Yahoo News A security camera tour of London and madcap chain reactions – the week in art
Artist of the Week
Lindsey Mendick
You don’t know what to expect from this beguiling artist – it could be lovely ceramic sculpture of food or a violent installation about power and abuse. Mendick has talent and imagination to spare and is, as they say, one to watch. She will be in a show at Carl Freedman Gallery curated by Russell Tovey when lockdown ends – meanwhile the gallery website has a fine spread of her work.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate
Also
Frida Kahlo
The great surrealist autobiographical artist is laid bare by an Exhibition on Screen, just released to stream or download and on DVD.
• Exhibition on Screen
Ann-Marie LeQuesne
This artist, who makes “filmed performances with people in public spaces”, has just released a security camera bus tour of London on her website The Annual Group Photograph.
• The Annual Group Photograph
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Do you want to create a garden that saves bees? Ginsberg is working with the Eden Project and Serpentine Gallery to develop garden designs that optimise pollination. And is an artist.
• Serpentine Galleries
Amadeo Morelos
This young Mexico-born artist makes surreal sculptures and paintings that play with ideas of physical perfection. Check out his current online show at Unit London.
• Unit London
Image of the week
We explored the madcap world of chain reaction artists. Joseph Herscher works out of his bedroom in a Brooklyn flatshare, where he builds elaborate contraptions using everyday items. An initial trigger – a lever being pulled or a marble released – sets off a sequence of unlikely connections climaxing in a daft goal: a stamp being licked, say, or a sandwich hurtling into his mouth. They are breathtakingly ingenious and often very funny. Read more here.
What we learned
Generations of female artists have been lost to history because their names changed after marriage.
London’s bridges are falling down
Celebrated Australian painter Jason Benjamin has died
JEB’s photographs of lesbian life in the 1970s are being republished
Stars including Ian McKellen urged changes to visa rules for artists
LensCulture art photography awards found beauty in a dismal year
Cambodia is regaining looted statues, but some things can’t be returned
The Indianapolis Museum of Art apologised for a job ad for a new director to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience”.
Grayson and Philippa Perry say life isn’t all unicorns
New York’s creative community is abandoning social media and returning to print
Photographer Deanna Templeton’s Love You is a gritty Valentine’s Day antidote…
… while we read about one of art’s great love triangles
Australian surfer Otis Hope Carey’s artwork is making big waves
Misan Harriman’s portrait of the Sussexes is ‘an unbuttoned romantic pastoral that … [brings] royal portraiture to an end’.
Found, Not Lost is a trove of Elliott Erwitt’s unpublished photographs
Black Panther Afrofuturist costume designer Ruth E Carter is having a retrospective in Atlanta
Juno Calypso created a honeymoon for one
Swedish designer Linda Ring bakes portraits in sourdough
Kim Novak, star of Vertigo, is an artist and mental health activist
The Great British Art Tour brought us a 17th-century selfie, a bronze souvenir, a patriotic flagship, a queer pioneer and a Brueghel bouquet
Masterpiece of the week
Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833
British history looks bloody and macabre in this painting of the last moments of Jane Grey, who was installed on the throne for just a few days to preserve a Protestant succession before being overthrown by Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary. Delaroche spares no pathetic detail. She shakes with horror in her matching silk dress and blindfold as her ladies in waiting wail and swoon. Even the executioner feels the tragedy of it. Delaroche often homed in on the violence of the British past and its grim stage, the Tower of London, where this is set: he also depicted the young 15th-century princes murdered in the Tower, probably by their uncle, Richard III. But appearances can be deceptive. While he choses to project his nightmares on the British past he is clearly also representing a more recent French history. For Lady Jane Grey, read Queen Marie-Antoinette going to the guillotine.
• National Gallery, London
Don’t forget
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