Category Archives: Art and design

‘I had designed it a little too small’: Abraham Poincheval on spending a week inside a sculpture of himself

Posted on by

He’s lived within a boulder, hatched a nest of hen’s eggs, and now plans to encase himself in a beehive. Is this France’s most extreme performance artist –and how does he go to the toilet?

Last month, in a smart gallery in Paris, the back of a sculpture was removed and a man was lifted out. He looked around, disoriented, as his body slowly unfurled. A doctor rushed to his side and, after inspecting him, announced he was in good health. The crowd cheered. He’d been in there for seven days.

Abraham Poincheval, possibly France’s most extreme performance artist, specialises in surreal feats of endurance, often in tight spots. He has lived inside a rock for seven days, and a stuffed bear for 13. For this latest work, Hartung, he decided to look at a painting by abstract artist Hans Hartung for seven days straight. He even built a special contraption for it: an aluminium shell of a man sitting on a block, looking down a large square funnel.

Continue reading...

Paula Rego: ‘Making a painting can reveal things you keep secret from yourself’

Posted on by

On the eve of her biggest ever UK show, the figurative artist recalls a 70-year ‘non-career’ tackling fascism, abortion, tragedy and the solidarity of women

When a Paula Rego retrospective at Tate Britain was first suggested three years ago, it was welcomed as an irresistible – an inevitable – proposal. For, as the show’s curator Elena Crippa observes, there is only a handful of contemporary female artists who have achieved comparable status. And there are not many artists who have made women their subject in the inward, intense and complicated way that Rego has over the decades – painting them in pain, power and surrender. This is the largest show of her career, with more than 100 pieces – paintings, collages, drawings, pastels, etchings, sculptures – many never seen in this country before. It will be a chance to unriddle the stories the paintings tell and to celebrate an artist of fabulous – in every sense – talent. And, as with any well-curated retrospective, it will be a way in to the narrative of Paula Rego’s own life.

In the weeks before the show’s opening, Rego – now 86 – has been gamely answering questions back and forth with me over email, with her daughter, Cas Willing, as secretary. And what has emerged as one of the remarkable things about her is that, undeterred by age and its challenges, she still goes to work every day in her Camden studio, in north London. Almost 20 years ago, I met her there and will never forget the thrill of feeling backstage – for there is a theatrical element to her work, a coming together of props, an undertow of drama. I recall a lifesize horse, racks of clothes and a couch given to her by an analyst – appropriately, given her interest in the collective unconscious (she started analysis in 1966). And it is in this studio that she continues to work with her leading lady, Lila Nunes, loyal model and friend (she is, like Rego, from Portugal).

Continue reading...

‘I see people ageing – I don’t always see us’: one family, 30 years, 30 photographs

Posted on by

It was a simple idea: one family, photographed at the same time every year. Zed Nelson has traced Sue and Frank’s transition from new parents to grandparents. What’s it like to see your life pass in front of you?

In the summer of 1991, photographer Zed Nelson, then 25, invited a couple of new parents he was acquainted with to visit his London studio. Oh, and bring your baby, he said. At the time he had ambitions to be a travelling photojournalist. Within the year, he would fly out on the first of a series of visits to far-flung conflict zones. But for this, Nelson had in mind a quieter, more domestic project. He set up a backdrop and lights, and he encouraged the visiting parents – a personable couple called Sue and Frank whom he’d met at a party – to pose with their newborn, Eddie. The parents held hands, wild-eyed, visibly shot through with the terror and excitement of parenthood. Eddie, weeks old, oblivious, considered his own fingers and dribbled. It might have been any other family portrait.

Except that Nelson invited Sue, Frank and Eddie back to his studio for more portraits, at the same time of year, every year, for as long as they agreed to come. He would chart the evolution of a parenting life, with Sue fixed in position on the right of the picture, Frank on the left, Eddie inching up between his mum and dad. “Same backdrop every year, same lights, same camera, same angle,” Nelson explains, thinking back over the finicky logistics of a project that has run since 1991 without interruption. “Every year I measure out the distances to the inch. It drives us all a bit mad. But we do keep coming back.”

Continue reading...

William and Harry unveil Diana statue at Kensington Palace

Posted on by

Bronze artwork depicts princess flanked by children to represent ‘generational impact of her work’

The long-awaited statue of Diana, Princess of Wales was finally unveiled in a scaled-down ceremony on Thursday which saw the dukes of Cambridge and Sussex reunited in tribute to their mother, setting aside their recent differences.

On what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, the brothers appeared together for the first time since the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, after Prince Harry flew in from California for the brief ceremony.

Continue reading...

Wolfgang Tillmans on space, Brexit and Covid: ‘Let’s hope we get on a dancefloor soon’

Posted on by

From tiny weeds to distant galaxies, the photographer likes to scrutinise the interconnectedness of everything. He talks about coping with lockdown – and living through his second pandemic

Wolfgang Tillmans and I talk on the phone on 23 June, which he calls the “fifth anniversary horribilis”, referring to the Brexit vote. He’s at home in Berlin: a day later, he will travel to the UK to install his new exhibition, Moon in Earthlight, in the seaside town of Hove. To conform to Covid protocols, he’ll be doing it on his own, without his usual assistants, carefully placing his photographic images around the space – a former Regency flat owned by his gallerist Maureen Paley.

