Kathryn Hahn returns as the nefarious witch in a WandaVision spin-off, and 90s nostalgia is back in full swing with deeply emotional new canvases from the British artist.
In Camera
Out now
Nabhaan Rizwan is electrifying playing a struggling actor attempting to crack the British film biz, in this dreamy but razor-sharp satire of the industry. Poetic and surreal as well as savagely insightful, it’s one of the best debuts of the year, from first-time director Naqqash Khalid.
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A new season of exhibitions in Norwich examines our ancient, complex and often destructive relationship with mind-altering substances, and asks what their ubiquity tells us about human nature.
Plenty is written about whether recreational drugs should be legal and how we should police their use. But the reasons underlying our use of drugs are less often considered. Why Do We Take Drugs?, a new exhibition season beginning this week at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, is devoting six shows to the task of finding a global answer to that question.
The season takes in everything from Amazonian rituals to North American hippydom, Japanese tea ceremonies and British boozing. What it won’t do is moralistically tut or wag its finger. Rather, its aim is to open people’s minds, but with knowledge rather than substances. As the centre’s director, Jago Cooper, explains: “The whole ‘just say no’ approach to drugs, to put them in a box and ignore them, doesn’t work. It’s better to have understanding and make informed choices.”
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Savoy House, London
Two little-known American photographers offer juxtaposed perspectives on the iconic artist’s early period in New York with images that were almost lost to history.
One was a drug-addled, gay ex-lover of the artist, the other a staunchly straight professional with a vision: two men (both called William) became the most important chroniclers of Andy Warhol’s early period in New York, one of the most mythologised periods of art history. They later vanished from Warhol’s Factory and his life – and their negatives were almost lost. But in a kitsch one-bed flat in a luxury complex on the Strand in London, their legacy is revived in an intimate exhibition, WarholMania.
It is the first time the photographs of Billy Name and William John Kennedy have been shown together, though they photographed Warhol at the Factory between 1964 and 1970. The staging of WarholMania in this small, plush residential flat is disorienting at first – footsteps disappear into thick carpets, natural light is shut out with chintzy silver curtains and shiny silver balloons float ominously overhead – a nod to the silver foil that covered the Factory. It’s a delicious way to recreate the atmosphere conjured in the photographs, of a hard-to-access place where anything could happen.
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Vincent scores exhibition of the year, Teresa Margolles prepares for Trafalgar Square, Hew Locke unpicks the royals and Tracey Emin opens her heart – all in your weekly dispatch.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers
Dazzling, disorientating and beautiful – this is the exhibition of the year and will make you fall in love with Van Gogh as if for the very first time.
• National Gallery, London, from 14 September until 19 January.
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Liverpool council’s new public building includes public art gallery spaces and a Stem centre.Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
A public building in the heart of Sydney’s south-west is one of the most beautiful new libraries in the world, according to the international arbiters of temples to literature.
Liverpool council’s new library, which opened in December last year as part of the Yellamundie Civic Place Library and Art Gallery, is one of four finalists in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions annual Public Library of the Year award.
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West Yorkshire city to host magic, music, film and theatre performances celebrating local talent, plus Turner prize.
A city centre magic show, the Brontës as you’ve never seen them before, and a bassline house symphony are all part of Bradford’s City of Culture lineup, which its organisers call a celebration of everything that makes the West Yorkshire city great.
Shanaz Gulzar, the creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, said the whole of the country was invited to come next year to a place she billed as young, diverse, creative and “the heart of the UK”.
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Boasting hovering haloes and futuristic forests, Old Street roundabout was meant to be a shining beacon for Britain’s very own Tech City. Instead, we have
120 hefty bollards and paving built to deter rough sleepers.
Computer-generated PR images often outshine reality, but rarely has so much been promised and so little delivered as at Old Street roundabout in east London, finally complete after more than a decade in the works. It was supposed to be the radiant hub of the UK’s very own Tech City, the much-vaunted Silicon Roundabout around which a vibrant community of startups would orbit, fizzing with ideas.
In 2012, the then prime minister David Cameron pledged £50m to transform this undistinguished traffic intersection into “the largest civic space in Europe” – a shining beacon for our “aspiration nation”, where tech companies would rub shoulders with young innovators in a dynamic, multilevelled, interactive landscape. It was eagerly championed by his Bullingdon club chum and then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who saw in it the chance for another novelty infrastructure project to add to his collection of costly follies. But their Nathan Barley fantasy never came to pass.
