Category Archives: Exhibitions

The show can’t go on: Russian arts cancelled worldwide

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Concerts, dance recitals and exhibitions have been postponed indefinitely after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has prompted responses from the cultural sphere, with Russian artists and companies beginning to feel the repercussions of decisions taken by the Kremlin. Not only has Russia been stripped of two prestigious events – the Champions League men’s final and Formula One’s Russian Grand Prix –but an increasing number of performances by Russians are being cancelled worldwide.

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‘They fill me with emotion’ … Benin celebrates the return of its looted treasure

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Priceless treasures stolen by the French army over a century ago have finally been returned to the African nation. Our writer joins the emotional celebrations

At first glance, it seems to be just another day in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. Motorbike-taxis are everywhere, filling the streets of the country’s economic capital with dust and noise. But inside the swanky presidential palace, something seismic is talking place: over a century after they were looted by the French army, 26 treasures that once belonged to the nation have gone on display to the public.

Art of Benin Yesterday and Today is more than just a stunning show of these ancient works, though. It segues from the looted 19th-century artefacts to work by 34 of the country’s contemporary artists. “This is a form of regained dignity,” says local art historian Didier Houénoudé, “and the culmination of a long fight started by African countries shortly before independence.”

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Global SinoPhoto awards – Chinese culture in pictures

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An image titled The Dancing Dreams of a Mountain Girl, depicting a young mountain girl dancing for her grandmother in a village in China, is the overall winner of an international photo competition celebrating Chinese culture. The Global SinoPhoto awards invited photographers to tell Chinese stories, imagining, interpreting and inspiring connections between Chinese culture and the rest of the world. The awards covered four categories: water (as 2022 is the year of the water tiger), home, work and play, and environment.

The Museum of East Asian Art (MEAA) in Bath is to exhibit the winning entries from 16 February until 14 May 2022

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First, a pickled shark. Next up for Damien Hirst, his ‘white elephant’ manor house

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The artist’s £3m Cotswolds pile, which has remained empty and unrenovated since 2005, has been described as an ‘eyesore’

When Damien Hirst bought a historic manor in the Cotswolds he had grand plans. The crumbling 19th-century Toddington Manor, which the world’s richest artist bought for £3m in 2005, would be restored to its former glory, turned into his family home and be a spectacular gallery for his personal art collection.

But years 17 years after its purchase, the property remains uninhabited and covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Locals have branded it an “eyesore,” a “white blob” and “a blight on the countryside”.

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Broken covers: collector puts world’s worst album art on show

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Steve Goldman’s first rule is ‘it has to make me laugh’, and he is sharing the fun with public in Huddersfield

There’s the album cover with the band as rabbits, or the one with a harmony duo walking out of water dressed only in their underwear and ties, but surely the most baffling is the concert guitarist pictured in dinner jacket and no trousers.

Why? “I’ve no idea, sorry,” says Steve Goldman, who owns about 300 records that can lay claim to having some of the world’s worst cover art.

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From concealed penises to Barbra Streisand: how Frieze got its mojo back – review

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Regent’s Park, London
After decades of fun, noise, fame and money, the London art fair has found its soul. But there’s still plenty of outrage and sleaze at the grown-up Frieze

I was relieved when I finally found the hidden willies. At times, the first post-pandemic Frieze art fair is so relaxing you could fall asleep in one of its classy lounges. So it was good to see Lindsey Mendick flying the flag for subtle outrage. At the Carl Freedman Gallery booth I come across her lustrous, decadent ceramic vases, whose wounded sides spurt octopus arms. Mendick should be on next year’s Turner shortlist if the Tate has any desire to save its dying prize. Then Freedman showed me another detail. From one of the pots protrude penises like shiny wet worms. It turns out there’s sleaze at the new, grownup Frieze after all – you just need a longer attention span to find it.

The art world has looked into itself during the pandemic. And it’s found that art has to be be more than just fun and noise and fame and money … it has to be sustaining. But how does a cultural sphere that has spent decades celebrating shallowness suddenly find its inner light? At first sight, Frieze has simply gone numb with shock.