These photographs range from an image of wet concrete pouring out of a nozzle to one of a root’s tendrils creeping along a gap in the pavement. They are presented in a variety of formats, from huge printouts suspended on bulldog clips to small photographs tacked to the wall. Like all his shows, Moon in Earthlight will serve as an installation in its own right, a manifestation of Tillmans’ tender scrutiny of the universe. It also includes a collection of astronomical yearbooks dating back to 1978, when the artist was a stargazing 10-year-old.

Continue reading...

‘Iconic gay image’: history of sailors and sex explored in Barcelona exhibition

Posted on by

Catalan city is hosting new show looking at relationships between men who spend their lives at sea

A new exhibition at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona seeks to tell the story of the romantic and sexual reality of men who spend their lives at sea.

El desig és tan fluid com la mar (Desire Flows Like the Sea) aims to evoke the lives of men living in isolation but at close quarters and whose intimate lives were once clandestine out of necessity because homosexuality was and, and in many places still is, considered both a sin and a capital offence.

Continue reading...

Greek police recover two stolen paintings by Picasso and Mondrian

Posted on by

Works by 20th-century masters found nearly a decade after audacious heist at Athens gallery

A Picasso gifted to the Greek people by the artist in honour of their resistance to Nazi rule has been found in a gorge after a builder admitted to stealing the masterpiece and two other artworks in an audacious heist from the National Gallery in Athens nearly a decade ago.

For nine years, Head of a Woman had lain hidden in the home of the self-described art lover alongside Stammer Windmill, a work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, also stolen during the overnight raid on 9 January 2012.

Continue reading...

Rare Rubens drawing bought at small French sale up for auction

Posted on by

Surviving page from notebook all but destroyed in fire in 1720 expected to fetch as much as £600,000

A drawing bought in a small French sale by a buyer with a hunch has been identified as a rare surviving page from an important notebook made by a young Peter Paul Rubens.

If Rubens’ original Theoretical Notebook still existed it would be a true art wonder, but it was all but destroyed in a fire in 1720. Only two pages were thought to have survived, treasures of collections in London and Berlin.

Continue reading...

Photographer Donavon Smallwood: ‘What’s it like to be a black person in nature?’

Posted on by

The self-taught 27-year-old discusses Languor, a prize-winning series of portraits shot in Central Park over the past year

Since he was seven years old, Donavon Smallwood had lived in the same apartment in Harlem close to the northern tip of Central Park. As a teenager, he hung out there with his friends and, later, as he became interested in photography, he would often wander through the park with his camera looking for hidden places where the clamour of the city seemed a world away. “So many urban communities don’t have any nature spaces,” he says, “so I was lucky to have one close by.”

In 2019, he had “a vague idea for a project about walking and looking”, a flaneur’s take on the park as a place in which to lose oneself. Throughout the spring and summer of 2020, while New York was in lockdown, he photographed in and around the wooded north-western corner of the park, where ravines, glades and manmade waterfalls give the impression of a natural wilderness. Often, on his way there and back, he encountered the same people, locals mainly, for whom the park was a place to escape the constrictions of the Covid pandemic.

Continue reading...

Frank Gehry’s Luma Arles tower to open in south of France

Posted on by

Building is architect’s tribute to Arles’ most famous residents: the Romans and Vincent Van Gogh

Rising from the skyline of Arles, the tower appears like a futuristic structure from a Marvel movie with nearly 11,000 stainless steel panels gleaming in the Provençal sun.

Here, at what was once the centre of the Roman empire in France, this twisting structure is the 92-year-old architect Frank Gehry’s tribute to Arles’ most famous residents: the Romans and the artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Continue reading...

‘They thought we were terrorists’: meet Joe Rush, the master of mutoid art and king of Glastonbury

Posted on by

The punky master of outsider art was once a pariah, thrown out of Britain for his anarchist ways. Now, he’s a national treasure. Joe Rush relives 40 years of sticking it to the ‘straight world’

“They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.

“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”

Continue reading...

Vulva decor: is Cara Delevingne’s vagina tunnel the start of something big?

Posted on by

The model and actor has a new household installation - a pink tunnel where she goes to think. Vulval art and design has an ancient history, but it’s becoming more popular than ever

Should you swap all your doors for a vagina tunnel? This is the pressing question raised by a video tour from the model and actor Cara Delevingne, who takes Architectural Digest around her LA home, and I believe the answer has to be “yes”. In her living room, a secret door in the mirrored panelling reveals a soft pink opening. Crawl right in, take the dog with you (Delevingne does). “I come in here to think, I come in here to create, I feel inspired in the vagina tunnel,” says Delevingne.

Delevingne, and her architect, Nicolò Bini, were inspired, she says repeatedly, by Alice in Wonderland, but this is more like a vulval version of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the Chronicles of Labia, if you like. You climb out through a washing machine at the other end – “rebirthed and cleansed!” cries our host. The vagina’s rebirth powers are strong: Delevingne’s terrier goes in, and comes out a husky. The theme continues through the rest of the house: there is a floral display in her bedroom (“This lovely bouquet of vagina flowers”) and a “pussy palace”, a tactile pink suedette-lined secret room complete with swing and mirrored ceiling.

