Art Photos mixed

Do not expect a snapshot, thesis or panorama of today’s Italian art scene in the national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale—but be prepared for a view of the fantastical. “I think a platform like the Biennale should be less about trying to systematise the Italian art scene and more about offering a different kind of experimental platform [for] artists,” explains Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the 2017 Italian pavilion. “It should be a space of taking risks and trying a different approach”.The curator “did not want to create a museum display, because the pavilion is not a museum, it’s not going to work in that sense,” Alemani says.

“It’s really a place to give artists carte blanche to transform the space radically and to offer the viewer an occasion to walk into the artist’s mind.”

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The American artist Michael Rakowitz and the British artist Heather Phillipson were announced today, 21 March, as the winners of the next two commissions to occupy the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Rakowitz will present a replica of the Lamassu statue that once stood at the Nergal Gate in Nineveh, Iraq, and was destroyed by Isis in 2015, while Phillipson will show THE END, a sculpture of a giant mound of whipped cream complete with cherry, fly and a functioning drone on top. The works are due to be unveiled in 2018 and 2020, respectively.



In 2020, Heather Phillipson will show THE END, a sculpture of a giant mound of whipped cream complete with cherry, fly and a functioning drone on top on the Fourth Plinth

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Living On A Thin Line by Timothy Poulton

The State Dining Room in Buckingham Palace (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017; Photo: Peter Smith)

The State Dining Room at Buckingham Palace remains closed, more than 16 months after damage was discovered in a timber beam that helps hold up the ornately gilded ceiling.

Initially a palace spokesperson had played down reports that the room would need to be closed for official functions and visitors for up to six months.*Subsequent investigations revealed a serious problem, requiring emergency stabilisation and a crash-deck scaffold. The room had been lined with full-length portraits from the royal collection, which had to be removed.

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The veteran Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya has created a site-specific work made of mist as the centrepiece of BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights (24 March-2 April)—the Tate Modern’s “first ever live exhibition”, says the museum director Frances Morris.Nakaya’s work—titled London Fog (2017) and made in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani—is on show outside the museum’s new Switch House building. The exhibition brings together “old friends with new friends”, Morris says.

Nakaya, who has “lifetime of collaboration” behind her—including with the US artist Robert Rauschenberg whose major survey is also on show at the museum—was the starting point for the exhibition, which combines performances, film, installations, music and dance.

There will be a “continuously changing programme” throughout the duration of the exhibition, says the show’s co-curator Catherine Wood. The exhibition, which is primarily housed in the museum’s subterranean Tanks galleries, is the first in a series of annual live exhibitions that will take place over the next four years, Woods says.



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When the artist Yoko Ono made the film Bottoms in 1967, officials at the Royal Albert Hall in London refused to show the 80-minute piece which consists of nothing but close-up shots of 365 bums. According to the UK newspaper, the i, Marion Herrod, the venue secretary, was enflamed by the proposal, saying: “We are concerned with the protection of the hall and I was not convinced that we should not have disruptive behaviour from way-out elements.”

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Thieves broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum yesterday morning (27 March) and stole a 100kg, pure gold Canadian coin worth an estimated €3.7m.The burglary took place between 3.20am and 3.45am, during a three-hour overnight lull in the local rail service, according to the Tagesspiegel newspaper. Police say they were alerted by a security guard at the museum around 4am; a special art unit of the regional force is investigating the theft.

A ladder that police discovered on the railway next to the museum suggests that the thieves entered through a window three to four metres above the tracks. Located on Museum Island, the Bode houses Berlin’s coin collection, one of the largest in the world, as well as sculpture and Byzantine art.

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Milton Gendel’s photograph of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen Vail with their shih tzus at their home in Venice (1950).

Milton Gendel: 50 Years of Photographs, which opens this month at the Galerie en Atelier Aroa in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the first exhibition in France to focus on the work of the American-born photographer and art critic.

Gendel became a correspondent for Art News in 1954 and is known for his connections to figures like the artist Salvador Dalí, the art dealer Leo Castelli and the British Royal Family. The show comprises around 70 black-and-white photographs taken throughout Europe, America and Asia and around 72,000 negatives and 60 albums of prints that date from 1946 to 2000. Some highlights include a photograph of Queen Elisabeth II feeding her corgis at Balmoral Castle (1976), a photograph of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen Vail with their shih tzus at their home in Venice (1950) and a collection close-up shots of artists like Alberto Giacometti, Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud.

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Tests conducted by UK scientists show that, from the early 18th century, Chinese artisans used European cobalt blue to produce famille rose porcelain. This is the first scientific evidence that overglaze pigment was imported from Europe from the early part of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Cobalt blue was an important pigment in the production of Chinese porcelain during this period. The cobalt used for blue-and-white ceramics was locally mined in China and has a high manganese content. But famille rose porcelain needed finer European cobalt, which gives a purer blue. European cobalt was also less susceptible to running when the glaze was fired.

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If you find visiting galleries a little intimidating, it’s worth heading to a rather novel, small-scale new venue in Hoxton Square in East London. The Skip Gallery is a.... gallery in a skip (to put it bluntly).

The London-based artists Catherine Borowski and Lee Baker came up with the innovative idea after struggling to find an exhibition space last year.

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