The Aotearoa New Zealand-born engineer-turned artist has created an art park of usable, social sculptures in the gallery\u2019s underground Tank space, including a barbecue, playground and sauna<\/p>
Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ul> It\u2019s 4pm on a Thursday and I\u2019m in a sauna underground at the Art Gallery of NSW, the hot, cedarwood-scented air a sharp contrast to the cool concrete cavern I\u2019ve just stepped in from. Inside the gallery\u2019s subterranean Tank \u2013 a 2,200 sq metre chamber that was once a second world war oil reservoir \u2013 Sydney-based artist Mike Hewson has repurposed a 1980s shed, gutting its faux-wood veneer and replacing it with western red cedar, from which he\u2019s also created ornate church-style pews for seating. The windows are now stained glass; the floor and ceiling are lined with travertine tiles left over from one of the gallery\u2019s older wings.<\/p> Clearly, this is no ordinary sauna. It\u2019s one of several surprising sculptural works in Hewson\u2019s playful exhibition The Key\u2019s Under the Mat, opening this weekend. There are also change rooms, a steam room, barbecue, sound recording studio, laundromat and playground \u2013 all fully functional. You can borrow towels, shorts, slides and T-shirts for free, or bring your own swimsuit (no bikinis).<\/p> Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning<\/a><\/strong><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Britain\u2019s favourite contrarian duo depict the past 25 years, ancient Egypt showcases its incredible artists and the great performance artist stages skeleton orgies \u2013 all in your weekly dispatch<\/a><\/p> Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures<\/strong> The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Who knew there were famous artists in ancient Egypt with unique styles, depicting what they saw and felt? Well, most of the time there weren\u2019t, although this exhibition does introduce you to one. From the Old Kingdom to the time of Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptians expected very much the same things of their artists, in a style that barely changed. An extraordinary limestone stela, or engraved slab, that was lent to the Fitzwilliam by the Louvre shows how young Egyptian artists were taught to see in the \u201ccorrect\u201d way, to make nature conform to the official style. A square grid demonstrates how to calculate proportions to render, for instance, a cat in a perfectly still profile, like a little feline god, an abstraction that was to be repeated for millennia.<\/p> Yet Made in Ancient Egypt strives to take you beyond the sublime formal facade to glimpse the artists or, as it calls them more cautiously, \u201cmakers\u201d behind the golden coffin portraits and pharaohs\u2019 statues. \u201cWho built the seven gates of Thebes?\u201d asked Bertolt Brecht in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here they are, the metalworkers, woodworkers, weavers. In a wooden model made about 4,000 years ago, female workers seated on the ground weave on a loom while others stand spinning thread. You can see a fine example of such women\u2019s handiwork, a white dress made 4,500 years ago. It hangs up, spooky as hell.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Withypool, Somerset:<\/strong> This is a landscape where things can lie hidden \u2013 not least a bronze-age structure that is more trip hazard than landmark<\/p> Seen from the barrow at the top of Withypool Hill, the common stretches away south like a lion\u2019s back, tawny grass glinting as the land dips and then rises to the open\u00a0skyline. Apart from a bridle path worn through like a rubbed seam, and a distant, narrow thread\u00a0of road, the ground appears empty. But it\u2019s not \u2013 we\u2019re only a few hundred metres from a bronze\u2011age stone circle.<\/p> Forget the mighty 4-metre-tall megaliths of Stonehenge, this modest, ground-hugging construction could almost be mistaken for a series of natural stony outcrops. The 29 miniliths are less than knee-high, set earthfast among wiry mats of heather and whortleberry, more trip hazard than landmark. Absent from early maps, the monument wasn\u2019t rediscovered until 1898, when a rider, led astray in the mist, stumbled over one of the markers.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Artist\u2019s installation looks into two 1970 shootings that symbolise cultural divides that still shape US politics<\/p> The Kent State shootings \u2013 when four college students were shot dead by the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest in May 1970 \u2013 is seen as a seminal moment in modern US history. The iconic photograph of a young woman screaming as she kneels over the body of a peer came to symbolise the political and cultural divides that still shape US politics<\/a>, while the event was immortalised in the song Ohio by Neil Young.<\/p> But just 10 days after Kent State, another campus shooting \u2013 this time of two black students by the police at Jackson State<\/a> \u2013 went relatively unnoticed. It\u2019s a juxtaposition the artist Naeem Mohaiemen brings to bear in his new film installation, Through a Mirror Darkly, at London\u2019s Albany House.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Squad confiscates works from Parma exhibition after consulting Gala-Salvador Dal\u00ed Foundation in Catalonia<\/p> Italy\u2019s art squad on Tuesday seized 21 artworks from a major exhibition in Parma dedicated to works by Salvador Dal\u00ed on suspicion they were falsely attributed to the Spanish surrealist.<\/p> The show, entitled Dal\u00ed, Between Art and Myth, had only been open for a few days at Palazzo Tarasconi<\/a> before police confiscated the allegedly forged works, including drawings, tapestries and engravings.