The impressionist painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, among many others, have just toured museums such as the Musee des impressionnismes in Giverny or the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. However, the true reason for this journey is…
The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and Queen Sonja of Norway inaugurated in Rome the exhibition "The Inner Scream", by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. More than a hundred works by the painter were lent by the Munch Museum in Oslo, and the show is held in the splendid Palazzo Bonaparte.
This autumn, the prestigious Fondation Beyeler in Basel will hold a major retrospective devoted to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (1929, Matsumoto). The famous building designed by Renzo Piano will house, for four months, seven decades of artistic production, from her earliest works -never before seen in Europe- to her most recent creations. The exhibition will include her emblematic Infinity Mirror Room, among other installations that immerse the viewer in a sensory experience without limits. Through paintings, sculptures, performances, collages, fashion and literature, a comprehensive vision will be offered of an artist who, at 95, continues to create with intensity and passion.
The surrender of Third Reich Germany to the Allies and the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination turns 80 years old. 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day, marked the end of the Second World War. Coinciding with this date, the Berlin State Museums open an extraordinary exhibition titled "The Angel of History. Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and The Angels of Berlin 80 Years after the Second World War".
The Reina Sofia Museum devotes an ambitious retrospective to Maruja Mallo, one of the most audacious and singular figures of the Spanish avant-garde of the 20th century. "Mask and Compass" tours her most emblematic series chronologically, allowing one to discover not only the evolution of her plastic language, always in transformation, but also the free, provocative and radically modern personality of an artist who defied aesthetic and social conventions in a turbulent time. An essential exhibition for understanding her place in the history of contemporary art.
Florence, during the first decades of the fifteenth century, was the axis around which the world turned. In among its twenty neighbourhoods with their gonfaloniers, their streets and palaces, their churches and houses, Alberti was writing his treatise “On Painting”, Masaccio had painted the Brancacci Chapel frescoes and his Holy Trinity adorned Santa Maria Novella church, Ghiberti completed the North Door of the Baptistery and Brunelleschi crowned Florence cathedral with a dome which, using never-before-seen techniques, he made to float in its enormity above the Santa Maria del Fiore apse.
Coliseum director Dr Rosella Rea accompanies ABC Cultural on an exceptional visit through some of the recently restored, but as yet unopen to the public, areas of this prodigious monument . Back in Madrid, we consult with Pritzker prize-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. “You need to close your eyes to imagine this gallery ... Archaeologists have found coloured, stuccoed areas and many frescoes. We know now that the interior of the Coliseum was red. Only the exterior was light, the colour of limestone travertine. Ancient architecture was always painted in bright colours and to forget this is to veer from reality", says Dr Rea, as we walk through a gallery whose restoration began in 2012 - thanks to a €25 million funding grant from luxury brand Tod's – and, although now completed, is still absolutely out of bounds to the public.
that God granted the world ten measures of beauty (yofi), nine for Jerusalem and just one for the rest of the world. The Holy City has no rivers, no sea view, no gardens. It is, rather, an ochre-hued stoney plateau set amongst valleys and dry riverbeds in the mountains of Judea. So what then is Jerusalem? Is it a concept, a wound, a state of mind? Jerusalem is two rocks and a wall. It's the custodian of the three symbolic stones of the three religions that derive from the same book: the Wailing Wall for Jews, the Holy Sepulchre for Christians and the Dome of the Rock for Muslims. One could say that its power resides in its promise of the cosmic, or its being the epicentre of stories about creation. According to Enrich Klein's 2005 account, Jerusalem has been destroyed 12 times, sieged 23 times, captured 52 times and recaptured 44 times. It is the only city in the world where history is both the past and also the future. Whatever our particular faith or whether we even have one or not, here is where its chaotic, propulsive energy is to be found.
Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, Venice now finds itself at death's door, not drowning in the Adriatic's high tides but suffocated by mass tourism. UNESCO has extended until December 2018 its deadline for Venice to meet twelve criteria, to the letter, that might spare it being added to the World Heritage in Danger List alongside Aleppo, Damascus and the historic centre of Vienna. Around 9.30 in the morning, crossing the Campo Santa Maria Formosa towards San Zaccaria, there is still a real feel of authentic Vienna with children on their way to school, kiosks piled high with bundles of Corriere della Sera and Il Gazzettino and the local dialect of young Venetians stepping off gondolas and vaporettos en route to the Plaza's fresh vegetable stalls piled high with basil, chicory, vine tomatoes and aubergines.
Yesterday, some privileged ones, attended at the Liceu a perfect performance of Andrea Chenier. When opera reaches that degree of perfection, very rare on the other hand, and the audience surrenders like yesterday's at the Liceu, opera lovers understand what Riccardo Muti means about the difficulty of the art of conducting: "... I believe that I am halfway along the road, and I am sure that I will never reach the other shore of the river, because behind the notes dwells the infinite, which means God, and we are too small before God". The great attraction was the debut in Spain! of Jonas Kaufmann (48!) singing staged opera, so the house was completely full and the expectation indescribable.
