OUTCAST: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World to be published by Faber in June 2025.
Writing, reporting, criticising. Mostly south of the world. Editor-at-larging for ArtReview.
A revelatory history of humanity - spanning thousands of years and ranging across the world - told through the lens of a misunderstood disease.
Outcast: A History of Us Through Leprosy is an examination of societies and individuals through the lens of leprosy, a disease far less contagious than the mythology that shrouds it.
Oliver Basciano, Taj Ali and Katherine Dunn have been revealed as this year's winners of the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards.
A cultural history of the disease that became a mythology, a symbol and an identity | Leprosy and isolation in Romania
Oliver Basciano finds out about living with leprosy in a quiet corner of Romania
Everyone I meet in Kyiv is tired. Physically tired. Emotionally tired. Tired from the shrill loud whirl of the air raid app forcing them from sleep
On a tiny scrap of land on the eastern outskirts of São Paulo, off an unpaved path leading to the favela beyond, stands a small squat building made of poured concrete and chipboard. A banner outside reads ‘Cozinha Solidária. Almoço Grátis’. Solidarity Kitchen. Free Lunch. It is a modest affair, but for many residents of Jardim Iguatemi the facility had become a second home.
Uniform, merchandise, alcohol, nationalism - these are the real markers of a ritual gathering
Rude, high-handed and unashamedly intellectual. Twenty years on from her death, what would the world think of Sontag today?
The images that spread across the TV networks and social media on Sunday 8 January seemed to confirm the worst fears, that a coup could really happen in Brazil.
Works ranging from the Sámi in northern Europe to the Xingu in Brazil reflect the battle against colonialism and capitalism
Co-founder Stefan Benchoam has gone from selling beer to make rent to showing at Art Basel
Dino D’Santiago is whipping up the audience with the ferrinho. The musician and rapper plays the instrument, a metre-long length of iron with regular notches hacked into it, with a knife, just as his parents and grandparents did in Cape Verde.
'Choreographies of the Impossible' brings in long-excluded artists and wears a sense of visceral anger with pride
A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the 'Global South'. But what does that mean? And is the term of any practical use?
As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. 'We didn't expect a criminal case, we didn't expect imprisonment, we didn't expect international attention. We didn't expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the [...]
In a painting by Karen Lamassonne from 1989, a couple wrap themselves around each other in a fevered clinch. The amorous pair are vastly oversized compared with the tropical city in which they kiss: the woman's bottom gently rests on the upper branches of a ceiba tree, a Lilliputian car drives past, a pedestrian strolls along the pavement, seemingly unaware of the gigantic lovers in their midst.
On Sunday 30th October Lula, the leader of the Brazilian Workers' Party, marked a remarkable political comeback, winning a third term as Brazilian president over the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. But as Oliver Basciano writes, the Brazil Lula will now lead is a very different one from that of his first term in 2003, with fresh challenges ahead for the Brazilian left.
'Jail, death or victory.' These are the three alternatives Brazil's incumbent leader says await him. It is an unusual rallying call for an election campaign, but this is Jair Bolsonaro, the 'Trump of the Tropics', and he may well be right. Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 when his initial rival, Luiz I...
Like many pop artists, Laila Shawa, who has died aged 82, used repetition and silkscreen printing. In the hands of forerunners such as Andy Warhol, the form and technique highlighted the commodification of celebrity - as in the American artist's images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley - but Shawa, who was Palestinian, had much darker and more political concerns.
Pedro Barbosa's house, in the leafy Jardins neighbourhood of São Paulo, is, at first glance, that of any avid art collector. Minimalist sculpture, monochrome canvases and text works hang on the walls and sit on every surface.
The artist's life, work and exile is foundational to the history of Black-made contemporary art and the continuing struggle for racial equality in Brazil 'You have my permission to produce The Emperor Jones without payment to me and I want to wish you all the success you hope for with your Teatro Experimental do Negro.