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K-boom! How the unstoppable stars of K-pop went gunning for the art world

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First came K-cinema, then K-pop and K-TV. Now South Korea’s young stars are conquering the world with K-art. But what do their dark visions say about their nation’s psyche – and ours?

Ohnim is having a blue period, just like Picasso. Over Zoom from a gallery in Seoul, the Korean rapper Song Min-ho, better known as Mino to K-pop fans but Ohnim in the art world, shows me a painting he finished the previous evening in collaboration with artist Choi Na-ri. It depicts a blue crouched figure, like a depressed version of Rodin’s Thinker. It may be still wet but will soon be shipped to London’s Saatchi Gallery for an art fair that showcases work by three of Korea’s biggest K-pop stars.

The meeting of K-pop and K-art is making the art world lick its lips. Businessman David Ciclitira, who set up the StART Art Fair at the Saatchi, says: “K-pop stars have immense reach through their social media. Guys like Mino, Henry Lau and Kang Seung-yoon, whose work will be in the show, have six to seven million followers each on Instagram. In Seoul, fans queue round the block just to see a work of art by any of them. Then they fight each other to buy. I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that at the Saatchi Gallery, but you never know.”

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Capsule of 1765 air reveals ancient histories hidden under Antarctic ice

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Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow features sculpture encasing air extracted from start of Industrial Revolution

An ampoule of Antarctic air from the year 1765 forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition that reveals the hidden histories contained in polar ice to visitors attending the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.

The artist Wayne Binitie has spent the past five years undertaking an extraordinary collaboration with scientists of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who drill, analyse and preserve cylinders of ice from deep in the ice sheet that record past climate change.

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Unseen Van Gogh sketches that rework scorned masterpiece to go on display

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Preparatory work for ‘redoing’ of The Potato Eaters – savaged in his lifetime – to feature in exhibition

A collection of Vincent van Gogh’s preparatory drawings sketched ahead of a planned “redoing” of The Potato Eaters, a masterpiece brutally slated by buyers, friends and family at the time of its painting, are being exhibited for what is believed to be first time.

The Dutch artist considered his depiction of a peasant family from the village of Nuenen in Brabant eating a meal of potatoes as one of only four of his works that could be regarded as important, alongside The Bedroom, Sunflowers and Augustine Roulin (La berceuse).

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Sci-fi script and a cage-shaped mosque: Islamic art gets subversive

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From subtle riffs on traditional script-based decoration to a late father’s letters to his lover, the artists vying for the Jameel prize generate deep emotion from meticulousness

Words have had outsize importance in Muslim culture since the beginning. The Qur’an, which literally means “recitation”, was of course revered as the word of God. But, crucially, images of human beings and animals were disapproved of because they could distract people from prayer; as a result, artists poured all their creativity and imagination into calligraphy. Facing the same restriction, craftsmen and architects created dazzling geometric forms into which words were often incorporated. The discipline imposed by not being able to depict living things gave rise to some of the most beguiling decoration on the planet.

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Sebastião Salgado receives Praemium Imperiale 2021 award – in pictures

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The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has been named as one of four winners of a £400,000 award given by the Japan Art Association. Amazonia, an exhibition by Salgado, opens at the Science Museum in London from 13 October. An exhibition of collectors prints, organised by the Photographers’ Gallery, is on show at Cromwell Place Art Centre from 20 October

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Golden history of Kazakhstan’s Saka warrior people revealed

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Exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to tell story of little known civilization that flourished from eighth to third century BC

Wisdom, as Bob Marley put it, is better than gold. From next month however, the precious metal is central to a major new historical exhibition in Cambridge using loaned artefacts telling the story of an ancient civilization little known beyond Kazakhstan.

