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We’ve Moved

All our updates about recent art news, art exhibitions and creative projects are now included on our own website blog. 

The new Pelham Communications blog can be found using the link below:

http://pelhamcommunications.com/blog

All updates will now be posted on our website, so don’t miss out and follow the link.

Hemmerle are exhibiting their newest creations at PAD London for the first time.

Hemmerle is a German, fourth generation family run jeweller at the vanguard of contemporary design. The Hemmerle family travel across the world treasure hunting for rare materials from colour changing garnets and melo pearls, to found materials like ancient carved jade and antique cameos. Nature is an infinite source of inspiration and a key element in the overall aesthetic and design process of Hemmerle creations.

In a pair of Hemmerle earrings Mara Mamba stones, a rare variety of Tiger Eye, are paired with textured brushed bronze. Mara Mamba Tiger Eye are extremely old stones found in the Pilbara region in Western Australia. These stones were formed during the early stages of the Earth’s history when there was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere.

Presented at the fair is an adaptation of Hemmerle’s exhibition-stand featuring a sculptural structure designed by Dutch architect Tom Postma, in collaboration with Hemmerle. Previewed at TEFAF Maastricht this year, the stand design was awarded the prestigious Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2016 for High Design Quality.

Frieze Art Fair 2016: Our guide

This week Frieze Art Fair includes an array of creativity from live art to sculpture, photography to painting, the fair offers everything that a contemporary art lover could want. Now in its 13 year the fair is still transforming the London art scene. But every year is different — this time, for instance, there’s a bounty of shows by leading American artists, from Robert Kelly to Jeff Koons. The Frieze Art Fair success has meant that museums and galleries across the capital time their biggest and most imaginative shows to lure the global collectors, museum directors and artists who descend on London every October. Some of the most promising booths to visit include Sophia Contemporary Gallery, Marlborough Fine Art and Waddington Custot.

Via Evening Standard

Painting once written off as £20 copy reassessed as £20m Raphael

The National Trust for Scotland has discovered a painting that art historians believe is likely to be a work by the Italian renaissance artist Raphael in one of its stately homes .

The painting, had been obscured by discoloured varnish and was attributed to a minor hand. Its potential as a work of one of the giants of art history, was initially spotted by the historian Bendor Grosvenor.

Grosvenor was visiting Haddo House, the National Trust’s 18th-century home in Aberdeenshire, to examine some other paintings for a new BBC series when he was struck by a picture tucked away in a corner, high up over a door.

he recalled: “I thought, crikey, it looks like a Raphael … It was very dirty under old varnish, which goes yellow … Being an anorak, I go round houses like this with binoculars and torches. If I hadn’t done that, I’d probably have walked past it.” 

The picture has been dated to between 1505 and 1510 As a Raphael, its value would be around £20m.

Via the Guardian

Clapton turns $72m by selling his abstract collection

Eric Clapton is set to sell a Gerhard Richter painting with an estimate of $20 million (£15.48 million), meaning that he will have made nearly $72 million from three of the German artist’s paintings, which he bought in a job lot for $3.4 million in 2001.

The three Richters bought by Clapton were part of a four-part series from 1994, the other one of which is jointly held by the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.

The sale of the Richter painting at Christie’s in New York next month will test the market for the artist, the value of whose work has fallen in recent months. Two of his pieces were withdrawn from sale earlier this year.

Gallery 1957 presents Serge AttukweiClottey at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair 

Gallery 1957 will be exhibiting the works of Serge AttukweiClottey at their first year at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair.  AttukweiClottey is the creator of Afrogallonism, an artistic concept commenting on consumption within modern Africa, through the utilisation of yellow gallon containers. His exhibition My Mother’s Wardrobe opened the gallery earlier this year. On view at 1:54 are Clottey’s wall-based sculptural installations created through cutting, drilling, stitching and melting found materials. The works are bold assemblages that act as a means of inquiry into questions of form and history.Also included are works from a recent series of charcoal drawings, Sex and Politics.

Booth G31

Opens: Thursday 6th Oct

Hemmerle at PAD London 

German, fourth generation family run jewellers Hemmerle will be returnign to PAD London this year. Presenting their latest creations including a pair of Hemmerle earrings made from brushed bronze combined with Mara Mamba stones, an extremely old  rare variety of Tiger Eye found in the Pilbara region in Western Australia formed during the early stages of the Earth’s history when there was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere. 

Booth A10

Opens: Tuesday 4th Oct

Louisa Guinness Gallery: The Museum of Artists’ Jewellery; The Curator’s Office

Louisa Guinness Gallery presents a new immersive installation of artist jewellery at PAD 2016. Featuring work by gallery artists Ron Arad, Anish Kapoor, Claude Lalanne and Nic Fiddian Green as well as new work by Christopher Thompson Royds, Blanca Munoz, Mia Fonssagrives Solow, Stephen Cox and Emily Young. 

