News

Bridget Riley unveils a site-specific work, Heather Phillipson’s fantastical images take over the Baltic and more – all in our weekly dispatch

Bridget Riley
The most brilliant abstract artist Britain has had unveils a wall painting called Messengers, whose constellation of colours evokes images in the National Gallery that range from angelic wings to Constable’s clouds.
• National Gallery, London, from 17 January.

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Animals from the American Folk Art Museum share a habitat with paintings from Fountain House Gallery that embrace a similar theme.

The French artist, known for creating visual realities, evokes a sense of consciousness through interactive experiences

A world where flies, humans and machines are the chief protagonists sounds like a classic dystopian nightmare. Yet Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt manages to be not just chilling but seductive and, occasionally, absurd.

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Is there a work of public art in your neighborhood or elsewhere that makes you smile, grimace or just scratch your head? We’d like to know.

Allendale, Northumberland: Finding things on a walk and taking them home to draw teaches observation about the natural world

A curled and desiccated bracken frond lies on the table in front of me. My pen describes it, swooping and twisting across the paper, inexact but feeling for the spirit of the plant. I am on the final page of a leporello in a year of nature drawings that has catalogued the changing seasons. A leporello is a concertina book; mine has stiff white cartridge paper and hard covers, and slots into a black carrying case. There’s a magic to the reveal as the pages are opened out, light and shadow falling across its zigzag surface.

Here is 2018, its slow start of shivering snowdrops and fragile hazel catkins, lungworts nectar-full in a late spring, grasses seeding and flowers going over fast in the summer drought. Seeds are blown from a dandelion clock to float their way across several folds of paper. An explosion of pollen beetles in July cluster in scabious and sweet peas. Wasps feast on fallen plums, cotoneaster berries ripen, sweet chestnuts tumble from their spiky cases.

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

Still reckoning with the fallout from her Emmett Till painting, the chastened artist reveals how the controversy has changed her — even as she moves forward with a new gallery show.

The 1970s performance artist known for his guerrilla-style spectacles in costumes made from trash and found objects gets an overdue retrospective.

Questions were raised over why a museum of Latino art was feting Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, whose archconservative friends oppose Pope Francis.

The government shutdown means you can’t see Charline von Heyl’s first-class retrospective at the Hirshhorn. But consider this substitute: the double life her paintings live online.

• A look at the famous building currently on sale
  
• New York City’s second most famous skyscraper
  

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‘The rubber boats are always overloaded and fragile. But at sea, if you don’t take photographs, there will be no evidence’

I’m employed by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières to document humanitarian rescue missions in the Mediterranean. But I’m also part of the team of sailor-rescuers – I received the same training, and learned the same drills and first aid techniques. As a photographer I’m a witness, but there’s always the possibility that I’ll need to put down the camera and be hands-on. It happens pretty often, in fact. For this particular moment on the rescue ship Aquarius in October 2017, I was able to just chronicle the rescue. In that one day, 588 survivors were brought aboard. The Aquarius can accommodate 600 people but we’ve had to bring 1,000 on before. The migrant boats often leave around the same time because they are all waiting for a window of good weather and a calm sea.

Related: Aquarius: onboard the migrant rescue ship – photographic diary

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Shaun Kardinal has a budget and a home filled with original works. For him, reaching out to artists and keeping his ears open have led to deals.

Museums, colleges and the art market are beginning to see amateur photographs as both collectibles and cultural artifacts.

LA is a city of concrete. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist mansions to Rudolph Schindler’s tilted houses, architects working there have embraced the material. A new map by Blue Crow Media shows some lesser-known structures are just as striking

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The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s biggest art show, uses interactive exhibits and live performances to help Indians connect with contemporary art.

The artist, who painted the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama, talks about his new project and his mission to bring diversity to museum walls

When the American artist Kehinde Wiley – known by many for his presidential portrait of Barack Obama – walked into a Little Caesars restaurant in St Louis, he didn’t know he’d walk out with models for his next painting.

He saw a group of African American women sitting at a table and was inspired to paint them for Three Girls in A Wood, a painting on view at the St Louis Art Museum. It’s part of Wiley’s exhibition Saint Louis, which runs until 10 February, where 11 paintings of St Louis locals are painted in the style of old masters, a comment on the absence of black portraits in museums.

