Category Archives: Art and design

Venezuela’s revolution of hunger: a photo essay

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Economically destroyed, socially unstable and now hungry, Venezuela is undergoing turbulent times. Photographer Ignacio Marín has been covering the crisis since May 2018. He talks about his images and his experience

For a time the “Saudi Arabia” of South America, today Venezuela more closely resembles Syria. Economically destroyed and socially unstable, the country is now fighting an ever more alarming spectre: hunger. In the slum of Petare in the metropolitan area of the capital, Caracas, refrigerators remain empty, supermarket queues grow longer and the necessity of procuring something to eat drives young people to violence.

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David Bailey: ‘Deneuve said it’s great we’re divorced – now we can be lovers!’

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As he powers into his 80s, the photographer recalls shooting everyone from Kate Moss to Andy Warhol, shares his regrets over voting leave – and reveals how Gordon Brown pulled a fast one on him

‘You look knackered,” says David Bailey, greeting me at his studio. It’s up a small mews and sprawls so casually across two floors that it still feels like the 60s inside. “Look at you,” he says. “Your buttons aren’t even done up right.” I look down at my jacket: that bit is true. But I tell him: “I’m not tired!”

“I was watching you walking along the street,” he says. “I thought, ‘That must be the journalist, she looks knackered.’” The combination of acuity (he must be right: he is, after all, the one who makes a living with his eyes) and demonic overfamiliarity (by this point, we are holding hands; I have no idea who started it) is disarming. If this is his shtick, it’s working on me, totally and overwhelmingly. Or maybe he has a tailored shtick for everyone he meets.

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‘Flintstone’ house sparks lawsuit from California town: ‘It’s an eyesore’

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The quirky home features dinosaurs and a sign proclaiming ‘Yabba-dabba-doo’, but neighbors aren’t amused

California architecture has captured the world’s imagination with its classic midcentury bungalows and beach houses. But one architectural landmark in the state has gone a distinctively different route, and it’s not to the town’s liking.

The “Flintstones” home in northern California appears to take its architectural cues from the town of Bedrock. The experimental house was built in the 1970s using a technique that involved spraying concrete to create curved walls. The result is a building where Fred and Wilma would feel at home, and it has become a landmark for drivers passing on I-280.

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‘Thai Banksy’ tests boundaries with gallery show before election

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Headache Stencil’s work portrays Thai democracy as a game for the ruling elite

His works began appearing overnight on the streets of Bangkok and Chiang Mai five years ago, incendiary satirical depictions of the military officials who took power in Thailand in the 2014 coup.

The authorities worked quickly to erase all trace of the graffiti, but there was no stopping the artist, who calls himself Headache Stencil and is often referred to as the Banksy of Thailand. Pictures of his works portraying the Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, as Dr Evil from Austin Powers or the deputy prime minister on the face of a Rolex have been shared millions of times on social media.

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Italian police reveal ‘€3m painting’ stolen from church was a copy

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Masterpiece by 17th-century artist Brueghel the Younger was swapped to foil heist

The heist appeared to have gone entirely according to plan. The thieves broke into the display case in an Italian church on Wednesday morning and made off with a €3m painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

But police revealed that night there had been one hitch – the snatched artwork was a copy.

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Anish Kapoor: ‘If I was a young Muslim, would I feel angry enough to join Isis? I would at least think about it’

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Britain has gone through the looking glass and the artist’s new show follows it into the abyss. He talks about the upsurge in racism, fighting for Shamima Begum – and his clash with France’s president

At 7.30 on the morning after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Anish Kapoor left his London flat for an appointment with his analyst. On the street, he heard two men talking. “Bet he doesn’t even speak English,” said one. “I turned around and they were talking about me. I was so furious.”

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, CBE, RA, the 65-year-old, Turner prize-winning, Mumbai-born British-Indian artist, who has lived in London since the early 1970s and (though this is hardly the point) speaks better English than most of his countrymen, had woken up in a new land. “Since then permission has been given for difference, rather than being celebrated, to be undermined.”

