Gormley's early mettle, AI paint pals and sky-high snogs – the week in art
Antony GormleyGormley's early sculptures are cast from his own body and have a macabre, almost archaeological beauty that recalls prehistoric and ancient Egyptian art.
White Cube Mason's Yard, London, until 8 June
Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and BeastsThis exhibition that opens on JMW Turner's 250th birthday explores a lesser known aspect of his art: his depictions of animals.
Turner's House, London, from 23 April to 26 October
Laura Lancaster & Rachel Lancaster: Remember, SomewhereThe identical Lancaster twins are both painters, though with different styles and sensibilities.
Baltic, Gateshead, until 12 October
That Marvellous AtmosphereStanley Spencer's epic vision of a tumultuous, happy occasion, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, gets an airing.
Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, until 2 November
David Salle: Some Versions of PastoralThe postmodernist painter lets AI remix his works, embracing instead of fearing the robot future.
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, until 8 June
A rare bronze of Le Baiser (The Kiss), produced during Rodin's lifetime and signed by the artist will be auctioned this month.
The 60cm-high bronze was one of the first three cast in this size. It was commissioned in 1904 by the Argentine Jockey Club to be presented as a marriage gift to Lucien Mérignac, the French fencing champion, and has since sat in the living room of a family home in western France. It is expected to pass €500,000 at auction.
Martin Parr went to Japan to photograph cherry blossom season in Kyoto
An auction of 40 Roy Lichtenstein works is expected to raise £26m
The Guardian wondered how pleased William Morris would be by his current ubiquity
Perth, Australia, is under pressure to drop plans for a seven-metre statue of an astronaut
'Art thief' Wayne Thiebaud was more than inspired by other artists
The design for a 12-metre high mosaic for victims of the 2011 Utøya island killings has been revealed
Jericho Skull, 8500BC-6000BC
This is one of the earliest surviving images of a human face – and one of the most memorable. Thousands of years before the creation of Stonehenge, the creator or creators of this daring sculpture took a real skull, probably of an ancestor or someone recently dead whose being they wanted to preserve, and filled in its lower face with plaster to make it more lifelike. Then they added bright white shells for eyes.
The disconcerting thing is how deeply this primitive, ritualistic artwork gets to the essence of portraiture. In Renaissance Florence, the faces of portrait busts were often modelled on death masks in a practice not a million miles from this. In the same era in Bruges, Jan van Eyck gave one of his painted portraits the inscription 'Loyal Remembrance', expressing the very same desire as the ancient people of Jericho to preserve a person. Photography has made portraiture a still more efficient posthumous preservative. In the era of the selfie, the images of the dead linger as ghosts in the machine. The creator of this object understood art, and death, and the urge to remember.
British Museum, London
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The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Literary masterpiece may be the best book of the 21st century
Balle, a Danish writer, gained international acclaim in 1993 with her short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind. She then effectively disappeared, retreating to a small Baltic island. Nobody heard much from her, but that was because she was working on the seven volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. If only every wrier spent nearly 30 years on their next work. What's emerged from Balle's self-imposed exile is a book which must win the International Booker Prize - for which its already shortisted - and should earn Balle the Nobel Prize. I make no apology for the gushing acclaim. This isn't hyperbole. If you don't read this, it's like living in the 1920s and not reading Fitzgerald, Woolf, Eliot, Stein or Hemingway. Balle has made herself the defining writer of this decade, and now competes as one of the greats of this century. First, ignore the title. I was recently poring over volume two in a cafe in Portugal when a friend asked me why I was reading a physics textbook. I was delighted. It gave me the opportunity to rant at length about why they must read Balle. On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes One and Two Solvej Balle (Image: