The painting depicts the moment after a diver hits the water in a swimming pool
David Hockney’s The Splash has sold for more than £23m at auction.
The 1966 piece by the Bradford-born artist last sold at Sotheby’s in 2006 for £2.9m and returned to the same auction house on Tuesday evening as the star piece in its Contemporary Evening Art Auction.
Continue reading...Architect and PM’s enthusiasm for Celtic crossing tempered by local cynicism of ‘pipe dream’
“The stars are aligning” for a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland, according to the principal advocate for a Celtic crossing, the leading architect Alan Dunlop.
Although engineering experts have dismissed the concept as “bonkers”, Dunlop has been pressing for serious discussion of Boris Johnson’s latest grand infrastructure scheme since he conducted a feasibility study into the proposal in 2018, when he first raised the prospect.
Continue reading...Street art has transformed Quinta do Mocho, an area once plagued by crime and unemployment
Avelina Lésper said it was almost as if Gabriel Rico’s piece knew how much she disliked it
An art critic has destroyed a contemporary piece at Mexico’s premiere art fair, sparking a debate about what constitutes art.
Critic Avelina Lésper said she accidentally shattered the installation on Saturday at the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City when she placed an empty soda can near it to express her disdain for the piece: a sheet of glass with a stone, soccer ball and other random objects suspended inside.
Continue reading...It has inspired TV, stage, film – and now two new art shows. Kathryn Hughes strips back the layers of this classic tale to understand its enduring appeal
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman created feminist fireworks the moment it appeared in the January 1892 edition of the New England Magazine. The short story takes the form of a secret diary written by a young married woman who is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Actually, the diagnosis has been made by her husband, who also happens to be “a physician of high standing”. In line with fashionable medical practice, “John” has prescribed a radical rest cure that involves separating the narrator from her small baby and confining her to the top-floor nursery of a rented country house: “I … am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.”
Gilman was writing out of her own agonising experience: five years earlier, and felled by postnatal depression following the birth of her daughter, she had been sent for treatment to America’s leading expert in women’s mental health, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. His punishing regime for depressed middle-class female patients involved strict bed rest with no reading, writing, painting and, if it could be managed, thinking. His theory was grounded in the pervasive belief that if modern girls stopped wanting things – education, the vote but, above all, “work” – they would become happy, which is to say docile, again. Mitchell instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never to touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman wrote later of her treatment, which felt more like a prison sentence, “I … came perilously close to losing my mind.”
Continue reading...The German Fernweh translates as a longing to be elsewhere. For Teju Cole this means Switzerland – which he visits ever year to write and photograph the country’s desolate beauty
Continue reading...Guardian Australia photographer Mike Bowers and reporter Christopher Knaus joined the Cowie family defending their property about 100km from Canberra
Continue reading...Bjarke Ingels is the go-to golden boy for Big Tech – and now Brazil’s Bolsonaro wants a bit of his magic. But should architects boycott oppressive leaders? Do their buildings glorify their ideology?
Sun-kissed walkways in the sky, platefuls of seafood ceviche, a private helicopter pickup from the beach – the Instagram account of Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has unfolded like an escapist travelogue epic in recent weeks, as his adventures in Latin America have taken their place in his dizzying globetrotting itinerary. But there is one photograph he hasn’t been so keen to share with his 730,000 followers: of him standing next to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, with the uneasy smile of a man who’s just secured his latest big commission from another unsavoury despot, in this case one who has boasted of being “proudly” homophobic.
According to a statement from Brazil’s ministry of tourism, Ingels visited Brazil to tour several states and discuss strategies for developing sustainable tourism on its north-east coast, in partnership with the Nômade Group, which recently built an eco-conscious luxury resort in Tulum, the ruins of a Mayan walled city in Mexico.
Continue reading...First he was a Turner prize-winning artist, then a Oscar-winning film director. Now, with a knighthood and a Tate Modern retrospective, he explains why he’s still angry – and still searching
Back in 2001, seven years before he directed his first feature film, Steve McQueen made 7th Nov, an installation that features in his forthcoming Tate Modern retrospective. Visually, it is his most minimalist work: a projection of a single still photograph of the crown of a reclining man’s head, which is bisected by a long, curving scar. And yet it possesses a visceral charge that unsettles more than any other piece that will be in the exhibition. That power rests in the accompanying monologue in which McQueen’s cousin, Marcus, recounts in brutally graphic detail the terrible events of the day he accidentally shot and killed his own brother.
7th Nov can be seen in retrospect as a signal of what was to come as McQueen made the transition from artist to director, creating acclaimed feature films that merged formal rigour with a narrative style that is often unflinching in its depiction of human endurance.
Continue reading...Painstaking operation to return Adoration of the Lamb to its former glory has left many speechless
A restoration of one of the world’s most famous paintings has been described as “a shock for everybody” after it revealed a depiction of a sheep with extremely human-like eyes.