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> A fearless war photographer, a peerless surrealist, a chronicler of Egypt and Syria \u2026 a new exhibition at Tate Britain explores how Lee Miller became one of the most urgent voices of 20th-century art<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> From Colin Firth\u2019s wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice to Meryl Streep\u2019s safari gear in Out of Africa, Cosprop\u2019s outfits achieved cinematic realism<\/p> When the costume designer John Bright founded the period costume house Cosprop in 1965, it was out of a desire to give the clothes seen in film and TV \u201ca greater realism\u201d than viewers had been used to previously. \u201cI decided that if we made the stock as real as possible, it would be universal,\u201d Bright says. \u201cThe truth is the truth for all times.\u201d<\/p> Over the intervening 60 years, that relatively simple mission led to the creation of some of the most notable costumes of all time: the Regency-era shirt that, once wet, turned Colin Firth into an instant heart-throb in 1995\u2019s Pride and Prejudice; the safari gear worn by Meryl Streep in 1985\u2019s Out of Africa, which ended up inspiring countless high-fashion runways; Johnny Depp\u2019s dishevelled 1720s Pirates of the Caribbean suit, so artfully soiled that you can practically smell it through the screen.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> This year\u2019s Turner prize contenders, a colourist\u2019s triumphs and immersive gaming in the gallery \u2013 all in your weekly dispatch<\/a><\/p> Turner <\/strong>prize The Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist\u2019s monumental installation, featuring a family tree stretching 65,000 years and a memorial to Indigenous deaths in custody, opens in his home state after making history overseas<\/p> WARNING:<\/strong> Contains distressing and offensive content<\/strong><\/p> In a darkened room, I squint to read the blurred typeface of a newspaper article that makes my stomach lurch.<\/p> It tells of a station owner who set a trap for a group of Aboriginal people by filling a cannon with powder and broken bottles and leaving it near a bullock carcass.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> A vibrant period for art in the city is celebrated in a new exhibition that goes from the rise of celebrity to hyper-capitalism to the devastation of Aids<\/p> With Downtown\/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, gallery L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan aims to make the case for the 1980s as a vital \u2013 and currently relevant \u2013 decade of artistic output. The blockbuster show has brought together a who\u2019s who of 80s art, with major pieces from Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, and many others.<\/p> The goal for Downtown\/Uptown is quite simple: to showcase the decade\u2019s best art for new generations. \u201cI was thinking about what art was pivotal to the moment,\u201d said Brett Gorvy, show co-curator. \u201cAnd also what over time has become pivotal. We\u2019ve been lucky to be able to access the greatest paintings of so many of these artists.\u201d<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> The Brown Collection, London You will find The Brown Collection in a Marylebone mews not far from the Wallace Collection. With its name and location, painter Glenn Brown cheekily suggests that this personal museum of the art he collects, plus his own creations, is on a par with London\u2019s famous gallery of rococo paintings and ancien regime clocks. The joke works best on your phone map where you can see how close they are.<\/p> The current exhibition Hoi Polloi is curated by Brown and supposedly looks at representations of \u201cthe ordinary man\u201d in art. It\u2019s a satirical nudge at claims to social worthiness by public galleries for there is zero purpose or theme here, just a mixing and merging of the curious and eclectic in fascinating juxtapositions over four floors of a luxuriously restored building that even has a gothic cellar reminiscent of the one in the Sir John Soane\u2019s Museum. Here you can be spooked by one of Gillian Wearing\u2019s lifelike masks.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Exhibition featuring fragile and rarely seen watercolours explores artist\u2019s jaunts in and around Avon Gorge<\/p> He was so keen on clambering around the craggy cliffs of the Avon Gorge as a teenager that he was nicknamed \u201cprince of the rocks\u201d.<\/p> An exhibition featuring rarely seen JMW Turner watercolours inspired by his nimble explorations of the gorge is opening at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. They are so fragile that they are rarely brought out of careful storage and may not be seen again for a while.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Every two weeks, a language is lost \u2013 and by the end of the century, half of the world\u2019s 7,000 tongues could have vanished. We meet the artist using eyeliner and chokeberries to rescue everything from Ogham to Arablish<\/p> In his studio, Sam Winston appears less artist, more linguistic alchemist. He is experimenting with manufacturing inks out of tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes, the juice of Belarusian chokeberries imported in a 100g packet small enough to make it past customs and a strange brew of kohl eyeliner from the Middle East and galena \u2013 the mineral form of lead sulfide \u2013 from Wales.<\/p> The coloured substances are used to conjure words on to giant canvas flags that will soon hang from the ceiling of London\u2019s Barbican Centre \u2013 connecting a group of poets\u2019 native languages with materials from their native landscapes. The quintet speak marginal or at-risk languages covering five continents, and their newly commissioned poems all speak to their sense of home.