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Boasting trippy trees and fluorescent fungi, the Swiss biennale returns with around 50 photography-based projects centred on the topic (dis)connected.
Pouting over the heads of passersby in the chocolate box streets of Swiss town Vevey is Daido Moriyama’s Pretty Woman. She strikes a monumental pose. The iconic image by the pioneer of Japanese street photography signals the opening of the eighth cycle of the Images Vevey photo festival, bringing a slice of Tokyo cool to this elegant lakeside town.
Daido Moriyama’s Pretty Woman on the facade of the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes in Vevey. Photograph by Laura Keller.
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Merther, Cornwall: For centuries, a small local population worshipped at St Cohan’s. Now it’s the ivy and thistles, ferns and avens that take their nourishment here.
In the hamlet of Merther, nature is concealing a secret. Wrapped in robes of ivy and traveller’s joy, the ruins of a 14th-century church are hidden among a small copse. Little remains of the original building; the crumbling outer walls have been slowly succumbing to wildlife ever since the church closed 80-odd years ago.
Brambles, thistles, avens and bedstraw grow at the entrances. Only one of the windows remains intact; the sun glances through the lead-lined glass as ivy fronds spill over the empty windowsills. Inside, a congregation of sycamores has gathered in the nave, branches stretching towards the heavens while hard ferns, hart’s-tongues and brackens cover the floor. A few relics of the church’s heydays remain: an ivy-shrouded pillar stands like an altar in the chancel, and the outline of bezant crosses can be seen against the far wall of the south aisle.
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‘Two families went up to the abandoned town to find their ancestral homes. They set out like Indiana Jones but ended up in tears as they reached the tumbledown buildings’
The population of Miraflores, which is in Peru’s Nor Yauyos-Cochas Landscape Reserve, has been shrinking as its younger inhabitants leave to start new lives in the nearby capital, Lima. In some ways, this mirrors the town’s founding more than a century ago, when its initial inhabitants moved there from another settlement called Huaquis – now a ghost town.
I have travelled in many Andean communities where people don’t have access to water. Within the next 70 years, we will no longer have glaciers, and their disappearance, combined with a drop in rainfall, has had an impact on agriculture in Miraflores. The people’s ancestors in Huaquis made use of lagoons, dams, dykes and canals dating back to the pre-Hispanic period, which the people of Miraflores are learning to restore and revive. I feel like while maybe we are not winning this big war, we are still winning some important battles, and Miraflores is an example of that. By embracing the ancient technology of their ancestors, the people there still have water.
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The artist explains how he became an Instagram star by smashing vegetables, popping balloons – and nearly killing himself with a knife sculpture.
Maybe you know him as the balloon guy. Or the knife guy. Or the guy who bashes vegetables with his own clean-shaven head. If you’ve misspent any time stuck in the visual treacle that is Instagram Reels, chances are you’ve found him, this bald man with the cucumber glasses or the carrot visor, the gherkin halo, the corn-on-the-cob unicorn horn. Maybe you’ve been icked out, maybe entranced. Quite possibly you’ve laughed out loud, said a big “Sorry, what?”, but then you’ve watched it again and again and again.
Since 2017, Norwegian artist Jan Hakon Erichsen has carved out a distinct niche on socials with absurdist performance art videos. They’re almost always shot in a corner of his studio. They feature foodstuffs, confetti and all manner of other household items. And they’re set in motion by way of simple systems built with basic timber, pulleys, rope, hinges, pegs, hangers, hammers, and whatever appliances he has that can make something move (a drill, a fan, his own body).
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Mockery and indignation follow unveiling of sculpture of late monarch at Antrim Castle Gardens in Northern Ireland.
One critic said it made the late queen look like Mrs Doubtfire. Others faulted the shape of the face, the posture and the wellies. Some called it offensive and ridiculous and demanded it be melted down.
Mockery and indignation began within hours of the unveiling of the bronze statue of Queen Elizabeth II at Antrim Castle Gardens in Northern Ireland on Friday.
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The British-American artist has turned down gallery mogul Larry Gagosian, walked away from a deal with Mark Ronson – and earned a big fanbase for her uncanny, intimate work.
