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artforum.com
May 14 2018
The Guardian
May 14 2018
The listing of 17 postmodern buildings by Historic England is great news, even if the structures that have made the grade – from a Slough industrial estate to the home of the architectural historian Charles Jencks in Kensington – are the most cerebral examples out there. That we are now starting to get to grips with PoMo architecture’s controversial legacy is welcome, not least because other important buildings have already been destroyed, and others are threatened.
Two years ago the Twentieth Century Society ran a conference in response to the growing threat to postmodern buildings in London and beyond. In 2015 we campaigned for James Sterling’s No 1 Poultry at Bank, which was about to be mutilated, to be given listed status. This stripy pink building, completed in 1997, sits in the conservative heart of the City of London, and was only erected after a prolonged and bitter fight to keep the Victorian buildings on the site before it. Perhaps in part because many conservationists still around today had campaigned so passionately against it in the first place, the listing was a struggle.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2018
Maverick architect whose bold visions included Peckham Library, winner of the 2000 Stirling prize
Will Alsop proposed turning Barnsley into a Tuscan hill town, flooding the centre of Bradford with a huge lake and adorning Middlesbrough with towers in the shape of Prada skirts. The maverick British architect, who has died aged 70, shook the establishment with his wild and wacky visions, which were often too harebrained for reality to bear. More interested in bold ideas than the financial practicalities of running a business, Alsop had a colourful career chequered by receivership and buyouts, which saw his firm take on six different guises over his four decades of practice.
Related: British architect Will Alsop dies aged 70 after short illness
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2018
Shortly before he became ill, the famously wacky architect let us into his mind-boggling studio for a final interview. Our writer recalls that smoky, boozy, extraordinary afternoon – and assesses his legacy
An oval of blue sky hung on the wall at the end of Will Alsop’s studio, floating against a pink backdrop, the white paint from hastily daubed clouds dripping down the vast canvas into a smudgy indigo lake below. “It’s our latest project for a big new park in China,” said Alsop, opening a bottle of red wine and pouring two generous mid-afternoon glasses. “We want them to be able to have blue sky all the time, despite the smog, so we’re planning to suspend this enormous LED-screen canopy on stilts above a new lake.”
It was characteristically mad thinking for the architect, who has died aged 70 following a short illness. Alsop spent his career conjuring bold, cartoonish visions, all designed to bring a little surreal joy into the world – even if many of them proved too ambitious for the laws of physics, or his clients’ patience, to stand.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2018
Symbolically named for a Duterrau painting that has long been missing, exhibition in Canberra interrogates the stories we haven’t told
Interrogating Australia’s missing history – all of those events around the colonial frontier that so many of us never heard about at school or read of in the history texts that supposedly guided us – is a fraught but critical responsibility of our leading cultural institutions.
The National Gallery of Australia, no stranger to telling the stories of frontier war – most recently in last year’s third annual Indigenous art triennial, Defying Empire – has taken a welcome and courageous step with The National Picture: the art of Tasmania’s Black War.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2018
Tributes pour in for ambitious designer of avant garde and modernist buildings including London’s Peckham Library
The British architect Will Alsop has died aged 70, his practice confirmed on Sunday.
He died on Saturday after a short illness, said Marcos Rosello, director of aLL Design, which Alsop set up in 2011.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2018
Once at the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion, the Buddha will be protected by Mission Impossible-style security
Inside a shipping container encircled by ironbark trees, eight kilometres north-west of Bendigo in regional Victoria, there’s a special cargo: a million-dollar Buddha, carved out of jade, that has seen more cities and faces than you or I could dream of.
He sits patiently in meditation pose, waiting to be unveiled amid great ceremony and carried into the gleaming white Great Stupa of Universal Compassion – the $20m Buddhist monument that rises out of the bushland next to the container. There, he will be protected by Mission Impossible-style security.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 13 2018
The New York Times
May 13 2018
The Guardian
May 13 2018
Sir David Chipperfield’s £56m project includes a subterranean vault, which offers visitors an enticing glimpse of studios
The architect Sir David Chipperfield would be quite happy if you visited his £56m expansion of the Royal Academy of Arts and couldn’t quite tell what he had done. Unlike the British Museum’s Great Court or Tate Modern’s Switch House, the illustrious Piccadilly pile in central London celebrates its 250th birthday with less of a flashy architectural statement than a series of discrete acts of corrective surgery – which, together, promise to transform the entire institution.
“I’m hoping this might take us from one star in the Michelin guide to two or three,” says Charles Saumarez Smith, the RA’s chief executive. “We’ve never really been a destination for cultural tourists before, as there hasn’t been much to see between the big shows.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2018
David Chipperfield has created an intriguing space for the Royal Academy, with new galleries, lecture theatre and cafe
Sometimes the most obvious things are hardest to achieve. It’s 20 years since the architect David Chipperfield proposed that a straight line would be the best way to get from the Royal Academy’s well-known premises in Burlington House, off Piccadilly, to 6 Burlington Gardens, a handsome Victorian building to its rear, into which the RA has just expanded. Only now, after abortive schemes by other architects proposed more roundabout routes, is this straight line about to open to the public.