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Nathan Benn’s vibrant photographs of his home state embody suburban Americana in all its peculiarity – from society galas to gator slides

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Eddie Martinez creates a whiteout; Sonya Blesofsky pays homage to a building’s past; and a group of artists is inspired by U.F.O.s.

The Lumina collective is made up of eight female photographers whose most recent exhibition, Echoes, is on at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until February 2019. Each photographer explains the inspiration behind their work around the collective theme of identity

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Pioneering artist who pushed the boundaries of jewellery, sculpture, installation and design

The artist Wendy Ramshaw, who has died aged 79, was best known for the jewellery she designed, and first gained widespread acclaim for in 1970 with a solo exhibition at the Pace Gallery in London. She presented sets of several complementary gold rings, some with semi-precious stones, establishing a signature vocabulary that she continued to develop in different directions for many years.

When the rings were displayed on a support, they constituted a unified sculptural object. When the wearer detached the rings, they could be deployed on the hand in a variety of configurations. As Ramshaw put it: “Most of my jewellery is made in parts or sections, so that the owner can share in the way the piece is worn.”

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Rare lithograph of Norwegian artist’s most famous work is centrepiece of exhibition

A rare lithograph of Edvard Munch’s most famous work, The Scream, will feature in the biggest UK exhibition of the artist’s prints in 45 years.

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, at the British Museum from April, will explore the Norwegian’s expression of complex, often fraught, human emotions. At a time when Monet was painting landscapes, Munch was depicting love and desire but also jealousy, loneliness, anxiety, grief and mental instability – most memorably in The Scream.

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As the masters celebrate big anniversaries, who reaches more powerfully across the centuries – and who deserves to hit the canvas?

It’s the art fight of the year, the rumble in the museum. Who is the greatest – Rembrandt van Rijn or Leonardo da Vinci? The two geniuses both have big anniversaries this year. According to the Netherlands, 2019 is officially the Year of Rembrandt. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Museum De Lakenhall in Leiden are all putting on shows for the 350th anniversary of his death in 1669. Yet Rembrandt isn’t getting his year to himself. This also happens to be the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo in 1519. It’s a great excuse for exhibitions by Britain’s Royal Collection and British Library as well as a grand retrospective at the Louvre.

So which is the bigger anniversary? The smart bet might seem to be Rembrandt. His art is so absorbing, tragic and inward. His portraits are the painterly equivalents of King Lear. He is a painter in whose shadows the soul can linger. By contrast, Leonardo is a pop star who’s still busting the market 500 years after his death – and isn’t that a bit oppressive? It’s hard not to feel alienated among all the smartphone-touting tourists in front of the Mona Lisa. Not much room there for the meditative silent communion you can have with a Rembrandt.

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The New York gallerist faces a possible prison term of three years after pleading guilty to tax evasion.

Cabbies in Hastings come from all over the world – so Tom Hunter took a ride with them, listened to their thoughts on their adopted East Sussex home, and photographed them at dusk or dawn in locations around the town

• Tom Hunter: A Journey Home is at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery from 9 February to 2 June

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The artist Oliver Jeffers sets his scale models against the universe of Manhattan.

The photographer Warren Kirk describes his new book Suburbia as part-social history, part-archaeology, part-storytelling. He has a simple desire to capture what he perceives to be beauty in the ordinary and commonplace. What better place to do that than where he spends most of his time – Australia’s suburbs

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A trained architect and pilot, the Polish photographer Kacper Kowalski frames the landscape in terms of human impact and formal patterns within nature, from views of autumn forests and spring fields in bloom, to the alien abstraction of industrial landscapes

• OVER/Side Effects at Galerie XII Los Angeles, 1 December – 12 January

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The property is within the traditional lands of the Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people and was bought 10 years ago by Bush Heritage

It’s day two of my visit and the suspense is killing me as we slowly walk towards the last of the pitfall traps we are checking that day. A plastic drum that has been buried in the ground with its rim at surface level is metres away, the small trap a form of passive collection used during ecology studies. As she steps over the small fenceline that draws the animals in, elation washes over Kate Taylor’s face – there’s a painted dragon, bright blue and green. One of two managers of Bon Bon station reserve in the Australian outback, she hasn’t seen one of these small lizards for years. She gently picks it up as it wraps its claws around her index finger. The lizard barely reaches her second knuckle. Its colours are so vibrant and it feels like we just won the lottery.

