They've only gone ahead and done it. I'm not even going to get into why those late SCOTUS appointments were so crucial. You know why. Nor am I going to tackle the absurd pro-life vs pro-gun debate. Because what happened yesterday is all about meddling with women's reproductive rights, it's all about control. But also about social status and race. This decision winds back the clock almost 50 years, removing the right to safe pregnancy termination from millions of women. Aborti

Sometimes the Venice Biennale takes you places you'd never dream of going to. A decision to escape the mad crowds of San Marco and take the ferry to Giudecca meant I was rewarded with a mesmerising insight into a nomadic culture I knew nothing about. Firouz Farman-Farmaian has recreated a traditional Kyrgyz environment where we see, hear, smell (the felt banners hanging from the ceiling are made of yak wool) and, mostly, feel. It is also possible to sit on a rug underneath th

Paula Rego died today. The art world has lost one of the greats. I'm so glad I got to see her some of her work one more time at the Venice Biennale, where it inhabits an entire room in the Central Pavillion. Rego didn't paint to please the viewer, she painted to unsettle them. Her pictures tell uncomfortable, ambiguous, and sometimes downright disturbing stories that we struggle to make sense of. And the longer we stand in front of them, the more we are intrigued and confused

Go early, go alone. This could be my motto for many things, but it becomes particularly fitting when I'm on my arty trips. And, for the sake of transparency, full disclaimer required: I am a lifelong Anselm Kiefer adept and, as such, chances are I will struggle to write anything remotely insightful or objective. In this case, going early meant that I could experience a good couple of minutes of blissful solitude in the Sala dello Scrutinio, a place of great symbolic importanc

On 11 June 1946, the Italian people voted in an institutional referendum to replace the monarchy with a republic. I won't lie, it was closer than I like to think, but they did it: 12,672,767 votes for the Republic vs 10,688,305 for the Monarchy. Importantly, this was also the first time that women voted at national level. As the journalist Anna Garofalo recalls: "The ballots that arrived at home inviting us to do our duty had a silent and peremptory authority. We turned them

My experience at the Venice Biennale is that it is often the fortuitous detour, aka me getting lost like I inevitably do, that is going to take you to the most unexpected rewards. This is how I came across David Cass' installation near the Giardini (now sadly closed so apologies for the late post). David's work is about the rise of sea levels, an issue Venice knows all too well. The idea behind Where Once the Waters is to raise awareness about the variation in sea level in t

“During the first two weeks of the war, I had the impression that art was only a dream, that I had only dreamed these twenty years of my professional life. And that art at all is powerless and ephemeral compared to the ruthless machinery of war that destroys civilian cities and human lives. Today I don’t think that way anymore, and I see that every artistic gesture makes us visible, and our voices audible.” - Zhanna Kadyrova After fleeing from Kyiv and finding shelter in the

“That is the archaeology I am unearthing: The spectre of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world.” - Kehinde Wiley As I was walking through the dimly lit halls of this show this morning, all I could think about was the news of the umpteenth shooting in the US, the one in Buffalo where a 19 year old killed 10 people. In a way, I felt like I was at the crime scene. And that was it. I realised I had no desire to rea

I had been following Nikolay Lukin on Instagram for some time, and this morning he followed me back. Дякую, Микола. His latest post is a week old, it shows us a wildflower meadow and trees in bloom in Odessa, which Nikolay captioned: Spring walks hand in hand with death. The work I have chosen is not recent, it's from 2016. The Ukrainian people have been living with Russian invaders since 2014, when Putin dispatched his army to the country's borders for 'military operations',

The first lockdown was nothing short of surreal. And although we were all at home and terrified of not knowing what the heck was happening, I find that now many of us are unashamedly nostalgic about some of some of its unexpected benefits. Namely a world that was suddenly cleaner, quieter. A world where nature was liberated and allowed to have a renaissance. A world whose eerie stillness was possible because of the lack of human presence. This is story behind this fascinating