From 19 May, it will take visitors from the academy’s existing entrance to Burlington Gardens, which was originally built for the University of London in 1870, unlocking one of the most significant expansions in the RA’s 250-year history. The work will increase its footprint by 70% and add new galleries, a 250-seat lecture theatre, education space, cafe-bar and space for the academy’s art school.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
The total came to $832m and included works by old masters including Monet, Matisse and Picasso
Twenty-two world records have been set at a Christie’s auction, including the $832m total for the priciest private collection of artworks and other treasures, owned by Peggy and David Rockefeller.
Related: Nude Modigliani painting expected to fetch $150m at auction
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
James Bugg is the 22-year-old winner of this year’s Moran contemporary photographic prize. Interested in visual storytelling, he captures people’s lives, their place and circumstances. Shooting with film on medium-format cameras, Bugg taps into themes within Australian culture and subculture, with a focus on places that begin to drift to the edges of society
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
This new gallery’s well-designed interior does justice to the German art star – and extends Britain’s arty south coast
A new gallery of contemporary art opens its soaring glass doors this week – or rather, an old one is controversially reborn. The renowned John Hansard Gallery, once out on the verges of Southampton University, to which it belongs, has moved into a specially designed building in the city centre. The exterior and interior are the work of two different architects, the developer went bust and too many cooks were involved in the broth. To describe the project as a long story would be the merest understatement: it has been going on for nearly 20 years.
But the good news is that the bad news – the exterior – doesn’t matter. Outside is an undistinguished shop-front of grey bricks speckled with sporadic beige, the default look of so much of today’s high-rise housing (the gallery morphs into flats at the back). Standing opposite is its exact twin, the Nuffield theatre, separated only by a narrow alley of tapas bars. The signage is hideously civic and almost comically inadequate for such important institutions. The name is absurd – why call these two entirely separate venues (three if you count the film charity City Eye) Studio 144? And both the theatre and the main galleries are hoisted up above more cafes and restaurants, as if they could hardly stand on their own two feet.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
During his wide-ranging career English artist Edward Bawden (1903-1989) worked as a war artist, created tube station murals, and even designed the masthead used by the Observer from 1939-1989. Now his book cover designs are being celebrated in a new volume entitled Are You Sitting Comfortably? The Book Jackets of Edward Bawden (Mainstone Press, £35).
Bawden used linocuts to create the covers of Ambrose Heath’s Good Food series, published in the 1930s, which, says James Russell, the book’s co-writer, “were not widely used at the time. They give the jackets a distinctive look that’s also down to earth”.
With their wobbly jellies and glum fish, these jackets also reveal “a sense of humour that transcends time”, says Russell. “Bawden could not stop himself from making jokes and playing. This found its way into everything he did.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
An early Martin Parr picture of a crowded pool in Filey, North Yorkshire shows a spirit of social realism
Martin Parr took this photograph in 1972, when shivering in crowded public baths was the archetypal experience of knock-kneed British seven-year-olds. At the time Parr, aged 20, was a student of photography at Manchester Poly. His real education, though, came from his paid holiday work as an official snapper at Butlin’s by the Sea in Filey, North Yorkshire. This picture, part of an exhibition of Parr’s early work opening next week, was taken in his first year on the job, as a “black and white walkie”. He graduated the following summer to the coveted status of “colour walkie”, able to take pictures at the Hawaiian/Caribbean beachcomber bar, where a tropical storm was conjured every half an hour.
You could say that Parr’s mature style as a photographer followed from that promotion. The colour-saturated images of fast food and sunburnt flesh, with which he made his name in the 1980s with series such as The Last Resort, were still to come. And you could also say that the shift in Parr’s style mirrored a shift in British society. His holiday subjects became more singular, atomised; those left behind by packaged fortnights to Greece and Spain.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
An interactive look at the future of design is refreshingly hopeful, despite fears about privacy and the global reach of internet giants such as Facebook
In the refined cave that is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sainsbury gallery, you are invited to plunge your hands into a sandbox. It doesn’t look like one, as projected coloured light makes it resemble a natural terrain, but it has the cool, granular feel remembered from childhood. As you scoop out troughs and pile up mounds an interactive system changes the projection such that lakes and snowy peaks appear, disappear and shift. The object is to tell you something about the effects of intervention on landscapes.