The installation will re-create the inner sanctum of a fictional curator. styled as their office-come-archive room. The major pieces will be displayed in cases around the room while the rest of the collection will be found tucked away in labelled and lined archive drawers.

Booth B4

Marlborough Fine Art presents Paula Rego at Frieze Masters

Marlborough Fine Art will present an exhibition of Paula Rego paintings from the 1980’s at Frieze Masters 2016. The exhibition focuses on important works from the ‘Vivian Girls’ series inspired by the Outsider artist, Henry Darger. The ‘Vivian Girls’ were the heroines of Darger’s novels that concerned the adventures of a group of girls living on a planet controlled by evil soldiers. 

Booth C8

Preview: 5th OCT

Opens: 6th OCT

Waddington Custot  presents Manolo Millares at Frieze Masters

Waddington Custot presents the first solo presentation of artist Manolo Millares in London. Millares received international critical acclaim at an early age

and is considered one of the greatest figures of 20th century Spanish art. His black paintings, on display at Frieze Masters are often interpreted as expressions of existential anguish experienced during the period when European society was still coming to terms with the horrors of the Second World War.

Booth G2

Preview: 5th OCT

Opens: 6th OCT

Sophia Contemporary at Frieze Masters

Sophia Contemporary Gallery first exhibition at frieze masters will be presenting fifty works of extremely rare Constructivist and Suprematist Russian porcelain and sculptures, drawn from the collection of Vladimir Tsarenkov, the father of Sophia Contemporary’s co-founder Vassili Tsarenkov. Four large-scale works by the American abstract artist Robert Kelly will also be exhibited. His works rational and formal style of painting has been influenced and defined by the Russian Constructivist tradition.

Booth G04

Preview: 5th OCT

William Morris

William Morris (24 March 1834 - 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement.

 Morris (1834-96) had trained as an architect and had early unfulfilled ambitions to be a painter. As a student at Oxford he met the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and through this friendship he came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Rossetti, and others in their circle.  In 1859 Morris married Jane Burden, an unconventional beauty and a favourite model for the Pre-Raphaelites. He immediately commissioned his friend, the architect Philip Webb, to build them a new home on land he had bought in Bexleyheath, Kent. Now a suburb of London, Bexleyheath was then a rural area. Morris wanted a modern home which would nevertheless be ‘very medieval in spirit'. This is exactly what Webb gave him.

 Morris and his wife moved into Red House in 1860 and spent the next two years furnishing and decorating the interior. Morris did much of the work himself, with help from his artist friends. Prompted by the success of their efforts, they decided to start their own company. In April 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was established at 8 Red Lion Square in London. It produced a range of original domestic furnishings including embroidery, tableware and furniture, stained glass and tiles. Wallpapers were soon added to the list because Morris was unable to find any he liked well enough to use in his own home.

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. profoundly influenced the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. He was also a major contributor to reviving traditional textile arts and methods of production, and one of the founders of the SPAB, now a statutory element in the preservation of historic buildings in the UK.

In his own time William Morris was most widely known as the author of The Earthly Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers, textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century Morris has been celebrated as a designer and craftsman. Future generations may esteem him more as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality.

Near identical photos shot 85 years apart in new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

Two almost identical images that were created nearly nine decades apart are being brought together at a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The photographs by French surrealist Claude Cahun and 1997 Turner prize-winner Gillian Wearing will go side by side at the show next year.

Cahun, who described herself as “neuter”, has been hailed as a pioneer for transgender artists. She defied convention in a romantic and creative relationship with her step-sister Marcel Moore. Cahun challenged gender norms though her work, using wigs, costumes and masks to change her appearance for a series of self-portraits. One of these, 1927’s “I Am In Training, Don’t Kiss Me”, was recreated by Wearing in her 2012 work, titled “Me As Cahun Holding A Mask On My Face”. Next March, the two photographs will go on show as part of Gillian Wearing And Claude Cahun: Behind The Mask, Another Mask.

 The National Portrait Gallery’s spring season also includes an exhibition of the leading British abstract artist Howard Hodgkin, in a collection titled Absent Friends. The gallery’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, said the season “brings together a landmark survey of the portraits of one of Britain’s greatest colourists together with an inspired parallel survey of the works of two innovative artists who, despite living in different time periods, share similar preoccupations with the nature of self-portraiture and identity”. 