After a stint in the commercial music world and amid a prolific career as a highly celebrated painter, Issy Wood accidentally released her second album in July. “Four days before it was meant to be, just by not making the files private on SoundCloud,” she says over cigarettes in her spaciouseastLondonstudio, in the deadpan, semi-self-deprecating tone she’s become known for. Accidental American, named after Wood’s murky relationship with her citizenship, had no trace of a marketing campaign. “Been out for ages I just forgot to post to the grid”, she wrote on Instagram two months later.
“I do it all myself so it came out with like zero fanfare,” she says. “It was more just me wanting to not hold on to it any more.”
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Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, National Gallery, London
This daring, dazzling exhibition gives us a thrilling sense of the artist’s transfiguring genius, showing how he remade the world around him with beauty, hope and searing colour.
Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open the this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. “He has all the Arles women he wants,” wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to renew himself.
Why does this exhibition start with these two paintings, instead of the blossoming trees or golden fields he painted that spring? The answer lies in the portraits’ very lack of prosaic fact. Van Gogh is an artist we’re still catching up with. We all know his turbulent story – that less than a year after arriving in Arles, he would cut off his ear, and be narrowly saved from bleeding to death – but we’re not so clear what made his art so extraordinary. Wasn’t he just an especially intense observer of sunflowers?
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Kerr Robertson and Catherine Brownell on the structural defects in the training and fees of architects.
Oliver Wainwright’s article about the Grenfell Tower inquiry report was spot-on (‘Professional buck-passers’: why the excoriating Grenfell report was right to damn architects, 5 September). He could also have added that the Royal Institute of British Architects’ complacency on continuing professional development (CPD) has been another factor. On the point about architects being expected to learn about the technical aspects of their profession on the job, it does not only apply to students.
The RIBA advises clients that the main benefit of appointing its members (who are called chartered architects by virtue of being members and seen as a cut above the rest) is that they are subject to CPD.
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He was one of the boldest and most influential Māori architects, whose outfits were as eye-catching as his buildings. A new book captures his creations, from his own defiant home to a ‘healing’ correctional facility.
In the leafy Auckland suburb of Kohimarama, where pitch-roofed clapboard homes line well-kept streets, a striking grey ziggurat rises from the subtropical foliage. It looks like a defensive fortification, greeting the road with a monolithic, windowless facade. Narrow arrow-slit openings puncture the sides of its blank, blocky bulk, as if keeping a lookout for bands of marauding neighbours. “I know people hate my house,” wrote Rewi Thompson, the architect of this arresting home, which he built for his family in 1986. “I guess it’s too different from people’s idea of a house in Kohimarama, or too defensive or challenging, or pure cultural shock!”
Thompson, who lived here until his death in 2016, was one of the boldest, most influential Māori architects in Aotearoa, or New Zealand. Through building, drawing, writing and teaching, he pushed his conviction that architecture had the power to reinforce Māori cultural identity, and restore a sense of agency to a people forcibly estranged from their land. As a new generation of young urban Māori architects and students embrace their Indigenous tribal heritage as never before, Thompson’s work has been compiled in Rewi, a landmark book that provides a wealth of inspiration through his built and unbuilt projects, brought to life with a colourful collection of interviews with clients, colleagues and students.
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Deborah Gahan remembers a fire on the Isle of Man in 1973 and says the Grenfell Tower inquiry shows how little has changed.
Do you remember Summerland? I did, on 14 June 2017, when I saw the images of Grenfell Tower burning on the news. Summerland was a holiday complex on the Isle of Man that burned down on 2 August 1973, killing 50 people and seriously injuring a further 80.
It was designed as an all‑weather tourist attraction with a capacity of 10,000, but its walls were clad with combustible materials and the roof, made of Oroglas, an acrylic sheeting, was to melt in the heat on to those trapped below.
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Fifty drawings of displaced people will be exhibited in a London church, in collaboration with UN refugee agency.
Providing safe routes for asylum seekers should be the focus of the UK government if it is to stop small boat crossings, according to the artist Es Devlin, who is unveiling 50 portraits of refugees that she wants to challenge misconceptions.
Devlin, who is best known for her spectacular theatre and opera stage sets, decided to create her Congregation project in collaboration with the UN high commissioner for refugees after researching the plight of refugees across the world and of those attempting to get to Britain.
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He once said all his paintings were inspired by sex. What’s changed? As the former YBA’s new show opens, Hume talks about his many obsessions – from swans to mirrors to doors – and explains how he uses dreams to solve painting problems.
