Museums

Jeff Koons is putting a new shine on the Ashmolean

Jeff Koons is back. The American artist and art commerce kingpin has just opened his latest show at Oxford’s Ashmolean, the world’s oldest public museum. Seventeen significant works – 14 of which make their first appearance on UK soil –...

Herzog & de Meuron gifts collection of architectural sketches and models to MoMA

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has just had a major injection of architectural mastery courtesy of a donation from Herzog & de Meuron. The Swiss firm has gifted a tranche of design drawings, photographs, models and other materials to...

Ebony G Patterson’s ornate night garden of toxic silk flowers and neo-baroque tapestries

It’s among the most enduring tales of deception: Eve and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden after eating the forbidden fruit, the original sin. In Ebony G Patterson’s largest survey to date, the mixed media artist similarly lures viewers...

The Met unveils plans for renovation of Rockefeller Wing

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is to undertake a renovation of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Galleries (AAOA), overseen by Los Angeles architecture firm Why. The three regional collections, which were founded almost 50 years ago...

Sweden’s Nationalmuseum renovation balances history with modernisation

Back to black: the best in contemporary black architecture

Over the centuries, the colour black is steeped in a history of functionality – the Vikings used black tar as a protective coating in both shipbuilding and architectural practices; the Japanese charred wood to preserve their constructs against the elements...

Italian sportswear giant Fila looks backwards to go forwards

Successful sportswear brands are no longer purveyors of just clothing and equipment for sports. They are now fashion brands. And footwear brands. And media publishers. And high fashion collaborators. They are lifestyle labels and video-makers and cultural icons to be...

The art of the beautiful game: football moves off pitch and into the museum

Football has many guises. It is a pastime where schoolboys scrape knees in a courtyard; a tear-jerking symbol of national pride; a multi-billion dollar industry with corporate interest; a global franchise with a zealot-like devotion to the athletes – the...

Leonor Antunes threads Bauhaus, brutalism and Cuban design in new installations

In her sublime, site-specific installations, Leonor Antunes pays homage to the practice of forgotten female luminaries in modern architecture, design and art. In Mexico City at the Tamayo Museum, she has reassembled pieces of objects made by the late Cuban...

The artists bringing their candid vision to queer photography

Tom Jackson, a fifty-something dump-truck driver and self-styled ‘redneck’ living in an insalubrious basement studio, made Netflix viewers everywhere weep when he was made over and reunited with his lost love by Queer Eye’s Fab Five. When Monica Beverly Hillz...

What’s next for Azerbaijan’s flourishing art scene, plus the best Baku galleries

Having only emerged from more than 50 years of communist rule in 1991, Azerbaijan has spent the last 25 years redefining itself. Gentrification has been rapid, especially in the past decade, and in the capital city of Baku, a skyline...

The contemporary art museum making waves on a French Riviera island

A visit to the newly launched contemporary art museum, the Fondation Carmignac hidden away on the island of Porquerolles along the French Riviera, is somewhat of an odyssey, which is exactly what its founders intended. ‘It’s a kind of striptease...