 Via Evening Standard

Going digital: fourth plinth gives rainy Brexit London the thumbs up

A seven metre-high thumbs up installation on the fourth plinth was unveiled in Trafalgar Square on Thursday morning. “What this represents is so important,” said the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, revealing the latest artwork to occupy the renowned spot. “Optimism. Positivity. The best of us. Particularly post-Brexit, the three most important words I say are ‘London is open’ and this shows Londoners, visitors to London, tourists, EU citizens, immigrants that London is open.”

 The giant thumb is the work called “Really Good” by artist David Shrigley and is the 11th contemporary art sculpture to be shown on the plinth. It was four years ago that Shrigley first came up with the idea of a giant thumbs up, so he had no inkling it would be seen in a Brexit context. But that’s fine, he said. “It is such an ambiguous thing which you can quite easily project your own meaning on to, it could endorse something I didn’t want to endorse.

 “My line is that it means whatever you want it to mean, but it doesn’t mean ‘that’.” “That” for Shrigley would be a rightwing message, although the interpretation is clearly out of his control. “It is an interesting thing and a scary thing. There is still time. There is potential for the meaning to change.” Shrigley hopes the thumb will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that things considered bad – the weather, the economy, politics – will benefit from the positivity contained in the work.

Reopening of The Palace of Fine Arts

In 1915 San Francisco held the Panama – Pacific International Exposition, an extraordinary world fair to mark the completion of the Panama canal and showcase San Francisco in all its brilliance in an unstable political and economic climate. The exhibition was compromised of ten palaces, and when the exposition came to end most of these were demolished. However, many felt the Palace of Fine Arts was too beautiful to be destroyed, and as a result a Palace Preservation League was set up.

 The Palace was designed by Bernard R. Maybeck, and is inspired by Roman ruins. It combines Greek and Roman elements, featuring a large rotunda dome within a pergola which is surrounded by water. The dome depicts the birth of Art alongside the ‘golds’ of California, poppies, citrus fruits, metallic gold, and wheat.

Brian Sewell's art collection sells for almost double its estimate at £3.7million

Brian Sewell’s art collection has sold for £3.7 million — almost double estimates — after a frenzied auction. The Standard’s celebrated critic died last September aged 84 after a battle with cancer. He worked at this newspaper for more than 30 years, but was previously an art expert at Christie’s, which hosted the sale last night. His lifetime’s collection of more than 200 works attracted bidders from 32 countries across four continents, in what auctioneers said was a testimony to his “discerning eye”. The highlight of the sell, Dido Reclining Asleep, by Michelangelo’s pupil Daniele Volterra, was sold to a museum for more than five times its £150,0000 estimate, fetching £797,000, a world record for the artist. Italian master Matthias Stomer’s 1652 oil Saint Jerome sold for £365,000 against a guide price of £100,000. A fragment of a chalk study by baroque master Agostino Ciampelli smashed the £20,000 brochure estimate, selling for a record £118,750.

 Via Evening Standard

V&A exhibition reunites masterpieces of English medieval embroidery

There are many more beautiful objects than two frayed and faded pieces of embroidery, in the first exhibition in a lifetime at the V&A of a medieval art form in which England once led the world.

The silk has rotted leaving only the linen backing and the tarnished gold and silver thread, but the two shabby pieces, reunited after 150 years, vividly demonstrate what ultimately happened to rare surviving examples of the luxury textiles. The panel showing Jesus Christ surrounded by his apostles was chopped up by a German priest so famous for his ruthless approach to the medieval treasures that he was nicknamed Franz “Scissors” Bock. He sold half to the V&A, which later turned down the offer of his entire collection for £500, and half to a museum in Vienna, and they have remained apart until now.

Via Guardian

New Serpentine Gallery season includes Dame Zaha Hadid retrospective and Grayson Perry Brexit exhibition

The new chief executive of the Serpentine Gallery today said a major Dame Zaha Hadid exhibition would pay homage to the late architect and “capture her spirit of discovery”. Yana Peel’s first programme since taking over from Dame Julie Peyton-Jones as chief executive will also include a collection of new works from Grayson Perry exploring what it means to be British after the Brexit vote. Peel and the Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, will shake up the Summer Pavilion with the appointment of architects Lord Rogers and David Adjaye to an advisory group overseeing the programme.

Never-before-seen drawings and rarely seen paintings, sculptures, installations and animated films from Dame Zaha as well as her notebooks will go on show in the retrospective, which opens in December. The architect, who designed the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, which opened in 2013, had agreed to the show just weeks before she died of a heart attack in March at the age of 65.

Via Evening Standard

Can Maastricht Take Manhattan?