unknown) As yet, I still don't understand the title and I don't really care. There's five more volumes to go, so keep me guessing, Solvej. Now to the story. One morning, bookseller Tara Selter wakes up in a Paris hotel, comes down for breakfast and notices that another guest dropped a piece of toast just as they'd done the previous morning. Soon, it seems the whole of yesterday is repeating for her. And it is. Tara is trapped in November 18. This is Groundhog Day as written by Albert Camus, Paul Auster or Milan Kundera. Tara has fallen through time. The rest of the world is unaware time has stopped: every item, creature, weather formation, every star in the sky, repeats its November 18 pattern each day. Tara, though, knows she's stuck, that the world is on a loop, yet she can do as she pleases, change her day. She's imprisoned, but also free. Initially, she returns home from her Paris trip to her partner Thomas. Each morning for months, she retells him her story: that she's trapped in time. He loves her, he believes her, but soon the repetition is destroying her. She's also began noticing some disturbing effects of her condition. Some items stay with her forever, like the money in her pocket. Other items simply vanish. She eats a can of soup but next morning it doesn't reappear. If Tara stays in one place long enough she would consume everything there, leaving nothing behind. She considers herself a 'plundering monster'. In the 21st century, isn't that what we've all become? So Tara leaves Thomas. He won't know she's gone, anyway. He'll still think she's on that Paris trip. It's as if everyone around her suffers from the amnesia of dementia. In a way, Tara no longer exists. If she spots a pretty cottage and the owners are away, Tara can move in and make it hers. It's November 18 forever, remember. But permanent November breeds winter gloom. By volume two, Tara has decided to travel through Europe, trying to build a real year for herself, with real seasons. She goes far North to experience a true winter with snow, then deep into Spain to recreate summer. Cornwall imitates spring. Germany gives her autumn. Her attempts to celebrate Christmas with her bewildered but supportive family are among the most moving scenes in the work so far. Tara is our narrator, meticulously documenting the strangeness of her isolation: 'I count the days and make notes. I do it in order to remember. Or I do it in order to hold the days together. Or perhaps I do it because the paper remembers what I say. As if I existed. As if someone were listening.' Balle is saying something very profound about modern life in this novel. The world has both broken down and speeded up; our identities are splintered; we're unmoored as a species, adrift and lost; time itself has ceased to make sense on a planet where we face oblivion at our own hand, be it by plundering the Earth or destroying ourselves through war. Our connections are broken - to family, friends and place; we are - each of us - very much on an existential plane. In a post-truth world, we are all Tara. 'I will never find the explanations I seek,' she says. 'I will only find new questions and new answers.' There's some added spice for Scottish readers. As you lose yourself in the text, you'll sometimes find yourself arrested by words like 'outwith' and 'swither' jumping off the page. Why is a Danish writer with a taste for wry philosophical speculative fiction employing words that only Scots really use? It turns out the translator is Scottish. Barbara J Haveland, who now lives in Copenhagen, has done a remarkable job. More prizes here too, please, literary world. Let's crown this great home-grown translator. I cannot emphasis enough how desperate I am for the next five volumes. Volume Two - each book is short and just rips along - closes as Tara realises she can spend her entire life trying to learn everything there is to know. Over many long, slow months she becomes an expert on ancient Rome, for example. Tara can attend university lectures wherever she likes, listening to the greatest minds discuss the most complex ideas. What hasn't occurred to Tara, though, is she could, if she wished, use what's happened to her for evil. She could kill someone and nobody would know. But would her victim return to life or disappear forever like an apple she's eaten? Balle is both a consummate and profound artist, and a writer who knows how to keep readers turning pages. Volume Two ends on a pitch-perfect cliffhanger. I just hope she doesn't need another decades-long hiatus from the world in preparation for her next masterpiece.
