- 15 April: ‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde - Exhibitions | The Guardian
He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius
‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”
This week, the picture of a 24-year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag, supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.
Continue reading... - 15 April: Edinburgh gallery invites public to hang their own art on its walls - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Edinburgh Printmakers says anyone can add work or co-curate the exhibition by moving artworks around
A gallery in Edinburgh has invited the public to hang their art on its walls.
Edinburgh Printmakers, based in a former factory in Fountainbridge, was the first open-access print studio in the UK when it first opened 57 years ago.
Continue reading... - 14 April: Now Play This 2024 review – the eccentricity is the point - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Somerset House, London
A world away from Fortnite and Call of Duty, the UK’s biggest festival of experimental games celebrates quirky one-offs and making it up as you go alongVideo game conventions are typically boisterous affairs, as thousands of visitors queue under a constellation of screens for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet unreleased titles on display.
Now in its 10th year, Somerset House’s Now Play This is to mainstream exhibitions what folk festivals are to raves. None of the experimental games presented here are destined to be advertised on the sides of buses, not least because many are one-offs that use bespoke controllers – a hatching of thick ropes and copper bands, or an old suitcase lined with speakers – connected to laptops via an umbilical tangle of wires. Few of these games adhere to the conventional rules or fashions seen in mainstream video game design, either. They might have no “win state”, or provide an “open play” tool set with which visitors can create their own rules. The eccentricity is the point. You’ve played those other games, the programme suggests: now play this.
Continue reading... - 14 April: ‘I spend less time self-sabotaging’: Robbie Williams and Joe Lycett on making art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The pop star and comedian discuss their artwork, social media and how Williams came of age in a classic Birmingham club
Joe Lycett and Robbie Williams were brought together by Instagram. Last August, Williams posted a painting of a small, saintly looking child (not him), and captioned it with an account of how he had once made the mistake of reading the comments below a Mail Online piece. “It was hellish,” he wrote. “The person (me) they were describing was the most horrendous person that ever walked the planet. I was crestfallen.” At this point, Williams thought the best plan would be to read some comments about people who “are good, salt-of-the-earth folk”. So he looked up a piece about Ant and Dec. “Surely to God no one can hate Ant and Dec,” he thought to himself. But no. “The second comment said: ‘I hate these two almost as much as I hate that fat c*** Robbie Williams.’”
Among those who replied to his post were Alan Carr, Piers Morgan, and Lycett, who said it made him laugh out loud – and so began their (possibly somewhat unlikely) friendship. The comedian also paints and makes ceramics (you can see his “after Hockney” portrait of Harry Styles, a rude vase he may – or may not – have designed for H&M, and several other works on his website); in 2018, his sculpture Chris was accepted by the Royal Academy for inclusion in its Summer Exhibition. By September, Lycett had visited Williams at home in west London, at which point they discovered how well they got on, and how similar their art is. Williams’s Inklings illustrations, like Lycett’s huge acrylics, have a pop art sensibility that pokes fun at celebrity culture and the so-called wellness industry.
You started posting art on Instagram last May. Is that right?
Yes. I’ve been doing stuff [making art] since 2006, but I hadn’t put anything out there.
Continue reading... - 12 April: Death-defying darkness, thought-provoking pop art and unrepentant nudes – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Caravaggio proves haunting, Yinka Shonibare brings colonial figures down to size and Monica Sjöö photographs the goddess feminism – all in your weekly dispatch
The Last Caravaggio
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The despair and darkness of Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula will hold you transfixed.
• National Gallery, London, 18 April-21 July - 9 April: ‘Mum fought like a tigress to stop me going into care’: Jason Wilsher-Mills on turning his childhood paralysis into art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
At 11, the artist was struck with a condition that paralysed him from the neck down. His new exhibition recalls years of hospitals, family love, and fighting with cinema managers
In the exhibition Jason and the Adventure of 254, there’s a sculpture of runner Sebastian Coe’s body with a TV for a head. This freezes in time the moment that the artist Jason Wilsher-Mills was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition: at 2:54pm at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, while watching Coe win a gold medal in the 1500m race at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Wilsher-Mills would spend the next five years paralysed from the neck down due to polyneuropathy and chronic fatigue syndrome, diseases that affect mobility and attack the immune system. In the centre of the show at London’s Wellcome Collection is a vast sculpture of the artist as a child in a hospital bed, as toy soldiers move towards his body – a metaphor that doctors used to explain to him that his white blood cells were attacking, rather than defending, his own body.