Gary Hume’s studio is overrun with swans. They don’t quite outnumber all the tins of Dulux gloss, his go-to paint, but it’s close. Avian necks and elegantly drooping heads, liquefying into abstraction and then curdling back into figuration, drift across the walls of his east London workplace. One charcoal drawing is echoed by a painting opposite, rendered in gloss and satinwood. Elsewhere, there are swan diptychs, Aubrey Beardsley-like affairs in black and white. Each has a horizontal line that bisects the swans, making them seem like winged Narcissuses gazing at their own reflections.
These are all destined for Hume’s new exhibition, Mirrors and Other Creatures, about to open at Sprüth Magers in London. While it’s true that there are paintings of other living things here – humanoid flowers and other natural forms – this place feels more like an aviary than a studio.
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Born in 1944, Horn’s surreal and witty work used birds, mechanics and masks to create ‘art machines’ and visual representations of sound.
Rebecca Horn, the German installation artist known for her surreal and sensual “art machines” incorporating musical instruments, bird feathers and mechanical engineering, has died aged 80, her foundation has confirmed.
According to the Moontower Foundation, Horn’s death was on Friday evening in Bad König, in her native western German Odenwald region.
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New exhibition, named after ‘theatrical encyclopedia’ Gabrielle Enthoven, showcases British stage history from the Restoration to Fleabag.
She was an avid collector of playbills, programmes and props who kickstarted the largest theatrical archive of the nation, now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Without Gabrielle Enthoven, we would not have theatre studies as a discipline today, according to Simon Sladen, the museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary theatre and performance.
Yet many will never have heard of Enthoven. That is about to change as the V&A has named a new exhibition in her honour, celebrating a century of the national archive, which is now protected by law.
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When does a quilt stop being craft and start being art? It’s a question full of sexist overtones, writes the novelist Tracy Chevalier, but there’s a Swedish ‘third way’ that changes everything.
The art versus craft debate is almost as old as the question: “What is art?” Boiled down to its gnarly, still disputable essence, art is created to make us think and feel, while craft is made to be used. A painting on a wall makes us ponder, whereas knitted scarves keep us warm, ceramic vases hold flowers upright and embroidered tablecloths cover tables.
Historically, art was made only by middle- and upper-class men. Outliers such as women, the working-class and minorities didn’t have the time or resources to learn to paint professionally. There were social as well as financial barriers: women weren’t allowed to study life drawing at the Royal Academy until the 1890s for fear they would see nudity. Craft, on the other hand, has always been available to more people because making something useful is valued in daily life, even if its price tag is far below that of a work of art.
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The Swedish artist’s new installation explores how the culture, motifs and cliches of Chinese restaurants reflect the evolving diaspora – and she’s made it a family affair.
For the artist Lap-See Lam, the Chinese restaurant abroad can be anything: a pragmatic business pursued for the sake of economic survival, a magic realist self-kitschified illusion, or a very real place where families gather, childhoods are made and memories are forged. Often it is all these things and more. Lam remembers growing up in her family’s restaurant, Bamboo Garden, in Stockholm.
“It was a typical Ming, Qing dynasty-inspired restaurant,” she says over a video call from her kitchen in Stockholm, sitting behind a large, yellow and blue vintage poster from an art exhibition. There was a jade-green pagoda, she says; textiles embroidered with koi fish patterning; decor made of porcelain. And also: “really comfortable sofas” she laughs. “That’s the best thing with the Chinese restaurant – it’s a family-friendly place, right? You can bring toddlers and they can roam around. Which we did.”
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This detailed biography complicates our perception of the bad boy of French art and illuminates his fraught friendship with Van Gogh.
Sue Prideaux begins her biography of Paul Gauguin with an account of his long-lost teeth. Four of them were discovered in the year 2000 in a well near the site of his last bamboo hut in French Polynesia. The artist had secreted them there in a jar, for whatever reason, and investigation by the Human Genome Project proved them to be his. It was thought that the teeth might also offer conclusive evidence for the popular belief that Gauguin had been “the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas”. But no trace of any treatments for the disease, arsenic or mercury, were discovered. “What other myths,” Prideaux asks, as she embarks on her reassessment of his life, “might we be holding on to?”
Prideaux is drawn to wild men as a writer; her previous biographies include award-winning lives of Edvard Munch and Friedrich Nietzsche. She has been helped in this project by the discovery in 2020 of a 213-page manuscript, Avant et après, handwritten by Gauguin during his last desperate two years in the Marquesas islands. It complicates the settled caricature of Gauguin as a sort of diehard libertine; instead, for example, detailing the importance of a string of legal battles he stubbornly fought on behalf of local Polynesian people in the French colonial courts.