Pope.L started out doing performance art because it was cheap, once crawling through a city in a Superman outfit. Now all the big museums want his often racially charged work. As a rare show opens in Britain, he looks back
"Histórias Brasileiras"[Brazilian Stories] is a profoundly depressing show, a curatorial snapshot of a country, it would seem, at the end of its tether. It coincides with the closing months of Jair Bolsonaro's grueling first term as the country's president, opening just before the world's fourth biggest democracy goes to the polls.
Yet by the time he had gravitated fully to Pop Art he had rekindled his earlier acclaim, with successful solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1972 and at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973. In 1980 Greaves staged a retrospective of his paintings at Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, and of his print works at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.
A greying man sits glumly in the oak-lined booth of a bohemian bar nursing a pint. Above the velvet-cushioned bench on which he hunches is a salon hang of cubist paintings - works in the style of Picasso, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall.
Antonio Tarsis started making art in 2009 when he was 14. His mother had died that year and he had never known his father. It was, he says, not just a way of coping with the situation, but a way of surviving.
For 16 nights, for six hours each night, in October 2005, visitors to Matt's Gallery in east London found Brian Catling stalking a stage set of dark ecclesiastical wood. The artist's behaviour was erratic and volatile: he paced up and down at speed; he messed around with an animal's jawbone; he would urinate from a constructed pulpit, or don a wooden dunce's cap.
I often stare open-mouthed at Brazilian supermarket shelves, horrified by the overt racism of some of the branding. One line of cleaning products features a caricature that's too grim to go into, and would likely have been considered offensive by many as far back as the 1920s.
On hearing the Russian rockets hit Kyiv in the early hours of 24 February, Ihor Poshyvailo knew his first responsibility was to get the collection of the Maidan Museum somewhere safe. The artefacts in the art historian's care are not paintings or sculptures, however, but a hodgepodge of common objects, which catalogue the 2014 Ukrainian " Maidan" revolution that ousted the Putin-friendly government of Viktor Yanukovych.
Graciela Iturbide will often crouch down to get her shot, so that her subject towers slightly over the viewer. It is a simple gesture but one that elevates the people in the Mexican photographer's work - often women, frequently indigenous or marginalised - to a position of power.
The one thing everyone agrees is that the Southbank Centre is in deep trouble. In May, the institution made an unusually public plea for government help.
hen fire devastated the National Museum in Brazil in 2018, one of the few objects to be found intact among the smouldering ruins was the St Luisa meteorite. While the Rio de Janeiro museum is still being rebuilt, the black rock, around a metre in length, is the star exhibit of the São Paulo Biennial, which opened at the weekend.
Over his three terms as president of the Philippines from 1965, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda were able to cream off some $10bn of the nation's assets through offshore banks. New revelations that a close associate of the dictator was also able to maintain an account with Credit Suisse as late as 2006 therefore comes as no surprise to Manila-born Pio Abad.
Wearing a T-shirt saying 'We Never Say No', the stevedore's son took any job going until he established his mastery of figurative bronzes James Butler, who has died aged 90, was a sculptor responsible for hundreds of bronze statues across Britain, Europe and Africa; his subjects ranged from Zambian freedom fighters to Richard III to Stan Cullis, former manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers.
A carpenter in the Siberian city of Tomsk was arrested after he held up a print of the 1871 painting at an anti-war protest On 6 March, Stanislav Karmakskikh, a carpenter in the Siberian city of Tomsk, was arrested.
For nearly 30 years, Pink Narcissus was a film as mysterious as it is sensual and erotic. Clocking in at just over an hour, it was released in 1971 with an anonymous director, and skirted the obscenity laws. Artistic, radical, with a truly innovative cinematic palette, it remained unashamedly gay and pornographic.
Last December in Moscow, dozens of international art world luminaries stepped out of the snow and into the vast, pristine galleries of GES-2, a new art centre. Located in a converted power station just a short walk from the Kremlin, the institution was funded by oligarch Leonid Mikhelson's V-A-C Foundation.
The founder of Forensic Architecture on the power of hyperaestheticisation, digital violence and how to read the world around us The Israeli-born architect is the principal of Forensic Architecture, a collective of architects, artists, academics, lawyers and journalists founded in 2010 and based at Goldsmiths University, London.