Jason and the Adventure of 254 is at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 12 January
Continue reading... - 9 April: Domestic bliss: legends in their own living rooms – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Nick Waplington’s Living Room caused a sensation when it was published, with its glimpses of everyday homes in Thatcher’s Britain. As his images go on show, the photographer looks back on a seismic work
Continue reading... - 7 April: ‘The surreal dislocation of the everyday’: how Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura captured the Troubles as never before - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Okamura, who moved to Ireland to explore JFK’s ancestry and stayed for 16 years to document political upheaval, is celebrated in a new exhibition and book
In 2016, the British photographer Martin Parr curated Strange and Familiar, a group show at the Barbican art gallery in London. Subtitled Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, it included work by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank as well as lesser known figures such as Edith Tudor-Hart. For me, though, by far the most strange and familiar images I encountered there were made by a Japanese photographer I had never heard of, and whose handful of small, colour prints from the early Troubles stopped me in my tracks.
His name was Akihiko Okamura and I later learned that he had travelled to Ireland in 1968, having already established a reputation as a war photographer in Vietnam. The first thing that took me by surprise was his rich colour palette: the deep reds, faded blues and ochre browns that reanimated a turbulent time for so long portrayed solely in stark monochrome. The second was his style, which tended towards quiet observation rather than frantic reportage. His photographs ranged from telling still lifes of ordinary and not-so-ordinary objects (a police riot shield and helmet resting against a wall) to portraits that resembled film stills (a lone British soldier, tense and primed as if for heroic combat, on a street corner). Okamura photographed newly delivered milk bottles arranged neatly on a sun-dappled doorstep as well as empty milk bottles resting on the window ledge of a Derry tower block, ready to be repurposed as petrol bombs and hurled at the police. His eye was caught by Loyalist youths hanging bunting for the marching season on a dusky sunlit street and young Belfast women picking their way through makeshift barricades, alert for images that undercut the obvious and the cliched.
Continue reading... - 5 April: Artists of the future, Ghanaian kings’ robes and a tiny moth – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Amateur artists join the pros in Gateshead, Old Master pastiches go on show in London, and a bursary for young photographers is launched in memory of the Guardian’s Eamonn McCabe – all in your weekly dispatch
Jerwood Survey III
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Well-known artists have each nominated their favourite beginner for this glimpse of the future of art, featuring Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Paul Nataraj and more.
• Southwark Park Galleries, London, 6 April to 23 June - 4 April: Manchester theatre restores cancelled Palestinian event after artists protest - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Home theatre apologises for upset caused by cancelling of Voices of Resilience
The organisers of a Palestinian literature event cancelled by a Manchester theatre last week, say they are “hugely grateful” the venue has agreed it can go ahead after a surge of support.
Home theatre apologised for the upset caused by cancelling Voices of Resilience, due to be held on 22 April, citing “recent publicity” and safety concerns for the organisers and those attending.
Continue reading... - 2 April: Boom and bust in the industrial north-east – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new exhibition brings together Chris Killip and Graham Smith’s seminal shots of England’s north-east from 1975-87, when heavy industry and working-class life were transformed
Continue reading... - 1 April: Are we really wearing micro shorts this season? The hot pants rebellion on social media - Exhibitions | The Guardian
This autumn in Australian style, tiny shorts have become a fashion trend – and not everyone is happy. Plus: Kate Ceberano’s quilts
In March, social media crackled as a community of women outraged by the threat of indecent exposure united in the comments section over a controversial clothing trend. The catalyst was an Instagram post from the US retailer Free People with the caption: “We are wearing micro shorts this season.”
The micro shorts in question are breathtakingly short – roughly the size of a pair of high-waisted boyleg underwear. Some commenters have described the denim styles as “janties”, while one wrote: “As a general rule, my inseam should be longer than my tampon string.”
Continue reading... - 31 March: Perth Museum review – a new-look leveller for the ancient seat of kings - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The mythic Stone of Destiny, used in Scottish and British coronations for centuries, is the star attraction of the £27m redeveloped Perth Museum – now brighter, easier to access and as eclectic as ever
It’s hard to think of a piece of masonry more charged with history, myth and emotion, per cubic inch, than the Stone of Destiny. This battered suitcase-sized object, on which Scottish and English kings have been inaugurated and crowned for centuries, has been abducted and re-abducted, bombed, broken and repaired. In 1996 it was taken to Edinburgh Castle from Westminster Abbey on the raised back of a Land Rover, surrounded by a glass screen and a guard of honour like a victorious president. Last year it was temporarily taken back to London, so that King Charles III could be crowned with it beneath him.
Now the stone sits in the former auditorium of Perth City Hall, a venue that formerly thrilled to the sounds of the Who, Morrissey and, just after she was first elected prime minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher. It has been a long time coming home – it was last seen in this city (or, to be precise, at the nearby Scone Abbey) more than 700 years ago, before King Edward I of England seized it. Now it is the literal and metaphorical centrepiece of the newly opened £27m Perth Museum, which has been redeveloped and installed in the old hall with the help of the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo and the exhibition designers Metaphor.