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Big exhibition will reflect life and loves of artist, from his first professional print in 1904 to 1960s masterpieces.
The British Museum is putting on a major exhibition on Pablo Picasso, one of the finest graphic artists of the 20th century, it will announce on Monday.
About 100 prints will reflect the life and loves of the artist with an extraordinary vision, whose best-known masterpieces include Guernica, one of the most powerful anti-war paintings.
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The NGV’s first landscape architecture exhibition has invited eight visionaries to picture the future of different sites along Birrarung – the Yarra River.Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email
In half a century, should Melbourne’s golf courses be flooded and transformed into wetlands? Could the city’s freeways be replaced with public parks? Will underwater robotic drones have a part to play in ridding our waterways of invasive species?
These are some of the questions explored at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070, a thought-provoking, optimistic and occasionally uncomfortable exhibition that presents speculative visions for the Birrarung (Yarra River) from eight of Australia’s leading landscape architecture studios. These practices were invited by the NGV’s curators, in association with the Birrarung Council and with guidance from Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung elders, to imagine what various sites along the Birrarung might look like in 46 years. And the results are varied.
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Ahead of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, the veteran artist and mentor to Hirst, Lucas et al talks about his nomadic early years, halcyon days at Goldsmiths – and the moment he stopped being ‘frightened’ of colour.
In 1961, aged 20, Michael Craig-Martin enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture and immediately found himself all at sea.
“Back then,” he recalls, “abstract expressionism was still lingering and painting was painterly. The first thing I realised was that I was the only person on the course who really couldn’t do it. I was just not given to that kind of painting. I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s all over for me.’”
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Cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who was hired by actor to make her directorial debut, says biopic of photojournalist shows woman plunged ‘into heart of darkness’
Kate Winslet insisted that her new film, in which she plays the fearless photojournalist Lee Miller, must have a female director.
The Oscar-winning actor, who is the lead star and co-producer of Lee, released in cinemas this week, wanted to portray American Miller as “a truth-seeker and a truth-teller”. She felt that Miller brought a particular sensitivity when she reported on the battle of Saint-Malo in the second world war, field hospitals in Normandy and the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
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Open letter to culture secretary also proposes ‘freelancers’ commissioner’ to champion cause of the low-paid in creative industries.
More than 4,000 artists have called on the government to create a levy on smartphone sales to fund visual art in the face of cuts, studio closures and the rise of generative AI.
Creatives including Sir John Akomfrah, Britain’s representative at the Venice Biennale, and Dame Sonia Boyce, the first black woman elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as film director and photographer Sam Taylor-Johnson and Turner prize nominee Heather Phillipson have signed an open letter to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary.
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White Cube Mason’s Yard; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
Puzzling portraits mine the memory in Donna Huddleston’s stylised look at the 70s, while Liorah Tchiprout paints a cast of dolls inspired by women from Yiddish theatre.
Two new shows by London-based artists tell stories, or imply backstories, through the art of painting. Both feature the same group of characters. And as so often in today’s contemporary art, these characters are all women.
The Irish Australian artist Donna Huddleston is best known for her pale and etiolated drawings of posing figures, occasionally sinister, cool to the point of chilly. To describe them as flat or linear would be an understatement. Meticulous in their airy pastel hues, they are as diagrammatic as an architect’s blueprints.
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The Japanese actor turned photographer seeks an element of chance in her ethereal scenes from everyday life.
International interest in Japanese photography has tended to focus on male photographers; a new book featuring 25 Japanese women practitioners, I’m So Happy You Are Here, aims to redress that balance. The collection takes in the historyof Japanese women photographers with particular emphasis on those working from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Many of the early street-photography pioneers documented the postwar realities of Japan, particularly the ways that women’s bodies had been effectively colonised by the male gaze of American servicemen stationed in Tokyo and elsewhere. By the 1990s, when this picture was taken by Hara Mikiko, some of those concerns had evolved.
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now is published by Aperture.
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From interviews with Dusty Springfield and Agatha Christie to Jane Bown’s astounding pictures and, of course, Nigel Slater’s recipes… Some of our most loved writers, photographers, columnists and creatives share their stories of happy days on the mag.Celebrating 60 years of the Observer MagazineA gallery of a few of our favourite covers
I joined at the beginning, initially as a secretary/researcher. There were few magazines then, and little television, so there weren’t many outlets for advertising, and the colour magazines like us lapped it up. The money was coming out of our ears and what we were doing felt new and exciting.
