Hyd tackles Covid with street art, rare Basquiat on block for $50mn and Hiroshima art set for restoration

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!

Street art in Hyd joins fight against Covid-19

Huge public wall art has come up on the walls adjacent to the toll plaza at Shamshabad, on the way to the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad. In the fight against the deadly Covid-19 second wave, techie Vinay Cheguri and his friends Uppara Sreedhar and Ram have put up eight portraits on the walls commissioned by the local municipality, giving existing awareness campaigns around them a bigger push in a unique form. With Cheguri, Sreedhar and Ram (who are full-time artists) put up a series of greyscale portraits of people, all different looking but with one thing in common — a blue surgical mask on their faces. News 18 reports.

Rare Basquiat ‘skull’ painting could fetch more than $50 million at auction

Estimated to go for over $50 million, a rare skull painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat is about to be auctioned off by Christie’s in New York in May this year. The artwork, ‘In this Case’, is one of a trio of “skull” paintings Basquiat made, and will be the centerpiece of Christie’s sale of 21st century art next month. In 2017, another from this series had sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $110 million. Dealers said the latest painting, with its dramatic red and yellow color palette, could also go for twice the estimated amount — a sign that lofty prices are enticing sellers to part with major works. CNBC elaborates.

In a first, Japanese gallery to restore ‘The Hiroshima Panels’

At least 71 years after the first work in the series was released, ‘The Hiroshima Panels’ by the late Iri and Toshi Maruki, who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, are set to be restored for the first time. The couple, who witnessed the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and rendered it into art, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The set of 15 works have severely deteriorated and become moth-eaten over the years. Each work, presented on 1.8-meter tall panels that together are 7.2 meters wide, is based on the Marukis’ experience of going to Hiroshima days after the August 6 bombing, and scenes reconstituted by gathering survivors’ stories, walking through the burnt wasteland while exposed to residual radiation. Kyodo News writes about the monumental task.

Hockney, 83, paints the spring in Normandy

World-famous Yorkshire artist David Hockney has been in Normandy, France, painting the arrival of spring. The 83-year-old says his recent work has given him a ‘new lease of life’, and a show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London will soon capture the season with 116 of Hockney’s iPad prints. He further plans to show ‘one big, long picture like the Bayeux Tapestry, 88 metres long’ depicting the whole year in Normandy, at a show in Paris. Speaking to the Andrew Marr Show, the painter professed to being surrounded in his cottage by hawthorn, apple, pear, plum, cherry and apricot blossoms. The Daily Mail writes about the development.

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