For six days beginning on Oct. 21, visitors to the crenelated, fortress like Park Avenue Armoury will find its 19th-century interior transformed into a light, modern setting. Translucent scrims will obscure the dark-wood lobby and second-floor period rooms, which will open to the public for the first time since their recent restoration. Muted colours will turn the Drill Room into airy galleries. There’s a message in this metamorphosis, which was commissioned for the American debut of the European Fine Art Fair, known as Tefaf. With its careful vetting of objects on display, dating from antiquity to the present, the fair is considered the most prestigious art bazaar in the world.

Tefaf’s arrival in Manhattan from its home in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is more than just another event on the cultural calendar. It’s an attempt by the fair, whose 270 exhibitors face a shrinking audience in Europe, to secure and revitalize its future. It’s a chance for dealers in historical art — Tefaf’s forte — to staunch the stampede of collectors into contemporary art and show that works of older art can look just as good in a modern setting as in a grand, classical home. And it’s a test of the global art market, which shrank to $63.8 billion in 2015, a 7 percent drop from 2014, and continues to wobble, judging by auction results, this year. “Many more people need to know what we are doing,” said Patrick van Maris, the fair’s chief executive.

Caravaggio

An Italian artist Caravaggio, by name of Michelangelo Merisi was born on this day, 29 September in 1571. He was a leading painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works.

Caravaggio painted the stories of the Bible as visceral and often bloody dramas. He staged the events of the distant sacred past as if they were taking place in the present day, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress. Caravaggio’s work shaped that of many later artists, ranging from Rembrandt in Holland and Diego Velázquez in Spain to Théodore Géricault in France. His dramatic sense of staging and innovative treatment of light and shade have also directly inspired many leading figures in the medium of cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese.

Simon Jenkins: ‘Net curtain-gate’ just makes us laugh rather than show sympathy

The Tate’s boss, Sir Nicholas Serota, once objected to residential towers going up behind his beloved power station. He lost, and a tower by Richard Rogers duly rose next door, and now he has hit back with a truly hideous tower of his own. That is what rich people do to each other. Serota’s viewing balcony leers down on Rogers’s svelte “Neo Bankside” glasshouse just 20 metres away. 

Next, Serota loftily entered into the spirit of the spat. He was derisive. The residents “knew Tate Modern was going up next door… The character and uses of the building were also widely known.” He said they bought their flats “with their eyes wide open”. As a concession he would ask visitors “not to gesticulate or photograph” the flat-dwellers. But since gesticulation appears to be an important facet of modern art appreciation, Serota suggested that if the neighbours wanted privacy they should get net curtains.

Two aspects of curtain-gate are quite baffling. Serota has to be right that legal searches for a property of this value would surely have disclosed the Tate’s plans in detail. The Tate was clearly likely to block the Neo Banksiders’ view of St Paul’s, so the obvious question was “with what?” If I were a resident I would sue my lawyer.

On the other hand I find it equally inexplicable that Southwark planners can have given the Tate permission for a viewing gallery that so closely overlooks people’s homes. Given that the only view from the balcony at this point is of the flats, a screen of sorts would surely have been in order. 

In this battle between the aristocracy of modern art and aristocracy of modern cash there are no losers — just fools. The rest of us should imitate Oscar Wilde who, after reading of the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, said: “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.”

Via Evening Standard

 Seeing is believing: documentary photography from Francis Bacon to 9/11

The French thinker Roland Barthes identified what he called the punctum: the crucial, often accidental, detail of a photograph that reveals something deeper. The curve of the worn stairs, in Simon Norfolk’s black-and-white study of what looks like an ordinary staircase in a nondescript house, is not an accidental detail in Norfolk’s photograph, but the crucial element in the composition that, as Barthes put it, “rises from the scene” with a force that makes it suddenly seem like a new photograph. Those who walked down these stairs, leaving the imprint of their vast numbers, were heading towards their deaths in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It is a photograph that evokes horror in the most subtle and affecting way.

“Part of the fascination with all photography is that the medium is firmly grounded in the documentary tradition,” Michael Hoppen notes in his introduction to the new exhibition ‘The Image as Question’. “It has been used as a record of crime scenes, zoological specimens, lunar and space exploration, phrenology, fashion and importantly, art and science. It has been used as ‘proof’ of simple things such as family holidays and equally of atrocities taking place on the global stage. Any contemporary artist using photography has to accept the evidential language embedded in the medium.”

That last sentence perhaps provides the subtext to the exhibition, which concerns the threatened position of documentary photography in an age of digital profligacy. Photographs are now so ubiquitous and, when shared on social media, often so unmoored from their context as to seem drained of meaning. The images here, Hoppen insists, have “a shared gravitas, a weightiness that emanates from their documentary function”.