"Mariupol is always covered with smog. On the other side of the sea is occupied Crimea - my home. 20 km away in the east, the war continues daily, but people just rest on the beach tired of the conflict. This beach is full of mines and people with guns. It has been going on for 2 years and people don't even notice it anymore because they are tired. They are tolerant to death, weapons, violence, war. I also came to the beach. For screaming. I looked at the sea, which is the bo

"There will be a painting that shows our victory, for sure." - Kinder Album (interviewed by Bird in Flight) The truth is we do not know that there will be, but I can but hope the artist is right. For now, I'm counting the little dot-like heads in her painting. I think I counted around 80, but after a few they seem to blend into one. It must be my declining eyesight. So I remind myself that each dot represents a person running from their home, one of the hardest things imagina

"During the quarantine period, I began to create staged self-portraits at home. In the photo, which was the beginning of the series, I seem to be hiding behind house plants in the corner, symbolically and succinctly denoting the existing dead-end state of each person during a pandemic. In my subsequent works, although I turn to self-irony, nevertheless, photographing myself in the nude, I live moments of self-acceptance. Over time, the series of self-portraits went beyond the

Artem Volokitin was born in 1981. He lives and works in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, home to 1.4 million people and less than 20 miles from the Russian border. Kharkhiv was therefore an obvious target for the invading forces. Last Sunday, Russian troops entered the city and started bombing it to the ground. We know the strategy, we have seen it in Aleppo. And in Chechnya before then. In response to the upheavals of 2014, the so called Revolution of Dignity, the sub

There are moments in life when our fear is such that we scramble for ways of taming it, in the hope that this crippling fear will somehow dissolve. And when we feel at our most powerless, all sorts of coping mechanisms kick in as we go down unexplored avenues trying to believe we can do something, anything, This is one of those moments. Me, I turn to art, like I always do. So today I'd like to showcase the work of Marina Skugareva, born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1962. I don't know

Today Instagram is aflood with red hearts, declarations of eternal love, schmaltzy quotes and unmissable promotions. And while swathes of people around the globe enthusiastically celebrate romance, it would appear that the origins of Valentine's Day are rooted in unspeakably gruesome rituals performed by the ancient Romans. So here I am jumping on the bandwagon with this Banksy piece, which first appeared on a wall next to Prince of Albert pub in Brighton, the LGBTQ capital o

"Good artists copy; great artists steal." - Apocryphal quote The history of modern and contemporary art is littered with instances of appropriation. Picasso famously adopted cultural imagery from African art assimilating, not without controversy, tribal art aesthetics into his Cubist works. Later on, albeit in different ways, and to name just a few, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman all purposely borrowed and incorporated elements from other visual

The Vase of Flowers by Jan van Huysum is one of the best still lifes that the Amsterdam-born artist produced between the end of the XVII century and the first half of the XVIII century. It is certainly one of the most sumptuous and breathtaking still lives I have ever laid eyes on. It's a triumph of bright colours, sinuous patterns of lines, sensuous textures and airy volumes. It's a symphony, it's a dance, it's a delicate and intoxicating scent. It's a superb example of the

"When I went to New York in 1992, I recognized that there was a genre called installation art, and had an idea that I will pop out from walls. I wanted to pop out from walls, from stuffy walls." -Yun Suk-nam Reminiscent of the Dadaist and Surrealist objects that lost their function to be transformed into something attractive and unsettling, the Godmother of Korean Feminist Art has produced beautifully upholstered armchairs and sofas that you cannot sit on. I love the contrast

Current rabbit hole update: scandals and crimes in the art world, of which I am delighted to inform you there is an abundance of. One episode of Ben Lewis' superb podcast ART BUST tells the story of American art dealer turned fraudster Inigo Philbrick's spectacular fall from grace. It's a compelling listen, during which Lewis also points out the dismally shoddy due diligence and the opacity of the resale market that de facto enabled the jaw-dropping magnitude of Philbrick's s