Category Archives: Art

All fores! Miranda July among artists to create feminist mini-golf course in Melbourne

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Swingers, which aims to celebrate the sport’s feminist history, will take over the Flinders Street station ballroom as part of the 2025 Rising festival

The acclaimed author and film-maker Miranda July is among a group of artists who are building a mini-golf course in Melbourne to celebrate the sport’s little-known feminist history.

Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf will take over the Flinders Street station ballroom, an abandoned space above the busy Melbourne railway station, as part of the city’s annual Rising festival.

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Embrace of Indigenous artists reaches London thanks to influence of Venice Biennale

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Curators and artists say this is a time of overdue recognition but others are cautious about the longevity of the moment

At last year’s Venice Biennale, the pavilions were packed with Indigenous art from around the world.

Artists from the Tupinambá community in Brazil sat alongside work by the late Rosa Elena Curruchich, who made pieces about Indigenous women in Guatemala. The Amazonian artist Aycoobo was celebrated, as were carvings by the Māori artist Fred Graham. The eventual winner of the Golden Lion – the event’s highest accolade – was the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore.

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Long-lost anti-fascist mural from 1930s restored and back on show in Mexico

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Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish’s The Struggle Against Terrorism revealed as some fear resurgence of fascism

A long-neglected 1930s mural in Mexico that warns about the rise of fascism has been revealed and restored – just as some historians say the world faces that threat once more.

The mural, which is titled The Struggle Against Terrorism, covers a 40ft wall in a colonial courtyard in Morelia, Michoacán, and depicts a history of persecution and resistance from biblical times to the modern day.

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Carl Bloch’s lost masterpiece Prometheus Unbound finds fame again in Athens

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Work that made its creator a superstar then mysteriously disappeared is mesmerising art lovers once more

It was commissioned by a Greek king, made its creator a superstar and in his native Denmark attracted crowds like no other painting before. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Now, nearly nine decades after it was last seen gracing the stairwell of the royal palace that would become the Athens parliament, Carl Bloch’s masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound, has found fame again in Greece.

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LA fires could test Getty Center’s claim of being safest place to store artwork

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Getty team says no current plans to move prominent pieces from center deemed ‘marvel of anti-fire engineering’

It houses some of the richest treasures of the art world, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, a popular Rembrandt and a priceless collection of paintings, portraits and other works spanning more than seven centuries.

To protect them, the Getty Center in Los Angeles was built in 1997 as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering”, complete with fire-resistant stone and concrete, protected steel, and set in well-irrigated landscaping.

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Still life quartet by Dutch golden age master to be shown together in Cambridge

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Jan Davidsz de Heem’s four paintings of sumptuous food and luxury objects were produced as series

A quartet of influential still lifes from the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem will go on display together for the first time since the 17th century at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The four paintings were produced as part of a series by De Heem, who is considered to be a master of pronkstilleven – a style of ornate still life painting – during the Dutch golden age, depicting displays of sumptuous food and luxurious objects.

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Crypto entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2m

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Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week

The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.

At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.

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Palestinian artists plan Gaza Biennale as ‘act of resistance and survival’

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Project involves showing work in Gaza but also sending works across Israeli siege lines for exhibiting worldwide

Palestinian artists in Gaza plan to stage a “biennale” exhibition as an act of defiance against Israel’s military onslaught and to focus attention on the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people under more than 13 months of bombardment.

About 50 artists from Gaza will exhibit their work within the besieged coastal strip, and are looking for art galleries to host exhibitions overseas. But in order to hold their work to the eyes of the rest of the world, the artists are facing a unique challenge: how to get their art across Israeli siege lines.

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Prado show aims to highlight true colours of polychrome sculpture

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Madrid Exhibition intends to rescue the technique – coloured paint applied to statues – from centuries of indifference

In a darkened corner of the Prado, not far from an outsized crucifixion and a sculpture of a dead, recumbent Christ with eyes of glass, teeth of ivory and fingernails of horn, is another depiction of Jesus that is remarkable in its poignancy, its humanity and its history.

The tiny, painted terracotta scene, titled Los primeros pasos de Jesús (Jesus’s First Steps), is domestic rather than divine and shows a chubby, beaming infant ambling towards his equally beaming father. Its creator was the Spanish baroque artist Luisa Roldán who, despite becoming the first female sculptor to the royal court in 1692, is only now making her debut in the hallowed Madrid museum.

