Haunting Shadow of Scrubbed Banksy Mural Goes Viral

It took courthouse administrators less than two days to remove Banksy’s latest stencil mural of a judge attacking a protester, which appeared in central London early this week. But what remains of the artwork is a shadowy stain, eerily reminiscent of a hooded...

A No Kings Movement for 19th-Century Art 

LONDON — How best to paint the scorned, the marginalized, the lost to view?  This was the challenge that faced the French artist Jean-François Millet in the middle years of the 19th century. His subject was the peasantry who worked on the land, owners of small...

Emily Kam Kngwarray’s Language of Country 

LONDON — An exquisite rhythm rolls across the sheer mass of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings, produced in prolific bursts of creativity between 1980 and 1996, the last decade and a half of her life. As she worked at the forefront of a movement that sought to translate...

An Insider Artist’s Outsider Alter-Ego

Grayson Perry, “I Know Who I Am” (2024), cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué (© Grayson Perry; courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, all other images Anna Souter/Hyperallergic) LONDON — The Wallace Collection is famous for its trove of Rococo art, such...

The Shocking Allure of Erotic Abstraction

LONDON — Some of the Courtauld’s previous exhibitions have suffered from insufficient curation. Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams, Eva Hesse, on the other hand, strikes the exact right balance. Drawing on scholar Jo Applin’s research, curator...

Edward Burra’s Satirical Surrealism

LONDON — Edwards Burra was a chronically ill English painter, suffering from debilitating arthritis and asthma throughout much of his life. Hailing from the upper classes of southern England, with regularized, side-parted, tamped-down hair, he spent much of his life...

Is Jenny Saville the UK’s Greatest Living Painter?

LONDON — Of all the YBAs (Young British Artists) of the 1990s — including upstarts like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, mouthing off petulantly to the art establishment with dead livestock and unmade beds — it is Jenny Saville who has been most entrenched in the history...

The Life-or-Death Art of Hamad Butt

LONDON — There is something both frightening and fascinating about a sculpture that could kill you. Hamad Butt’s Familiars (1992) is a series of three sculptures that, if broken, could toxify the air and cause significant harm. “Familiars 3: Cradle” resembles a huge...

The Life-or-Death Art of Hamad Butt

LONDON — There is something both frightening and fascinating about a sculpture that could kill you. Hamad Butt’s Familiars (1992) is a series of three sculptures that, if broken, could toxify the air and cause significant harm. “Familiars 3: Cradle” resembles a huge...

Giuseppe Penone Captures the Breath of the World 

LONDON — In this era of climate crisis, during which it has become evident that we urgently need to reassess our relationships with the environment and other species, the art world is increasingly commissioning exhibitions themed on ecology and the more-than-human...

Leigh Bowery Was His Own Artwork 

LONDON — The very idea of encapsulating the concept of Leigh Bowery within a gallery space should not work. He was not someone who brought art objects into the world, but was instead an embodiment of ideas and acts that can no more easily be categorized as singularly...