Archaelogists say Sumerian plaque dating from around 2400BC may have been looted
An ancient sculpture is to be returned to Iraq after it was secretly smuggled out of the country and offered for sale in the UK – only to be seized by the Metropolitan police.
The previously unknown Sumerian temple plaque, dating from about 2400BC, is being repatriated with the help of the British Museum, which first tipped off the police after spotting its planned sale in 2019.
Continue reading...Photographer Luke Gilford couldn’t believe his eyes when he first stumbled across a gay rodeo. He set out to capture the joyous, tender, authentic world he saw there
Luke Gilford was at a Pride event in northern California in 2016 when he was drawn to a stand by the sound of Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5. What he found there would change his life. Members of the local chapter of the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association were promoting what they do, and how they live. Gilford looked on in astonishment. “I grew up around this world,” he says. “I had no idea this existed. I really didn’t think it was real.”
A sought-after film-maker and photographer, to whom Barbara Kruger is a mentor and Pamela Anderson and Jane Fonda muses, Gilford cuts a striking figure. A New York Times profile that same year recounted how you could often catch a glimpse of him downtown, in a hand-me-down cowboy hat, football-style shoulder pads over his bare torso.
Continue reading...Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages. Colonialism wiped out Barbados’s biodiversity in the 17th century by replacing local vegetation with the monoculture of intensively farmed fields of sugarcane, but wild plants are proliferating again. The series is now on show at Haarlem Artspace, Derbyshire, until 11 October as part of re:rural. “I want to use the plants to learn to listen to the land in another way and acknowledge its trauma,” she says.
Brad Downey says first lady shows contradiction between US’s position on race in 2020
The American artist behind a controversial statue of the US First Lady Melania Trump, unveiled this week in bronze in her native Slovenia, has defended the work as a representation of the contradictions of her husband’s presidency.
Brad Downey, a conceptual artist from Kentucky based in Berlin, said the statue that replaced an earlier wooden carving destroyed in an arson attack in July, was motivated by his “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.”
Continue reading...Tribute that adds abandoned shopping trollies to the impressionist image of water lilies to be sold at Sotheby’s auction
Street artist Banksy’s version of Claude Monet’s impressionist masterpiece will go on sale at Sotheby’s London gallery for an estimated £3-5m.
The painting, called Show me the Monet, was created in 2005. It is framed around Monet’s famous water lilies picture but is filled with jarring images of upside-down shopping trolleys and a traffic cone bobbing in the water.
Continue reading...Original carving near US first lady’s hometown in Slovenia was badly damaged in fire
A bronze statue of the US first lady, Melania Trump, has been unveiled near her hometown in Slovenia, to replace a wooden carving of her that was burnt in an arson attack two months ago.
The new work – like the original – is a collaboration between Brad Downey, a Berlin-based artist from Louisville, Kentucky, and a local craftsman, Ales “Maxi” Zupevc, who have invited residents of Melania’s hometown of Sevnica to see the work in nearby Rozno, south-eastern Slovenia.
Continue reading...Infinite Cantabria by Okuda San Miguel is a riot of colours, geometric shapes and animals
A 90-year-old lighthouse perched on a lush cape in northern Spain is at the centre of a cultural row after a dazzling paint job by a local artist left the tower outshining its lamp – and some critics blanching.
For almost a century, the lighthouse, near the Cantabrian town of Ajo, was a mute, monochrome sentry beaming its light out over the Atlantic.
Continue reading...With nightlife in limbo due to Covid-19, the legendary temple of techno has reinvented itself as art gallery – with works by Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans and more
Inside a disused power station in east Berlin, a red-and-white buoy is bobbing mid-air, swooping six metres up and six metres down in rhythm to imaginary waves. The artist who had the idea to hang it there, Julius von Bismarck, has connected an automated pulley system via sensors to a real buoy in the Atlantic Ocean, mirroring its movements.
Usually, the waves crashing over the heads of visitors to these halls are made of sound, pumped out of a custom-built PA that many dance music connoisseurs consider the finest in the world: this is Berghain, Berlin’s mythical temple of bassy industrial techno.
Continue reading...Papua New Guinean student Lesley Wengembo has painted campus assistant Mal Nagobi for Australia’s famous Archibald prize
Alongside Malachi Nagobi, progress across the august grounds of the National Art School in Sydney is constantly – happily – impeded.
“Mal!” comes a voice, “hello Mal,” another. Every handful of steps, another person wants to stop to chat.
Continue reading...Head of a Bearded Man revealed to be from same wood panel used for Rembrandt’s Andromeda
A tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man (c 1630) which was bequeathed to it in 1951 as a Rembrandt panel. In 1981, it was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist that effectively has a final say on attributions.