The Ghent Altarpiece, completed by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432, is a 15th-century masterpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral in Belgium, widely considered to be the first major artwork to use oil paint.
Continue reading...Devastated by his time in Germany, which he regards as still Nazi, the artist has moved. As he unveils a powerful virtual reality artwork, he talks about needing a monster to fight – and why he’d like to be a barber
‘When we filmed this,” says Ai Weiwei, “the elephants didn’t know what to do. Once they were used for labour, and now they have lost their job.” The artist is talking about the groundbreaking documentary he has just made about unemployed logging elephants in Myanmar. You watch the film, shot with 360-degree virtual reality technology, through a special headset. Turn your head slowly and your view gradually changes. Turn your head 180 degrees and the picture changes completely.
“When they lost their job,” he continues, “each elephant had a few people to take care of it, so those people also lost their job.” Ai (Weiwei is his first name and means unknown or future) relates to the elephants as readily as he does to the subject of the second part of his VR project – this one about the lives of Rohingya refugees in a Bangladeshi camp.
Continue reading...Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK talking to young women about the issues important to them in 2020: public safety, body image, social media and feminism. Their research found that girls are fed up and frustrated with the lack of real progress on gender equality.
Continue reading...Gardeners discovered Portrait of a Lady while clearing ivy at gallery in Piacenza
A painting found hidden in an Italian gallery in December is an authentic Gustav Klimt piece stolen almost 23 years ago, experts have confirmed.
The Portrait of a Lady was one of the world’s most sought-after stolen artworks before it was found concealed in a wall of the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery, the same gallery from where it went missing in the northern city of Piacenza.
Continue reading...Rotunda at National Trust property exploits gloom from scaffolding to stage exhibition
A 200-year-old Italianate palace, hidden away in the Suffolk countryside and currently encased in more than 270 miles of scaffolding, is to hold an exhibition that is only taking place because it is undergoing £5m of conservation works.
Ickworth, a Georgian estate and one of the most photographed of all National Trust properties, will on Satuday open its magnificent but leaky Rotunda to show off world class works of art and objects which few people know are even there.
Continue reading...New Orleans and Cuban musicians join in Havana’s annual jazz festival, defying Trump’s efforts to weaken US-Cuba relations
Continue reading...She was ignored for decades, but now Suter has been rediscovered as a pioneering eco-artist. We meet her, and her 97-year-old collagist mum, in the wilds of Guatemala
A large dog romps across a blue and white canvas, leaving a trail of brown paw prints. “Oh well,” shrugs Vivian Suter. “They’re part of the work now. I don’t think anyone will mind.” I realise Bonzo – one of three Alsatian crossbreeds that shadow the artist wherever she goes in her Guatemalan home – has just put the finishing touches to an artwork that will shortly be on public display thousands of miles away.
The painting lies on the floor of her “laager” – a storage barn open to the elements, apart from a metre-high stone wall, which you have to clamber over with the help of a rickety chair. The wall is to guard against mudslides, she explains, gesturing at a ghostly tideline that rings the interior. Most of her works hang from a rack; the piles on the floor are for three upcoming exhibitions in Berlin, London and Madrid. Having just opened a 53-piece installation at Tate Liverpool, Suter is halfway through choosing the 200 works that will feature in her Camden Arts Centre exhibition, which opens next week.
Continue reading...The US president has warned Iran he will obliterate its cultural sites. Here is our guide to the nation’s jewels, from hilltop citadels to a disco-ball mausoleum
If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with.
Does Trump know what would be lost? Probably not – but he’s hardly the only one. The fact that the country is rarely visited by western tourists is not due to a lack of attractions. With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s.
Continue reading...Baldessari saw his work, juxtaposing painting, text, video, sculpture and more, as a counter to the world’s po-facedness
John Baldessari, the Californian conceptual artist known for his witty and provocative image-making, has died aged 88.
Baldessari was known for countering what he saw as a po-faced conceptual art scene with colour and humour. He once videoed himself being forced to write lines in a notebook: “I will not make any more boring art.” Such pieces were devised in the 1970s, after Baldessari had grown so disillusioned with his painted works that he took them to a San Diego funeral home and had them incinerated. He called the work The Cremation Project. Baldessari then baked the ashes into cookies and exhibited them at the seminal 1970 show Information at Moma in New York. After this, he felt free to embrace a wider palette beyond painting, working with text, video, photo collage and sculpture, among other forms. Recently, he had turned his attention to the world of emojis, blowing them up on canvases in a playful exploration of one of his key fascinations – the intersection between images and words. “How can you not be interested in emojis?” he told the LA Times in 2017. “They just look so stupid!”
Continue reading...Raghubir Nagar has been given a colourful makeover by the Delhi Street Art group, drawing art lovers and selfie-snappers to a rundown area that they would never normally visit
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