Art News & Articles

The 2020 Virtual National Arts Festival reached its conclusion with the announcement of the winners of this year's Standard Bank Ovation Awards. Livestreamed to Facebook, the Standard 2020 Ovation Awards ceremony was attended by fans and followers of the arts as the 45 winners of the Standard Bank Ovation award were honoured and overall winners of the Bronze, Silver and Gold were announced. In celebration of the winners, 2020 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz Sisonke Xonti and 2013 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz Shane Cooper performed during the show. A panel of adjudicators spent countless hours reviewing work to find those productions that fully embraced performance for digital audiences and told stories that resonated with our current times and hopes for the future. They awarded 45 productions with the Standard Bank Ovation recognition, a badge that is placed on the show page as a marker to audiences, but ten shows, in particular, stood out and were awarded Gold, Silver a...

The Artscape Theatre's 2020 edition of the Women's Humanity Arts Festival, consisting of a series of live and pre-recorded online events, will be held online between 9 and 31 August. Funded by the City of Cape Town, this virtual festival will have a full programme of dance and theatre performances, panel discussions and podcasts. Even the Women’s Humanity Walk organised by Woman Zone, which each year sees thousands of participants take to the streets from an iconic building and walking in unity to the Artscape piazza, will be a special virtual edition this year. It will take viewers on a complete tour of Cape Town’s city sites that relate particularly to women, past and present. All the shows and performances will be accessible via the Artscape website:  www.artscape.co.za Under the theme, ‘Freedom and Inclusivity for All Humanity’, this year’s festival will shine a spotlight firmly on South Africa’s continuing epidemic of gender-based violence. “Women are judged on what they w...

Click below link to view video on Pointillism style paintings by artist Ganesh Kelagina Beedu Shenoy

Click below picture / Link to view video "Light of the World" - 50 paintings of Lord Jesus Christ by various artists

Missing greenery and nature? Run to the Albert-Kahn museum and discover its exceptional garden to enjoy a wonderful change of scenery. On weekends, you can enjoy this wonderful invitation to travel to the heart of nature. We missed beautiful places and we are happy to be reunited with them. In Île-de-France, since lockdown has been lifted, forests and woods have become the place to be before parks and gardens reopen. Throughout the region, one loves to rediscover the most beautiful green places for bucolic reunions. By  Boulogne-Billancourt , a wonderful site has reopened: the  Musée départemental Albert-Kahn . It features idyllic garden, as well as a museum housing some of the famous “Archives de la Planète” [Planet’s Archives] collections created by philanthropist  Albert Kahn  including pictures and shots from the world between 1909 and 1931. Missing greenery and nature? Run to the Albert-Kahn museum and discover its exceptional garden to enjoy a wonderful change ...

Paris Musée National Picasso and Musée Rodin team up and offer an exceptional double-exhibition about Picasso and Rodin. From February 9 to July 18, 2021 discover two exhibitions on the bonds between the two artists in their own Parisian museums. A great first you do not want to miss! Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin: two artists, two big names in the art world. The Musée Rodin and the Musée national Picasso team up and present the “Picasso - Rodin, une exposition, deux lieux” [Picasso-Rodin, one exhibition, two locations]. This double event is set at the same time, from February 9 to July 18, 2021, in both museums. This is going to be a great meeting in the galleries of the Musée Rodin. Picasso and Rodin face one another and answer one another through their works. In this mix of paintings and sculptures, we discover a rather unexpected dialog, a resonance and an unexpected proximity. Both exhibitions complete one another, each focusing on a different art aspect of both men. At the Musé...

Click below links to view advertisements and apply directly : Director of Community Engagement - Open Art Alliance, US Fine Arts Sales Consultant -  Chihuly Studio, US Executive Director - Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir  Director of Photography/Cinematographer - Bolt Entertainment | Atlanta Video Production Services Company, Texas US Creative Producer - Micro, US Creativity Director - AXLR DATA PVT LTDHyderabad, Telangana, India Creativity Art Director - Orangemedia.meThrissur, Kerala, India Visual Designer - AmazonBengaluru, Karnataka, India Creative Designer - Oodio StudioBengaluru, Karnataka, India Senior Art Director - A.P. Moller - MaerskBengaluru, Karnataka, India Illustration Artist - Rioconn Interactive Pvt. LtdAhmadabad, Gujarat, India Art & Design Teachers - Nutan EnterprisesMumbai, Maharashtra, India Fashion Design Intern - AshapankhKhed, Maharashtra, India