Though the Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, who has died aged 106, spent 70 years refining her painting style into a severe yet seductive form of geometric abstraction, her pioneering work remained largely unrecognised by the art world until she was in her early 90s.
Since July, visitors to Folkestone harbour have encountered a double archway brightly painted with a geometric pattern in an array of colours. A part of the Kent town's triennial art festival, it is the work of the Ghanaian-born artist Atta Kwami, who has died aged 65.
Lars Vilks, who has died aged 75, was a Swedish artist who attracted international notoriety with his drawings featuring the Prophet Muhammed. Spending his last 10 years under state protection after multiple assassination attempts, Vilks was killed in a traffic collision in south-west Sweden, alongside the two police bodyguards he was travelling with.
Though It's Dark, Still I Sing speaks to a country wrecked by the negligence of Bolsonaro’s government, from the human cost of the pandemic to the fires that rage through the Amazon.
It was a hot day in São Paulo on Saturday and, on a busy intersection in the southwest of the city shortly after midday, it got hotter still. Under bright sunlight, a truck pulled up, its box trailer piled with car tyres.
n 1979, the Stasi entered Ralf Winkler's Dresden studio and trashed the place. It was the culmination of a harassment campaign against the artist, who found fame under the pseudonym AR Penck, for refusing to make social-realist propaganda. Instead, his paintings featured oft-repeated hieroglyphs, odd symbols and signs, seemingly child-like naive scrawls and simple stick men (often with outsized penises).
The culture wars are fought in many places, but few would have expected a park flowerbed to be one of them.
É irônico que num momento em que a reputação internacional do Brasil foi manchada por sua política e sua resposta à pandemia, uma figura tão humanitária quanto Lina Bo Bardi esteja sendo consolidada como ícone internacional.
In the 1970s and 1980s, photographer and activist Claudia Andujar was living among Brazil's Yanomami indigenous people, whose villages are dotted across 9.6 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest. "At the time they had known very few people outside their own community," Andujar says slowly when we meet in her modest apartment in central São Paulo, running her hands over the tabletop as she remembers the details.
Over a hundred pairs of inky-black eyes stare out of their glass vitrines. These are Conceição Freitas da Silva's "bugres": the diminutive figures that for over two decades until her death in 1984 the Brazilian artist carved from tree trunks and branches.
In early 2020 I attended a protest outside the police headquarters in downtown São Paulo. The small crowd had come to hear from the relatives of nine young people, all Black, who had been killed in a stampede when police fired rubber bullets indiscriminately across a packed 1 1 baile, a dance party, in the south of the city.
ith squeezed budgets, British museums are increasingly relying on private patronage, for financial support and donation of artworks. Yet while the former has faced close scrutiny in recent years, the latter have received little attention.
In the 1960s Chuck Close, fresh from art school, was sitting in a New York restaurant when Jasper Johns walked in, passing by his fellow diners in total anonymity despite the older painter's great fame. After seven decades of self-portraits, Close, who has died aged 81, never suffered the same fate, his face recognisable to generations of museum-goers.
He covered protest marches in Hong Kong, conflict in Iraq and riots in India, but was killed during a battle in Afghanistan Danish Siddiqui, who has died aged 38, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and journalist; he was killed in crossfire between Afghan special forces and Taliban fighters.
A strict adherence to formalism and geometric abstraction led Jeffrey Steele, who has died aged 89, to pioneer op art. In the artist's most famous works, through carefully planned, tightly controlled patterning, a sense of optical movement occurs on the canvas.
Diego Cortez, who has died aged 74, was a linchpin of the New York underground in the 1980s, and instrumental in the career of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1978 he co-founded the Mudd Club, a multistorey venue of exposed brick and shabby red velvet furniture in a downtown area considered a no-go zone.
On a boiling hot morning in June 1984, hundreds of women converged on the Museum of Modern Art in New York to protest. MoMA was holding a huge exhibition of recent art and of the 165 artists showing, only 14 were women.