It’s an enjoyably tactile moment, unexpected for any exhibition of design, let alone one on the abstract universe that digital technology is often thought to be creating, but part of the point of The Future Starts Here is that the material as well as the virtual world is being recreated. “If we had done this five years ago it would have been very much about apps, but now the future is about physical things again,” says Rory Hyde, the V&A’s curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism, who with the architect Mariana Pestana curated the exhibition.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2018
Born in Grenada in 1956, the artist Denzil Forrester moved to London in 1967. His paintings of London’s 1980s reggae club scene and police brutality have been exhibited at Tate Britain and White Columns in New York. From Trench Town to Porthtowan, a retrospective curated by artists Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs takes place from 26 May to 23 June at the Jackson Foundation Gallery in Cornwall, where Forrester now lives.
A number of your paintings were inspired by Winston Rose, who died in a police van in 1981. How did his death affect you?
He was a friend of mine – we lived in the same house on Rectory Road in Stoke Newington in the 60s. I hadn’t seen him for a few years and I saw in the local news he was dead. He was killed by police, but it was called “misadventure”. I started making paintings about him – I didn’t plan to, but I painted his burial. I was doing a nightclub painting and took out the DJ and put a coffin in instead. He was an electrician, and a very good boxer. After they killed him they chucked him on the floor of the van and the social worker saw them sitting with their feet on him. I couldn’t stop doing paintings of Winston. They take up all your energy. I didn’t realise how draining they were.
The Guardian
May 11 2018
Israeli missiles over Syrian airspace, Arsene Wenger’s final match as Arsenal manager in London, demonstrations in Gaza and Cate Blanchett at the Cannes film festival – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists
Continue reading...artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
The New York Times
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
The New York Times
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
The Guardian
May 11 2018
The unseen side of the Great Depression, the metal side of David Nash and the dirty side of Richard Long – all in your weekly dispatch
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Continue reading...artforum.com
May 11 2018
The Guardian
May 11 2018
Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) is due to become one of the most expensive artworks ever when it goes on sale in New York
When it was first exhibited in Paris in 1917, Amedeo Modigliani’s female nude Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) caused such a stir that the police were called and the gallerist was accused of outraging public decency.
On Monday it is expected to sell for more than $150m (£111m), becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever and helping push auction sales this fortnight to more than $2bn as the world’s wealthy splash out on masterpieces for their private museums.
Continue reading...artforum.com
May 11 2018
artforum.com
May 11 2018
The Guardian
May 11 2018
The American painter mixes comic-book symbolism and domestic imagery in her striking, crazily shaped canvases
Elizabeth Murray’s genre-bending 1998 painting fused abstraction and pop, while drawing on everything from cubism to surrealism, the comic books she religiously read and drew as a kid in Chicago, and the graffiti she saw plastered across the walls of 70s and 80s New York.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 11 2018
Lisson Gallery, London
The wandering artist’s perennial walks have led him to contemplate sun, moon and stars with the devoted awe of mankind’s early ancestors
Mud is not a promising medium to draw with. It is dull, thick, unpromising stuff. A muddy drawing sounds like a vague and boring one. Miraculously, however – or maybe just because he’s spent 50 years making art in and of the land – Richard Long’s huge new mud drawing Gravity Crescent is hypnotic, full of complex 3D curves that snare the eye.
It looks as if eels are nesting in the wall. They writhe and wriggle, each tubular body created by a swerve of Long’s mud-stick. The raw wet earth with which he created this towering work, on a pristine white wall in London’s Lisson Gallery, comes from the river Avon, so perhaps the material is haunted by the river’s flashing, silver-scaled creatures. His muddy swirls mass in an engrossing swarm. The flow and life of the river seems caught in this whirlpool of mud.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 10 2018
From famous locations to the simplest home vegetable garden, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family snapshots, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden’s rich history in photography
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 10 2018
As the first direct flights from the UK launch this month, we find that, despite rampant building and gentrification, the home of country and bluegrass hasn’t lost touch with its roots
For a medium-size US city, Nashville has an XXL reputation. Everybody thinks they know what it’s about: country music, the Grand Ole Opry, Johnny Cash, improbable dreams of stardom, cheesy ballads and rhinestone shirts.
But don’t be so sure, warned singer-songwriter and rising star Ben Danaher, during a gig at 3rd and Lindsley, one of the city’s many superb music venues. “Lots of dive bars are becoming karaokes,” he said, before dedicating a song, Silver Screen, to “all the hipsters”.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 10 2018
Coppersmith’s painting, in the style of George Lambert, was the winner among 794 entries and 57 finalists
• Archibald prize 2018: finalists – in pictures
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Yvette Coppersmith has won the $100,000 Archibald prize for her self-portrait, painted in the style of Australian realist George Lambert and inspired by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
The five-time finalist, who has previously painted Prof Gillian Triggs and comedian John Safran, said she originally intended to paint Ardern herself.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 10 2018
The New York Times
May 10 2018
artforum.com
May 10 2018
artforum.com
May 10 2018
The New York Times
May 10 2018