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Emmanuel Macron plays down diplomatic spat with Italy

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French president seeks to overcome ‘misunderstanding’ during appearance on Italian TV

Emmanuel Macron has said that the recent diplomatic clashes between Italy and France were “not serious” and needed to be surmounted for the greater good of Europe.

In an interview on Fabio Fazio’s talkshow on the Italian television channel Rai 1, the French president also warned against nationalism, arguing that “we need a strong Europe”.

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Forget tango: the murga of Buenos Aires is a riot of sequins and salvation

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Freelance photographer Kate Stanworth has been following a Buenos Aires murga group for 10 years, as they perform in an energetic street carnival that is little known beyond Argentina

Argentina’s charismatic capital, Buenos Aires, might be more famous for tango, steak and football than colourful carnival parades. However, murga – a feisty, home-grown form of street dance and percussion performed during carnival season, once unfairly thought of as only performed by drop-outs and drunks – has flourished in recent years, providing a source of pride, happiness and salvation for the predominantly working class families that dedicate their lives to it.

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A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses

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The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long

“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”

While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.

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Frank Gehry at 90: ‘I love working. I love working things out’

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He didn’t hit his stride till he was 50, and now the architect, as inventive and bold as ever, hangs out with everyone from Harrison Ford to Jay-Z

I’ve taken up flying,” says Frank Gehry, aged 89 years and 11 months, as he sits opposite me in his Los Angeles office, “a little bit.” Then he tells a story. How in his youth he had a job washing aeroplanes, and how his cousin had a Waco biplane and would take him up in it. How he wanted to do this again. How the subject came up when Sydney Pollack was making the 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry. How the architect asked the film director, did he know someone who had a Waco?

“Yes, he did – Harrison Ford. And I knew Harrison way, way back, when he was a cabinet maker. He bid for some of our projects.” But Gehry never got to fly with the man who played Han Solo. Then, one evening, he was at a dinner party complaining to Ford on the subject when the host chipped in. He had another make of biplane, a Stearman, and was happy to take Gehry into the sky. He shows a photo as proof. “I can’t land it or anything, but he lets me steer it.”

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George Mendonsa, The Kissing Sailor in famous photograph, dies at 95

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Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed sailor kissing Greta Friedman in Times Square at the end of the second world war

George Mendonsa, the sailor who was captured in a famous photograph kissing a woman in Times Square amidst celebrations of the end of the second world war, has died. He was 95.

His daughter, Sharon Molleur, told the Providence Journal her father fell and had a seizure early on Sunday at the assisted living facility in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he lived with his wife of 70 years. He died two days before his 96th birthday.

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Final days of the ‘Isis caliphate’ – photo essay

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Photojournalist Achilleas Zavallis has been in Syria covering the collapse of Islamic State across the region and the resultant displacement of families

For the past week the Syrian Democratic Forces have been trying to defeat the last remnants of Islamic State that fortified themselves in the small town located on the banks of the Euphrates River, near the Iraqi border.

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City of stairs: the interconnecting walkways of Hong Kong

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Hans Leo Maes captures the bridges and stairways that link up the hilly, population-dense city

Hong Kong is known for its flashing lights, neon signs and high-rise skylines. But the architect and photographer Hans Leo Maes documents an alternative side – the city’s interconnecting staircases and bridges.

“The extreme population density in Hong Kong means [structures] are stacked and linked by stairs, often external and very visible,” Maes says.

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Nan Goldin threatens London gallery boycott over £1m gift from Sackler fund

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Artist brands planned donation from pharmaceutical family to National Portrait Gallery unethical over OxyContin link

The National Portrait Gallery will be forced to turn down a gift of £1m from members of the multibillionaire Sackler family if it goes ahead with a prestigious new exhibition of the work of US artist Nan Goldin.

The photographer and activist is threatening to boycott the gallery if it accepts the donation from the owners of the American pharmaceutical company that makes the addictive painkiller OxyContin, the Observer has learned.

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