In 2019 I was asked to be on the jury for the Turner Prize. I was pretty happy about this. As an art critic, to be asked to judge one of the biggest art prizes feels like something of a professional endorsement. I even rang my mum to tell her.
Carnival in Brazil is one of the world's biggest, brashest parties. But under Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, there has been increase in police raids in poor neighbourhoods adding, Oliver Basciano finds, a tinge of bitterness to the party spirit.
By rights I shouldn't be writing this. I should be on the streets of São Paulo, beer in hand, as carnival rages around me. The bloco -street party-that passes under my window is a queer one. There would be a lot of kissing and not a lot of clothes.
On the screen of Leonardo Finotti's control pad the graves captured by his drone camera seem to go on forever. We are standing on a scrubby patch of grass that acts as the car park for the Cemitério da Vila Formosa, on the eastern periphery of São Paulo, about an hour from the centre of the city.
Restitution and the long shadows of history preoccupy two leading British authors
One bright morning in May 1994, in a summerhouse in the Norwegian fjord town of Åsgårdstrand, Charley Hill, a Scotland Yard detective, stared down a trapdoor leading to the basement. Below, in the dark, was Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, stolen three months earlier from the national gallery in Oslo.
Eyebrows were raised in the art world when actor and art collector Russell Tovey was appointed as a judge for this year's Turner Prize.
Last month saw a plethora of photocalls to launch the rollout of various vaccines for COVID-19, opening up a new aesthetic front in the war against the pandemic. Globally these have been one of the few occasions over the past year in which embattled politicians have had the chance to disseminate a positive image of themselves.
Arts institutions formulate a rebuke to the conservative forces currently wreaking havoc in Brasilia - and scrutinise their own historic complicity The leaders of Brazil's state-funded arts institutions have found themselves in a bind ever since Jair Bolsonaro's far-right presidency began at the start of 2019.
At a time when indigenous land is once again under attack, exhibitions in São Paulo of works by Glauco Rodrigues and Jaider Esbell offer urgent perspectives In 1962 Glauco Rodrigues was invited to a residency programme in Rome. When the artist returned home to Brazil two years later, he found the country a very different place to the one he had left.
Quite what the dispute between Duggie Fields and his tutor at the Chelsea School of Art was about has been long forgotten; Fields' protest has not. Always a snazzy dresser, on that day in college in the 1960s, Fields, who has died aged 75, unpinned the Donald Duck badge attached to the lapel of his black velvet three-piece suit and stuck it through the canvas of the abstract painting he had been working on.
I've been on the search for a new swimming pool in São Paulo since my regular haunt, Estádio do Pacaembu, was first closed to house a Covid-19 field hospital on the adjoining football pitch. And while cases have eased, the pool remains drained and shuttered as it undergoes refurbishment.
What is like to be an artist in a country led by a far-right president? Brazilian artists and thinkers explore the cultural life of their country in the era of Bolsonaro.
The artist Aldo Tambellini, who has died aged 90, was obsessed with the colour black. "Black to me is like a beginning," he said in 1967. "Black gets rid of the historical definition. Black is a state of being blind and more aware. Black is a oneness with birth.
While my Portuguese is improving, I still have to really concentrate to be able to follow a conversation. As such, when in São Paulo, I live an oddly alienated existence; other people's chatter - on the metro system, in cafés, and in supermarkets - is indecipherable background noise.
Politics infused everything that the designer Enzo Mari touched. Mari, who has died aged 88 of complications related to Covid-19, produced thousands of objects over a 60-year career, from pen holders and toys to chairs and vases. Each of those items drew inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement, in the simplicity of their form, and from his own uncompromising belief in communism.
Grayson Perry has drawn criticism from fellow artists after claiming the economic fallout of Covid-19 will clear galleries of "dead wood". "I think every part of life has probably got a bit of fat that needs trimming" Perry told the Arts Society Magazine.
In 1963 the artist Mohamed Melehi, then living in New York, was included in the Museum of Modern Art show Hard Edge and Geometric Painting and Sculpture. If he had stayed in the city, Melehi, who has died aged 83 of Covid-19, might have gone on to enjoy a similar level of fame to American peers painting in the same style, such as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland.
