- 26 July: Mind-altering montage, Taylor Swift’s costume crawl and Constable goes west – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A major retrospective of Peter Kennard’s dissenting images, the V&A goes for Swifties and The Hay Wain arrives in Bristol – all in your weekly dispatch
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent
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The veteran montage artist and activist gets a retrospective of his incisive images.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 19 January - 25 July: ‘If people are upset, we’re doing something right’: the artists subverting the language of ads - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Collectives such as Pattern Up use the visual signifiers of well-known brands to deliver satirical statements. ‘It’s something everyone can relate to – which is dark,’ they say
Labour’s landslide win in the general election saw many Conservative MPs experience a Portillo moment. Top Tories including Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg were unseated by discontented constituents. But, a few days before, something a wee bit different took place: a Portaloo moment.
Overnight, a mobile toilet popped up on the streets of Shoreditch, east London, complete with a Polling Booth sign and ballot paper loo roll. A true safe seat, if you will. It was the latest potty-mouthed installation from Pattern Up, a collective of young artists formed in Brighton but now operating across the UK and Ireland. The stunt encouraged voters to consider spoiling – or, in an act of dirty protest, soiling – their ballots. “Obviously not everyone should spoil their ballot. But any vote was already spoiled anyway because the main two parties were so similar,” a spokesperson for the group says.It was not the only stunt Pattern Up pulled for the election; the group also mocked up a set of Stuck Up Starmer and Soggy Sunak action figures and put up posters suggesting Tory voters should go to Specsavers.
Continue reading... - 25 July: Keep on Kicken! 50 years photographing Berlin and beyond – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
From cold war subcultures to topless bridesmaids, a new exhibition at Kicken Berlin features half a century of groundbreaking images
Continue reading... - 24 July: ‘She could have lived in these galleries to create the music’: Taylor Swift in among the V&A permanent collection - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A trail set throughout the museum displays pieces from Swift’s archive including a serpent mic, a drag beard, instruments, outfits and cowboy boots
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The Kensington Valhalla, the Raphael Cartoons, Paul Delaroche’s St Cecilia and the Angels, the pre-Raphaelites, Foggini’s Samson and the Philistines: these are just some of the items in conversation with costumes and artefacts from Taylor Swift’s archive at a new V&A Museum exhibition. Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail presents 13 moments from across the 34-year-old musician’s career. Rather than contain them in a single exhibition, the pieces – from tour attire to instantly recognisable outfits from Swift’s album art and videos and even a fake beard – are spread across the entire footprint of the museum, engaging with the permanent collections.
“It’s the first time we’ve done this kind of theatrical installation for a contemporary artist,” said curator Kate Bailey. Organising it entailed plenty of other firsts: “I’ve never displayed a microphone before,” she said – not least one adorned with a gold serpent, as designed for Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour.
Continue reading... - 23 July: Big in the country: rural life across Europe – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
From Cornish thatchers to Polish apple pickers and Hungarian hand-milkers, these images capture the essence – and difficulty – of farm life
Continue reading... - 22 July: Photographer Magnus Hastings celebrates the artistry and pride of drag - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Queen, his biggest show to date, opens in Liverpool and features new commissions of the city’s drag performers
As a child, Magnus Hastings loved stealing his sister’s clothes and wearing his mother’s heels and feather boas, before he got “shamed out of being a drag child”.
Now, decades later, the award-winning photographer is celebrating the artistry of drag and the collective spirit of pride in his biggest exhibition to date at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.
Continue reading... - 22 July: Oscar Murillo: The Flooded Garden review – my inner Pollock could not be contained - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Tate Modern, London
Is it love or just a summer fling? Oscar Murillo has invited the public to add their own paint to his canvas – but I wouldn’t be tempted. Would I?Look at me – I’m Jackson Pollock! Doing action painting in the Tate Turbine Hall!
I usually dread interactive art. I prefer to look at art silently, passively and, assuming it’s good enough, to absorb its nuances and meanings slowly. Why do some artists insist on making us doers rather than observers? Queuing with my family to enter the oval arena that Oscar Murillo has set up for us, the masses, to paint his latest work, I even started questioning the financial side. Murillo is a successful artist who will also open a doubtless lucrative show with Gagosian this summer. And he expects people, especially children, to paint his latest hit for free? Seeing his own fussy works on display in Tate’s Tanks, I suppose he needs all the help he can get.
