s sci-fi.
The volcano on the Canary island of La Palma, protests in the occupied West Bank, the Omicron variant in South Africa and fires in North Carolina: the most striking images from around the world this week
Continue reading...Guardian Australia’s photographer-at-large takes us through the scenes that made up a tumultuous year in Australian politics
Continue reading...The National Gallery of Victoria’s blockbuster summer exhibition reveals the vision of an icon, well beyond her Maison’s codes
Sitting in the corner of a white cube at the National Gallery of Victoria are three small, empty glass bottles. Each has a printed black and white label that reads Pour l’été: for summer. They once contained the first fake tan products, which came in the form of powder, liquid and oil. The bottles are from the summer of 1932 and were produced by Gabrielle Chanel, who returned from a holiday on the French Riviera with a tan and made it fashionable to be bronzée.
The bottles are on display as part of the much-anticipated exhibition, Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, which has travelled to Melbourne after its 2020 debut at the Palais Galliera in Paris. There it was much celebrated as the first exhibition to be staged in Paris with a focus on the work of Chanel as a designer, rather than on her much-mythologised life, or the fashion house that bears her name.
Continue reading...
Louis Wain’s extraordinary cats, uncanny surrealism in Liverpool and a look at Islamic coffee culture from Sufi pioneers to the Ottoman empire – all in your weekly dispatch
Derek Jarman
The visionary film-maker was also a powerful artist. This is a full survey of a great British radical.
• Manchester Art Gallery until 10 April
As they reveal their Christmas commission at Harewood House, the two ‘connoisseurs of make-believe’ explain how their immersive installations soothe the soul
It is hard to pin down exactly what Lord Whitney does. On paper, the Leeds-based artist studio has built music video sets for Nicki Minaj, art-directed promo footage for The Voice, built a fantastical world for Chambord liqueur, recreated scenery from hit Netflix shows and transformed the underbelly of Leeds Town Hall into a forest. Its founders, Amy Lord and Rebekah Whitney, refer to themselves as “connoisseurs of make-believe”, but this title is as evasive as our rambling Zoom conversation, during which they discuss reading children’s books, choosing the perfect pitch for a piece of music and playing with ice skates in a stately home.
Until you step into one of the magical worlds they have conceived and constructed, perhaps it’s hard to make sense of what they do. But inch a toe under the dusty half-light of an old gardener’s office at Harewood House, touch the fading documentation peeling off crypt walls under Leeds city centre and breathe in the cherry blossom fragrance wafting through the Great Hall of Chatsworth, and the wonder of what Lord Whitney creates is immediately apparent. Even their studio, a renovated mill in the Meanwood area of Leeds, is a playground featuring a treehouse, an indoor greenhouse and a cabinet of curiosities.
Continue reading...The latest collection to buy from Guardian Print Shop is a series of classic covers from Weekend – plus the iconic first issue of our new Saturday magazine featuring Greta Thunberg covered in oil
Continue reading...A new book details how nudism began as a movement of intellectuals, feminists and artists, only to be suppressed by the state. But our attitudes to nakedness also tell us a lot about ourselves
When Annebella Pollen was 17, she left behind her strict Catholic upbringing for the life of a new-age hippy, living in a caravan and frolicking naked among the standing stones of Devon, while earning a living by modelling for life-drawing classes. That early experience, followed by a relationship with a bric-a-brac dealer, shaped her later life as an art historian. “I’m very interested in things that are culturally illegitimate,” says Pollen, who now teaches at the University of Brighton. “A lot of my research has been looking at objects that are despised.”
Foraging trips with her partner to car-boot sales alerted her to a rich seam of 20th-century nudist literature that is still emerging from the attics of middle England: magazines whose wholesome titles – Sun Bathing Review or Health & Efficiency – concealed a complex negotiation with both public morality and the British weather. This is the subject Pollen has picked for her latest book Nudism in a Cold Climate, which tracks the movement from the spartan 1920s through the titillating 50s, when the new mass media whipped up a frenzy of moral anxiety, to the countercultural 60s and 70s, when the founding members were dying off and it all began to look a bit frowsty.
Continue reading...
This fascinating film explores who the famously anonymous Bristol graffiti artist might be, and what – if anything – he actually stands for
A great weariness tends to come over me when the subject of Banksy rears its urban-stencilled head. Whether this is my fault, the fault of the media for constantly bringing up Banksy, the fault of Banksy himself, or the fault of people who will not stop referring to Banksy in polite conversation, I don’t know.
