Outdoor art: sculptures and monuments to visit
The easing of the lockdown has meant that, in England at least, it is now possible to spend more time outside. And with art galleries still closed for the foreseeable future, said The Guardian, “why not seek out public sculptures and monuments” instead?
London is home to thousands of outdoor sculptures, said Culture Whisper, from the statues in Parliament Square – Gillian Wearing’s 2018 monument to the suffragist Millicent Fawcett is the only woman of the 12 public figures depicted – to the “unexpected” Barbara Hepworth, (1963), on the side of John Lewis on Oxford Street. In Kensington Gardens, you’ll find Henry Moore’s elegant six-metre tall (1980); across the Long Water is a 1912 statue of Peter Pan commissioned by J.M. Barrie and made by George Frampton. In the British Library’s courtyard in King’s Cross, there is Eduardo Paolozzi’s “monumental” (1995), inspired by Blake’s famous portrait. The Greenwich Peninsula has a range of more recent work: Gary Hume’s “spectacular” (2008), an abstract bronze modelled on a mannequin’s limbs; and Richard Wilson’s (2015), a cross section of a ship hull that floods with the tide every day. The peninsular is also home to one of the city’s most striking sculptures, said Time Out: Alex Chinneck’s (2015): an electricity pylon that looks as if it has been thrown down into the earth.
Winged Figure
The Arch
Bottle of Notes
Newton
A Slice of Reality
A Bullet from a Shooting Star
Liberty Grip
In Middlesbrough, you can find a work by “one of America’s great modern artists”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Created by Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen,
(1993) is a 30ft-tall sculpture built in “homage to local boy Captain Cook”. Cambridge, meanwhile, has a
Edvard Munch’s is an icon of modern alienation and isolation, said Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. But the painting may need to isolate itself in a more contemporary sense: it “needs to practise some physical distancing”. Munch painted four versions of the masterpiece, and the most famous one – in the Munch Museum in Oslo, created in 1910 – has faded slightly, with the artist’s “initially bright yellow brushstrokes” turning to “an off-white colour”. Normally, deterioration like this can be attributed to a gallery’s atmospheric conditions – lighting or heat, for example. But according to a study by an international team of scientists, this is not the issue. Damage to this painting can be blamed on excess humidity: a condition apparently caused by art lovers breathing too close to its surface. “When people breathe they produce moisture and they exude chlorides,” said Professor Koen Janssens, who took part in the study. “In general with paintings it is not too good to be close too much to the breath of all the passers-by.”
of the North, Northumberlandia,
Silvas Capitalis
News from the art world
fascinating monument in the form of the
(2008) by John C. Taylor, an uncanny “Einsteinian” timepiece. The clockface is plated in pure gold with radiating ripples that allude to the Big Bang; it is topped by a monstrous grasshopper whose jaws move to devour the seconds as they pass.
Conversation Piece
Corpus Clock
Folkestone in Kent now has 45 pieces of public art on display as part of the town’s Triennial festival, said Charlie Harman on Kent Online. The most “eye-catching” is Antony Gormley’s
(2013) – an iron figure looking out to sea under the Folkestone Harbour Arm. In Canterbury, there’s a haunting giant face, originally opposite the now demolished Marlowe theatre: (2003), by Rick Kirby, was inspired by Marlowe’s phrase “the face that launch’d a thousand ships” and made using scrap metal recovered along the Kentish coast. Dover’s most famous piece of public art – Banksy’s mural of a workman chiselling out one of the stars on the EU flag, which appeared in 2017 – was whitewashed over by persons unknown last year.
Time XVIII
Another
Bulkhead
The northeast’s most famous public artwork is Gormley’s said The Chronicle. But it has plenty more to offer.
near Cramlington, is a huge earth sculpture in the shape of a reclining female figure designed by the US landscape architect Charles Jencks (the car park is currently closed, but aims to open this month). At the mouth of the Tyne in South Shields, you can find (1999) by Juan Muñoz – 22 mysterious figures affectionately known as “the Weebles”. And at Kielder reservoir, Northumberland, there are a series of installations – perhaps most striking is a giant wooden head,
(2009), by the US art collective Simparch.
Angel
Covid-19 poses major problems for Britain’s museums, said Craig Simpson in The Daily Telegraph, yet they also face one serious challenge that long pre-dates it. Put simply, they just can’t stump up the cash to buy art any more. According to the Art Fund, which campaigns to keep national treasures in the UK, Britain ”lost £556m worth of nationally important art to overseas buyers” between 2009 and 2018. In that period, culture ministers temporarily banned the export of 66 items – including works by Turner, Hogarth, Raphael, Picasso and Cézanne – which were later lost, after attempts to match the bids with public money and donations failed. The problem is that private owners who might in the past have bequeathed their art to the nation, or sold to UK museums to benefit from inheritance tax loopholes, are being wooed by large sums offered by foreign collectors. “The US is behind more of these losses than all other nations combined”: more than half of these works, by value, went there.