everything on Fine or Performing Arts that catches our eye and excites our imagination
The realm of Bogdan Bogdanović’s thought-provoking spaces in former Yugoslavia is a feast for the senses, and a pinnacle of all art and architecture exploring memory and loss. “Most of my monuments are to the victims of Fascism, to the Partisan movements. They are monuments dedicated to suffering; they are never triumphalist and have no… Read More
Morphologies, programmatic adjacencies, and spatial compositions : it’s all Greek to me, as I take a long, hard look at architecture’s Rococo lingo To paraphrase a quote from one my favourite artists, J.M. Basquiat, I’ve first learned about architecture by looking at it. My ongoing fascination with architecture, and the research of its forms, history… Read More
Scythian pagan rituals may have informed this rarely seen set of monumental sculptures, cast using experimental concrete techniques. In 1964, acclaimed British sculptor William Mitchell created a magnificent work of art for the British Cement Association in Wexham Springs, Buckinghamshire. Seeing photos of that sculpture on the internet for the first time was somewhat unsettling… Read More
London’s fantastical Victorian bestiary of prehistoric creatures remains awe inspiring despite its age A few years ago, I spent a morning in south London, looking for the beautiful remains of Crystal Palace – one of the grand feats of engineering that epitomised the Victorian era. Joseph Paxton, the renowned Victorian gardener and architect, was behind… Read More
In the sunlit Arcadian plain close to the ancient city of Mantineia in Greece, there’s a church like no other. It’s an astonishing melange of styles, combining elements of Classical, Byzantine and Modern architecture, and yet remaining true to none. Its construction is the life’s work of architect and iconographer Kostas Papatheodorou, who has delivered… Read More
go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie Spartan epitaph at Thermopylae Modernist austerity meets Spartan rigour in a Greek memorial cemetery like no other The new city of Sparta was founded in 1834 at the behest of Otto, the Bavarian prince who became the first King of… Read More