Even so, Aurélia Rouvier and Laurent Richard’s 90-minute, documentary Banksy Most Wanted (BritBox) did a fine job of keeping ennui and irritation at bay. Its swift jog-trot through the history of one of Bristol’s most famous sons, with extensive footage of his work – in situ, on merch, in the hands of collectors who had tempted freeholders to part with parts of their non-party walls – still allowed plenty of time for consideration of the wider, more philosophical issues raised by his art.
Continue reading...Playing with ideas of gender and class, the Sydney-based photographic artist poses at colonial trophy homes and reimagines their inhabitants
Minnie Macgregor’s deadpan portrait, taken circa 1899, hangs on the sitting room wall of Meroogal, a timber house with gothic trimming her relatives owned at Nowra on the New South Wales south coast. Her “insanely massive” hair in the photograph drew queer artist Gerwyn Davies to her story.
The photograph was taken before Macgregor fell ill. “The diagnosis was it was her hair, it was too big, and it was draining all of her power,” Davies says, relaying mythology gleaned from a historic house curator. “They forced her to chop all her hair off, which was pretty cruel.”
Meerogal by Gerwyn Davies, inspired by Minnie Macgregor
Continue reading...In the mid-1960s Mick Rock, a rather unlikely Cambridge scholarship boy, was by far the most exotic undergraduate beast in Gonville and Caius College, already with a wild and reckless reputation. He lived just above me on “O” staircase in Tree Court, relying on the reliably draughty corridors to disperse those ever-present fumes of marijuana, and somehow satisfying his tutors term after term that essays were getting written, work was being done. Invariably ahead of the game, he always argued that weed – or at least the relatively innocuous variety then available – was far less dangerous in the long run than the alcohol and tobacco which most of us enjoyed in the pubs as a matter of course.
For me, as a head-in-the-books medical student, it was an altogether dizzying experience just being with Mick. I certainly learned to keep my few precious girlfriends well away. Despite his hectic life-in-the-fast-lane approach to the college routine, he somehow even managed to stay one step ahead of the proctors and bulldogs who were meant to “keep discipline” among the students. It all seems rather quaint now, but I still cherish the superb b/w photos he took of us all with that famous battered old 40-quid Pentax.
Continue reading...The Belfast artists built an illicit drinking den and filled it with banners, ashtrays and scrawled-on mirrors to create a pointed portrait of Northern Ireland. What will they do with the £25,000 prize?
It’s the morning after the night before, the night in which the 11-strong, Belfast-based Array Collective, along with two babes-in-arms and one tiny golden-haired child, stepped on to the podium at Coventry Cathedral in their sparkling finery to receive the Turner prize. Three of them – Emma Campbell, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell and Stephen Millar – have volunteered to brave hangovers and speak for this group of friends. Each has their own artistic practice, but they won the prize in their guise as a collective, through which they campaign on such issues as women’s rights, language rights and LGBT rights, with wild costumes, clever banners and a great deal of dark humour.
When you enter their section of the Turner prize exhibition, at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, you are enfolded into the dark, cosy and faintly anarchic arms of a lovingly recreated síbín, or illicit bar, where every detail – from the banners hanging from the ceiling to the ashtrays painted with Ulster’s red hand – has some story, some significance in their history of campaigning, on often difficult and painful issues such as abortion.
Continue reading...Europe’s in-demand theatre director is also an avid cinephile. A dizzying exhibition joins the dots between his adaptations of arthouse movies – by Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes and others – staged with designer Jan Versweyveld
Where does Ivo van Hove find the time? The ubiquitous Belgian director’s newly announced version of The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau will be staged in London in March, starring Ruth Wilson. His subterranean take on Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, made for the Odéon in Paris, has just run at his ensemble’s home, the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Several of his shows for ITA’s repertory continue to tour. His epic revenge drama Age of Rage – about the Trojan war – is planned for spring at the Barbican, where his take on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was scuppered by the pandemic.
He is one of Europe’s most in-demand stage directors, but while his reputation was made on radical, virtuoso versions of ancient Greek tragedies and weighty American dramas, his rise is also inseparable from his passion for cinema. Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes and Luchino Visconti are among the auteurs whose films he has reimagined for the stage with his partner, the designer Jan Versweyveld.
Continue reading...Rijksmuseum aims to bring together all the works by Girl with a Pearl Earring painter that are fit to travel
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has announced a “first and last” exhibition of all the paintings by Johannes Vermeer that are fit to travel, as its director claimed growing museum rivalry makes such international cooperation unlikely in the future.
Vermeer, whose most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, dating from around 1665, is thought to have painted 35 masterpieces, of which 23 were shown together 26 years ago at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Continue reading...