Category Archives: Art and design

‘People laugh but think twice’: Belgian cartoonist takes on plastic pollution

Posted on by

Pieter De Poortere is putting his best-known character, Dickie, to work to help galvanise opposition to a giant plastics plant in Antwerp

Belgian cartoonist Pieter De Poortere was trying to do his bit for the environment: eating less meat and diligently sorting his rubbish – glass, paper, plastics. He realised it wasn’t enough. “I thought if we all sort out our trash, then everything will be recycled, everything will be OK, then we are doing great. But actually that is not true,” he said pointing to the problems of the global waste industry, where wealthy countries’ plastic may be dumped, or burned on open fires in poorer countries.

So he put his best-known character to work, as part of an international art project that launched in April, aiming to draw attention to the problem of plastic production.

Continue reading...

Painting swapped in 70s for grilled cheese sandwich serves up windfall

Posted on by

Painting by Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis traded for a meal at Irene and Tony Demas’s restaurant could fetch C$35,000

Working out of the kitchen of their small restaurant in Ontario in the 1970s, Irene Demas and her husband Tony soon learned the value of trading their dishes for the talents of local bakers, craftspeople and artisans.

“Everyone supported everyone back then,” said Irene, at the time a bright-eyed chef in her 20s. In exchange for daily fresh flowers, for example, the couple would take soup and a sandwich to the florist next door.

Continue reading...

Taika Waititi portrait wins packing room prize at 2022 Archibalds

Posted on by

New Zealand-born artist Claus Stangl wins prize decided by gallery staff with painting of Academy Award-winning director

New Zealand-born Sydney-based artist Claus Stangl has taken out one of Australia’s top art honours with his portrait of Academy Award-winning director Taika Waititi.

On Thursday, Stangl was announced as the winner of the packing room prize, a sub-category of the Archibald prize, Australia’s leading prize for portraiture.

Continue reading...

‘A visionary in many ways’: art world mourns loss of Yolngu artist Mr Wanambi

Posted on by

The painter, film-maker and Mulka Project founder died on Sunday, leaving behind a legacy of boundary-pushing art and an archive of cultural knowledge

The art world is mourning the loss of one of Australia’s most respected First Nations artists, Mr Wanambi, with one of his mentees saying “his passing has changed our entire landscape”.

The Yolngu painter, film-maker and curator died in Darwin on Sunday, more than 1,000km from his home in north-eastern Arnhem Land. He was just 59 years old. His family have requested his first name and image not be published.

Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

Continue reading...

Edinburgh show will display street photographer’s never-before-seen work

Posted on by

University will host major survey of Robert Blomfield’s shots of student life in 1950s and 60s

Previously unseen work by a photographer who captured life in Edinburgh and has been compared to the great Henri Cartier-Bresson is to go on display at an exhibition in the city where he lived and worked.

Robert Blomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between shooting university students, locals and the landscape of the Scottish capital.

Continue reading...

Ukraine accuses Russian forces of seizing 2,000 artworks in Mariupol

Posted on by

City council is reportedly preparing materials to initiate criminal proceedings over mass cultural looting

Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of seizing “over 2,000 artworks” from museums in the occupied city of Mariupol and moving the pieces to areas of the Russian-controlled Donbas region.

“The occupiers ‘liberated’ Mariupol from its historical and cultural heritage. They stole and moved more than 2,000 unique exhibits from museums in Mariupol to Donetsk,” the Mariupol city council said in a statement posted on its Telegram channel on Thursday.

Continue reading...

Venice Biennale: women outnumber male artists in main halls for first time

Posted on by

Black women occupy prominent pavilions with some venues showing work from non-binary, disabled and trans artists

There is no shortage of art’s big beasts in Venice, as the world’s most prestigious international art event, the city’s biennale, opens to the public.

Georg Baselitz has made works to hang in the 18th-century stucco frames that once held portraits of the Grimani family in their palazzo. Marc Quinn is showing in the National Archaeological Museum. Anselm Kiefer has covered the walls of a colossal room in the Palazzo Ducale with paintings encrusted with shoes, clothing, metal, and even a ladder.