On Sunday, Poland goes to the polls after a bitter presidential election campaign. As part of his election strategy, the incumbent, president Andrzej Duda, has whipped up a culture war with LGBT people firmly in the firing line.
Of all the scenes in Mohamed Bourouissa's show at the Photographers' Gallery in London, it is the one the artist did not capture himself that is the most haunting. A man, perhaps in his mid-forties, stands in the aisle of a Brooklyn grocery store holding two bottles of Tide detergent.
Video art emerged in tandem with experimental film during the 1960s, as lively, open-ended alternatives away from the centre. Practitioners with contrarian agendas and backgrounds in disparate fields - music, performance, literature, visual art and the moving image - took to experimenting with audiovisual configurations.
Released after his solo exhibition at The Holburne Museum in Bath and coinciding with the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, this title highlights Djordje Ozbolt's recent work, reproducing the artist's sculptures, paintings and drawings from late 2013 to early 2017.
Frank Dunphy, who has died aged 82, was the business brain behind the multimillion-pound career of the artist Damien Hirst. A garrulous working-class Irishman, he gained a reputation for driving hard bargains for his client and running roughshod over the traditions of the art world.
Book review: The Jakarta Method: Washington's anticommunist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world by Vincent Bevins, reviewed by Oliver Basciano
In Andy Warhol's film Chelsea Girls, Brigid Berlin sits cross-legged issuing commands. "Donnie, comb it a little. Come here and give it a poke. Get the brush, the spray and all my tools," she says as she sweeps a hand through her bouffant do.
From love letters to mail-order pornography – on the long history of LGBT communities finding solace in the anonymity of the postal system
The two collaborators explored themes of love and aggression in an often tempestuous partnership Ulay, who has died aged 76, was best known for his 12-year collaboration with the performance artist Marina Abramovic; meeting in Amsterdam in 1975, the two artists became lovers, their avant-garde work based on that relationship.
In 1987, the Brazilian artist Jac Leirner began to collect the empty Marlboro Red packets produced by her hefty smoking habit. She first flattened them, then strung them up on a piece of tubing over 13ft in length.
This survey exhibition is a feast for the eyes, particularly if your eyes are partial to feasting on fit men. Featuring over 300 photographs and films, both editorial and art, by more than 50 artists, the exhibition seeks to survey how masculinity has been represented from the 1960s to the present.
In Duhigó's Nepũ Arquepũ, a 2019 acrylic-on-wood painting, a woman starts a month of postpartum recovery in a hammock strung across the beams of a straw-roofed, mud-floored maloca. The naked young mother cradles her newborn as the local shaman of the Tukano tribe, an indigenous people of the Northwest Amazon, sits close by, administering blessings and medicine.
Stacked on a table in Edmund de Waal's studio in south London is today's post - a dozen or so packages from various book shops. They will be unwrapped and added to the artist's Library of Exile, a collection of more than 2,000 titles written by people forced to leave their countries of origin for political reasons, from the Roman poet Ovid to children's author Judith Kerr.
At 89, Claudia Andujar still has her work cut out. For five decades she has photographed the Yanomami indigenous people, an Amer-Indian tribe who number 33,000 and live in 192,000 square kilometres of rainforest that straddle the borders of Brazil and Venezuela.
As Trevor Paglen's exhibition on AI bias opens, the Barbican Centre won planning consent to install 56 new high-definition CCTV cameras, some with facial recognition.
Manal AlDowayan is on her way from the desert regions in the north of Saudi Arabia to Jeddah when we speak. She's splitting her time between two new major commissions, both ambitious in scale and concept. Not bad for someone for whom art was not a first career.
When the storm came after lunch at Vivian Suter's home in Panajachel, I assumed that, though heavy, it was standard for the dog days of Guatemala's rainy season. Perhaps the deluge would stop in an hour: a short, sharp downpour, leaving the air refreshed.
"When I see art by all these different communities, you can recognise they were made within similar political situations."