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We take a look back at London fashion week though the lens of legendary photographer Chris Moore.
This September, the British Fashion Council continues its 40th anniversary celebrations, so we’ve taken the opportunity to revisit the last four decades at London fashion week through the lens of the original catwalk photographer, Chris Moore. As fashion week begins, Mr Moore, who turns 90 this year, won’t be squashed into the photographers’ pen at the end of the runway, but he will probably feel the twitch of his shutter finger as the season’s shows get under way. Covid was the natural opportunity for Moore to hang up his camera bag, though he still continued with some longstanding clients, including CSM degree shows, Simone Rocha and Christopher Kane, until last year. Moore will most likely be at home in Northumberland with his longtime partner, Maxine Millar (herself a photographer who has run the studio since they met in the late 80s), and their beloved cats, enjoying a long walk in the countryside.
Chris Moore in 2017, aged 83. Photograph by Hirokazu Ohara.
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It’s six decades since David Astor launched the first issue of the Observer Magazine. Here, we looks at its evolution.Observer Magazine writers share their memoriesA gallery of a few of our favourite covers
Radical, tolerant, enquiring, pro-consumer, lid-off, helpful. It’ll be no-holds-barred, without being noisy. It should have bite without malice. Wave-of-the-future type stuff, when possible. Whiff of scandal… Serious. Non-expert. Funny.”
In early 1964, this was future editor Michael Davie’s vision for the planned Observer Magazine. The project was a long-ruminated riposte to the Sunday Times, which had launched its “Colour Section” in February 1962 with an in-your-face graphic cover of Jean Shrimpton wearing Mary Quant, photographed by David Bailey: your early 1960s cool bingo card almost filled before you had even turned the first page. It was a revolutionary break with the postwar era of newsprint rationing, when papers ran only two or three pictures a week.
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Painter’s Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, bought by Leighton House Museum in June, will star in November exhibition.
He was the most distinguished artist of the late 19th century – a grandee who entertained Queen Victoria at his home in Holland Park and was president of the Royal Academy for nearly two decades.
Frederic Leighton was feted for his portraits of women, especially his stunning Flaming June, currently the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Royal Academy. But he actually preferred painting landscapes and very occasional seascapes, one of which, Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, he adored.
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The photographer co-opted hair artist Afro Ele to find the perfect rip curl.
Last year, visual artist Fede Kortez travelled to the west of Ghana to direct a documentary on surfers. His base was Busua Beach, well known for attracting the worldwide surfing community to its swells. Kortez took a day out of the documentary schedule for the shoot, the idea for which he had been ruminating on for more than a year.
“I wanted to take some boys with their boards and style them up with vibrant hairstyles and cool accessories, with the beach in the background,” he says.
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Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark star in a creepy new folk horror, and there’s an exhibition of iconoclastic works by the king of pop art.
Starve Acre
Out now
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark play a couple beset by grief in this powerful adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s dark folk-horror novel. Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo, it’s an unsettling trip into earthy, supernatural superstitions, set in rural 1970s Yorkshire.
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Portsmouth-born, working class artist was known for collaborations with David Bowie and the Clash.
Derek Boshier, known for his collaborations with the likes of David Bowie and the Clash, has died at the age of 87.
The Portsmouth-born artist was known as one of the pioneers of British pop art, and took pride and inspiration from his working-class roots.
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Master sculptor and stone carver who created grottoes, public memorials and ecclesiastial work in the UK and the US.
A 1983 poster for the Victoria and Albert Museum shows a letter cutter with corduroy trousers, braces and a shapeless hat standing at the base of an inscription cut into the terracotta wall announcing in flaming gilded capitals its opening as the Henry Cole Wing, now sadly obscured by the new entrance paving. The artist appearing in the photograph was Simon Verity, who has died aged 79, whose later career in the US left much more visible traces, including the array of prophets carved on the west portal of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York.
A master sculptor and stone carver, in the UK he created grottoes, churchyard memorials for a range of 20th-century figures (including John Betjeman) and English ecclesiastical work.
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Hannah Perry takes a spectacular approach, John Stezaker offers reality-bending works and classicist André Derain designs for theatre – all in your weekly dispatch.
Hannah Perry: Manual Labour A spectacular multimedia approach goes with introspective themes as Perry explores motherhood, class and gender.