Continue reading...

Solar system recreated in Derry sculpture trail

Posted on by

Our Place in Space is part of £120m government-backed Unboxed festival spanning UK over coming months

A glowing silicone sun measuring 2.3 metres in diameter and a pinhead-size Pluto have been brought down to earth in an extraordinary scale model of the solar system aimed at giving the public a true sense of the huge size of space.

The six-mile (10km) riverside sculpture trail opens in Derry on Friday as part of Unboxed, the £120m government-backed celebration of creativity that spans the UK over the coming months.

Continue reading...

Dutch golden age painting worth up to $5m discovered at Blue Mountains property

Posted on by

Experts say 400-year-old work is likely collaboration between Dutch master Willem Claesz Heda and his son

A 400-year-old “one in a million” Dutch painting worth up to $5m has been found at a property in the New South Wales Blue Mountains.

Called Still Life, the work was recently located at the National Trust of Australia-managed Woodford Academy during a restoration project.

Continue reading...

Connecticut mechanic finds art worth millions in dumpster at abandoned barn

Posted on by

Work by Francis Hines, who wrapped buildings and paintings and died at 96 in 2016, found in dumpster and now destined for sale

Paintings and other artwork found in an abandoned barn in Connecticut turned out to be worth millions of dollars.

Notified by a contractor, Jared Whipple, a mechanic from Waterbury, retrieved the dirt-covered pieces from a dumpster which contained materials from a barn in Watertown.

Continue reading...

Rome villa with Caravaggio’s only ceiling fresco fails to sell again

Posted on by

Sprawling Villa Aurora – at centre of legal battle – attracts no bidders for second time at cut-price €377m

For the second time in three months, a historic Rome villa that contains the only ceiling fresco ever painted by the Renaissance master and famed scoundrel Caravaggio has failed to attract a bidder.

More than four centuries after his death at the age of 38, the man known during his lifetime for his fistfights, arrests and lawsuits as much as for producing what would become many of history’s best-known paintings is still causing trouble.

Continue reading...

William Morris’s ‘heaven on earth’ Oxfordshire home restored to former glory

Posted on by

After a £6m renovation project, the pioneering designer’s farmhouse is reopening to the public

For William Morris, the Oxfordshire village of Kelmscott was “heaven on earth”. An old farmhouse became a beloved rural retreat and inspiration for the pioneering designer, author, architectural conservationist and social reformer, widely regarded as the father of the arts and crafts movement.

Now Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade, is reopening to the public on 1 April following a £6m renovation project, preserving and enhancing it for future generations.

Continue reading...

147 razor cuts: bloody artwork marking Indigenous deaths in custody wins Australia’s Blake prize

Posted on by

Wiradjuri artist SJ Norman has won $35,000 prize for Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains), which saw him receive 147 wounds in 147 minutes

  • Readers may find images in this story distressing

Wiradjuri artist SJ Norman has won the 2022 Blake prize for an artwork that saw him receive 147 wounds to his back, representing the number of Aboriginal deaths in police custody over the last decade in Australia.

Norman was announced the winner of the $35,000 prize at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on Saturday, for his performance piece and photographic diptych titled Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains).

Continue reading...

Berlin Krautrock exhibition celebrates groundbreaking genre

Posted on by

Posters of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can span movement’s roots in the counterculture scene of 1968

A motley train of shaggy-haired musicians is gliding into the future on a hastily sketched highway, brandishing bongos, vegetables and flaming guitars.

The poster for a 1971 gig by German-English-Swiss trio Brainticket, on display at Berlin’s small Bröhan Museum until 24 April, visually sums up the essence of a German musical movement so forward-looking at its height, its country of origin is only now starting to recognise its legacy.

Continue reading...

Sumaya Sadurni: photojournalist and ‘rock’n’roll Mother Teresa’ dies at 32

Posted on by

Described as ‘outstanding and fearless’ by Bobi Wine, tributes have been paid to Sadurni, whose work featured in the Guardian and New York Times

Sumaya Sadurni Carrasco has died while travelling to take photographs for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine in northern Uganda. Thomas Mugisha, an NGO worker, also died in the accident on 7 March.

Sumy, as she was known, was a talented, driven and courageous photojournalist with a rare gift for friendship. At just 32 years old, she had built a powerful body of work, which had been published in some of the world’s best-known publications; in 2020 she was shortlisted for the Guardian’s agency photographer of the year. She also leaves a legacy of knowledge and inspiration that she passed on to young photographers as a Uganda Press Photo award mentor, a teacher at Makerere University and a Canon trainer.

Continue reading...

Two employees of New York’s MoMA stabbed after man denied entrance

Posted on by

New York police said the man’s membership had been revoked for previous incidents of disorderly conduct

A man stabbed two people inside the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Saturday afternoon after he was denied entrance for previous incidents of disorderly conduct, authorities said.

Police said the two people who were stabbed were museum employees. Both were in stable condition at Bellevue hospital.

Continue reading...

Black Women Photographers on what International Women’s Day means to them

Posted on by

We hear from a some of the members of the Black Women Photographers collective, a group facilitating greater diversity in editorial photography

The Black Women Photographers collective, established via a Covid-19 relief fund, is approaching its second year of promoting and empowering Black female photographers, as well as increasing the visibility of their work.

In March, a virtual summit supported by Adobe will feature Raven B Varona, Kimberly Douglas, aka @kihmberlie, Audrey Woulard, Lola Flash, Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Amanda J Cain, NHL’s first Black woman team photographer, Whitney Matewe, DeLovie Kwagala, Cheriss May, Sade Ndya, Chaya Howell and Idara Ekpoh.

2017: My friends Dara and Isioma, who I have known since 2008 in boarding school. This photo was taken at one of our many mini alumni meetups. After spending six years of the most formative parts of our adolescence in a remote school campus – loving, hating and knowing each other – we can say that we come from each other.

Continue reading...

‘These are our local heroes’: the artist painting murals of hope in a Zimbabwe township

Posted on by

Basil Matsika hopes his joyful murals of Mbare’s music and sports stars will inspire others to look beyond the area’s poverty and crime

Street artist Basil Matsika paints murals of local musicians and daily life in the streets of Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest townships, in the capital Harare. With his brush and paint jar, he says he communicates deep sentiments of hope amid the overwhelming landscape of poverty.

While many see Mbare as a crime-ridden neighbourhood, Matsika, 40, chooses to see beauty in the grimy, patched walls of the Matapi flats, which have become his canvas for his giant murals.

Continue reading...

Surreal: art’s weirdest worldview bounces back a century after its birth

Posted on by

Literary and artistic movement enjoying another golden age, with international events and exhibitions


A century ago in the ateliers of Montparnasse in Paris, surrealism was born from the gloom of the first world war that had engulfed and devastated Europe.

The cultural movement led by the French writer and poet André Breton would give rise to artists of international renown including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí.

Continue reading...

Ten years of my art was lost in a fire I accidentally started – but I made better work from the ashes

Posted on by

A devastating fire in my studio forced me to approach painting and life in a new way

Two weeks before the first lockdown I was in my studio putting the finishing touches to my most ambitious body of paintings to date. The studio was packed with hundreds of works of art. For the past four years I had been working with the Syrian writer Professor Ali Souleman and the documentary filmmaker Mark Jones. Ali lost his sight in a bomb blast in Syria in 1997 and we had been attempting to translate his experiences of war and displacement into a collection of paintings – to make the unseen seen. Ali and Mark were coming the very next day for an unveiling. The studio was overstuffed, no pause or resting place for the eye anywhere. It was, in hindsight, a self-portrait of a restless mind.

I’ve always been driven by obsessive-compulsive tendencies: counting and control, endless tinkering, seeking a never-coming calm. A patch of work caught my eye. Could it be a bit more darkened and burnt? I felt an itch behind my eyelid, a twitching fidget. I should have waited until I could move the boxes. I couldn’t wait. I switched on the blowtorch and passed it over the surface. It would only take a moment. A moment was all it took.

Continue reading...