In 1962, when Beverly Pepper was invited to take part in an artist residency at a metalworking factory in the Italian town of Piombino, they asked if she could weld. "Of course," she lied, quickly seeking out a local handyman to teach her the basics.
John Baldessari was a towering figure in conceptual art. I mean, literally he was a towering figure: 6ft 7in to be precise. He was also incredibly important. His own work spread across painting, photography, film, video, artists' books, billboards and public sculpture.
Last week, the four artists shortlisted for the Turner prize turned themselves into a four-strong collective in order to win as a group - a move that caused controversy in the press, consternation over social media and a bust-up on Radio 4 between the Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle and his Sunday Times counterpart, Waldemar Januszczak.
Imagined Communities, the 21st edition of Videobrasil, takes its title from a 1983 book by Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson that describes nationality, 'nation-ness' and nationalism as 'cultural artefacts of a particular kind'. For the curators of this film-festival-turned-art-biennial, with its admirable and longstanding focus on artists from the 'global south', they are artefacts long-past their sell-by date.
'What do telephones, poetry and the Museum of Modern Art have in common?" read a press release issued by the New York institution on 21 July 1970. A question to which they might have added gay liberation, Aids activism, the aesthetics of advertising, Tibetan Buddhism and sleeping for Andy Warhol, and still received the answer of John Giorno.
Hardcover 290 x 248 mm 123 pages. Published by Parasol unit, London, 2015
In 1957 the artist Ed Clark, who has died aged 93, was in his New York studio making a painting for a forthcoming show when he decided to introduce an element of collage, a stretch of paper that hung over the side of the canvas.
In 2009, Saba Innab joined the reconstruction team of the Nahr Al Bared refugee camp. Home to more than 27,000 displaced Palestinians in northern Lebanon, 95 per cent of the settlement was destroyed during fierce fighting between the Lebanese army and militants two years prior.
"This is shit," the man in the ski jacket spat. "It's fucking propaganda." A moment earlier he had burst into the gallery and demanded I tell him what the charcoal drawings I was looking at were about. "Er...," I said hesitantly, "They each depict an arson attack made on a building in which asylum seekers were housed."
In February 1955 the Greek artist Takis stood bored on the platform at Calais train station. He was travelling back to Paris from London, where he had had his first solo exhibition, but his train was delayed. His eyes fell on a trackside signal, a metal upright pole with flashing lights at the top.
Karsten Schubert, who has died of cancer aged 57, was a London-based art dealer whose eponymous gallery was central to the nascent Young British Art scene in the late 1980s. S
Marisa Merz, who has died aged 93, was the only female artist associated with arte povera, the late-1960s Italian movement that favoured everyday, throwaway materials over traditional media such as oil paint and marble.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, who has died aged 95, harboured a seven-decade obsession that the common understanding of colour was wrong. "Colour," the Venezuelan-born artist believed, "evolves continuously in time and space." "I want people to realise that colour is not a certainty, but a circumstance," he said in 2014. "Red is maybe red.
Mr Viera is not worried about the new, more modern, tuna factory that has arrived on São Miguel. Sociedade Corretora, of which he is the manager, has been canning tuna since the Second World War.
'Queer people have been afraid since the president was elected," says Paulx Castello. "He has been demonising us from the start - but this was different. Here we were personally under attack."
The Iraqi-American couldn't stand showing at a museum that has an arms dealer on its board; Oliver Basciano spoke to the artist on the Whitney problem, Leonard Cohen and Palestine, and buying Saddam Hussein's dinner plates.
