Arts news

Van Gogh: Self-Portraits review – ghostly encounters with greatness

06-02-2022 14:00

Courtauld Gallery, London
This small, unmissable show of 16 of Van Gogh’s 37 surviving self-portraits, all made during the last four years of his life, reveals a world of extreme feelingWhat did Vincent van Gogh look like? Only one photograph of the artist exists, and in it he’s unrecognisable. At 19, the beard has not yet appeared; the familiar inverted triangle of his skull still goes incognito beneath the fleshiness of youth. Later, several of his friends would make portraits of h

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Ai Weiwei: ‘I am like a cat. Cats can play for a whole day’

06-02-2022 10:30

As his new show opens in Cambridge, the artist reflects on his interest in fakes, why he’d love to go home, and the fate of the Chinese tennis star Peng ShuaiAi Weiwei, 64, must qualify by now as a grand old man of contemporary art except that as a sculptor, photographer and documentary film-maker, he is characterised by unflagging energy and youthful playfulness. As a child, he lived in a dugout in China’s “Little Siberia” where his poet father, Ai Qing, had been banishe

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‘Damien Hirst stole my cherry blossom’: artist faces plagiarism claim number 16

06-02-2022 08:30

Painter Joe Machine ‘incensed’ by similarity to his own canvases, created a decade beforeOver the years, Damien Hirst has faced more than one accusation of copying someone else’s work, with artists variously claiming to have created his diamond skull, his medicine-cabinets and his spin-paintings before he did. The one-time enfant terrible of the British art world has always denied plagiarism, although he did go as far as saying in an interview in 2018 that “all my ideas a

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The big picture: a Technicolor tribute to Trayvon Martin

06-02-2022 08:00

Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop pays homage to the teenager killed in a 2012 US shootingIn 2016, the Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop began what he calls the “liberty project”, dramatising in his studio defining moments of black history. This picture, dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, is the most recent of the events that he portrays. As in all of his pictures, Diop casts himself as the teenager, just as he depicts himself in the shoes of Senegalese second w

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