• Baltic, Gateshead, until 16 March.
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Centre Pompidou, Paris
From Ernst to Dalí, from Maar to De Chirico, this is a dazzling riot of creativity, celebrating the artistic potential of the unconscious – and shoes.
Poignancy is not a word we associate with surrealism, but you feel it when you walk down a corridor of blown-up photobooth pictures and enter the Pompidou’s blockbuster marking the movement’s 100th birthday. Everybody was so young when the first surrealist manifesto was published in October 1924: was it really a century ago? Painter Yves Tanguy sports a punk hairstyle as he grimaces for the automatic camera; Marie-Berthe Aurenche, another painter, whips her hair up into chaos; Salvador Dalí closes his eyes as if asleep.
These people are funny and having fun. Of all the modernist art movements, it was the surrealists who were best at enjoying their revolution. In the Pompidou’s perfectly judged exhibition, that pleasure shines through as you meet these artists, all dead now, not so much as giants of art history as extremely amusing companions.
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The ultimate responsibility for the tower’s safety lay with its architect, said the 1,700-page report, which highlighted a ‘widespread failure among the profession’. Why are so many architects now utterly detached from the realities of construction?
Lying manufacturers, incompetent inspectors, muddled regulations, contemptuous landlords – the blame for the Grenfell Tower fire has been hurled in all directions, exposing a housing and construction industry that is rotten at every level. But, after seven years of waiting, yesterday’s inquiry report makes it very clear that there was one professional actor that bore the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of what was designed and built: the architect.
In the excoriating 1,700-page document, the architecture practice Studio E, which led the tower’s 2015 refurbishment, is picked out for numerous “significant” failings, from its lack of knowledge of the building regulations, to its reliance on subcontractors, to fundamental errors in the design of the new cladding, which had “catastrophic consequences”. The combination of combustible aluminium composite panels, used with equally combustible foam insulation, and a lack of proper fire barriers in the facade, was the equivalent of wrapping the tower in firelighters, leading to the avoidable deaths of 72 people. Studio E, the report concludes, bears “a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster” – some of the most damning language used for any party involved.
Architects have long complained of the erosion of their status, seeing their role at the top of the tree relentlessly undermined and usurped by specialist subconsultants. There are now separate experts for every part of the design process, from environmental performance to facade design, people flow to drainage, leaving the architect as an increasingly ineffectual middleman, supposedly presiding over these multiple specialisms while having little technical knowledge of any of them.
The role of professional buck-passer is made all too clear in the Grenfell report. It lays out how technical queries from the cladding subcontractor, Harley Facades, about such crucial details as cavity barriers – which prevent smoke and fire from spreading through the gaps in walls and ceilings – were simply passed on to the fire consultants, Exova, “without [the architect] becoming directly involved”.
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The award-winning artist is reinventing the way landscapes are depicted in art – not least by pointing out that human bodies are made of the same stuff.
Teresita Fernández is a landscape artist – but these are not landscapes as we know them. Rather than a spot on a map, her understanding of the term extends from the depths of the Earth to the cosmos, and from the cellular to the psychological. Her vast mosaic panel sculptures and wall reliefs of cartographies evoke galaxies, weather systems, oceans, and archipelagos, which appear to be continually in flux. “I think of landscape as being very expansive,” says Fernández, 56, who was born in Miami to Cuban exiles who had fled the 1959 revolution, and is now based in New York. “I’m drawing parallels between the movements of the sea and the cosmos, a flow that is also replicated in our bodies’ circulatory system.”
While Fernández’s work encompasses installation and film, she regards her practice as largely sculptural. Her vertiginous landscapes lure the viewer in with their magnificent colours and textures, composed of natural materials such as charcoal, gold, wood, clay and copper, but the lush surfaces often hint at hidden traumas relating to colonialism and other atrocities. There’s a widespread assumption, she says, that landscape is something passive, pleasurable or constructed, which allows her surreptitiously to “tuck” sociopolitical commentary into her work, creating what she calls “stacked landscapes” that are layered with multiple, often invisible histories.
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Pieces from sculptures to costumes are donated to Bahia after being in US and Canada’s museums for 30 years.
Amid a global movement to return artworks to their countries of origin, about 750 pieces by predominantly Black Brazilian artists are coming home after being exhibited in museums across the United States and Canada.
The sculptures, paintings, prints, religious objects, festival costumes, toys and poetry booklets have been outside Brazil for more than 30 years and are now being donated to a museum in the country’s Blackest state, Bahia.
