Maud Lewis sold her paintings on Nova Scotia roadsides but found a larger audience after a documentary chronicled her life and work
A Canadian painting that was swapped 50 years ago for a grilled cheese sandwich has sold at auction for an “astounding” C$350,000 (US$272,000).
Black Truck by the folk artist Maud Lewis sold for 10 times its assessed value, setting a new high mark for a painter whose popularity has surged in recent years.
Continue reading...Paintings produced in collaboration with Ed Godrich are titled with ‘names that define the 1980s’
Trish has never been seen in public before. Nor have Sharon, Janet, Debbie, Denise, Donna, Jacqui, Joanne, Kim, Lorraine, Mandy, Paula, Sandra or Tina.
But for the next two weeks, these 14 artworks by the pop star Robbie Williams and his creative partner Ed Godrich will be on display at Sotheby’s in central London.
Continue reading...Pieter De Poortere is putting his best-known character, Dickie, to work to help galvanise opposition to a giant plastics plant in Antwerp
Belgian cartoonist Pieter De Poortere was trying to do his bit for the environment: eating less meat and diligently sorting his rubbish – glass, paper, plastics. He realised it wasn’t enough. “I thought if we all sort out our trash, then everything will be recycled, everything will be OK, then we are doing great. But actually that is not true,” he said pointing to the problems of the global waste industry, where wealthy countries’ plastic may be dumped, or burned on open fires in poorer countries.
So he put his best-known character to work, as part of an international art project that launched in April, aiming to draw attention to the problem of plastic production.
Continue reading...The Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is one of a series made after the actor’s death in 1962 and has become the ‘pinnacle of American pop’
Andy Warhol’s famed 1964 silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe has sold for $195m at auction, setting a new a record for a work by an American artist.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is one in a series of portraits Warhol made of the actress following her death in 1962 and has since become one of pop art’s best-known pieces.
Continue reading...Painting by Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis traded for a meal at Irene and Tony Demas’s restaurant could fetch C$35,000
Working out of the kitchen of their small restaurant in Ontario in the 1970s, Irene Demas and her husband Tony soon learned the value of trading their dishes for the talents of local bakers, craftspeople and artisans.
“Everyone supported everyone back then,” said Irene, at the time a bright-eyed chef in her 20s. In exchange for daily fresh flowers, for example, the couple would take soup and a sandwich to the florist next door.
Continue reading...New Zealand-born artist Claus Stangl wins prize decided by gallery staff with painting of Academy Award-winning director
New Zealand-born Sydney-based artist Claus Stangl has taken out one of Australia’s top art honours with his portrait of Academy Award-winning director Taika Waititi.
On Thursday, Stangl was announced as the winner of the packing room prize, a sub-category of the Archibald prize, Australia’s leading prize for portraiture.
Continue reading...The painter, film-maker and Mulka Project founder died on Sunday, leaving behind a legacy of boundary-pushing art and an archive of cultural knowledge
The art world is mourning the loss of one of Australia’s most respected First Nations artists, Mr Wanambi, with one of his mentees saying “his passing has changed our entire landscape”.
The Yolngu painter, film-maker and curator died in Darwin on Sunday, more than 1,000km from his home in north-eastern Arnhem Land. He was just 59 years old. His family have requested his first name and image not be published.
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Continue reading...University will host major survey of Robert Blomfield’s shots of student life in 1950s and 60s
Previously unseen work by a photographer who captured life in Edinburgh and has been compared to the great Henri Cartier-Bresson is to go on display at an exhibition in the city where he lived and worked.
Robert Blomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between shooting university students, locals and the landscape of the Scottish capital.
Continue reading...City council is reportedly preparing materials to initiate criminal proceedings over mass cultural looting
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of seizing “over 2,000 artworks” from museums in the occupied city of Mariupol and moving the pieces to areas of the Russian-controlled Donbas region.
“The occupiers ‘liberated’ Mariupol from its historical and cultural heritage. They stole and moved more than 2,000 unique exhibits from museums in Mariupol to Donetsk,” the Mariupol city council said in a statement posted on its Telegram channel on Thursday.
Continue reading...Our Place in Space is part of £120m government-backed Unboxed festival spanning UK over coming months
A glowing silicone sun measuring 2.3 metres in diameter and a pinhead-size Pluto have been brought down to earth in an extraordinary scale model of the solar system aimed at giving the public a true sense of the huge size of space.
The six-mile (10km) riverside sculpture trail opens in Derry on Friday as part of Unboxed, the £120m government-backed celebration of creativity that spans the UK over the coming months.
Continue reading...Yarra city council says ‘no decisions’ made about whether Fallen Fruit statue will return
A 1.8-metre public sculpture of an anthropomorphic banana in Melbourne that was removed for repairs may never be reinstated, with the council unable to commit to its return.