Golden objects unearthed from ancient burial mounds built by the Saka warrior people of central Asia – a culture which flourished from around the eighth century BC to the third century BC – will go on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

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Tate donor warns: ‘I’ll take back my £20m Francis Bacon collection’

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Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, says the gallery has not kept to a pledge to stage exhibitions of the works

When more than 1,200 sketches, photographs and documents from the studio of Francis Bacon were donated to the Tate in 2004, it was described as one of the most generous gifts the gallery had ever received, estimated to be worth £20m. Now the donor is threatening to cancel the gift, accusing the gallery of reneging on pledges to stage exhibitions of the material.

Barry Joule, a longstanding friend of Bacon, had wanted the items to go to the Tate, as it had been the artist’s favourite gallery. Over the years, he kept expecting the Tate to do justice to it with an exhibition, as he says they had planned on accepting the gift. He wrote repeatedly to curatorial staff, asking when the show would happen.

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Exhibition to show 50 contemporary portraits of Holocaust survivors

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Imperial War Museum display shows survivors alongside younger generations of their families

When Kitty Hart-Moxon, 97, was recently asked to choose one object that symbolised the horrors she survived at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz, Belsen, and on death marches, she had no doubts.

A glass container encasing the preserved tattooed numbers she had cut out of her own arm and also that of her mother, Rosa Lola, which she keeps in a cupboard at her home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, is a shocking, tangible reminder.

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Doggerland: Lost ‘Atlantis’ of the North Sea gives up its ancient secrets

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The land mass that linked Britain to continental Europe was rich in early human life until it flooded

The idea of a “lost Atlantis” under the North Sea connecting Britain by land to continental Europe had been imagined by HG Wells in the late 19th century, with evidence of human inhabitation of the forgotten world following in 1931 when the trawler Colinda dredged up a lump of peat containing a spear point.

But it is only now, after a decade of pioneering research and the extraordinary finds of an army of amateur archaeologists scouring the Dutch coastline for artefacts and fossils, that a major exhibition is able to offer a window into Doggerland, a vast expanse of territory submerged following a tsunami 8,000 years ago, cutting the British Isles off from modern Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Scandinavia.

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‘Iconic gay image’: history of sailors and sex explored in Barcelona exhibition

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Catalan city is hosting new show looking at relationships between men who spend their lives at sea

A new exhibition at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona seeks to tell the story of the romantic and sexual reality of men who spend their lives at sea.

El desig és tan fluid com la mar (Desire Flows Like the Sea) aims to evoke the lives of men living in isolation but at close quarters and whose intimate lives were once clandestine out of necessity because homosexuality was and, and in many places still is, considered both a sin and a capital offence.

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How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins

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The Finnish artist’s work was hugely influenced by her passion for the great outdoors – in particular the tiny island of Klovharun

In 1964, when she was in her 50s, the Moomin creator Tove Jansson settled on her dream island. Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, “a rock in the middle of nowhere”, according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis. For 18 years she and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent long summers there, heading out from Helsinki as soon as the ice broke in April, leaving only in early October. The island meant “privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences”.

Klovharun encapsulates something of Jansson’s originality as an artist and writer – and her human presence. Her illustrated Moomin books, which began to be published just after the second world war, brought her phenomenal acclaim and devotion. The tales of amiable troll creatures have been taken to generations of hippy hearts; their pear-shaped faces have adorned a million ties. Their marketing triumph – in which Jansson enthusiastically participated – has overshadowed her other achievements as a painter, novelist, short-story writer, anti-Nazi cartoonist, and designer of magazine covers. Success may also have obscured how ambivalent she was, how often on the cusp of identities. She was brought up in Finland speaking Swedish, had male and female lovers, told her stories in pictures and in prose, lived on water as well as land. More and more she appears as a pioneer. Not least in her crystalline descriptions of the natural world.

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Five thousand years of mystical magnificence: Epic Iran at the V&A – review

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V&A, London
Persepolis and Isfahan are dazzlingly brought to life in a blockbuster show that explores five jaw-dropping millennia of cultural history, from soaring domes to charging horses


Typical. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once. That’s what the V&A’s luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.

That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsi’s epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.

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