Photographer Fred Sigman’s latest book, Motel Vegas, documents the vernacular roadside architecture that at once dominated the Nevada city’s skyline
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
Now kids, help us to kill Bin Laden! The dark side of Washington’s spy museum
The bugged shoes and poison brollies are fun and fascinating. But why are the sections about state-sponsored torture and assassination so uncritical?
Sitting in a glass case, standing out against a backdrop of deep red, there’s an ice axe that still bears a rust mark, the consequence of a bloody fingerprint left on it decades ago. One day in 1940, this axe was hidden inside Ramón Mercader’s suit jacket, suspended by a string, as he walked into the office of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary living in exile in Mexico, having been sentenced to death as an “enemy of the people” in his home country.
Mercader slipped behind Trotsky’s desk and brought the axe down with tremendous force, penetrating two-and-three-quarter inches into his skull. Trotsky died 26 hours later. Mercader served 20 years in prison then returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow. On his deathbed in 1978, his last words were: “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”
Continue reading...Headless self-portraits from a face everyone knew – Luchita Hurtado review
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
Marcel Duchamp massaged her feet and Leonora Carrington built her kids a house. But the work of the 98-year-old Venezuela-born painter is every bit as extraordinary as her life
For a period while living in Chile with her artist-husband Lee Mullican in the late 1960s, Luchita Hurtado painted inside a walk-in closet, standing there and looking down over her breasts and belly to her feet and the floor below. Sometimes a bar of light came in through the slats of the door. She included this in her painting, too. She looks down at the rug, or into a woven basket, that streak of light picking out the weave of the basket, momentarily brightening the pattern on the Navajo rug.
In one painting she drops a strawberry into a bowl on the floor. It hangs in mid-air in the half-lit gloom. Sometimes there seem to be two, three or even four people in there: eight feet on a gorgeous rug, green apples big as bowling balls, inexplicably huge and vivid against the dyed lozenges of the rug, every nub in the rug’s structure picked-out in paint. The painting evokes the feel of the rough texture against naked feet. In another it is all flat zigzags and pattern, interrupted by naked mellow skin.
Continue reading...The 20 photographs of the week
Conflict in Syria, shocking pink fashion at Cannes, and a seal pup making a splash – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists
Continue reading...In pictures – IM Pei’s finest works
IM Pei, one of the most celebrated and prolific architects of the 20th century, has died aged 102. The son of a prominent Chinese banker, he favoured stone, steel and glass in his creations that bore his hallmark geometry and reverence for light
Continue reading...Titian masterpieces to be displayed together for first time since 1704
The 16th-century paintings will be shown as a series in London, Edinburgh, Madrid and Boston
One of the most important groups of high Renaissance paintings is to be brought together for the first time in more than 300 years.
A partnership between galleries in London, Edinburgh, Boston and Madrid was announced on Thursday which will allow five of Titian’s greatest paintings to be seen as they were intended – together as a series.
Continue reading...Rooftop pool? Notre Dame proposals defy traditionalists
Designs from architects around world also suggest glass, crystal and metal spires
An architecture firm has proposed replacing the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with a swimming pool, as France prepares to launch an international competition to restore the fire-damaged gothic edifice to its former glory.
After the roof and spire of Notre Dame were damaged in a fire watched worldwide in April, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was open to a “contemporary gesture” in rebuilding it “more beautiful than before”, and the prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, called for a new spire “adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era”.
Continue reading...Boards not borders: Gaza youth skate in search of fun – in pictures
Calling themselves the Gaza skate team, a group of young Palestinians get together to skate and rollerblade amid deprivation and high security
Continue reading...‘There is less fear’: restoration of Kabul repairs the ravages of war
Afghanistan rebuilds the old town and creates register of dwellings to promote peace and help residents feel safer
Amir Gol first arrived in Kabul after fleeing his home – a Taliban stronghold – in Nangahar. He had no idea where to settle, so he rented a small mud house and started collecting and selling used plastic to make a living. Almost a decade later, little has changed for the 60-year old father of eleven. He sits cross-legged on a cushion outside the house he rents for 600 Afghani (£5) a month. Occasionally, he says, members of insurgent groups come to his neighbourhood, a settlement specked with poorly constructed mud houses and plastic tents in the city’s outskirts.
Continue reading...I have seen the tragedy of Mediterranean migrants. This ‘art’ makes me feel uneasy
The vessel that became a coffin for hundreds has gone on display at the Venice Biennale. It intends to stir our conscience – but is it a spectacle that exploits disaster?
On the night of 18 April 2015, about 180 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a fishing boat capsized with hundreds of migrants on board. Among the waves and beneath the ship’s 23-metre hull, 700 passengers who had dreamed of a better life drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean.
Last week that giant, rusty vessel arrived in Venice on the occasion of the city’s Biennale art festival, where it went on display on Saturday in an installation designed by the artist Christoph Büchel.