The artwork, which features a menacing skull facing Rose Street in Fitzroy, was created by artist Adam Stone and titled Fallen Fruit.
Continue reading...Work by Francis Hines, who wrapped buildings and paintings and died at 96 in 2016, found in dumpster and now destined for sale
Paintings and other artwork found in an abandoned barn in Connecticut turned out to be worth millions of dollars.
Notified by a contractor, Jared Whipple, a mechanic from Waterbury, retrieved the dirt-covered pieces from a dumpster which contained materials from a barn in Watertown.
Continue reading...Wiradjuri artist SJ Norman has won $35,000 prize for Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains), which saw him receive 147 wounds in 147 minutes
Wiradjuri artist SJ Norman has won the 2022 Blake prize for an artwork that saw him receive 147 wounds to his back, representing the number of Aboriginal deaths in police custody over the last decade in Australia.
Norman was announced the winner of the $35,000 prize at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on Saturday, for his performance piece and photographic diptych titled Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains).
Continue reading...Posters of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can span movement’s roots in the counterculture scene of 1968
A motley train of shaggy-haired musicians is gliding into the future on a hastily sketched highway, brandishing bongos, vegetables and flaming guitars.
The poster for a 1971 gig by German-English-Swiss trio Brainticket, on display at Berlin’s small Bröhan Museum until 24 April, visually sums up the essence of a German musical movement so forward-looking at its height, its country of origin is only now starting to recognise its legacy.
Continue reading...Basil Matsika hopes his joyful murals of Mbare’s music and sports stars will inspire others to look beyond the area’s poverty and crime
Street artist Basil Matsika paints murals of local musicians and daily life in the streets of Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest townships, in the capital Harare. With his brush and paint jar, he says he communicates deep sentiments of hope amid the overwhelming landscape of poverty.
While many see Mbare as a crime-ridden neighbourhood, Matsika, 40, chooses to see beauty in the grimy, patched walls of the Matapi flats, which have become his canvas for his giant murals.
Continue reading...Literary and artistic movement enjoying another golden age, with international events and exhibitions
A century ago in the ateliers of Montparnasse in Paris, surrealism was born from the gloom of the first world war that had engulfed and devastated Europe.
The cultural movement led by the French writer and poet André Breton would give rise to artists of international renown including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí.
Continue reading...A devastating fire in my studio forced me to approach painting and life in a new way
Two weeks before the first lockdown I was in my studio putting the finishing touches to my most ambitious body of paintings to date. The studio was packed with hundreds of works of art. For the past four years I had been working with the Syrian writer Professor Ali Souleman and the documentary filmmaker Mark Jones. Ali lost his sight in a bomb blast in Syria in 1997 and we had been attempting to translate his experiences of war and displacement into a collection of paintings – to make the unseen seen. Ali and Mark were coming the very next day for an unveiling. The studio was overstuffed, no pause or resting place for the eye anywhere. It was, in hindsight, a self-portrait of a restless mind.
I’ve always been driven by obsessive-compulsive tendencies: counting and control, endless tinkering, seeking a never-coming calm. A patch of work caught my eye. Could it be a bit more darkened and burnt? I felt an itch behind my eyelid, a twitching fidget. I should have waited until I could move the boxes. I couldn’t wait. I switched on the blowtorch and passed it over the surface. It would only take a moment. A moment was all it took.
Continue reading...Exhibited artists cover up their work in protest after piece portraying ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is removed
Four overlapping black and white rectangles make up Israeli artist David Reeb’s painting Jerusalem. On two, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is portrayed praying at the Western Wall – known also as the Wailing Wall – from two different angles, his hands pressed against the stone. Opposite the images, thick brushstrokes spell out phrases in Hebrew: “Jerusalem of gold”, the title of a nationalistic song – and “Jerusalem of shit”.
The work was among several explicitly political, daring pieces featured in an exhibition that opened in December at the newly renovated Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art near Tel Aviv.
Continue reading...Renaissance works transported for first time since the artist installed them in churches 600 years ago
A collection of bronzes sculpted by Renaissance master Donatello have been moved for the first time from the Italian churches where he installed them 600 years ago so that they can be displayed at a ground-breaking exhibition in Florence
Three of the four pieces, a relief, a statue and two bronze doors, from Siena Cathedral and San Lorenzo baptistery in Florence, are also being restored to their former glory using techniques ranging from chiselling with porcupine needles to thermographing to discover structural weaknesses.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Petr Aven’s donation returned after he was called one of Putin’s closest oligarchs in the list
A Russian billionaire named in EU sanctions “as one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarchs” stepped down on Tuesday as a trustee of the Royal Academy, which has also returned a donation he made towards a Francis Bacon exhibition.
The RA – which had had been among UK cultural institutions and bodies facing calls to sever ties with Russian oligarchs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – said that the billionaire banker Petr Aven would be stepping down with immediate effect.
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