Continue reading... - 21 July: Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body review – an Olympic revelation from first to last - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Hollywood’s Tarzan, a swimmer from Blackpool and devout Eric Liddell are among the stars in a superb show of art, film, photography and more capturing the speed and style of the city’s pivotal modernist GamesA fragment of misty grey film opens this enthralling exhibition. It shows tennis divas in flapper dresses swanning ceremonially round a stadium, and sprinters leaping forwards with greyhound grace beneath the lingering smoke of a starter’s pistol. Swimmers cut through pools like elegant blades. Cross-country runners hurdle walls then vanish from sight.
Two wrestlers lock limbs with such equal force they appear temporarily motionless, still as a statue. And right beside them, as if bodying forth into our space, is their exact counterpart in three dimensions: a cast of an ancient Greek sculpture made thousands of years ago. Art and reality – the two are so identical as to make you draw breath, and think again about ancient and modern, classical perfectionism and actual reality. Time spools back and forth in the gallery.
Continue reading... - 20 July: Green dreams: Joy Labinjo’s paintings celebrating park life – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
When the British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo, known for her colourful, largescale portraits, was commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries in south London to help celebrate its 40th anniversary, she immersed herself in the life and history of the area. Eventually she was inspired to make Southwark Park itself her focus. “I felt at peace there,” she says. The result is We Are Briefly Gorgeous , a series of 16 vibrant artworks. From kids playing on bikes to individuals reclining on the grass with a book, the project aims to capture how the public interacts with a much-loved green space . These aren’t portraits, Labinjo says, they’re “characters within a story”.
Continue reading... - 19 July: Modernist Paris, a Monet adventure park and the death of life drawing – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Oscar Murillo turns Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into an epic painting garden, while Goshka Macuga delves into ancient archeology, and the Paris of 1924 is revisited, which is the last time it held the Olympics – all in your weekly dispatch
The Flooded Garden
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An art adventure playground for all ages, inspired by Monet’s water lily garden and conceived by painter Oscar Murillo.
• Tate Modern, London, until 26 August - 18 July: Road to ruins: Peter Mitchell’s crumbling Leeds – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Demolished flats, boarded-up cinemas, disused buildings … Mitchell’s photographs of Yorkshire (and beyond) have established him as a key chronicler of a changing Britain
Continue reading... - 18 July: Dover Castle ‘rises from ashes of the 1216 siege’ in digital exhibition - Exhibitions | The Guardian
English Heritage’s display shows the castle before an epic battle for control against French and rebel forces
In 1216, as a civil war raged in England, with French soldiers and English rebels joining forces to overthrow King John, Dover Castle became a fortress for the monarch and helped decide the fate of the kingdom.
But an epic and bloody struggle for control of the castle left it badly damaged, including destroying multiple towers and its defensive walls.
Continue reading... - 17 July: ‘Some of the most shocking photographs ever taken’ – The Camera Never Lies review - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
While undeniably powerful, this show of often horrifying photographs from global conflicts and crises needs more context and a more questioning approach to their takers’ status as truth-tellersAt the entry, there’s a wall smattered with some of the most shocking photographs ever taken. In these images, which belong to The Incite Project collection, mankind’s capacity for evil is magnified and feels immutable, an unfathomable sea of carnage and chaos. Ticking every trigger warning box, these famous photographs – mostly taken by white, foreign photojournalists – depict global conflicts and crisis: Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Vulture and the Little Girl, the definitive image of the famine that devastated South Sudan in the 1990s; Malcolm Browne’s photograph of a Buddhist monk shortly after he set himself alight, in protest against the South Vietnamese government in Saigon.
The latter is another Pulitzer-prize-winner, published in papers, on postcards and on Rage Against the Machine’s debut studio album in 1992. There is also Richard Drew’s The Falling Man, the image of someone plummeting from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks, a shot that came to represent the fall of America. Here too is the photograph of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on the Turkish shore. There is an inescapable sensation of an unequal world, of wordless, senseless brutality.