Via The Guardian

For sale: six flats priced at £100m... and the art on the walls will cost the same again

Next month, six apartments in the restored Park Crescent in Marylebone will be put up for sale at a total of £100 million — their interiors dripping with works by leading artists that are valued at exactly the same amount. Major names include Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry.

About 500 have been invited to a lavish launch party in the crescent’s eight acres of private gardens on October 6 to coincide with the start of the Frieze art fair in Regent’s Park. 

Names on the guestlist include Angelina Jolie — who is believed to be looking for a London home following her split from Brad Pitt — Amal Clooney, David and Victoria Beckham, Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and members of the Qatari royal family.

Viewers are free to buy the properties — huge lateral apartments behind the stucco facade of the crescent — with or without the works that have been chosen to decorate them. In total 20 homes are going on sale, ranging in price from £3.95 million to £20 million.

Via Evening Standard

 UK gallery to celebrate the art of mining

A former bank in the marketplace at Bishop Auckland in County Durham is to become Britain’s first art gallery devoted to coal mining.

It will house more than 300 pictures and other art works amassed by two collectors of mining art, Bob McManners, a retired GP and Gillian Wales, a retired librarian and town hall manager, both of whom come from mining families.

The £600,000 Mining Art Gallery, which will open next summer near an art gallery featuring Spanish old masters by El Graco and Veláquez, is the latest move by Jonathan Ruffer, the fund manager, to regenerate Bishop Auckland.

“Through imagery they tell us what it felt like to work in the coal mines, not simply what it looked like,” says Dr McManners. “In this, mining artists are unique and we find no equivalent corpus of experimental art from the other heavy industries that flourished in the north-east in the 20th century.”

Ms Wales said Mr Ruffer’s arrival had been a “kind of fairy story” for Bishop Auckland. “It’s brought a kind of euphoria and hope. There’s a great wave of optimism through the whole town.”

André Breton

André Breton was born on February 18, 1896, in Tinchebray, France. After a brief medical career and military service in World War I, he settled in Paris and joined the city's artistic avant-garde. Surrealism began in the 1920’s as an offshoot or extension of the Dada movement. Breton was its founder as a Dadaist and devotee of Sigmund Freud’s work with psychoanalysis.

André Breton decided (along with the Dadaists) that rational thought was at fault for the world’s problems and that change could only come about through the subconscious mind. He eventually wrote three Surrealist Manifestos and based the movement on the idea that ordinary things, such as objects, symbols, and images could have important meaning when created and viewed with the subconscious. His manifestos encouraged free expression and the release of the subconscious mind, and were  followed by the novel Nadja and volumes of essays and poetry.

His ideas, of course, led to a few new techniques in the world of art, such as automatic drawing (where you don’t think, you just draw lines and see what happens) and collaborative artwork (where the randomness of each member helps to limit logic or planning.) In addition, once the artwork was created it was completely open to interpretation by anyone, with no right or wrong meaning.

In New York, Breton and his colleagues curated Surrealist exhibitions that introduced ideas of automatism and intuitive art making to the first Abstract Expressionists. He worked in various creative media, focusing on collage and printmaking as well as authoring several books. Breton innovated ways in which text and image could be united through chance association to create new, poetic word-image combinations. His ideas about accessing the unconscious and using symbols for self-expression served as a fundamental conceptual building block for New York artists in the 1940s.

Art Sales: the contemporary art market feels the squeeze

The contemporary art market still appears to be contracting judging from the Frieze week auctions which go on view in London this weekend. At the equivalent auctions last October, 884 lots were crammed into the week with a minimum estimate of £185 million. This year there are 746 lots (down 15.6 per cent) with a minimum estimate of £131.5 million (down 29.2 per cent). The statistics follow the trend this year after London’s contemporary art auction results fell by 36 per cent in February, and by 49 per cent in June.

A sense of foreboding has been stirred by reports from the season’s first contemporary art sales in New York where some artists prices were said to have fallen by 90 percent in a "slumping market", according to the magazine, Art News. But that story was very selective, picking out less than a handful of artists whose prices had been previously artificially hyped. The decline, in other words, is one of supply rather than of demand or values. In Sotheby’s Frieze week sales, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hannibal, which cost $79,500 in 1993, is now estimated at £3.5 million ($4.6 million). The problem for the auctioneers is that some sellers are nervous about the market and holding back, which reduces sale totals. The immediate effects of this has been both a reduction in staffing levels, and in the provision of financial guarantees which auctioneers arrange to encourage sellers.

Via: The Telegraph

 Turner Prize 2016, Tate Britain, London — ‘It feels like a real exhibition

For the first time in years, the Turner Prize display feels like a real exhibition, with themes, conversations and an overarching vision, rather than a rabble of random competing egos. Elegantly choreographed at Tate Britain, the subject is sculpture, and the works are figurative, raucously physical and frequently funny.