Woody Allen never ceases to surprise. In his latest film, Blue Jasmine presents a completely new approach to the economic crisis about which cinema has also spoken so much in recent years. Inside Job, Margin Call, The Company…
I saw your eyes fixing on my answer. “YES”. It came out of a dark and unsuspected part inside me. I remembered exactly that sensation and the need to breathe pure air. To sweat and feel the…
To read such surprising literature in Spanish at this stage of my life fills me with satisfaction. Chirbes has devoted his life to this craft, but through sheer ignorance I have only just discovered him in this novel of…
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin empire, is much more than an entrepreneur: he is a visionary who has pushed the boundaries of business, adventure, and philanthropy. From his beginnings with a student magazine to his journey into space, Branson champions a human-centered leadership committed to people and the planet. In this interview, he reflects on artificial intelligence, climate change, and his calling to change the world with passion, empathy, and action.
Nicolas Berggruen (1961) is the founder and chairperson of Berggruen Holdings and the interdisciplinary think-tank, the Berggruen Institute, where scientists, economists, philosophers and artists from around the world engage and put forward proposals to tackle the 21st-century challenges facing humanity. Among the issues raised against the technifying, globalization and capitalist background of our time is that of how we see ourselves and recognize the other person in all their fullness from a moral perspective.
Damien Hirst (1965) began his artistic career as an iconic member of the Young British Artists group. The advertising mogul and gallery owner Charles Saatchi raised this group to the heights of world recognition and made Hirst its foremost representative, by funding and supporting his career. He was the one who managed to sell - in 2004 and for 9.5 million euros - Hirst’s tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde. This particularly representative work forms part of his Natural History series, along with his cabinets of fish in formaldehyde.
Recently inaugurated in Lisbon, Rapture, is the largest exhibition by artist and political activist, Ai Weiwei, (Beijing, China, 1957) described by The New York Times as one of the most important critical artists of our time, with his eloquent and unsilenceable voice for freedom. The exhibition title has various meanings; one is the “transcendent moment that connects the earthly dimension with the spiritual dimension.” Another is the “hijacking of our rights and freedom”
The philosophy of George Berkeley can be summed up in a few words: matter does not exist. A radical and provocative claim that he tried to argue in his most important book: “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”, written when he was 28. Hylas is a Cartesian thinker who defends the existence of matter, while Philonous is Berkeley himself, who inspired the well-known principle: esse est percipi. This could be translated as: the world only exists if it is perceived.
Thomas Aquinas taught at several universities (Paris, Naples and Viterbo, among others) and was a most profound connoisseur of Aristotelian philosophy. But these facts, rather than turning him into the paradigm of Scholastic philosophy, show only that Aquinas was a child of his time. If Thomas holds interest for philosophy beyond the fact that his thought can be situated within a particular historical period, it is because he presents an extraordinarily powerful and original philosophy.
In recent years Stoicism has grown so popular that it has become a mass phenomenon. Hardly a week goes by without the general press offering us a newly published Stoic synthesis just out in the bookshops, or a cursory analysis of the reasons for the return of this ancient philosophy. All sorts of Stoic podcasts circulate on the internet; youtubers, opinion leaders and great entrepreneurs claim to promote Stoic values, and the Greco-Roman classics of this school, such as Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, find a place in bookshop windows for the first time.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau always liked to swim against the current, like an enfant terrible who let himself be swept along by no fashion or opinion, perhaps because he understood philosophy as an existential rather than a professional commitment. He grew up in the company of many readings in which "that free and republican spirit took shape, that indomitable and proud character, incapable of bearing the yoke and servitude" (Rousseau, 1997, 34).
Banksy is the pseudonym of the most high-profile graffiti painter in contemporary Street Art. Although there are no concrete biographical facts to go by, it is believed he was born in the outskirts of Bristol in 1974, later moving into the city where he spent his adolescence. A recent study by Queen Mary University in London identified the artist as Robin Gunningham and confirmed he grew up in Bristol. According to the illustrator and graphic designer Tristan Manco, one of the most ardent researchers into urban art, the controversial Banksy was an apprentice butcher before getting into graffiti during the 80's "aerosol boom". In the 90's, he was a gang member of Bristol’s DryBreadZ crew, aka DBZ, at which time his fame began to spread like wildfire, mainly due to his tit-for-tat overpainting war with the top graffiti artist of the day, King Robbo.
To contemplate a painting by Cecily Brown is to experience something vital, especially as regards the massive canvasses she churned out feverishly during the early years. Their surfaces manifest an intense vacuous horror, where a profusion of colours and brushstrokes reveal bodies twisted in passion or revulsion, fairytale characters, nudes, fruits, trees or, even, just lines of expression and vibrant colours that are a masterclass in composition.
“I am a specialist in life as a permanent crisis.” Thus defines himself Miquel Barceló, one of the most sought-after and internationally recognized Spanish artists alive today. His capacity for communication goes hand in hand with the scope and variety of his work: huge canvasses, small drawings, murals, engravings, book illustrations, ceramics, sculpture, opera staging, album covers, posters, television programmes
Francisco de Goya's work is universally famous for its spectacular quality, its modernity and its commitment. The Fuendetodos teacher was a pioneer in technique and subject matter; a nonconformist in a society where he never quite fit in, but who surrendered to his dazzling artistry.