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‘I followed the hunt from a distance with my knee on the steering wheel – focusing manually while trying not to hit an anthill or go down a warthog burrow’
My wife Angie and I have spent much of our careers as photographers focusing on big cats in the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, but when each of us won Wildlife Photographer of the Year it was with pictures of different species. Angie’s winner was of elephants looking at a heron. Mine was this, which was taken in 1987, before Angie and I met. Having lived for over a decade in Africa, and published books about lions and leopards, I’d travelled down to the Serengeti to work on one about the great migration, keen to see what the wildebeest do during the wet season. While there, I realised there was also a story to be told about the wild dogs that make dens on the southern plains at that time, when food is most plentiful, as they’re raising their puppies.
It took me six years to get all the pictures I needed for my book The Leopard’s Tale – they are extremely difficult animals to photograph. So I loved the contrast of switching to the most social carnivore and pack-hunting of animals. I’d got permission to live in my car for weeks, even months, at a time – which meant I could follow the wild dogs without having to travel back and forth. I was at the den 24/7.
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The right smell can send us back to our childhood – or much further. Scent designer Tasha Marks reveals the tricks of her trade.
Should you wish to know what the cesspit of a Norman fortress smelled like, Tasha Marks has ventured there. Go to Rochester Castle, descend the dank steps and put your nose to the smell chamber. What rich delights await? It’s not just the stink of human excrement and urine. “We know that there was food waste in there,” says Marks. And animal waste. Marks says she is never sure what to describe herself as, but “scent designer, historian and artist” comes close. Where a perfumer blends alluring scents for the body, Marks creates custom-made odours for spaces – usually museums, galleries and historic buildings.
“I work closely with the curators around developing a smell,” she says. “They send me lots of information – it doesn’t have to be smell-related. I just want to know everything about it and begin to imagine what it might smell like.” From there, Marks works with chemists and perfumers, who help her blend aromas, and with fragrance libraries that have all manner of scents – including the worst. “There’s otter poo, dragon poo … there’s one just called ‘poo’.” It isn’t about authentically recreating a smell, she says of her evocative work: “It’s about storytelling.”
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Written by members of the Gay Liberation Front in 1972, A Gay Song is a joyously defiant rallying cry. Artist Ian Giles explains why he persuaded its unruly creators to
return to the studio.
‘There is a little bit of gay in everyone today,” sing Michael Klein and Gillian Bartlam, the lead singers of Everyone Involved, a collective of musicians formed by Klein and the UK Gay Liberation Front (GLF) activist Alan Wakeman. “Gay is natural, gay is good, gay is wonderful,” the song continues. “Gay people should all come together, and fight for our rights!”
The aptly titled A Gay Song is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ protest song to have been recorded on vinyl. It was written by Klein and Wakeman, then recorded in London in 1972, with backing vocals from GLF members – only five years after the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales.
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The New York multimedia luminary celebrates five decades of groundbreaking work in a new retrospective exhibit.
Multimedia artist Futura 2000’s new career retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been decades in the making – and has only come about due to years of intense perseverance. While Futura has reached the heights of his chosen medium, now boasting high-level collaborations with the likes of Virgil Abloh, Uniqlo and Nike, he spent years struggling to break into the art world and build a name for himself. His exhibition, Breaking Out, represents a new milestone and an achievement of validation from the New York art world that has long proved elusive to him.
The artist first began creating work in the early 1970s as a part of the graffiti scene that was flourishing in his home borough of Brooklyn. From the beginning, Futura’s work stood out for its abstraction and sci-fi themes, which the artist has credited to the black and white TV shows and B-movies that he watched as a child and young adult in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey was a major touchstone that got the artist thinking about space and the future, and he also found inspiration in 1979’s franchise-starter Alien, particularly in how the alien’s form influenced his own cast of characters.
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The six-bedroom Wave House in Malibu was designed by Harry Gesner, whose son says it inspired Jørn Utzon’s Sydney landmark.Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email
An iconic California beach house thought to have inspired Jørn Utzon’s design for the Sydney Opera House has sold for US$20m less than its original asking price.
Malibu’s Wave House, designed by the American architect Harry Gesner in the late 1950s, was bought by the former Victoria’s Secret model Karlie Kloss and her venture capitalist husband, Joshua Kusher, founder of Thrive Capital, for US$29.5m last week.
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