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In the 1990s, Goldsmiths college in London spawned the YBAs. Now, it has incubated a very different group – whose work is as likely to turn up in an international court as in a gallery

Up a narrow staircase at the labyrinthine Goldsmiths college in London is an airy room where researchers, film-makers, AI experts, investigative journalists and archaeologists pore over computer screens. This is the nerve centre of Forensic Architecture, the research agency that was a strong contender for the 2018 Turner prize (they lost out to Charlotte Prodger) and which has gained a name for its meticulous “counter-forensic” investigations into human rights abuses.

In this post-truth era, verification is paramount, so myriad documentation sources have to be corroborated in minute detail. On a recent visit I paid them, researchers were synchronising police bodycam film and extended thermal footage with film shot by an activist. Someone else was scrutinising CCTV footage connected to the recent unsolved murder of an LGBTQ activist in Greece. The investigative film-maker Laura Poitras was visiting and journalists from the New York Times had been over to learn about setting up a visual investigations unit. A team is currently training Chicago activists to respond to police violence.

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Locals furious over decision to close the pier for two months, a year after it won the Stirling prize

The battle of Hastings pier has erupted in public insults and accusations after a decision, announced at the end of December, to close the seaside town’s prize-winning attraction for two months.

Furious locals have accused owner Sheikh Abid Gulzar of keeping them in the dark over his plans for the pier’s future after his sudden decision to shut it until March for repairs and improvements.

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New images by Emma Stibbon of locations used by Turner and Ruskin highlight the toll taken on Alpine landscape

A Royal Academician has followed in the footsteps of JMW Turner and John Ruskin to capture in photographs the breathtaking sites in the French Alps that 19th-century artists caught so strikingly. The resulting images reveal a stark depiction of how climate change has taken its toll on the glaciated landscape.

For a forthcoming exhibition on Ruskin and Turner, Emma Stibbon was commissioned to go to Chamonix and record the glaciers around Mont Blanc where, in the early 1800s, Turner painted sublime watercolours that inspired Ruskin to embark on his Alpine tours decades later, photographing and drawing awe-inspiring glaciers such as the Mer de Glace.

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New steel band version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah will be one of his eight picks

The British artist Jeremy Deller is to use his time as a castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs to premiere his latest work of art.

A specially commissioned uptempo version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, played by the Melodians Steel Orchestra and broadcast for the first time, will be one of the eight discs Deller chooses to accompany him on his imaginary island stay.

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Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, is one of the world’s coldest cities; temperatures in January average -40C. Alex Vasyliev started photographing his cold and isolated home town to stave off tedium. “I did not always want to shoot here. Yakutsk seemed unbearably boring and ugly to me. But in this boredom and unattractiveness, I find charm,” he says. “I like to shoot things that others criticise – ugly streets, parking lots, gas stations, old playgrounds, ordinary people.” The region’s icy conditions feature heavily in his work, which captures the harsh reality of life so far below zero. “Russia is a completely different world. Local people are accustomed to such conditions, but living in the winter is hard here,” he says. “Cold steals our energy. Life stops.”

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The photographer’s collection The Last Ships records the decline of heavy industry on the Tyne in the 1970s

This photograph belongs to a bigger series by Chris Killip called The Last Ships, which traces the decline of shipbuilding on the Tyne. “I made them with a sense of urgency, as I thought it wasn’t going to last,” Killip said later. “I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution. It happened all around me during the time I was photographing.”

Killip was intrigued by the contrast between the epic scale of the ships that loomed over the streets of Wallsend and South Shields and the working-class communities that lived in their shadow. Here, children play on a quiet terraced street beneath the towering outline of the Tyne Pride, the biggest ship ever built on the Tyne and, as it turned out, one of the last. The red-brick houses, the stone wall, the fog lend the scene an almost Victorian feel. Within a few years, though, that way of life came to an end with a brutal finality. Just two years after this photograph was taken, Killip made another in the same place: the street was demolished, the community scattered.

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Government-funded museums and zoos have been forced to shutter, and can’t reopen until a federal budget is agreed

Outside the National Archives in Washington, a sign says “Closed.”

“We’re sorry,” it reads. “Due to the shutdown of the federal government, the Washington DC facility is closed.”