Rebeccah Blum, an independent curator based in Berlin who was known there as an ambitious and compassionate supporter of artists, has died at age fifty-three. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Emma, on social media. Through initiatives like Blum Fine Art Management, a firm she started in 2012, and Satellite Berlin, a platform cofounded with art advisor Kit Schulte in 2014, Blum focused her career on international collaboration. From 2007 to 2012, she directed programming at Aurel Scheibler gallery’s downtown Berlin space, ScheiblerMitte, where she oversaw solo exhibitions by Michel Auder, Anthony Goicolea, and Joe Zucker. Blum also worked as a European ambassador to New York’s David Nolan Gallery and created a translation and editing service, Wordsmith, whose clientele included the Goethe-Institut and the Vitra Design Museum. “Rebeccah wanted to stimulate the general dialogue between art and culture in a meaningful way and to develop new content in collaboration with other areas...

Despite  objections  around the world from preservationists, politicians, prominent curators, and tens of thousands of  petition signers , the Norwegian government has detached the concrete mural by Pablo Picasso that has adorned a building in Oslo’s downtown Regjeringskvartalet quarter for fifty years. The structure, a Brutalist office complex known as the Y-block, which was damaged in a 2011 terrorist attack, is slated for demolition as part of redevelopment plans for the city’s small government district. The Y-block was realized in 1969 by modernist architect Erling Viksjø, who also designed the adjacent H-block, which hosts a smaller Picasso mural,  The Seagull , in its lobby. Both works were executed by Picasso collaborator Carl Nesjar and are being relocated. According to the  Times , Viksjø’s grandson and Nesjar’s daughter, Gro Nesjar Greve, have jointly sued the Norwegian government to prevent  The Fisherman  from being reintroduced above the V...

The artist Heather Phillipson’s latest work is a 31-foot statue of a dollop of whipped cream, with a fly on it. This one hasn’t been easy. In March, the work was meant to be installed on an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, the latest in a series of commissions that brings contemporary art to the central London plaza. But on the day the installation was scheduled to begin, Britain went into lockdown. Soon after, she was having conversations with the London city officials about whether the work could be installed during the pandemic at all. The work’s title, “The End,” didn’t have the best connotations at a moment when thousands were dying. “It started to feel like there’d never be a good time, or a right time, for it to go up,” Phillipson said in a recent interview at her East London studio. On Thursday, “The End” was finally unveiled. Phillipson said the work had been conceived in 2016, not long after Britain voted to leave the European Union, and she had wanted the creamy sculpture, ...

Many public art installations have been created in support of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, including street murals appearing on the streets of cities across the country after the words were painted in bright yellow on the street behind the White House on June 5. While some examples have been powerful because of their timely reaction to current events, some communities are emphasizing the importance of taking the time to have community input before creating anything and to ensure that those involved with the public art projects are committed to the issue for which the art is seeking to promote.  When the New York City Public Design Commission (which has jurisdiction over all buildings and art proposed on city-owned property in Manhattan) set out to paint their own street mural, they slowed the process and listened to the community: “We actually took the time to have the conversations with people that are in the actual Black Lives Matter movement,” says Justin Garett ...

Museums and Galleries, Cultural Heritage Sites, Photography studios and Auction houses are all exempt from wearing masks indoors. Of course, it is up to the individual gallery to decide if they will require masks to be worn to protect their staff and visitors and many have already stated that all entering their premises must wear masks. The UK Government has brought in new laws which will fine people flouting the rules by slapping them with a £100 penalty charge. Police have stated, this will only be a last resort. The new guidance states: No one can enter a buildings such as shops without a mask which covers your face and nose unless you have a reasonable excuse. Face coverings must be worn in: Shops and shopping centres, Banks, building societies, credit unions, short-term loan providers, savings clubs and currency exchange offices and anywhere that transmits money by cash or cheque, Post offices, Takeaway food establishments. The requirement to wear a face-covering also app...

The Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania is putting in storage a collection of more than 1,000 skulls, including some that belonged to enslaved peoples, following an outcry from students. The crania, which were held in a private classroom, belonged to the collection of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century Philadelphia-based physician known for his “broadly white supremacist” views, according to the institution.  Last year, a group of students at the university discovered that 53 skulls in the Morton Cranial Collection came from individuals enslaved in Havana, Cuba, while two others belonged to enslaved Americans. They presented their findings at a symposium hosted by the Penn & Slavery Project, an initiative tasked with probing the school’s “ historical connections with the institution of slavery .” The museum, which reopened to the public today for the first time following a four-month shutdown, is currently working to repatriate or re-bury the crania, it said in a...

