Latest news with #CevdetErek
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A magical mystery tour of Liverpool, bug-eyed cuteness and the world of vineyards – the week in art
Liverpool BiennialTurner winner Elizabeth Price and Turkey's Cevdet Erek are the stars of this mystery tour of Liverpool that's occasionally magical. Various venues, Liverpool, until 14 September Yoshitomo NaraYou like bug eyed paintings of cute yet uncanny characters? Look no further. Hayward Gallery, London, 10 June until 31 August Sea InsideAn investigation of our relationship with the undersea world, featuring Hiroshi Sugimoto, Marcus Coates and more. Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, until 26 October Liliane Lijn: Arise AliveThis pioneer of art made with light and motion shows her works from the 1950s to the present day. Tate St Ives, until 2 November Rudolf StingelAbstract paintings inspired by vineyards, leading you into worlds of matted, knotted green. Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, from 12 June until 20 September Derek Jarman sometimes cast spells over his doomy black paintings, into which he threw his rage at society's treatment of queer people. Alex Needham writes about the film-maker and artist's galvanising spirit ahead of a new exhibition of his work, and the publication of an unfinished screenplay. Edward Burra is British art's great unknown The V&A's five-star show Design and Disability is a boundary-breaking triumph Philip Hoare has detailed how William Blake became a queer icon Photographer Jungjin Lee's landscapes roar with the supremacy of nature Performance artist Allen-Golder Carpenter is spending three days in a jail cell Banksy's been up to his newest tricks in Marseille Our critic wasn't sure what Leonardo Drew's towers of broken urban debris amount to Trump wants to fire the first female director of the US National Portrait Gallery Heinz Berggruen collected treasures of modernism branded degenerate by the Nazis Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion As Altadena begins rebuilding after the LA fires, a new show centres its creative history The glorious legacy of Gwen John is finally outshining her flamboyant brother's The Serpentine's first movable pavilion resembles 'an expanding crepe-paper ornament' Derek Jarman's brooding 'black' paintings throw fresh light on his genius Hamad Butt died too soon to win recognition as the most dangerous YBA of all The Lincolnshire Ox by George Stubbs, 1790 A prodigiously huge ox is shown off by its owner in this typically surreal and haunting masterpiece by the Liverpool-born animal painter who captured the curiosity of his age. It was a real animal, and John Gibbons, the man in the painting, made money showing it off: at the time when Stubbs portrayed it, the Lincolnshire Ox was on display to paying crowds in London. Its growth was attributed to being fed purely on grass, proof of scientific improvements in 18th-century British agriculture. Stubbs, who anatomised horses, shares this scientific interest. He exhibits the ox as a dreamlike wonder, using its owner as scale and admiring its profound placidity as it munches grass. The other animal, much more alert and assertive, is thought to be Gibbons's fighting cock. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Liverpool Biennial review – AI seagulls, gladiatorial football and big trouble in Chinatown
I narrowly avoided being 'relieved on' by a seagull in Liverpool. Another critic pulled me aside just in time. But then again, she pressed the button to release the airborne poo – fake, I think – in the first place. This is Kara Chin's funny installation in a cinema recreating the seediness of the seaside with squawking AI seagulls on video screens, chaotic electro-assemblages resembling mutant arcade machines and a floor covered with guano. Liverpool is not by the sea but close enough that seagulls provide a chorus as you walk between Liverpool Biennial art events in museums, galleries, warehouses and community centres. I can't see the Liver Birds on the skyline without remembering the first time I visited this city as small child, seeing my aunt off on a voyage across the Atlantic, from docks that then loomed with massive ships. Proustian memories of the biggest city I knew as a child return with a vengeance in a raw warehouse space where Turkish artist Cevdet Erek has created a homage to the noise and intensity of soccer crowds. He loves football and loud music. I meet him there and he enthuses about attending Anfield as research, and being inspired by a track on Pink Floyd's Meddle. Flashbacks of matches with my dad surge. But Erek's installion is not a literal portrayal of a football game. Instead it transfigures the noise and tension of a big match. The space is dominated by an arena made of brown, earthy bricks while a pounding soundtrack pumps from speakers in its seating areas. It's eerie and seems ancient, for the pebbly arena and stands make you think as much of gladiatorial games as modern soccer. Vicious drums increase the menace. But there are no people. It's a ruin excavated in the desert, to which a Floyd of the future have come to perform to the empty air. The 2025 Liverpool Biennial is entitled Bedrock and its best moments come when artists engage with the emotional bedrock of Liverpool itself – from football to religion. Is there a difference? At Bluecoat contemporary arts centre, Amy Claire Mills shows a bright, booming mural of Liverpool's coat of arms, reproducing its surreal mythology in which the sea god Neptune, a merman, dolphins and, of course, the Liver Birds all feature. Yet by and large the freshest experiences are to be had in site-specific works outside galleries and museums. The Walker Art Gallery's Biennial show of unmemorable art is eclipsed by the likes of Hogarth and Millais in its collection. Nour Bishouty has placed a wooden sculpture of a gazelle-like animal, inlaid with mother of pearl, on a plinth below a painting of an outsized ox by Liverpool-born 18th-century artist George Stubbs. Past beats present here. But enter Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, with its stupendous interior by Giles Gilbert Scott, and you see a veil of colour suspended against its brown craggy heights, a woven work by Cypriot artist Maria Loizidou that depicts people being raised up by angels into the heavens. Its imagery of redemption is positively medieval. Taking religion seriously turns out to be the freshest, most surprisingly successful aspect of this art festival in a multi-faith city. On the Liverpool skyline you can sometimes see both Scott's neo-medieval pile and the more graceful modernist Catholic cathedral. In the best artwork of the Biennial, Turner prize winner Elizabeth Price explores a question that might not occur to many people but she makes fascinating: how did Britain's Catholic communities come to build so many modernist churches? Her film, in a darkened hall in Liverpool's Chinatown, uses a suspenseful soundtrack, digital graphics and sinister negative images to ponder this. As Irish Catholic immigration to Britain increased in the 20th century, the growing community had to remedy a lack of Catholic churches. A new one was built around a century ago on Anglesey, the first stop for many Irish immigrants arriving by sea. Price tries to understand why it took a radical modernist form, an upturned ship's hull moulded in concrete by an Italian architect. She relates it to military architecture, including airship hangars, and the music becomes more threatening. Yet she doesn't seem satisfied with her own answers – and as a drum throbs, the colours and negative saturation get ever more lurid. For a moment I expected a horror ending, a murder in the cathedral. Instead she takes you inside some of the churches to see their mysticism enhanced by her effects, and it dawns on you. The supernatural force haunting these spaces is – can it be … God? I'd always thought of Price as a gothic artist. But just as William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was trying to promote the Catholic faith, so in this compelling artwork Price appears to reveal that she is, and always has been, a religious artist. Outside this city roars, profane and riotous, but under the skin it has a soul. The Liverpool Biennial has a lot of forgettable art in it. But at its best it cuts not just to the architectural but the spiritual heart of Liverpool. Huge as that heart is. The Liverpool Biennial opens 7 June
