Feminist sculptor Marta Palau dies at 88; Sprawling sandcastle built by artist on dried river bank; and one more art news from around the world.

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Feminist sculptor Marta Palau dies at 88

In a statement released on 12th of August, Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL) announced the passing away of the artist Marta Palau. She started her art career as a painter and, during the 70s, began producing the works for which she is best known — sculptures made out of natural materials. She took up feminist themes at a time when few Mexican artists were doing so. Born in Albesa, Spain, in 1934, Palau and her family moved in 1940 to Tijuana, Mexico after the fall of the Second Spanish Republic. Palau’s work received acclaim in Mexico, and it appeared in biennials such as the 1986 Havana Biennial, where she won the top prize, and the 1987 Bienal de São Paulo. In 2017, her work was included in the show ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985’, which was showcased that year at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, before heading to the Brooklyn Museum. Read ARTnews to learn more.

 

A sprawling sandcastle built by artist on dried river bank

Due to the drought afflicting Europe, Swiss artist Francois Monthoux got more time to extend his dream world, in the form of an annual project of building clay sculptures on the banks of the Toleure river in Switzerland. This is known as “Monthoux castle”. The drought allowed him to commit more time to his sculptures, which have sprawled into an entire city of spires. The artist has been working with clay from the dried bed of the river, in the Vaud canton in western Switzerland. Now he wants it to rain because he cannot see plants dying all around him, but the thought of his dream world getting washed away by rains makes his heart ache. REUTERS reports.

 

The Getty will return a cache of illegally sourced ancient sculptures to Italy

After an investigation revealed that a set of ancient terracotta sculptures and other artworks have been illegally sourced, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles will return these artworks to Italy. In a lead-up to the repatriation, the museum has removed the items from view. These include a life-size statue depicting the poet Orpheus with a pair of sirens dating to between 350 and 300 BCE; a marble head and stone mould for casting pendants, both from the second century AD; an 1881 oil painting by Camillo Miola; and a fourth-century BCE Etruscan bronze thymiaterion, or incense burner. artnet news reports.