Arts news

• Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism review – spot the standouts in lavish display of bafflingly weak art

  02-02-2025 10:00
  Royal Academy, London
  Harking back to a wartime RA show, this mishmash of 20th-century Brazilian art, much of it in thrall to European modernism, ends exactly where it should begin…A warning at the outset – the birth of modernism, in Brasil! Brasil! at the Royal Academy, does not mean the actual baby. You will not be flying down to Rio in the 60s. There will be no cool constructions by Lygia Pape or fluttering sculptures by Hélio Oiticica, no hint of Oscar Niemeyer’s sw
  
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• ‘A living, breathing work of art’: Leigh Bowery by those who knew him best

  02-02-2025 07:00
  
  The performance artist shocked 1980s London with his surreal outfits, outlandish lifestyle and collaborations with Lucian Freud, dancer Michael Clark and others. As a major exhibition opens at Tate Modern, family and friends talk about Bowery’s larger-than-life legacyIn October 1980, 19 year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the small Australian town of Sunshine in suburban Melbourne. He brought with him a single suitcase and a portable sewing machine. A few months later, he spent hi
  
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