Arts news

• Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas review – bulging tights, pervy plinths and kinky boots

  25-09-2023 18:48
  
  Tate Britain, London
  In this gloriously filthy show, the sculptor collides old and new work to make an exhilarating cornucopia of sex, jokes and deathA wax-cast erect penis is planted on a chair, and a pair of pink dentures sit upright on the other. The chairs are corralled behind a low barrier, to deter the adventurous from taking a seat and doing themselves a mischief. Those pesky Tate barriers also prevent you from sitting on another chair, beneath a plain wooden box cantilevered above it, wh
  
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• Glasgow to the rescue as blast of realism brings punch to the new Scottish galleries – review

  25-09-2023 16:51
  
  The National, Edinburgh
  The mountains, lochs and rivers are ravishing. But it’s the artists from Glasgow – that one-time hotbed of modernism – who bring a rawness to these lavish new galleries celebrating Scotland’s artOne thing rapidly becomes clear in these lavish new purpose-built galleries of Scottish art: Scotland likes itself. Or at least, Scottish curators are far fonder of their country than their opposite numbers at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery
  
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• British Ceramics Biennial 2023 review – 50 shades of clay from high-flying potters

  25-09-2023 16:37
  
  Various venues, Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme
  Located in what was once the beating heart of the industry, more than 50 of the best ceramicists working in Britain use squidgy forms to teach us about humanityThe only thing that unites the works in the British Ceramics Biennial is that they all explore the possibilities of creating with clay. The decision to refrain from dictating an overarching theme allows the four-venue showcase to express fully the interests and inclinations of the be
  
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• End of Term review – art-school horror is fusion of slasher and country-house whodunnit

  25-09-2023 10:00
  
  Weird goings-on in a basement lead to Cluedo-ish suspects and piecemeal flashbacks, but here it is the audience that suffers in the name of art‘So, you call yourself conceptualists, do you?” says the straight-arrow detective quizzing Melissa (Chelsea Edge), a cool-customer art student with three long lacerations on her face. “Mostly. Ashley wasn’t,” Melissa replies. “Unless anti-conceptualism is a concept. She was always about being in the moment. Expressionis
  
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• ‘Time is the only valuable thing’: artist Sarah Lucas on slacking, social media and her free bus pass

  25-09-2023 06:00
  
  As Tate Britain opens a retrospective – replete with cigarettes, marrows and plaster casts of her husband’s penis – the former YBA extols the importance of being idle‘One of the pleasures of getting old,” says Sarah Lucas as she lights a rollup in Tate Britain’s garden, “is that a lot of your life is done and it’s not going to make that much of a bloody difference. That along with the bus pass is one of the few perks.” She throws back her hai
  
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• Arthur Brand: ‘I never give up informants - they will shoot you dead’

  25-09-2023 06:00
  
  The ‘Indiana Jones of the art world’ on receiving that stolen Van Gogh, how he gains the trust of criminals and police, and how he got into his unusual careerArthur Brand stands at the front door to his modest flat in east Amsterdam, where a week ago he took an extraordinary delivery: a stolen Vincent van Gogh painting worth up to £5.2m.He didn’t sign for it. The delivery man, a criminal uninvolved with the theft who had been granted amnesty to return the piece, smiled an
  
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• New gallery spaces showcasing Scottish art to open in Edinburgh

  25-09-2023 01:01
  
  Much-delayed £38.6m project brings works from 1800 to 1945 together for the first time as single collectionA suite of new galleries built to present work by many of Scotland’s most famous artists, including the Glasgow Boys, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, opens to the public this week.For the first time, the galleries in Edinburgh will showcase significant pieces of Scottish art held by National Galleries Scotland in a single collection, after a much-delayed cons
  
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