Continue reading...Venezuelan upheaval delays pavilion at Venice Biennale
Political chaos leaves country’s artists playing catch-up just days before art event begins
Switzerland is partying, sequin-clad dancers whirling on a vast screen. Russia is staging an elaborate homage to Rembrandt. But between them – or rather between their national pavilions in the public gardens of Venice – Venezuela is deserted and padlocked shut.
The Venice Biennale, the art world’s most celebrated international event, is due to open to the public on Saturday, and the venues have already thrown open their doors to curators, artists, museum directors, press and collectors. But not Venezuela’s pavilion. Winter leaves are piled up in the courtyard; discarded building materials and rubbish are heaped at the side.
Continue reading...Fuel for thought: black market in petrol in Togo and Benin – in pictures
For thousands of people in Benin and Togo, the illegal trade in fuel looted from oil-rich Nigeria offers a lifeline. The human impact of this lucrative dealing has been documented by Spanish photographer Antonio Aragón Renuncio, whose series on the subject – described by the judges as ‘brilliantly affecting’ – won him the 2019 London Business School photography award
Continue reading...Ghana shakes up art’s ‘sea of whiteness’ with its first Venice pavilion
In curving galleries designed by David Adjaye, artists are putting Africa firmly on the biennale map
The Venice Art Biennale, the world’s most celebrated international art event, has a history that is inextricably bound up with colonialism.
Its first pavilion for the showcasing of a “national” art was established by Belgium in 1907. Britain followed soon after. European countries remain dominant at the event – at least numerically.
Continue reading...Loaded: the moped delivery drivers of Hanoi – in pictures
From footballs to live fish, delivery mopeds piled high with unwieldy, unlikely goods are one of the Vietnamese capital’s most distinctive sights. As the city plans to ban motorbikes altogether, photographer Jon Enoch captured the drivers at work
Continue reading...Dream weavers: the indigenous Ainu people of Japan – in pictures
The Ainu of Hokkaido in Japan were not officially recognised as an indigenous people until 2008. This recognition came after a long history of exclusion and assimilation that almost erased their society, language and culture. Photographer Laura Liverani collaborated with members of the Ainu for this exhibition called Coexistences: Portraits of Today’s Japan, showing at the The Japan Foundation, Sydney until 21 June.
Continue reading...Italians try to crack Leonardo da Vinci DNA code with lock of hair
Hair tagged as polymath’s in US collection to be tested against remains in French grave
Two Italian experts are set to perform a DNA test on a lock of hair that they say might have belonged to Leonardo da Vinci.
The hair strand was found in a private collection in the US and will go on display for the first time at the Ideale Leonardo da Vinci museum in Vinci (the Tuscan town where the artist was born), from 2 May, the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death.
Continue reading...Paolo Di Paolo’s Italy in the 1950s and 60s – in pictures
The Paolo Di Paolo: Lost World exhibition presents more than 250 largely unseen images from the photographer’s archive. Di Paolo chronicled life in his country as an economic boom followed the destruction of the second world war. Although those were the years of la dolce vita he was an anti-paparazzo – he shunned the salacious and respected his subjects. The exhibition is at MAXXI in Rome until 30 June
Continue reading...Why we need to pause before claiming cultural appropriation | Ash Sarkar
The debate, tied up with racial oppression and exploitation, is a difficult one. Yet not every interloper is a colonialist in disguise
Is Gordon Ramsay allowed to cook Chinese food ? Is it OK to dress up as Disney’s Moana? Can Jamie Oliver cook jollof rice despite plainly not knowing what it is? Exactly what is cultural appropriation? To take a glance at Good Morning Britain, the ITV show that never takes its finger off the pulse of Middle England’s clogged arteries, you’d think it’s a question of white people seeking permission to have fun. And in return, new media outlets have guaranteed traffic from anxious millennials by listing things that fall into the category of problematic when white people adopt them (blaccents, bindis and box braids).
Related: Gordon Ramsay defends new restaurant in cultural appropriation row
Continue reading...High-density megacities: the photographs of Michael Wolf
Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf is best known for Architecture of Density, which shows the city’s tower blocks as dramatic geometric abstractions, and Tokyo Compression, which captures rush hour on the Japanese capital’s subway. He died this week aged 64
Continue reading...London Extinction Rebellion mural is a Banksy, says expert
Art dealer who owns a dozen pieces by the street artist is convinced by Marble Arch work
A Banksy collector and expert believes a mural that appeared at Extinction Rebellion’s Marble Arch base overnight is an authentic piece by the Bristolian street artist.
John Brandler, who owns a dozen pieces by Banksy is convinced the artwork – which features the slogan “From this moment despair ends and tactics begin” next to a young girl sitting on the ground holding an Extinction Rebellion logo – is an original because of its execution and theme.
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