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Sainsbury Centre, Norwich Collaborating with a fragrance company, the Sainsbury Centre has developed a scent designed to calm and induce a mood of peace. You can sample it in a \u201cmulti-sensory reflective space\u201d created to display a Monet landscape lent by the National Gallery, one part of a constellation of exhibitions and events centred around the question: Can We Stop Killing Each Other? But by this point the only question I was asking is, why did I fall for it and make the trip to this glass house on the University of East Anglia campus?<\/p> Jago Cooper, its director, is full of bright ideas. He\u2019s set out to inject energy into the home of the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection with such wheezes as declaring all its artworks to be \u201calive\u201d \u2013 and staging shows around Big Questions of Our Time. Maybe this particular question is too big, but I think if it had been broken down and some logical clarity applied there might have been something to say \u2013 instead of saying nothing, which is what this windy absence does.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> He is arguably America\u2019s greatest living painter, elevating everyday black life to the level of epic, jaw-dropping masterpieces. Now, for his biggest European show, the artist talks us through his disturbing new works<\/p> <\/p> History weighs on Kerry James Marshall, though not all that heavily. When he talks about the hefty subjects of his art \u2013 from slavery to civil rights \u2013 he does so with a disarming, disquieting lightness. Maybe that\u2019s because at almost 70 years old, and at the peak of his popularity, he\u2019s seen it all.<\/p> Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few blocks away from where the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a white supremacist attack that killed four young black girls, took place in 1963. When his family moved to Los Angeles, they ended up right in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day uprising fuelled by growing racial tension in the poorest part of the city.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Documents include letters calling for recovery of bodies and a falsified safety log that was part of a cover-up<\/p> Poignant records relating to a colliery disaster in the 1930s that lay unseen for decades at the National Archives<\/a> are being put on display close to the site of the mine in north Wales.<\/p> Among the documents at the west London archive are petitions and emotional letters calling for the bodies trapped in the underground explosion at the pit in Gresford to be recovered. Despite the heartfelt entreaties, the vast majority remain there.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Readers respond to Jonathan Jones\u2019s view that the chain of galleries is losing its identity as more dynamic rivals flourish<\/p> The analysis by Jonathan Jones of what\u2019s gone wrong at Tate was spot-on (Shrinking audiences, a cash crisis and rivals on the rise: what\u2019s gone wrong at Tate?, 12 September<\/a>). All the truly memorable exhibitions we have seen this year were in the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, the Wallace Collection and the Royal Academy. Frankly, the Tates have not had a single show that excited us since Peter Doig (2008), Lynette Yiadom\u2011Boakye (2020), Frida Kahlo (2005), and Richard Deacon and El\u00a0Anatsui in 2016.<\/p> The universally loved, wondrous art of painting is eschewed in favour of performance nonsense, boring videos and hideous installations. Kerry James Marshall unveils a triumphant vision of Black America, the executed queen of style gets her own show, and Hitchcock puts the knife in \u2013 all in your weekly dispatch<\/a><\/p> Kerry James Marshall: The Histories<\/a> Michael Werner Gallery, London Jean Rhys was a perpetual outsider. Born Welsh and Creole into largely black Dominican society in 1890, she was out of place everywhere \u2013 too foreign for Europe, too Caribbean for Britain, too white for Dominica, and much too female to be taken seriously as a writer for most of her lifetime.<\/p> But her literary influence continues to grow and resonate, especially with American critic and curator Hilton Als<\/a>. His group show is a heady, passionate, experimental love letter to Jean Rhys \u2013 to her literature, her in-betweenness, her life of unbound creativity in a postcolonial world \u2013 in the vein of his previous exhibitions-as-portraits of Joan Didion<\/a> and James Baldwin<\/a>.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n
\n The couple who have made art together since the 1960s depict life in 21st-century Britain, as they see it.
\n \u2022 Hayward Gallery, London, from 7 October until 11 January<\/a><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
<\/strong>Revealing tantalising new details about the real lives of artists and craftspeople, this show takes you beyond the death mythology and into the realm of magic<\/p>
<\/strong>Nnena Kalu, Rene Mati\u0107, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa strut their stuff and compete for the now time-hallowed contemporary art award.
\n \u2022 Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, from 27 September until 22 February<\/a><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
<\/strong>This gloriously eccentric personal museum by painter and former Turner nominee Glenn Brown is a mesmerising delight as it cheekily imitates the nearby Wallace Collection<\/p>
<\/strong>This exhibition asks whether art can diminish the human capacity for violence \u2013 but you might want to throttle someone after seeing this nonsense<\/p>
Ann Eastman<\/strong>
London<\/em><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
<\/strong>America\u2019s superstar painter shows his carnivalesque pictures which make Black people the triumphant heroes of art history.
\n \u2022 Royal Academy, London<\/a>, 20 September until 18 January<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
<\/strong>Artists as varied as Sarah Lucas, Gwen John and Georg Baselitz are called upon by critic-curator Hilton Als to chime with the writer of Wide Sargasso Sea<\/p>