Category Archives: Art

‘We have lost a limb’: Azu Nwagbogu, the visionary curator bringing African art home

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From helping photographers capture the Nigerian protests to exhibiting during a pandemic, the director of LagosPhoto festival has had his work cut out. Now he wants to fight ‘afro-pessimism’ and the posturing around Black Lives Matter

When I first spoke to Azu Nwagbogu, the recent protests against police brutality in his native Nigeria had just entered their second week. The curator was upbeat, describing them as “an incredible awakening”. A week later, when we made contact again, he sounded more sombre, but no less defiant, following the fatal police shootings of at least 12 protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, the main gathering point for the daily demonstrations.

“This protest is not about ‘the poor masses’,” he tells me. “My sister, who is a medical doctor and a consultant anaesthetist, was active in the protests. Everyone who isn’t in government has had enough. The genie has been let out of the bottle and it won’t go back in without the wishes of the people being fulfilled.”

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Tracey Emin on her cancer: ‘I will find love. I will have exhibitions. I will enjoy life’

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As she recovers from a brutal summer of cancer treatment, Tracey Emin takes us round her new show – and imagines spending the next 30 years painting in her pyjamas to the sound of birdsong

‘I am so lucky,” says Tracey Emin as we stand in the grand galleries of the Royal Academy. I can tell, from her brown eyes, that she’s smiling beneath her face mask. As we roam rooms painted moody blue for her new exhibition, in which her paintings, bronzes and neons are juxtaposed with the oils and watercolours of Edvard Munch, Emin adjusts her stoma bag occasionally and laughs a lot. “I’m in love with Munch,” she says. “Not with the art, but with the man. I have been since I was 18.”

This is not what I expected. Minutes earlier, walking through this London gallery’s courtyard, I felt darkness descending everywhere. England was re-entering lockdown, Biden hadn’t yet won Michigan and the last visitors to the Royal Academy for a month were heading out into the night. I expected the 57-year-old artist to be at death’s door, defeated by disease and circumstance. She is, after all, putting on an exhibition hardly anyone will see: “They sold 16,000 advance tickets but when Boris announced the second lockdown, we knew we couldn’t open.” All she can hope is that the gallery will open in December, but that is uncertain.

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George Condo: ‘Change can’t just be an idea or a slogan – it has to get real’

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The artist, who worked with Warhol, befriended Basquiat and painted for Kanye, talks about making art during a tumultuous year and why he left New York City

The New York City artist George Condo has become New York state artist George Condo, a surprising move for someone so intensely intertwined with the city’s culture. The Hamptons is his new normal, after he ditched Manhattan in March.

Not that he is keeping track of time. “The month of May soon turned into August, which then turned into November,” Condo says to the Guardian from his studio later that day. “2020 is just the framing of the time lapse.”

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A selfie set in stone: hidden portrait by cheeky mason found in Spain 900 years on

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A British art historian’s painstaking study of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela uncovered a medieval prank

He is a medieval in-joke, a male figure carved in the early 12th century for one of the world’s greatest cathedrals, but no one has known of his existence until now. The figure has gone unnoticed by millions of worshippers who have made the long pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north-western Spain over the centuries. He has looked down on them from the top of one of the many pillars that soar upwards, each decorated with carved foliage, among which he is concealed.

Now he has been discovered by a British art scholar who believes that he was actually never meant to be seen because he is a self-portrait of a stonemason who worked on the cathedral in the 12th century.

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Berlin: vandalism of museum artefacts ‘linked to conspiracy theorists’

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Use of oily substance across three galleries reportedly related to claims they are centre of ‘global satanism’

At least 70 artworks and ancient artefacts across three galleries on Berlin’s museum island were vandalised with an oily substance earlier this month, German media has reported.

Objects including Egyptian sarcophagi, stone sculptures and 19th-century paintings held at the Pergamon Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum sustained visible damage during the attack on 3 October, according to reports in the weekly Die Zeit and broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Tuesday.

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Prado’s first post-lockdown show reignites debate over misogyny

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Exhibition exploring how women have been treated in art world runs into criticism

The last face that meets visitors to the Prado’s first post-lockdown exhibition is one of the very few that appears to look the spectator squarely in the eye.

The cool gaze of the Portuguese-Spanish artist María Roësset – free of guilt, shame, saccharine virtue or predatory intent – comes as something of a relief after the sanctimonious, salacious and often sad series of pictures that precede it.

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Purrfect match: cats and their human doubles

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We all know someone who looks like their dog, but what about our feline friends? Photographer Gerrard Gethings set out to match moggies with their lookalikes – with uncanny results. By Kathryn Bromwich

If you’ve spent much time on the internet over the past decade, chances are you’ve seen some cats on there. Cats chasing their own tails. Cats attempting ill-judged jumps from one piece of furniture to another. Or, in the case of Gerrard Gethings, a cat who looked exactly like the actor David Schwimmer. “There’s something about the shape of Schwimmer’s face that’s quite interesting,” says the London-based photographer, “and the cat had exactly the same face. That pushed me over the edge, into thinking there was something in it.”

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Ancient sculpture put up for auction in UK to be returned to Iraq

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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.

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Kissing cowboys: the queer rodeo stars bucking a macho American tradition

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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.

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Wild plants of Barbados illustrated on plantation ledgers – in pictures

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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.


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‘Frustrations at US policies’ behind Melania Trump statue, says artist

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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.”

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Banksy’s Monet tribute to go on sale for up to £5m

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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.

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Wooden Melania Trump statue replaced with bronze after arson attack

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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.

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Dazzling makeover of 90-year-old Spanish lighthouse divides opinion

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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.

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Auf wiedersehen, techno: Berlin’s banging Berghain club reborn as a gallery

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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.

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Portrait of a mentor: ‘granddaddy’ of National Art School campus finds himself the subject

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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.

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‘Fake’ Rembrandt came from artist’s workshop and is possibly genuine

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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.

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Treble Dutch: £13m old master painting stolen for a third time

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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.

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Palestinians stage surprise ‘thank you’ event for Banksy in Bethlehem

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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.

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Hunt is on for rightful owner of Nazi-looted French painting

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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.

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