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      ‘Every single work is a masterpiece’: the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the greatest Flemish drawings

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 08:00

    A new show brings together historic sketches from Bruegel to Rubens and more, capturing fleeting snapshots of everyday 16th- and 17th-century life

    The women gather in a circle, talking intensely and unselfconsciously, their attention passing from one animated face to another as the conversation darts around the group. They seem completely unaware, from a window above the courtyard where they’re chatting, the artist Jacques Jordaens is sketching them in quick red chalk and brown ink.

    It is 1659, Antwerp, and, according to Jordaens’ scribbled note at the bottom of the paper, these so-called “gossip aunts” are discussing local political “disturbances” – perhaps the recent strike of the painters’ guild. “It’s a snapshot of daily life that you don’t usually see,” says An Van Camp, the curator of Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

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      Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 05:00 · 1 minute

    In the past nine years, the musician and artist has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a shocking, deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning

    Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland , who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave , came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

    Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs ( Into My Arms , Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree , Ghosteen and Carnage . He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage ), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files ), screenwriter ( The Proposition ) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

    ‘These losses are incorporated into the artistic flow’ … Cave’s sculptures go through the glazing process. Photograph: courtesy of Liv & Dom

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      Molten magnificence: how Richard Serra’s giant steel sculptures bent time and space

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 17:39 · 1 minute

    The American’s mighty masterpieces – straight, curved or set at thrilling angles – sucked everyone nearby into their mysterious gravity. Our critic pays tribute to art’s legendary man of steel

    What could seem more out of step or more timeless than Richard Serra’s work – with its obdurate metal blocks and curving steel walls that can feel as threatening as the side of a ship that curls above you as you flounder beneath? Serra’s sculptures are about as precarious as Stonehenge: they might last for centuries or even millennia – or fall and crush you to death in an instant. It is as if they were oblivious to human scale and the length of a human life. But without us, they are just ruins, remnants of overarching ambition. Most of them would survive our ending but there would be no one to witness them. There’s the paradox. Serra’s mighty works are nothing without us.

    Le Corbusier’s architecture and early Morandi still lifes , Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of vacant city squares and Giacometti ’s figures standing still and walking; Georges Seurat’s conte crayon gradations and elegant atomised forms whose edges seem about to dissolve – they are all somewhere in Serra’s formation, created in a career that lasted more than 60 years. In many ways, he was a very European American artist. Serra, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, was a daunting, fascinating artist. He made me think differently about space and sculpture – and about looking. Serra can make us feel physically and psychologically vulnerable, even though scaring us was never part of the point. Beyond all the analysis and critique, Serra’s sculpture is just there , like a rock or a cathedral.

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      ‘Obnoxious’: sculptures and installations that have divided opinion

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 16:46

    Statues in St Pancras station and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea endure despite opposition from public

    It was described by one council planner as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted and has attracted so much controversy that no artist has admitted to making it.

    But the faceless sculpture of Prince Philip outside a Cambridge office block that is to be taken down years after it appeared is not alone as a work of divisive public art.

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      Amid air raids and electricity shortages, a Ukrainian artist paints the Russian invasion

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:00

    For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone

    To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.

    Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of the country on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”

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      Rare show of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s work opens in Paris

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 09:39


    Exhibition features more than 120 sculptures by Romanian who revolutionised the art form

    A rare retrospective of Constantin Brâncuși, who revolutionised sculpture in the early 20th century but whose works can be extremely tricky to transport, opens in Paris on Wednesday.

    Born in Romania in 1876, Brâncuși arrived in Paris at the age of 28 and soon after joined the workshop of another historic sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

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      Richard Serra, uncompromising American abstract sculptor, dies aged 85

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 01:09


    The Californian artist, who died of pneumonia, was known and eventually loved for his massive rusting steel structures now housed in museums around the world

    Richard Serra, the American artist known for bending the boundaries of sculpture, has died at the age of 85.

    Serra died at home on Tuesday at his home in New York. The cause of death was pneumonia, his lawyer John Silberman confirmed to the New York Times.

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      ‘Dalí’s were unfilmable’: the astonishing story of Hitchcock’s lost storyboards – found in a bric-a-brac sale

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 17:10 · 1 minute

    Five decades ago, a fan picked up a set of the director’s meticulous storyboards for just $50 – including the lost Spellbound dream sequence by Salvador Dalí in which Ingrid Bergman turns into ants

    It is Los Angeles in the early 1970s and the critic John Russell Taylor is driving around the San Fernando Valley, checking out the goods on offer at various yard sales. It’s usual for locals to put their bric-a-brac out on their lawns, hoping to raise some cash. What’s less usual, however, is the bounty that Taylor spots in one yard: a series of storyboard panels from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, a thriller about a psychoanalyst starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.

    Taylor recognises them straight away. He is a Hitchcock scholar, who will go on to write the director’s authorised biography . On closer inspection, he notices something else: that one of the panels depicts the film’s famous dream sequence, and seems to have been drawn by a different artist to the others; a world-renowned surrealist who was hired when the sequence was first conceived as a 20-minute showstopper rather than the three-minute segment it ultimately became. Among the stack of nine storyboard drawings Taylor purchased that day, he walked away with one that was most likely drawn by Salvador Dalí himself.

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      ‘Harkens back to the Aids quilt’: using art as protest for the trans community

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 16:18 · 1 minute

    With an increase in US anti-trans legislation, this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility will see impactful art and a drive to validate a powerful community

    Since its inception in 2009, Transgender Day of Visibility – which occurs every year on 31 March – has been a focus point for greater awareness of the challenges faced by transgender people in the United States, as well as a celebration of the community’s strength and diversity. In 2015, for instance, a selfie campaign via social media caught on massively, drawing in trans celebrities and leading to heightened awareness and understanding of trans people. In 2021, it reached a milestone, as Joe Biden became the first US president to formally recognize the day.

    This year, Transgender Day of Visibility falls amid a widespread campaign against the rights of transgender people – with nearly 500 anti-trans bills advanced in 2024 alone, following up on hundreds more bills in previous years, trans people in America now find themselves with restricted access to things like medically necessary healthcare, the ability to participate in sports, the use of crisis shelters, bathrooms, and other essential facilities, and even the right to have proper identification. These actions have led to internal refugees throughout America, with trans people fleeing hostile states for safer ones.

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