Continue reading... - 16 July: ‘You never know what you’ll bump into’: a wander around Britain – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
For over a decade Jamie Hawkesworth hopped on trains to random parts of the country to photograph people and places. These unique portraits tell his story
Continue reading... - 15 July: The Guardian view on outdoor play: ministers should give it a whirl | Editorial - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Children are naturally playful, as the artist Francis Alÿs reminds us. But they still need support and encouragement
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, whose exhibition about children’s games is at the Barbican in London, describes playground “tag” as being “always about the menace of other people”.
The game of chase depicted in one video in the show, shot in Mexico in 2021, is a Covid variant called Contagio. The players wear masks and, when tagged, switch these for red face coverings indicating that they are infected.
Continue reading... - 15 July: Artists should exploit AI’s capabilities, say creators of new Tate Modern show - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Exhibition traces long relationship between artists and technology, a symbiosis that is sure to continue
Artists should see the advance of AI technology as an opportunity and not a new existential threat for creativity, according to the team behind Tate Modern’s new tech-based show.
Catherine Wood, the museum’s director of exhibitions and programmes, said the Electric Dreams exhibition showed the decades-long relationship between artists and technology – and the fact the two worlds would probably always be intertwined.
Continue reading... - 12 July: A very British surrealist and the Tories’ legacy in cartoons – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Drift inside Leonora Carrington’s strange dreams while Ben Jennings parodies 14 years of political failure in a graphic Rake’s Progress – all in your weekly dispatch
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary
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Strange dreams and a passionate life make this a seductive summer celebration of a very British surrealist.
• Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, West Sussex, until 26 October - 10 July: Actors’ show-stopping art exhibition: ‘We’re used to rejection so nothing was turned down!’ - Exhibitions | The Guardian
More than 250 works by 40 stage talents are on display in London for an impressively wide-ranging event that supports the Theatre Artists Fund
A couple of years ago, two fine actors, Nancy Carroll and Christopher Villiers, found themselves playing minor roles in a movie about a male stripper, Magic Mike’s Last Dance. During the long hours of shooting in a London theatre, they discovered a shared passion for painting. Realising that their profession was filled with artists of all kinds, they set about organising an exhibition, Mama (Many Actors Make Art), which which was first mounted in 2023 in the basement of a building in Brixton, south London, called the Department Store. The second edition is now on and it is a real eye-opener.
Firstly, the scale is remarkable: there are 259 works by 40 artists. But Carroll tells me there is no attempt to curate “Actors,” she says, “are so used to rejection that Chris and I decided that nothing should be turned down. But we also wanted the show to be of some use so, while the actors are free to sell their work, a 10% commission goes to the Theatre Artists Fund set up by Sam Mendes and Netflix to provide help for hard-pressed freelancers. There is also a lucky dip, which means that, for a £20 donation, you get an unmarked envelope containing a surprise work.” I put down my money and am now the proud owner of a colourful portrait by James Fleet called Film Festival Sketchbook.
Continue reading... - 10 July: From Shakespeare’s lost plays to the world’s oldest horse: the bumper Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024 quiz - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The five nominees competing to be crowned the UK’s best museum have each sent in five devilish questions about their collections – how culturally clued up are you?
The Art Fund award for Museum of the Year is announced on 10 July
Continue reading... - 9 July: ‘It’s like Where’s Wally in broken Britain’: Ben Jennings on his Tory-era take on A Rake’s Progress - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A millennial navigates the gig economy, fights in pubs and gets kettled on a demo in Snowflake’s Progress, the Guardian’s political cartoonist’s Hogarthian epitaph for the last 14 years of Conservative rule
Guardian cartoonist Ben Jennings and I stand forlornly before Sir John Soane’s Museum in London as we are told that is it closed. We had planned to see William Hogarth’s tragicomic painting cycle A Rake’s Progress, the model for Jennings’ Snowflake’s Progress – his personal picaresque survey of broken Britain.
Like a couple of ne’er-do-well Georgian fops, we have mucked up – until another journalist generously phones the director, Will Gompertz, who comes down to size us up. The former BBC arts supremo apparently thinks what the hell and gives us a VIP tour of Soane’s atmospheric house.
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Originally posted 2011-02-25 17:28:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