The four shortlisted candidates will compete for the £25,000 top prize which includes Anthea Hamilton’s 18ft door in the shape of bulging polyurethane foam buttocks. Helen Marten’s Gothic dolls’ house, adorned with snakeskin, bones and stuffed insects, doubles as a faux waste system. Josephine Pryde has invited graffiti artists to deface a miniature passenger train. Michael Dean creates anthropomorphised hieroglyphs in calligraphic concrete, steel and corrugated metal. The exhibition will be running until January 2nd, 2017.

Via: Financial Times

 Newcastle is top for art and design

When recruiting undergraduates, the head of fine art at Newcastle University sees elite arts schools as among his chief rivals, rather than other Russell Group universities. What Newcastle offers is a school devoted solely to fine art in the heart of a vibrant city campus. About 600 candidates apply for 65 places each year on its fine art degree, which is over four years, as was traditional in art schools, rather than three, and includes art history as part of the course.

Of these, a third are invited for an interview, and while candidates are expected to meet the minimum A-level entry requirements, offers are based on their portfolios. 92.5 per cent of final-year undergraduates rated the quality of teaching highly, helping to push Newcastle to the top of the art and design subject table for the first time.

Via: The Times

 Bass Museum Announces Ten-Year Acquisitions Initiative, Starting with Work by Ugo Rondinone and Sylvie Fleury

Miami Beach’s Bass Museum has announced an acquisitions initiative that will add “a major work of contemporary art” to its permanent collection every year in the fall over the next decade. The first set of acquired works are an Ugo Rondinone sculpture and a Sylvie Fleury neon installation. Fleury’s work will debut in 2017. (The date of the unveiling of the Rondinone is not yet confirmed).

The news comes a few weeks after the Bass announced that its post-renovations reopening had been pushed back to spring 2017, depriving Art Basel Miami Beach attendees from seeing the museum during its originally scheduled opening this December. The museum closed for renovations in May 2015.

When the Bass does reopen, visitors will be able to enjoy Rondinone’s majestic 41-foot totemic day-glo sculpture Miami Mountain—which is similar to the celebrated works that he installed outside Las Vegas this year—alongside a site-specific neon work created for the museum by Fleury, Eternity Now.

T.C. Cannon

On this day, Tommy (T.C.) Cannon was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, to a Kiowa father and a Caddo mother. He was given the name Pai-doung-u-day, which translates into "One Who Stands In The Sun," His early life was spent near the Zoltone springs in Southern Oklahoma. As a teenager the family moved to the Gracemount area where he attended the local high school. He displayed a talent for drawing and writing at an early age winning numerous awards for his art work around the Gracemount and Anardako areas.

He was exposed to the art of the Kiowa Five, a group of Native American painters who achieved international reputations in the fine art world and who helped developed the Southern Plains-style of painting. T.C. Cannon joined the Institute of American Indian Arts of Santa Fe in 1964, where he studied under Fritz Scholder.

After graduation from IAIA, he enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute but left after two months and enlisted in the army. As paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, Cannon was sent to Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. During the Tet Offensive, he earned two Bronze Star Medals. He was also inducted into the Black Leggings Society, the traditional Kiowa warriors' society.

Cozying Up to Chinese art

“We’re not at the heights of 2010 and 2011, but the market has definitely recovered its mojo,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s chairman of Asian art, who was the auctioneer in New York this month.  An 18th century Chinese teapot sold for $3.5 million, it was one of the star lots in Sotheby’s biannual ‘Asia Week’, the auctions raised $60.4 million. Thanks to the presence of two prestigious single-owner collections, the total proceeds from the series was 149 percent higher than the equivalent series last September. 

Brexit, the impending U.S. presidential election and general macroeconomic jitters might have cooled demand for European and American art, but the market for historic Chinese artifacts seems to be warming up again – at least at auction.

“A sense of depth is back,” added Mr. Howard-Sneyd, commenting on the number of bidders from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan vying for the lots in New York. Sotheby’s said that collectors from Asia Purchased 58 percent of the lots and accounted for 75 percent of the value of the sales. In the case of the 18th century famille-rose “Hui Mountain Retreat” teapot, more than half a dozen bidders competed before it was bought by an Asian collector.

Via International New York times

 BP protesters put on a show at museum

An ocean-themed group organised by more than 100 artists — dressed as sea creatures, mermaids and pirates — called for BP’s sponsorship deal to be dropped. They billed their performance, which included sea shanties, as a “theatrical battle between BP and the ocean”, at the venue in Bloomsbury, central London.

