British photographer Polly Alderton likes to put her family in the spotlight, capturing every intimate moment from cuddles with the cat to sibling scraps Continue reading…
Touched by the hand of Ithell: my fascination with a forgotten surrealist | Stewart Lee
Ithell Colquhoun’s fecund, fleshy paintings were soaked in mysticism. But was she running my life from beyond the grave?I am a travelling entertainer. I spent decades in secondhand bookshops in shabby sidestreets, filling the sick-stomach void between …
Artist Sutapa Biswas: ‘I wanted viewers to work hard and feel uncomfortable’
A new exhibition showcases an artist who has spent four decades shattering Asian stereotypes and highlighting women’s untold storiesThe artist Sutapa Biswas’s father was a legendary figure in her family: a Marxist agronomist who stood up to the governm…
The grandmother reviving India’s oldest martial art – in pictures
Meenakshi Amma, 78, lives in Kerala, southern India, where she teaches the ancient practice of kalari, or kalaripayattu, to new generations Continue reading…
Send us to Coventry! How the Turner Prize and a touring bin put the city on the map
It started with lockdown and a broken angel, but Coventry’s year as city of culture is highlighting its reputation for resilience Shortly before midnight on 23 January 2020, security cameras outside Coventry Cathedral picked up two ghostly figures smas…
Louis Wain’s anthropomorphic cats to go on display at Bethlem museum
Eccentric artist was famed for outlandish drawings produced while a patient at ‘Bedlam’ psychiatric hospital“He has made the cat his own,” HG Wells once said of Louis Wain. “English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of the…
Watch out! Contemporary artists take on the Beano – in pictures
“It’s strange,” says Andy Holden, curator of new Somerset House exhibition, Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, “that a formula from 1938 still resonates today. That it survived the birth of children’s TV, computer games and a changing world.” The co…
‘Freedom’: exhibition celebrates Barcelona’s 1970s counterculture
Underground recalls brief but intense flowering of movement in city following death of FrancoWhen Spain’s repressive dictatorship finally came to a close with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the counterculture that had been bubbling away for yea…
Capsule of 1765 air reveals ancient histories hidden under Antarctic ice
Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow features sculpture encasing air extracted from start of Industrial RevolutionAn ampoule of Antarctic air from the year 1765 forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition that reveals the hidden histories contained in polar …
Poussin and the Dance review – the greatest frozen ballet in all art
National Gallery, LondonBacchus and his cavorting retinue of centaurs, satyrs and naked nymphs are in constant motion and yet spellbindingly still in the precision-engineered art of Nicolas PoussinThe scene: a chain of dancers in a glade, Roman tunics …