On the work of Don McCullin, Roger Fenton and Susan Meiselas
Three-day event makes late move to secret location in wake of row between LGBT and feminist groups
His psychedelic paintings linked the Bauhaus to Islamic art - and brought the radicalism of the late 60s to Morocco. Now, at 82, the world is set to rediscover his vibrant visions
The curator, who has died aged 55, was the only person to curate both the Venice Biennale and Documenta, helped redefine what African art could be and provided a platform for the likes of Steve McQueen
American artist known for his white paintings who was regarded as the link between abstract expressionism and minimalism
Hardcover 280 x 210 mm 126 pages. Published by Parasol unit, London, 2014
Conceptual artist who explored alternative belief systems and cosmologies
Hardcover 280 x 210 mm 133 pages. Published by Parasol unit, London, 2016
Artist whose collaboration with young New Yorkers the Kids of Survival pioneered socially engaged conceptual art
Bruguera and two others were planning protests over Decree 349, a 'dystopian' new law that will forbid artists to practise without a government licence
Some have employed security guards. Others have fled. With Jair Bolsonaro about to take power, many artists in Brazil fear the censorship and intimidation they now endure will only get worse
Artist described as 'a radical in the vein of Blake and Turner' who was commissioned to draw every cathedral in England
In Cape Town, Oliver Basciano discovers the importance of archaeology in the South African artist’s work
Oliver Basciano reports on the stricken state of Brazilian politics as the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo opens
Pupil of Krishnamurti who became a world-leading printmaker and art teacher
Painter hailed as the best of his generation, who won the inaugural Turner prize
Danish artist whose paintings oscillate between abstraction and landscape
From police ‘kettling’ tactics to hashtags, Oliver Basciano traces the way revolt has changed
Enrico Castellani, who has died aged 87, was a quiet man who made quiet art. Yet he was regarded not only as one of the great Italian artists of the 20th century, but the "father of minimalism". It was the American artist Donald Judd who dubbed him thus, but Castellani's art was rooted in the avant-garde milieu of mid-20th century Europe.
I’m sat, wrapped up, outside a café in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. Spread out amongst the cups and saucers are the only four issues of Svep, a visual poetry magazine founded by the late Vesselin Sariev in 1990, which I am leafing through with the poet’s widow, Katrin, and daughter Vesselina
Virginia Surtees, who has died aged 100, was a fervent champion of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement and the leading scholar of one of its key protagonists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her research into figures such as John Ruskin, George Price Boyce and Ford Madox Brown occurred while such artists were deemed deeply unfashionable.
Reviewing Gideon Rachman's new take on East-West relations.
In March 2015 I walked through the lanes of Büyükada, an island that lies an hour's slow ferry ride from Istanbul, eventually coming to the track that leads down to the ruins of the villa in which Leon Trotsky lived between 1929 and 33.
German artist whose primitive-style imagery, recalling cave art, reflected the harsh realities of the cold war
"It was like an American robot had landed." It is dusk in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and Pravdoliub Ivanov is pointing out the site of the city's first Coke machine, installed in 1989 as the country transitioned from communism to capitalism.
Dana Schutz’s depiction of the mutilated body of a 14-year-old African American boy has been accused of using black death as racialized ‘spectacle’
Incorporating his academic background as a geographer, and the skills of an investigative reporter, Trevor Paglen is an American artist whose work has sought to expose the often hidden physical apparatus and architecture that governments and, increasingly, private companies employ to monitor and control the public.
Oliver Basciano records the Palestinian artist's adventures on the Sinai Peninsula
The Argentinian-Swedish artist as nineteenth-century Romantic
The emotional, sensual experience of encountering a work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster work is hard to describe. I remember feeling a shiver in the Brazilian summer heat amid the gardens of Inhotim...
How those on the margins fought back
To walk around the 'old town' of Warsaw results in a disconcerting feeling.
The Tehran-born, Toronto-based artist memorialises the impact of geopolitics and urbanisation on the natural world
When the gallery gets infected by the world outside
Hans Ulrich Obrist occupaies the Modernist villa architect Lina Bo Bardi built for herself.
Reviews of Looking Under the Skin at the South London Gallery; Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception at Tate Modern; Design Research Unit: 1942-72 at Cubitt; The Slice: Cutting to See at the Architectural Association; Public Reading Rooms at the Architectural Association; Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy; The Natural Order of Things: Marcelo Cidade and Andre Komatsu at Max Wigram Gallery; Chelsea Flower Show 2011; and Laura Oldfield Ford: documenting the urban flux