The protest was an attempt to persuade Hartwig Fischer, the museum’s new director, to reverse his decision to accept a five-year sponsorship agreement worth about £1.9 million a year from 2017. The museum currently receives about £2 million a year from BP under a five-year deal that began in 2012. The protesters said that they were highlighting the irony of the oil company sponsoring the Sunken Cities exhibition while contributing to climate change that most scientists believe will result in raised sea levels. The museum responded that it respected people’s right to protest but said that temporary exhibitions were only possible with funding from private sponsors.

Via The Times

  Art world awaits the Pitt-Jolie collection

Auctioneers are taking a keen interest in the fate of the $25 million art collection believed to have been amassed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The actors, who announced their separation last week, have made no comment about how they will divide their assets, which include a private gallery of works at Château Miraval, their home in the south of France.

Pitt and Jolie own several works by Neo Rauch, the German artist, including Etappe, a depiction of a Formula One car in a pit stop. Pitt bought it at Art Basel in Switzerland in 2009. They also own ‘the Hope’ depicting a child with a spray-painted flower series, by a British street artist Dom Pattinson, which they received as a wedding gift in 2014. The couple have never made their purchases public but the collection is widely believed to contain works by Banksy bought for £1 million in 2007 in London.

Via The Times

 Barack Obama says thanks a billion to Hackney artist who put president's face on a billion-dollar bill

A young artist from Hackney who spent a year working on a painting of Barack Obama today told how he was overwhelmed to receive a personal letter of thanks from the White House. Kevin Gill, 20, worked for up to 10 hours a day over 12 months to create the “billion-dollar bill” featuring the American president’s face. 

Four months later, he received an official letter in the post from Mr. Obama thanking him for the “kind gift”. Mr. Gill, who has been inspired by the president’s battle to tackle gun crime in the US, said his “biggest goal” now was to meet him in person. 

The artist said: “My main thoughts were that Obama had never been on a note before, and that there has never been a billion-dollar note, so I decided to merge the two to create some artwork. “When I received the reply I was overwhelmed, I was just so moved and shocked. I thought maybe he might reply after he stepped down because he would have more time but I never actually expected a reply. “The whole process took a year, I had to do sketches and planning and then actually paint it. It’s not an ordinary painting, it’s double-sided — so twice the work.

Cindy Sherman and David Salle: History Portraits and Tapestry Paintings at Skarstedt Gallery

Skarstedt is inaugurating its new London gallery at 8 Bennet Street, St James’s with  A joint exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits and David Salle’s Tapestry Paintings. 

David Salle’s Tapestry Paintings are a pastiche on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch genre styles. The background imagery is drawn from narrative scenes from historical tapestries with smaller grisaille paintings and coloured motifs inset into the canvas.   

Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits take their inspiration from noble historical paintings from the renaissance, baroque, rococo and neo-classical periods She uses a range of props and costumes in her classically composed images to play up to the clichés of subjective portraiture.

Gallery opening and private view:  Friday 30th September

Paula Rego: Dancing Ostriches - Marlborough Fine Art 

Working from literature, myths, fairy tales, cartoons and religious texts, Rego creates narrative works imbued with mystery.

Paula Rego’s Dancing Ostriches series was inspired by Walt Disney’s Fantasia and became Rego’s response to mark the centenary of cinema in Britain.

On display will be the new tapestry Eagles Daughter by Paula Rego presented by Marlborough Graphics. Based on a 16th century folk tale that tells the story of a beautiful young girl’s life, born to a man who was raised by eagles, and betrayed by an ugly, wicked old woman.

Private View: Tuesday 27th September 6PM

The Boldness of Calder -  Louisa Guinness Gallery

The Boldness of Calder will be the first solo exhibition in the UK of Alexander Calder’s jewellery. Bringing together major pieces of Calder jewellery from around the world, presented amongst iconic images of the jewellery being worn on notable women throughout history, as well as contemporary images commissioned especially for the show. 

Private View: Tuesday 27th

Robert Kelly: Black on Bone - Selected Work Sophia Contemporary

Sophia Contemporary present fifteen paintings at their Mayfair gallery in th   the first solo exhibition in London of renowned American abstract artist Robert Kelly.  

Commanding and rich in texture, Kelly’s process-based artworks combine techniques such as assemblage, drawing, painting and glazing, which are meticulously layered to create complex compositions.

Théodore Géricault

An influential French painter and lithographer, Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was born on this day, 26 September 1791. He was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement known for “The Raft of the Medusa(above)” and other anatomy paintings.

Géricault left the art classroom under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a rigorous classicist who disapproved of his student's impulsive temperament yet recognized his talent. Instead, he chose to study at the Louvre, where he copied paintings by Rubens, Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt. During this period at the Louvre he discovered a vitality he found lacking in the prevailing school of Neoclassicism. Much of his time was spent in Versailles where he gained his knowledge of the anatomy and action of horses.