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British Museum receives record £1bn donation of Chinese ceramics

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Collection of 1,700 pieces dating from third to 20th century is highest-value gift of objects in UK museum history

The British Museum has been given a private collection of Chinese ceramics worth about £1bn, the highest-value object donation in UK museum history.

The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan to the London museum since 2009.

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Steph Wilson wins Taylor Wessing photography prize with striking portrait

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National Portrait Gallery announces £15,000-winning portrait that conveys atypical image of motherhood

A portrait documenting an unconventional and “imperfect” example of motherhood has won one of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes.

The National Portrait Gallery has named the British photographer Steph Wilson as winner of the 2024 Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize for her portrait Sonam. The photographer, who works between London and Paris, wins £15,000.

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Huge crime network forging Banksy, Warhol and Picasso uncovered in Italy

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Art police and Pisa prosecutor say 38 people being investigated, with about 2,100 fake artworks seized

Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.

Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.

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Belgian comic book withdrawn amid outrage over racist depictions

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Publisher ‘profoundly sorry’ for hurt caused by Spirou and the Blue Gorgon as it recalls 30,000 copies from shops

A comic book has been withdrawn from sale by its Belgian publisher after an outcry over racist depictions of black people and “hyper-sexualised” images of women.

The publisher Dupuis announced that its graphic novel, Spirou and the Blue Gorgon, would be removed from shops after the book caused a storm on social media.

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Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum

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A mechanic working at the LAM museum in Lisse assumed the artwork, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together, was rubbish

A Dutch museum has recovered an artwork that looks like two empty beer cans after a staff member accidentally threw it in the rubbish bin thinking it was trash.

The work, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist Alexandre Lavet, appears on first glance to be two discarded and dented beer tins.

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Show shines light on overlooked artist who made UK’s first Holocaust memorial

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Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London

The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.

Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.

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‘Absolutely hideous’: new London sculpture of Oscar Wilde condemned by his grandson

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Gloomy segmented head of famed playwright fails to convey his wit and brilliance, says Merlin Holland

A huge sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head lying on its side, his face sliced into segments, has been condemned as “absolutely hideous” by the playwright’s grandson.

Merlin Holland, an expert on Wilde’s life and works, has ­criticised a 2ft-high black bronze sculpture by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi that is to be unveiled in a public garden in Chelsea, south-west London, near Wilde’s former home.

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‘Impossible task’: NGV to take largest international exhibition of Indigenous art to US

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The show, which will tour for three years across North America beginning in 2025, will feature the gallery’s ‘absolute masterpieces’ – including works by Emily Kam Kngwarray and Albert Namatjira

The largest international exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art will open in 2025 at Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art and tour for three years across North America.

Titled The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, the show will feature more than 200 works from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) collection from the 19th century to the present day – including masterpieces by the late Emily Kam Kngwarray, Rover Thomas, Sally Gabori and Albert Namatjira.

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London’s fourth plinth artwork aims to ‘unite trans community around the world’

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Trafalgar Square piece by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles is made of masks depicting faces of transgender and non-binary people

A towering cuboid made of more than 300 masks depicting the faces of transgender and non-binary people, this year’s fourth plinth artwork, has been described as a piece designed to “unite the trans community around the world”.

The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles was flanked by members of her country’s trans community as Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant) was unwrapped in Trafalgar Square on Wednesday.

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River Stour sculpture commemorates 16th century drowning that inspired Shakespeare

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Figure of woman on her back underwater draws inspiration from Hamlet’s Ophelia and death of senior Tudor judge

Almost 500 years ago, a wealthy and well-connected judge named Sir James Hales walked into the River Stour near Canterbury in order to take his own life. Hales had risen to favour under King Henry VIII but had refused to convert to Catholicism under the repressive regime of his daughter Mary, and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Struggling with his mental health after his release in 1554, he drowned himself. But as suicide was a crime at the time, his widow was denied the right to inherit his property and so took the matter to law, in a case that became so famous in the 16th century that it inspired Shakespeare’s portrayal of the suicide by drowning of Hamlet’s Ophelia.

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Icelandic fishing giant Samherji sues art student for spoofing corporate website

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High court told ‘culture-jammed’ apology for high-profile corruption scandal ‘did not qualify as parody’

Iceland’s biggest fishing company is suing an art student at London’s high court for spoofing its website and issuing a fake public apology over a high profile corruption scandal.

The costly lawsuit, which will be heard this month, is feared by the student’s supporters to have a potentially chilling effect on artists engaging critically with large corporations, while also raising questions about the UK’s status as the go-to litigation jurisdiction for powerful businesses.

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