The artist Petrit Halilaj has withdrawn from the Belgrade Biennial after the organizers of the exhibition dithered over how to present his nationality in accompanying materials. Halilaj is from Kosovo, and the biennial is organized and hosted by the Cultural Centre of Belgrade in Serbia, a country that does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state. He pulled out of the show after he was unable to agree with the organizers about how his country of origin would be named in the list of participating artists. Halilaj, who is based in Berlin, has written an open letter detailing his experience with the exhibition, which is officially called the 58th October Salon: Belgrade Biennial.  Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, and there is a fraught history between the two nations. During the Kosovo War of 1998–99, fought between the two nations,   Halilaj himself was displaced and spent more than two years living in refugee camps.  In his letter, Halilaj recalls how...

In a royal first, Queen  Elizabeth II  became a part of a virtual unveiling of a self-portrait that happened via a video call on July 25, 2020. Painted by Miriam Escofet, the portrait was commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as a “lasting tribute to Her Majesty’s service” to diplomacy,  The Guardian  reports. The report also mentions that upon seeing the portrait, the Queen even pointed out jokingly how the tea cup placed on the table next to her was actually empty. The painting was shown to the Queen for the first time on a computer screen, amid the restrictions in the country because of the  pandemic , after which she spoke to the members of FCO about their work during the  coronavirus  health crisis. According to  The Guardian , this virtual unveiling was hosted by Sir Simon McDonald, who is the permanent under-secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, and head of the Diplomatic Service. He had joined the art...

The Tate is facing protests against job cuts that trade unions and others say will disproportionately affect black and minority ethnic staff as it reopens its doors for the first time in four months. A socially distanced demonstration will take place outside Tate Modern in London on Monday as the institution welcomes back the public. As many as 200 jobs are at risk in its commercial arm – which operates retail, publishing and catering – where a higher proportion of staff are BAME, according to the PCS union. “Many of these colleagues will be amongst the lowest-paid staff on the Tate estate, with some at risk earning little more than the national minimum wage, and in some of the most diverse teams across Tate,” said the union. It comes after attempts by the Tate to express support for Black Lives Matter on social media sparked a backlash, with critics circulating a selfie by the Tate’s controversial benefactor,  Anthony  d’Offay , in which he is holding a golliwog. The Tate res...

Sunrise by Rob Ottesen Kinetic Pointillism  is a technique used in  painting , where an image is created with points of color applied in patterns of movement, with the intention of reinforcing the message of the artwork. Founder of the technique is Rob Ottesen, who first showed works made from the technique in 2013,  and who focused on teaching the technique to adolescent students.  Mediums used include paint, ink, and other mediums.  An aspect of the technique includes the use of cultural images and spelled-out words. Light House by Rob Ottesen Jesus by Ganesh Kelagina Beedu Shenoy                                             Bhagavad Gita by Ganesh Kelagina Beedu Shenoy Exhibitions of the artwork have been shown at the  Port St. Lucie  Civic Center Art Gallery.  Ottesen’s personal work has been shown at the  Gutenberg Museum  in...

An art critic has accidentally destroyed a contemporary work at an art fair in  Mexico . Avelina ​Lésper, who is known as a provocateur, said she shattered the installation – a sheet of glass with a football, a stone and other random objects suspended inside – by Mexican artist  Gabriel Rico , after she placed an empty drink can near it to express her dislike of the piece. “It was like the work heard my comment and felt what I thought of it,” Lésper said in a video statement for Melenio, a media group that publishes her columns. “The work shattered into pieces and collapsed and fell on the floor.” She was then reportedly told the work, titled “Nimble and Sinister Tricks (To Be Preserved Without Scandal and Corruption)” was valued at $20,000 (15,477). She denied deliberately damaging the work – on display at the OMR gallery in Mexico City – or attempting to leave the scene of the accident. The OMR gallery, which was displaying the piece, criticised Lésper’s behaviour as unprofe...

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) has suspended an exhibition of work by  Jon Rafman , a high-profile artist from Montreal whose work appeared in last year’s Venice Biennale. Over the past decade, Rafman has been considered one of the most important artists of his generation for video-based work that explores the darkest corners of the internet. His 2014 video work  Mainsqueeze , which includes footage of a woman killing a live crawfish, has been widely exhibited. Rafman’s show, which featured two video works  Disasters Under the Sun  (2019) and  Poor Magic  (2017), has been suspended “until further notice,” according to a message posted last week on the museum’s website. Asked about the development, a spokesperson for the museum told  ARTnews  on Friday, “For the time being, the MAC won’t comment any further on the matter.” The museum reopened to the public in late June after a temporary closure due to the coronavirus. Rafman’s exhib...