Articles

The mural popped up yesterday night when protestors gathered at Marble Arch to celebrate the end of the ten day long demonstrations. The image showed a child clutching an XR sign while crouching near a plant, with accompanying words: ‘From this moment despair ends and tactics begin’.

In the sixteenth century, so the story goes, Iran imported glass from Europe, but it would arrive fractured and broken after its long journey. Artisans began using the shards to decorate mosques, creating the intricate mosaics known as aineh-kari, in which mosques' domed ceilings and fretted walls are transformed into sparkling arrays. Years later, the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who died on Saturday in Tehran, used this technique as the inspiration for her distinctive sculptures and wall-hung works.

“How do you see this tree? said Gauguin at the Bois d’Amour: Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible”.

Laura Focarazzo is a video artist and independent curator, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her works include experimental films and videos. She uses the sounds as a 'script' for the construction of non-narrative pieces. She collaborates with local and international sound artists. She works with her own field recordings and abstract images as raw materials in the construction of her videos.

François-Henri Pinault — chairman and CEO of Kering, the French-based luxury group behind Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and other world-renowned brands — has pledged $113 million towards the rebuilding of the Notre Dame cathedral.

Laurent Ferri, a curator at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University told Bloomberg the relics inside were “now likely reduced to ashes”. If some were lost, many more were saved. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said most of the significant artwork and holy objects inside were recovered. France’s culture minister Franck Riester shared images of priceless artworks being loaded into trucks.

Notre Dame cathedral has caught fire, according to the Parisian fire service and eyewitnesses. Footage posted online shows a large fire engulfing the upper part of the cathedral, with the flames licking around its two bell towers.

A researcher says he has found where William Shakespeare lived in London and wrote some of his most popular works, including Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Evidence shows Shakespeare lived in lodgings overlooking the graveyard of St Helen's Church in the 1590s, theatre historian Geoffrey Marsh said.

Arts Minister Michael Ellis has placed a temporary export bar on a 16th century marquetry casket from the historic Newbattle Abbey, Scotland, in a bid to keep it in the country. The treasure, considered one of the most important early pieces of South German furniture in the country, is at risk of being lost unless a buyer can be found to match the £750,000 asking price.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced yesterday that it had acquired 300 works of art in the last six months. As a result of these acquisitions, 60 new artists and collectives have entered the collection.

Dan Robbins, an artist who created the first paint-by-numbers pictures and helped turn the kits into an American sensation during the 1950s, has died. He was 93. Robbins, whose works were dismissed by some critics but later celebrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, died Monday in Sylvania, Ohio, said his son, Larry Robbins.

The acknowledgment will be awarded on Saturday, 11th May 2019 at Ca’ Giustinian, Venice, during the opening of the Biennale Arte.

'It was just a theory, but I thought: what if the king asked for the next best thing: a faithful copy made by Leonardo on canvas. The latter was a new medium in those days. I started to go through the archives in France and Florence and in the latter found a letter where the king of France asks the Signoria to send Leonardo to work for him for a while. So, da Vinci goes to Milan a second time as the painter of the king, why? Because he’s making a copy of the Last Supper.'

The Bulgarian-born artist, famous for wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin along with his late wife Jeanne-Claude, will cover the massive monument with 25,000 metres of silvery-blue recyclable material.

A 2,600-year-old seal bearing the name of an official who served in the court of a First Temple period king has been discovered in the City of David in Jerusalem. The seal reads “(belonging) to Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King.”

Edinburgh Printmakers at Castle Mills, Dundee Street, will open to the public on Saturday 27 April 2019 with The Politics of Heritage vs. the Heritage of Politics by German printmaker Thomas Kilpper, a site specific floor carving commissioned to mark the organisation's move into the major new development and responding to the social history of the building. The new institution for the Scottish capital is the former headquarters of the North British Rubber Company.

Café Müller is a piece originated by Pina Bausch in 1978. The performance took place for the first time on May 20th, 1978 at the Wuppertaler Opernhaus with music by Henry Purcell, set design and costumes by Rolf Borzig with collaboration by Marion Cito and Hans Pop. The same evening were shown four performances by the choreographers Pina Bausch, Gerhard Bohner, Gigi-Geokjrghe Caciuléanu and Hans Pop, all under the same title and with communal aspects on stage: Four people at a table.

The Matching Pair vases by British artist and potter Grayson Perry go on permanent display inthe V&A’s world-famous Ceramics Galleries. Created in 2017 in response to the huge social and political rift caused by Brexit, each vase depicts supporters of Leave and Remain.

London’s Royal Academy of Arts has just opened a splendid new exhibition on ‘The Renaissance Nude’, charting depictions of the naked body in Europe from 1400-1530 in a range of different media media, from painting to sculpture, from engravings to illuminated manuscripts. Highlights include Titian’s Venus Anadyomene, from the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and Bronzino’s St Sebastian, from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

The second part of the interview with Jean-Pierre Isbouts focuses on his study of Leonardo’s two Mona Lisas, the identity of the portraits’ sitters, and a da Vinci anniversary celebration announcement.