BBC News
5 days ago
- BBC News
One of JMW Turner's first paintings rediscovered after 150 years
Turner's first ever exhibited oil painting is to be put up for auction after being lost for more 150 Rising Squall, features a dramatic view of a former hot spring and spa in Bristol seen from east bank of the River Avon, before Clifton Suspension Bridge was built. It made its way around the world and returned to the UK but was unknown as a Turner masterpiece for more than a century. His signature was revealed after the painting was cleaned last artwork will displayed in a public exhibition at Sotheby's, in London, between 28 June and 1 July before it is auctioned with an estimated value of up to £300,000. Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby's senior specialist, said: "It's a fascinating and very instructive insight into his early style."He added the painting represents Turner, famed as a watercolourist, as a teenage artist with "ambition and skill" in his early experiments an oil painting made its debut at the Royal Academy in 1793, three days after Turner's 18th birthday, before being bought by Reverend Robert Nixon, a customer of his father's barber Nixon's son inherited the painting after his death, Mr Gascoigne said, adding it then fell "into obscurity" having last been exhibited in Tasmania, Australia, in 1858. Mr Gascoigne said: "Bristol would have been a very natural place for a young artist based in London to get to relatively easily and relatively cheaply, but would provide him with the sort of dramatic, sublime, picturesque landscape that he was seeking."There was early mention of the painting in obituaries of Turner's life but for at least a century it was mistaken for a watercolour, meaning it was missing from the catalogue of his exhibited oil until the discovery last year during a restoration project, experts believed Turner's earliest exhibited oil was the Fisherman at Sea painting.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
One of JMW Turner's earliest paintings rediscovered after 150 years
An oil painting of a stormy Bristol landscape has been rediscovered as one of the earliest works of JMW Turner, created when the artist was 17 years old and lost to his canon for the past 150 years. Turner's signature on The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol was discovered in the process of cleaning the painting after it was sold last year. At the time of the sale, the work was attributed to a 'follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson', an 18th-century artist. Dreweatts, the auctioneers, had suggested the work would fetch £600-800, although the buyer is believed to have paid less. Now, in a year of exhibitions and events to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of the man widely considered to be Britain's greatest and most influential artist, the painting is to be sold again. This time it will be auctioned by Sotheby's with an estimated value of £200,000-300,000. 'We are as certain as it's possible to be that this painting is by Turner,' said Julian Gascoigne of Sotheby's. The painting had been examined by 'all the leading Turner scholars alive today who unanimously endorsed the attribution'. As well as the recently revealed signature, there were 'clear references to a painting of this subject' in obituaries of Turner and in early literature on the artist in the years after his death in 1851. But in the second half of the 19th century, 'a series of mistakes were made, which were repeated and compounded, with it described as a watercolour', said Gascoigne. It was omitted from the first complete resume of Turner's work published in 1901, and 'over the course of the 20th century, it was forgotten about as just another relatively minor early watercolour'. The person who bought the painting last year initially thought it may have been the work of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a French émigré painter living in London whose studio Turner frequently visited. De Loutherbourg's wife, suspicious that Turner was intent on appropriating her husband's painting technique, eventually threw him out. The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol was the first oil painting exhibited by Turner, at the Royal Academy in 1793, the year after it was painted. Based on a drawing in his sketchbook and a watercolour, both held by Tate Britain, it depicts Hot Wells House in Bristol seen from the east bank of the River Avon, now the site of the Clifton suspension bridge, amid swirling storm clouds and tempestuous waters. Hot Wells was a hot spring and spa that was a popular attraction in Georgian England. The painting was first acquired by the Rev Robert Nixon, a customer at Turner's father's barbershop who befriended and encouraged the young artist. Nixon was among the first to urge Turner to paint with oils. 'It gives us a real insight into the ambition that Turner was clearly exhibiting at this early stage of his career, and shows a level of competency in oil painting, which is quite a technical medium,' said Gascoigne. 'It changes a lot of what we know, or thought we knew, about Turner's early work and our understanding of how his technique and style evolved.' Turner applied the oil paint thinly, almost like a watercolour. 'He's feeling his way through the medium, but bringing all the experience he already had as a watercolour painter to his application of oil. 'This technique of washy, translucent glazes of paint is something he comes back to later in his career, in the 1830s and 40s, and is one of the things that allowed him to completely revolutionise the art of painting – breaking down forms, seducing them in light, taking his painting technique towards the level of experimentation and abstraction that we think of today with his late, great masterpieces.' At the time of last year's sale, the painting was 'very dirty, it hadn't been touched for a long period of time, it had very old discoloured yellow varnish on it,' said Gascoigne. The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol will go on public display for the first time in 167 years later this month at Sotheby's in London before being auctioned on 2 July.