Continue reading...

AI helps return Rembrandt’s The Night Watch to original size

Posted on by

Rijksmuseum reproduces Dutch master’s work in all its glory, 300 years after it was cut to fit between doors

The Night Watch by Rembrandt has enraptured millions visiting Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and its previous homes over the centuries, dazzling with its scale and fine detail.

But it is only from today, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence to recapture some of the Dutch master’s genius, including the sweep of his brush strokes and perspective of his eye, that it can for the first time in 300 years be enjoyed in its complete form.

Continue reading...

‘My parents’ trauma is my trauma’ – Veronica Ryan on making first Windrush monument

Posted on by

She used to worry about ‘not making enough to pay the rent’. But with a solo show, a commission to make UK’s first Windrush monument and an OBE, the artist has stepped out of the shadows

Veronica Ryan’s handbag is always heavy. The British sculptor has been a collector since childhood, and her bag is her toolbox, her magpie’s nest, her anchor for a life lived in many places. It’s also fertile ground. Ryan’s mother once caught a glimpse of a date stone she was attempting to germinate in there. “You’re not going to get dates to grow here,” she said, referring to Britain and its climate. “I’m just really excited to see if I can,” replied Ryan. And she did.

Much like the seed, Ryan too is flourishing. For years, she worked in the art world’s shadows, using whatever materials she could find and often “not really making enough money to pay the rent”. But in 2018, aged 62, she won the Freelands award, which puts £100,000 towards showcasing a mid-career female artist yet to receive the recognition she deserves. The artist gets £25,000 and the gallery the remainder.

Continue reading...

Unknown treasures: the forgotten women of Manchester’s Factory Records

Posted on by

A new exhibition shines a light on the female creatives and managers who helped turn the home of Joy Division and New Order into a three decade-long powerhouse

From its figurehead Tony Wilson through to the male-dominated bands that found fame on the label, Factory Records is sometimes seen as the epitome of a muso lad fest. But a new exhibition at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum is having a go at changing all that, casting welcome light on the women who were integral not only to Factory’s birth but its three decade-long survival.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

Continue reading...

German police appeal for information after 17th century paintings found in skip

Posted on by

An art expert believes the paintings are by Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten and Italian Pietro Bellotti

German police have appealed for information from the public after two 17th century paintings were discovered in a skip at a highway rest stop.

Police said a 64-year-old man found the oil paintings at the rest stop near Ohrenbach in central Germany last month. He later handed them in to police in the western city of Cologne.

Continue reading...

‘We have more in common than what separates us’: refugee stories, told by refugees

Posted on by

In One Thousand Dreams, award-winning photographer Robin Hammond hands the camera to refugees. Often reduced by the media’s toxic or well-meaning narratives, the portraits and interviews capture a different and more complex tale

Robin Hammond has spent two decades crisscrossing the developing world and telling other people’s stories. From photographing the Rohingya forced out of Myanmar and rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to documenting the lives of people in countries where their sexuality is illegal, his work has earned him award after award.

But for his latest project the photographer has embarked on a paradigm shift: to remove himself – and others like him – from the process entirely. Instead, as part of an in-depth exploration of the refugee experience in Europe, the stories of those featured are told by those who, arguably, know them best: other refugees.

Continue reading...

‘It has the feel of a little local pub!’: Guardian readers on their extraordinary DIY sheds

Posted on by

From an allotment shelter built out of old doors to a storage shack turned into a chapel, here are some of the best of our readers’ creations

This is my pandemic project: a garden pub shed, called the Doghouse. It is custom-built from timber with a Firestone rubber roof. Lockdown finally gave me the time to build it and I tried to reuse or recycle materials where I could. The doors and windows were from a friend’s old conservatory. The timber herringbone and boards, plus the back bar shelving, are pallet wood, which I burnished with a chainmail pad, and oiled to give it a nice worn look. I built the bar and canopy from scratch using leftover framing timber. The bench was built from a recycled bed headboard and I used a mattress for the seat. The table and chairs were a local Gumtree find, and the bar memorabilia and pumps were from eBay. I’m probably proudest of the bar. It has the feel and character of a little local pub – we often eat dinner there for a change of scenery. Our two children love it. But we will, of course, still support our local pub whenever we can. Gavin Thomasson, 42, design manager, Ipswich

Continue reading...

How did a £120 painting become a £320m Leonardo … then vanish?

Posted on by

A film about the disputed Salvator Mundi blames the National Gallery for its role in giving credibility to the claim that it was the artist’s lost work

The National Gallery is facing controversy over its role in the tangled story of how the world’s most expensive painting emerged from obscurity before being sold for a staggering £320m, only to vanish again from the public eye.

The gallery exhibited the Salvator Mundi in its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition a decade ago when it was an unknown work with doubts about its attribution, restoration and ownership.

Continue reading...

‘Father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène at work – in pictures

Posted on by

A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

Continue reading...