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before the opening session of the House of Representatives, New Year celebrations from around the world, migrants climbing the border fence in Tijuana and the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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This week in our regular series of exclusive Guardian print sales is a swimmer by the River Neva, Leningrad, 1982 by Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe

In February 1982, photographer Denis Thorpe flew to Leningrad, as it was then, with a friend – a brief stopover before catching a connecting flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Walking along the River Neva, near the island that houses the historic Peter and Paul Fortress, the pair spotted “this brave soul” preparing to take the plunge at the site of a river swimming pool. “For me, she symbolises the strength of the Russian people,” says Thorpe. Swimming in icy water was a cultural phenomenon in the USSR, but fell out of favour after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the winter of 2017, however, enthusiasts revived the tradition, and started swimming again at the iconic fortress with its needle-thin golden spire. Was Thorpe tempted to test the water all those years ago? “Absolutely not – I kept my thermals on.” Hannah Booth

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

The virtuoso trumpeter, who died last year, will be honored at two venues.

Turner meditates on midwinter, Kentridge contemplates science and spacetime and Colishaw presents a shocking robotic portrait – all in our weekly dispatch

Prints I Wish I Had Published
Picasso, Rauschenberg, Blake and Turner are among the galaxy of great artists whose prints are brought together in an exhibition opening soon.
• Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, 11 January-9 February.

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The English painter and satirist depicts a vision of vibrant cacophony that resonates more than two centuries later in the Brexit era

In this print from 1741, the professional violinist covers his ears, confronting a motley crew of street musicians: the ballad singer with her crying baby; the drummer boy; the oboe player, who, like the boy peeing, seems to be deliberately out to annoy the man at his window.

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A Mexican tattoo artist with a sweet tooth, refugees biking across the desert and a customer in a Mongolian beauty parlour make up some of the poignant and uplifting images submitted to the Portrait of Humanity prize. Backed by the Guardian and focused on unifying the global community, this is the last in a monthly gallery selected by a Guardian picture editor before the closing date on 8 January

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Small spaces, even smaller budgets and abundant creativity: At three downtown galleries, artists aren’t simply showing their work.

When Olivia and Harlan Fischer discovered glass art, the moment was “similar to how I felt in high school when I discovered jazz,” Mr. Fischer said.

Helen Mirra’s complex weavings reverberate; Magalie Comeau’s monochromes have architectural allusions; and Jennifer Wynne Reeves’s work speaks in a voice shaped by Facebook.

A pivotal report calls for thousands of artworks to leave French museums and return to West Africa. An artist, a historian and a philosopher debate what should happen — and what these objects could mean to young Africans who have never seen them.

Our picture editors choose their photo highlights from around the world

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Exhibitions in the next 12 months promise to share a wide selection of tech-related artwork, from Instagram inspired pieces to a history of selfies

Neil Harbisson, the world’s first cyborg artist, has an antenna implanted in his skull. His artist girlfriend, Moon Ribas, has online sensors in her feet. Five or 10 years ago, this would have seemed like the plot of a Philip K Dick story, but now it’s less fantasy and more reality.

With our dependency on smartphones, our Netflix addictions and with almost half the country on dating apps, our devices are becoming dangerously inseparable from our everyday lives. From surveillance to selfie vanity and memes, a series of technology-themed exhibits are coming to the US next year, which trace the evolution of photography, show the roots of social media and share how technology can actually be a force for good.

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Designed by Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer, Lebanon’s international expo site has been abandoned since civil war broke out in the 1970s

“It could collapse at any time,” says the architect and activist Wassim Naghi. The facade of the unfinished, subterranean space museum in Tripoli, Lebanon, is visibly decaying and its steel reinforcements are rusted – but that may not be its biggest problem. “The ageing concrete’s carbonation is invisible,” explains Naghi when we meet in his office in the centre of the city. “We don’t know how bad it really is.”

Situated beneath an elevated concrete helipad, the museum was part of a planned permanent international fair designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the early 1960s that was expected to accommodate more than 2 million visitors a year. The 100-hectare (250-acre) site’s 15 existing buildings also include a domed theatre, an atrium, an arch and collective housing. A 717-metre-long boomerang-shaped canopy was designed to house the permanent exhibition, alongside a separate, traditionally styled pavilion for exhibitions relating to Lebanon.

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