On April 2nd 2019, Sotheby’s is launching a Modern and Contemporary African Art auction to exhibit masterpieces by renowned Sudanese artists. The line up will include artwork from Ibrahim El Salahi and Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, who helped found the Khartoum School in Sudan, alongside artwork from Salah Elmur and Hussein Shariffe. Formed in 1960, The Khartoum School was a modernist art movement formed to simulate the changing face of the newly independent Sudan, from Anglo-Egyptian...
Over 200 works from the private art collection of George Michael are to be auctioned by Christie’s in London this March. The proceeds will help to continue the singer-songwriter’s philanthropic work. The late George Michael, who died suddenly on Christmas Day in 2016, was a keen visitor to galleries and artist’s studios, where he developed friendships with many of the Young British Art Movement (YBA) artists whose work he admired deeply. His impressive collection represents...
A comprehensive exhibition of the work of controversial American artist Jeff Koons is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until June 9th. Koons himself together with Sir Norman Rosenthal curated the exhibition, which features 17 works, 14 of which have never been shown in the UK. They span the artist’s entire career and his most well-known series including Equilibrium, Statuary, Banality, Antiquity and his recent Gazing Ball sculptures and paintings. Koons is widely known for his iconic...
Opera Gallery London has announced its show Transformation by one of Spain’s most acclaimed artists, Lita Cabellut. With works owned by celebrities such as Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry and Gordon Ramsay, Cabellut is the third highest selling artist in her home country, and has works exhibited around the world. Cabellut’s work is largely inspired by her backstory. The artist’s mother ran a brothel on the outskirts of Barcelona, and after Cabellut’s mother passed away when...
A well-known but rarely sighted portrait by Lucian Freud is heading to auction for the first time, after hanging in a legendary Irish house in the Wicklow mountains for more than 50 years. The 1956 painting, Head of a Boy, is a tender tribute to its sitter, the late Hon. Garech Browne, wealthy Guinness heir and lifelong friend of figurative British painter Lucian Freud. Executed at the Luggala estate by a 34-year-old Freud when Browne...
A Banksy artwork that was painted to memorialise the victims of a 2015 terror attack in Paris has been stolen. The black and white work depicted a mournful female figure wearing a veil and was reportedly cut out of the emergency doors at the Bataclan concert hall, where it paid homage to the 90 people killed at the venue in November 2015. The concert hall reported the theft in a tweet on Saturday. ‘It’s a...
The notorious Banksy strikes again. Season’s Greetings, which appeared on the side of a nondescript garage in Port Talbot just before Christmas in 2018, has been sold to a private dealer for a six-figure sum. About 20,000 people are thought to have made their way to visit the anonymous street artist’s latest mural since it was discovered in the Welsh town, but the graffiti now belongs to Essex-based Banksy expert John Brandler. After finding himself...
As quickly as it was rediscovered, a painting believed to be a lost work of Renaissance master Michelangelo has disappeared, a matter of days before experts were due to examine it. The 16th-century artwork depicts Mary, Joseph and a sleeping baby Jesus and had been undisturbed in a dark corner of the Sin Ludgerus church in the small Flemish town of Zele. Upon his discovery, pastor Jan Van Raemdonck, 61, noted the startling similarities between...
After 142 years on New Bond Street, one of London’s oldest commercial art galleries, The Fine Art Society, is marking a new chapter by offering over 300 works in a Sotheby’s auction taking place in February 2019. The sale on 5 February 2019 will see pieces by some of the most distinguished artists of the last 150 years go under the hammer. Perhaps most significant is James McNeill Whistler—one of the first and most celebrated...
Klimt was the master of symbolism, but was his personal life as scandalous as his paintings? Born on July 14 1862 in Baumgarten, Austria, Gustav Klimt was the son of a struggling gold engraver. Klimt was the second of seven children and lived in poverty while he studied architectural painting at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts. All three of the Klimt boys displayed early artistic talent—as a member of the ‘Company of Artists’ (a group...
