Arts news

• ‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building

  14-10-2021 20:51
  
  The 2021 RIBA Stirling prize has gone to Kingston University’s free-flowing Town House, a welcoming, transparent, roomy place perfect for students to spark off each otherAfter more than a year of Zoom tutorials and online lectures, students are back learning face to face – and nowhere more so than at Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building.A palatial £50m complex, the winner of the 2021 RIBA
  
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• The life less ordinary of artist Laura Knight

  14-10-2021 09:00
  
  From painting nudes at a time when it was forbidden to sleeping among the troops in both world wars, the vitality of her work makes her still strikingly relevant“It is my opinion that fine realism is indeed true abstractionism,” the British painter Laura Knight wrote in 1954. Her critics complained that she was just copying life, but Knight believed that she transformed the world more than abstract painters, who seemed to her, to ignore its sensuality and specificity.We can decide fo
  
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• Will the increase of online exhibitions kill the physical gallery?

  14-10-2021 08:05
  
  After Covid forced galleries to move their exhibitions to a digital space, artists and art institutions are now grappling with a divisive new normalWalking into Canada Gallery on the Lower East Side, a wall of 400 latex masks greets you. The faces express frustration and weariness.Michael Mahalchick’s seventh solo exhibition, US, represents Donald Trump’s “basket of deplorables”, a phrase Hillary Clinton used to describe of Trump supporters during his 2016 presidential ca
  
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