Public artwork of the week
Stefan Brüggemann’s OK (Untitled Action)
Are we all going to be “OK”? The Mexican artist has sprayed a three-storey building in Folkestone gold, before scrawling the two-letter word across it, graffiti-style – a response, he says, to our current situation under lockdown. • Creative Quarter, Folkestone
Also showing
The Munch Museum
Feel like screaming? The Munch museum is debuting its digital platform The Experimental Self, which lets visitors explore the Norwegian artist’s experimental photography – including his groundbreaking selfies.
• Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway
Rachel Rose: Lake Valley at the Carnegie Museum of Art
Transport yourself outside your four walls with the American visual artist’s Lake Valley, a mind-bending animated collage comprising illustrations from old children’s books.
• Watch the animation here
Rijksmuseum
The national museum of the Netherlands reopens from 1 June and has extended its popular Caravaggio-Bernini exhibition until mid-September.
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Martin Creed’s Take the Plunge
The Turner prize-winning artist’s new video work is a short, quirky affair featuring some dazzlingly bright purple tartan trousers.
• Watch it here
Image of the week
Kookaburra, by Farvardin Daliri
And there you were thinking mastering sourdough was some kind of lockdown achievement. Australian artist and academic Farvardin Daliri used his downtime to build a mobile 750kg kookaburra, which has been entertaining people in Brisbane, where it put in an appearance this week. Made of interlocking steel circles and a fibreglass beak, Daliri’s big bird also has the ability to laugh, thanks to a custom-built sound system. “People just adore it,” he said. He plans to drive it up the Queensland coast for the Townsville cultural festival in August.
What we learned
Galleries across continental Europe are starting to reopen
The Turner prize is cancelled – but artists will get £10k bursaries
Nick Burton’s new comic updates a historical plague story for Covid times
All about the astonishingly lifelike ‘reborn’ dolls, created by artists to resemble real babies
Gary Green was there when New York’s sweaty, trashy, late-70s punk scene had its moment
Ai Weiwei has designed 10,000 face masks for coronavirus charities, to be sold on eBay
How the world’s cities could look in the aftermath of the coronavirus
A French photographer has been taking in the wonders of the Soviet roadside revolution
Why people are demanding a retrospective for this Scottish “painter of stirring genius”
Who some of the world’s stylish men are …
… and how Slim Aarons art-directed poolside fashion this year
How rule-breaking theatrical outfit Forest Fringe have created a joyful DIY theatre kit
What the world of American crime looked like in 1957
Meanwhile the great British art quiz visited Hull, Stoke-on-Trent, Orkney and Falmouth
We remembered Richard Hughes, the British architect who designed hundreds of buildings in east Africa
Masterpiece of the week
Edward Ruscha – Standard Station (1966)
The station’s gas pumps sit untouched. Ruscha fell in love with these outposts while driving through the deserts on the road trips he took as a young man in a battered car – the only human thing you might see for miles. Today, the pumps are quiet once more, with nowhere for people to travel (unless your eyes are so bad you have to dash to Barnard Castle) and certainly no desire to touch dirty metal surfaces unless you have to. The sky burns beautifully in the background of Ruscha’s painting, but also ominously. If we’re to stop buildings catching fire – as depicted in other Ruscha works – we might think about keeping those pumps untouched once this current crisis is all over.
Don’t forget
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