Continue reading... - 31 March: Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings review – vital, intimate, exceptionally intense - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
So fragile that they are rarely seen in public, 120 of Flemish art’s finest drawings show you the minds and hands of the artists at work – chief among them the surprisingly dark and mysterious RubensMist descends at dusk along the path through a forest. Pale water, motionless beneath a footbridge, holds the last of the light. Pollarded willows raise their amputated arms, as if in warning, while slender elms lead invitingly into the distance. It is a scene of ominous enchantment – should you stay or should you go?
Peter Paul Rubens, flushed with a lifetime’s success, has bought a country manor outside Brussels. He takes a sheet of oatmeal paper out into the grounds with a stick of charcoal. The drawing, made purely for his own purposes, one feels, is so mysteriously beautiful it stops visitors in their tracks at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: Rubens in private, his fascination with the landscape now become ours. It is a crossroads all of its own in this enthralling show.
Continue reading... - 29 March: Artistic unicorns, protest ceramics and queer art from Morocco – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch
Unicorn
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Medieval bestiaries, Renaissance art and narwhal horns make for a fascinating first exhibition in this impressive new Scottish museum.
• Perth Museum, Perth, 30 March to 22 September - 28 March: Perth Museum review – a magical display of rampant unicorns and naked Picts - Exhibitions | The Guardian
City Hall, Perth
This is how to reinvent a local museum, with inspiring, fun exhibits from the Stone of Scone to a salmon boat celebrating a proud and unique historyIt takes balls to transform a local collection of archaeology, art and stuffed salmon into a museum with ambitions on an international scale. And it so happens that balls are one of the new Perth Museum’s highlights, albeit prehistoric stone ones. Decorated with nodules large and small, these carved rocky spheres were a speciality of neolithic artists in Scotland. What do they mean? Nobody knows, but their carefully designed patterns evidently meant a lot to the people who lived in what is now called Scotland about 5,000 years ago.
A stone can say so much. Even a blank one. Compared with these intricately hewn prehistoric artefacts, the stone that is the centrepiece of this museum is visually dull indeed – but it is enlivened by a spectacular setting. The museum has been fashioned out of an old Edwardian city hall with an imposing classical exterior and a huge, galleried central chamber. Right in the middle rises a tall wooden tower inside which, after a dramatic build-up in a darkened antechamber, you are admitted to see Scotland’s Stone of Destiny.
Continue reading... - 28 March: ‘Every single work is a masterpiece’: the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the greatest Flemish drawings - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new show brings together historic sketches from Bruegel to Rubens and more, capturing fleeting snapshots of everyday 16th- and 17th-century life
The women gather in a circle, talking intensely and unselfconsciously, their attention passing from one animated face to another as the conversation darts around the group. They seem completely unaware, from a window above the courtyard where they’re chatting, the artist Jacques Jordaens is sketching them in quick red chalk and brown ink.
It is 1659, Antwerp, and, according to Jordaens’ scribbled note at the bottom of the paper, these so-called “gossip aunts” are discussing local political “disturbances” – perhaps the recent strike of the painters’ guild. “It’s a snapshot of daily life that you don’t usually see,” says An Van Camp, the curator of Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
Continue reading... - 28 March: Rare and raw: never before seen Rolling Stones – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
In 1981, photographer Brian Aris was invited to join the rock’n’roll legends at rehearsals in Boston. He captured their intense musical bond – but couldn’t corner Charlie Watts
Continue reading... - 28 March: ‘Sport is never just sport’: Olympics exhibition in Paris reflects 20th century’s highs and lows - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Les Jeux Olympiques: Miroir des Sociétés opens ahead of Paris Olympics and puts previous games in context of conflicts and injustices
From the Nazi stadium propaganda in 1936 Berlin to the 1968 Mexico City podium protest of medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were expelled from the competition after raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute against racial injustice, the Olympic Games have held a mirror up to some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.
Now, as the Paris Olympics prepares to open this summer against a backdrop of war from Ukraine to the Middle East – with Emmanuel Macron saying Russia will be asked to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Games – a new exhibition in Paris takes an unflinching look at the social and geopolitical impact of the Games over the last century.
Continue reading... - 27 March: Rare show of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s work opens in Paris - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Exhibition features more than 120 sculptures by Romanian who revolutionised the art form
A rare retrospective of Constantin Brâncuși, who revolutionised sculpture in the early 20th century but whose works can be extremely tricky to transport, opens in Paris on Wednesday.
Born in Romania in 1876, Brâncuși arrived in Paris at the age of 28 and soon after joined the workshop of Auguste Rodin.
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Originally posted 2011-02-25 17:28:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