Continue reading...Two Laughing Boys by Frans Hals seized in overnight raid at museum
It’s nothing to smile about for lovers of Dutch art. Police have reported that Two Laughing Boyswith a Mug of Beer, by the old master Frans Hals, has been stolen for a third time.
The Golden Age work, painted in 1626-7, was snatched from a small museum in the town of Leerdam, near the city of Utrecht, early on Wednesday morning.
Continue reading...Photographs of works go on display in Manger Square to celebrate British street artist’s contribution to diversifying tourism
Photographs of 20 pieces of Banksy’s artwork in Palestine have been displayed in the centre of Bethlehem as a thank you to the anonymous British street artist for helping diversify tourism in the city.
The images were collated by Palestinian photographers for the surprise exhibition in Manger Square.
Continue reading...Sign hangs next to Nicolas Rousseau artwork in Verdun asking public for information
A 19th-century oil painting stolen from Nazi-occupied France during the second world war has gone on display in an attempt to trace its rightful owners, after being returned by the son of the German soldier who was ordered to take it.
After 76 years in Germany, the small untitled artwork by the French painter Nicolas Rousseau is back in France and being exhibited at the World Centre for Peace, Liberty and Human Rights in the north-eastern town of Verdun.
Continue reading...Visitors can view work by likes of Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean and take guided tours of venue
Berlin’s legendary Berghain nightclub will relax its notoriously strict door policy for art lovers from next month as the venue turns into a gallery while the German capital’s nightlife remains on hold because of the pandemic.
Berghain, housed in an old power plant on the border between the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg districts, will from 9 September show works produced during the Covid-19 lockdown by 85 Berlin-based artists, including established figures such as Olafur Eliasson, Tacita Dean and Wolfgang Tillmans and younger names such as Shirin Sabahi, Christine Sun Kim and Sandra Mujinga.
Continue reading...The UK cultural sector, so obsessed with being ‘world leading’, is standing on the brink. It needs to broaden its gaze
It’s a painful time to tell stories about the arts. This week, hundreds of venues across the UK were lit up in red – not in an inspired display of creativity, but as a cry for help as arts venues find themselves on the brink of collapse.
The protest culminated in the iconic chimney at London’s Tate Modern art gallery being made bright red, and illuminated with the words “Throw Us a Line” – a reference to the 1m jobs at risk in the live events sector following the Covid-19 pandemic and shutdown. A report from the digital, culture, media and sport select committee warned last month that the UK now faces the prospect of becoming a “cultural wasteland”.
Continue reading...Video by Es Devlin and Machiko Weston tells story of nuclear bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
A powerful 10-minute video artwork marking the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been released by the Imperial War Museum in London.
The museum commissioned stage designers Es Devlin, who is British, and Machiko Weston, who is Japanese, to make the piece, which tells the stories and explores the impact of the bombings from different perspectives.
Continue reading...Exclusive: gallery removes reference to venue as ‘most amusing room in Europe’ as calls grow for artwork’s removal
Tate Britain has removed a reference to its restaurant as “the most amusing room in Europe” after complaints about racist depictions in a 1920s mural.
The Rex Whistler restaurant is covered floor to ceiling in a specially commissioned mural by the eponymous British artist titled The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, which depicts the enslavement of a black child and the distress of his mother. It also shows the boy running behind a horse and cart which he is attached to by a chain around his neck.
Continue reading...Romantic seascapes – with political message in washed up life jackets – raise funds for Bethlehem hospital
A Banksy triptych, which aims to make a powerful political statement on the global migrant crisis, sold for £2.2m at an auction in London that also featured works by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Bridget Riley.
The three paintings were offered by Banksy to raise money for a hospital in Bethlehem.
Continue reading...Muralists are covering the Afghan capital’s blast walls with agitprop imagery and calling out corruption
From the killing of George Floyd in the US and the drowning of Afghan refugees in Iran, to the signing of the US-Taliban agreement towards peace and brutal murder of a Japanese aid worker, a group of Afghan artists have taken paintbrushes to adorn Kabul’s grey blast walls with vivid imagery.
The barriers have been transformed into politically inspired murals, which the artists hope will create “visual dialogue” and raise awareness of corruption and injustices.
Continue reading...Glaser’s bold logo, created for free in 1977, helped boost New York’s image and he was also part of the team that founded New York magazine
Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up the feelings for his native New York with “I (HEART) NY,” died Friday, on his 91st birthday.
The cause was a stroke and Glaser had also had renal failure, his wife, Shirley Glaser, told The New York Times.
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