Turner Prize nominee Michael Dean is London's most exciting art star

In his work, he tries to give material form to words. He starts with a word, then interprets it physically using industrial materials such as concrete and corrugated iron to create his odd, yet oddly endearing, abstract sculptures. He is nominated for last spring’s South London Gallery show Sic Glyphs, in which he explored the three-dimensional possibilities of language by assembling sculptures spelling out words. 

 Dean is likeably open about the fact that the £5,000 runners-up cheque, let alone the £25,000 prize money, was an incentive in his agreeing to be a Turner nominee. ‘I mean that will go a long way,’ says the artist who buys his clothes second-hand and does not eat out. 

 Winning a £50,000 Paul Hamlyn award in 2014 was transformative. That and his work beginning to be collected allowed the family, including Erol, 10, and Oskar, 5, to buy their first home in Ilford — ‘We love it; it’s like Bethnal Green 10 years ago’ — and Dean to rent a nearby studio which actually has the capacity to store his works. Before, he would often have to hide them in plain sight behind park bushes, in car parks or sidings. ‘No one gives a s*** about a piece of broken concrete on the street as long as no one trips over it,’ he says cheerfully.

Turner Prize 2016 is open at Tate Britain 27 September to 2 January 2017.

 Via The Evening Standard

 America saved me but London is my backbone

At a starry Tate Modern dinner on Tuesday night, architect David Adjaye collected the Panerai London Design Medal for his long-standing contribution to the industry — one of the British Land Celebration of Design awards that form part of the London Festival of Design.

 With an OBE and Stirling Prize nomination already in his pocket, Adjaye is flying high, even before taking into account the latest medal. He reckons a third of his life is spent on planes, jetting between projects in the US, Europe and Africa.

 Born to Ghanaian diplomat parents and brought up in north London, Adjaye is an inveterate globetrotter. He’s just back from the US, where his $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture opens to the public on Saturday. It is the newest addition to the suite of monumental Smithsonian museums along the Mall in Washington DC. 

 Although Adjaye claims “London is my home, my creative hub” London’s design internationalism with which he grew up is under threat from Brexit, and Adjaye has been vocal about it: “It’s sad. London has become a world leader because of this. I’m concerned that the dynamism, the spice, of the design community will be lost. I don’t want us to squander the jewels we’ve inherited from the past 30 years.”

 Via The Evening Standard

  William Kentridge: An overnight sensation — at last

From time to time a name crops up on the art scene with what soon starts to feel like an almost cultish regularity. That name, at the moment, is William Kentridge. I’ve lost count of the times over the past few months that the subject of his work has been brought up and discussed.

 At 61, soberly dressed and with a silvery thatch, he hardly looks the part of the latest art-world hipster. However, go to the Whitechapel Gallery in east London — which is stagingThick Time, Kentridge’s first major UK show for 15 years — and you will find out why this South African artist is stirring up such an appreciative fuss.

 Kentridge has slowly and patiently built up his reputation. Developing the signature charcoal drawings that lie at the foundation of his practice into animations and films, gradually deepening his long-cogitated references as he went, he has put together a body of work that exerts more than a just visual fascination. It is also intellectually absorbing.

What in less artful hands could dissolve away into merely pleasing visuals, or else solidify into indigestible lumps of science and politics, is translated by Kentridge into something profound and persuasive. The art world is talking about Kentridge for a very good reason. If you want to join in the conversation, get along to this show quick. 

 Via The Times

  BBC to be ‘unashamedly Hull-centric’ during city’s year in cultural spotlight

There will be Bacon’s Screaming Popes, Spiders from Mars, the world premiere of a new Richard Bean play and a particularly important and surprise commitment from the director general of the BBC: from 1 January 2017 Hull will always be on the weather map.

 Hull was named UK City of Culture after the success of Derry’s inaugural year in 2013. Both follow the transformative examples of Glasgow and Liverpool, which were European Capitals of Culture in 1990 and 2008 respectively. What that means is a budget of £32m and a blizzard of arts and culture in the city over 365 days.

 Among the highlights will be a four-day season of Nordic music curated by the singer-songwriter John Grant; the transformation by Opera North of the Humber Bridge into a piece of music; a season of films by Anthony Minghella; and a retrospective celebrating the work of ambient music pioneer Basil Kirchin.

 There will also be a homecoming show for David Bowie’s backing band the Spiders from Mars which featured local boys Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick “Woody” Woodmansey. The plan on 25 March is for a live rendition of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars in its entirety, by the band Holy Holy – featuring Woodmansey, Tony Visconti and Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory.