Category Archives: Art and design

Jürgen Wittdorf: Berlin gallery revives homoerotic art of communist era

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In what would have been artist’s 90th year, first retrospective at Biesdorf Palace has been a surprise success

Seven men wash the sweat off their toned bodies in a communal shower. Unless you squint and mistake a tightly gripped bar of soap for something else, their limbs are suspended in tantalising proximity but never quite touch.

The German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s 1963 linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport, may look like something out of a top-shelf graphic novel or the virile drawings of the gay liberation icon Tom of Finland.

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Battersea power station: timeline of a modern classic

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Begun in 1929, the building was a collaboration between architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott

Battersea power station was built in two phases, as a collaboration between the architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Halliday was responsible for the overall shape and the interior.

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‘Ordinary’ Chinese vase sells for almost €8m after ferocious bidding war

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Tianqiuping-style porcelain sells for nearly 4,000 times its estimated value after buyers are convinced it is a rare artefact

An “ordinary” Chinese vase put up for auction in France and valued at €2,000 (£1,745) has sold for almost €8m after a ferocious bidding war among buyers convinced it was a rare 18th-century artefact.

At the sale in Fontainebleau near Paris, auctioneers were astonished as the offers from about 30 mainly Chinese bidders kept on coming. When the hammer fell the vase had been sold for €7.7m – almost 4,000 times its estimated value. With the seller’s fees, the final purchase price was €9.12m.

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Campaigners celebrate as V&A severs Sackler links over opioids cash

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London museum bows to years of pressure and removes signs acknowledging the family behind the OxyContin crisis

Campaigners calling for the name Sackler to be dropped from cultural landmarks are celebrating this weekend. Their smiles mark five years of demonstrations and dramatic stunts as another major arts institution – London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – takes down signs acknowledging the financial contribution from this wealthy family.

The museum is dropping it controversial ties with the Sackler family, descendants of US makers of addictive opioid prescription drugs. It’s a victory for the campaign group Sackler P.A.I.N, which staged a dramatic public protest at the gallery in November 2019. The group, led by American artist Nan Goldin, argued that donations from the family that founded now-bankrupt Purdue Pharma, maker of the painkiller OxyContin, were a moral stain on cultural institutions that accepted them.

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Lucian Freud’s etching of Wolseley restaurant creator to be sold

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Artist dined at Mayfair restaurant almost every night in later years, and would sometimes share a table with co-founder Jeremy King

A portrait by Lucian Freud of the restaurateur behind the Wolseley, the Mayfair establishment where the artist dined nearly every evening in the last few years of his life, is to be sold next month.

Freud was completing the etching of Jeremy King when he died in 2011. The two had become friends over a period of about 30 years after Freud began dining at Le Caprice, another King establishment (and a favourite of Diana, Princess of Wales’s), and at the Wolseley when it opened in 2003.

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Brad Pitt makes surprise debut as a sculptor at Finland art gallery

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Actor appears alongside Australian musician Nick Cave and British sculptor Thomas Houseago to reveal his first ever public art exhibition

Most know him for his blockbuster movies, chiselled cheekbones and high-profile relationships, but Brad Pitt can now add creating sculpture to his list of achievements after publicly debuting his first works of art in a lakeside museum in Finland.

The A-list Hollywood star unveiled the sculptures – what he called a “radical inventory of self” – at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a move that came as a surprise. It is the first time the “largely self taught” artist presented his sculptures to the public, the gallery said.

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Folio from ‘world masterpiece’ illuminated manuscript goes up for auction

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Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month

A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.

The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.

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Canadian city pulls bison sculpture in row over representation of colonialism

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Edmonton decided Ken Lum’s paired figures of a bison and fur trader could ‘cause harm and induce painful memories’

A Canadian city has pulled a public art project over fears that a pair of towering bronze statues could be seen as an endorsement of colonialism – the exact opposite of the work’s intended meaning, according to the artist.

The work, which cost C$375,000 (US$285,000), comprises two large bronze figures which were intended to stand on either end of a pedestrian bridge in Edmonton. On one end, a 13ft bison was to stare out over the water. At the other, a colonial fur trader, measuring 11.5ft, would sit atop a pile of bison pelts.

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Yinka Ilori’s patterns and designs to be celebrated at London Design Museum

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Free exhibition will include some of creative’s architectural projects and draw from his west African roots

The bold colours and striking patterns of Yinka Ilori’s furniture, homeware, textiles and billboard graphics are to be celebrated for the first time in a free museum exhibition.

Ilori, who grew up in a Nigerian household in north London, has drawn inspiration from west African textiles in his artwork and designs.

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How an Indigenous Australian artist ‘astonished’ a giant of American art

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Sol LeWitt never met Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who began painting in her 80s, but he was blown away by her work. A new AGNSW show celebrates their unlikely link

He was one of the 20th century’s pioneers of modern American art; she was the Anmatyerre artist who put Australian desert painting on the world stage.

Sol LeWitt and Emily Kame Kngwarreye never met, yet one had a profound effect on the work of the other, and led to one of the largest collections of Utopia art outside Australia. LeWitt became a huge fan of Kngwarreye, and of the distinct style produced by the Indigenous Australian artists working in Utopia, Northern Territory.

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‘Fit of pique’: lost vorticist masterpiece found under portrait by contemporary

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Atlantic City by Helen Saunders discovered under Praxitella by Wyndham Lewis, who may have painted over it on purpose

A lost masterpiece by a leading abstract artist of the early 20th century has been discovered beneath a portrait by a contemporary who may have painted over the original in a “fit of pique”.

Atlantic City by Helen Saunders, a member of the radical and short-lived vorticist movement, depicts a fragmented modern metropolis, almost certainly in the vibrant colours associated with the group. A black and white image of the painting appeared in Blast, the avant garde journal of the vorticists produced shortly before the outbreak of the first world war.

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Vandalised Mayer-Marton mural in Oldham church granted Grade II-listed status

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Crucifixion mosaic and fresco saved from destruction after two-year campaign

A stunning mural created in a Catholic church by a Jewish refugee from the Nazis has been saved from destruction, decay and vandalism after being granted Grade II-listed status by the UK government.

The Crucifixion, by the leading 20th-century artist George Mayer-Marton, is a rare combination of mosaic and fresco standing almost 8 metres (26ft) high, taking up an entire wall inside the Holy Rosary church in Oldham.

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Tehran museum unveils western art masterpieces hidden for decades

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‘Deviant’ works by artists including Picasso and Warhol return to display at exhibition in Iranian capital

Some of the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.

The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.

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Portrait of tyrant Thomas Picton moved to side room in Welsh museum

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Exhibition includes two specially commissioned works reframing story of former Trinidad governor

For more than a century, the portrait of Thomas Picton hung in a prominent position at the National Museum Cardiff, the image’s description hailing him as a military hero rather than a tyrant and a torturer, before it was removed from view in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

From Monday the two-metre-tall portrait of Lt Gen Picton is back on display in the Welsh capital – but in a very different context.

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Ancient sculptures found in storage box finally returned to Mexico

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Consulate accepts a dozen small artworks amid worldwide movement to repatriate Indigenous items

Small, ancient sculptures that have been gathering dust in an Albuquerque storage box are returning home to Mexico, where they are intertwined with the identity of Indigenous communities.

The Albuquerque Museum Foundation celebrated the repatriation of a dozen sculptures in a ceremony on Wednesday. The local consulate of Mexico accepted Olmec greenstone sculptures, a figure from the city of Zacatecas, bowls that were buried with tombs and other clay figurines that date back thousands of years.

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Saudi Arabia plans 100-mile-long mirrored skyscraper megacity

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The Line – due to be just 200 metres wide – will make Neom world’s most liveable city ‘by far’, officials claim

The promotional material is striking: two mirror-encased skyscrapers stretching more than 100 miles across a swathe of desert and mountain terrain, providing a future home for 9 million people. Is it the ultimate in high-density living, or a grandiose science fiction fantasy?

In short, economists, architects and analysts are not quite sure. So extravagant is Saudi Arabia’s plan to create an urban utopia that even those working on the project, known as the Line, do not yet know if its scale and scope can ever be realised.

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Kherson’s secret art society produces searing visions of life under Russian occupation

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Painters, playwrights and photographers have defied the threat of arrest in southern Ukrainian city to share their experiences

Under the threat of imprisonment, interrogation and the constant pressure of searches by Russian soldiers, six artists secretly met in a basement studio in the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson.

In the months after their homes were taken over by Putin’s forces, the artists formed a residency during which they created dozens of works, including drawings, paintings, video, photography, diary entries and stage plays.

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King Kong statue returns to Birmingham for Commonwealth Games

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Statue is recreation of pop art installation by Nicholas Munro displayed in city centre in 1970s

When the British pop artist Nicholas Monro was asked to make a public sculpture for Birmingham in the 1970s, he raised a few eyebrows when he produced an 18ft fibreglass statue of King Kong.

“It was really just a finger up to the system. They wanted something typical and boring, so he gave them a massive gorilla,” said Monro’s son Claude. “I think there was a certain amount of ‘Is this art? What is this?’” added Joe, Claude’s elder brother.

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Anticolonial hero statue to occupy Trafalgar Square fourth plinth from September

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Antelope by Samson Kambalu depicts John Chilembwe wearing hat in defiance of colonial rule in Nyasaland, now Malawi

A sculpture of a preacher who was killed in an anticolonialist uprising in what is now Malawi will be unveiled in September on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Antelope by Samson Kambalu is the 14th contemporary artwork to be commissioned for public display in the historic central London square.

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