Arts & Culture

Have your pick from surveys on photography and landscape painting to spotlights on Zurbarán, Mary Cassatt, and more. The post Ooh Là Là! 10 Must-See Shows in Paris This Fall appeared first on Artnet News .

SAINT OF ATHENS TRANSLATES BRAND DUALITY INTO flagship BOUTIQUEDesigned by Saint of Athens, the Peace + Chaos flagship boutique in Thessaloniki, Greece, serves as a physical manifestation of the fashion brand’s dual identity. The interior scheme builds on a spatial dialogue between monochromatic minimalism and high-energy visual elements, reflecting the ongoing tension between discipline and creative disruption inherent to fashion design.all images ©Giagkos PapadopoulosCONTRASTING EXPERIENTIAL ZONES PAIR neutrality WITH VISUAL CHAOSThe retail interior by creative agency Saint of Athens and designer Manos Kypritidis is structured into two contrasting experiential environments. The ‘peace’ zones employ soft neutral palettes, natural materials, clean linear geometry, negative space, and diffused lighting to establish an atmosphere of clarity representing the origins of creation.

Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”. NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November. The investigative documentary, which contains 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders speaking anonymously on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night, has received widespread praise. In a five-star review, the Financial Times’s Danny Leigh says that as a piece of cinema, “journalism and film-making brilliantly entwine”. The Times calls the film “hugely provocative and a disturbing account” of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, and the Irish Times brands NAZA an “essential record of engineered nightmare”. In a four-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw says the “anguish of Gaza is brought into pin-sharp focus”.

The cast and crew behind The Archers, including the one-time guest star Judi Dench, have written to the BBC director general urging him to keep the recording of the Radio 4 drama in Birmingham. It emerged this week that the corporation was planning to stop recording the rural community soap opera in the city for the first time in the show’s 75-year history, after it scrapped plans for a radio drama studio. Staff were informed last week that the BBC, as part of its £500m cost-cutting drive, had ditched plans to build a bespoke studio at the Tea Factory in Digbeth, the corporation’s new Birmingham headquarters. Production staff will still move to the Tea Factory, but the broadcaster is looking for an existing studio where the show could be recorded. The West Midlands is included in the search, but there is no guarantee The Archers will be recorded in the region. Actors rehearse an episode of The Archers in the BBC studios in Birmingham.

“My past sculptures [and] tools act as levers that pry ideas from my mind.” Welcome to the 359th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Allan Wexler tinkers, saws, and paints in the woods of Long Island, in a studio he built himself. Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio. Allan Wexler, Southold, New YorkHow long have you been working in this space? After living part-time on the North Fork of Long Island for decades, in 2001, we bought four acres of woods in Southold. I was trained as an architect, and so we, like most creative people, had always dreamed of designing and building a unique house and art studio. We completed the studio in 2006. We completed the house in 2009. I also have a small studio in Brooklyn. Describe an average day in your studio. I wake in my house and prepare coffee in my La Pavoni Espresso maker. By 9am, I commute for my one-minute walk on the well-worn path through the woods to my studio.

Plus, Sarah Michelson's MoMA finale, and David Rimanelli is 'apprehensive' about Alex Da Corte. The post The Art World Is Hungry, Lucien Smith’s Final Paintings Are Going on View, and More Art-World Gossip appeared first on Artnet News .

Large, a multi-million-dollar contemporary art space founded by collector Laurent Dumas, leans into L’Île Seguin's industrial past. The post Inside the Paris Art Center Built on a ‘Cursed’ Island appeared first on Artnet News .

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Plus, Francois Pinault plans a permanent display at the Palazzo Grassi and a $30M Modigliani heads to Phillips. The post British Museum Lands Major $40M Donation appeared first on Artnet News .

A nude figure with frazzled hair lies in bed, the sickly colored linens draped across their upper body. Fingertips glowing red as if inflamed, the character grasps a navy phone and stares catatonically at the screen. A vibrant infinity symbol is superimposed on the scene, emerging as endless loops of energy and mesmerization from the device. The all-too-relatable portrait is part of a suite of new works by Robin F. Williams capturing the omnipotent techno-dystopia we’re collectively barreling toward. Extrapolating on the ways humanity and machines merge, the Brooklyn-based artist presents a mystical vision of another world infused with pop culture and art history.

Opposing forces tug against each other in this new drama as Anne-Marie Duff is magnificent amid playwright Helen Edmundson’s implausible plotting. The result is a failed suspension of disbelief yet a convincing central performance. Duff plays Julie, a mother, ex-wife and working woman whose already over-burdened life is turned upside down by an incident at a tube station when an 11-year-old boy randomly and aggressively insults her. She challenges him, reasonably, and in a series of unconvincing plot turns, winds up facing a legal battle and potential prison sentence. As a story of an ordinary middle-aged woman being buffeted by patriarchal forces around her, this play is stuffed full of important issues. We hear stories of casual sexual abuse, laughed off by those around Julie. Now we see her life virtually destroyed by the boy’s allegation. There is mention of CCTV footage and you wonder if an Adolescence-style video reveal is to come. But the plot makes clear that there is no incontrovertible evidence against her, yet she stands to lose everything. Potential brilliance … Ioanna Kimbook (left) and Anne-Marie Duff in Some Woman at the National Theatre, London.

It's a Frieze Week dispatch! The post The Hits and Misses of London’s Frieze Week appeared first on Artnet News .

It is always fun to join in a craze, like a Victorian going mad for penny farthings. Which is probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey this summer, buying my ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else. This year’s other divisive adaptation, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, had the world and his wife arguing about it before they had even watched the film. No doubt the makers of the recent Sense and Sensibility movie were also hoping for lots of people to go and see it to discover whether they hated it. After all, very few of us leave the cinema saying: “That’s exactly how I pictured it in my head.” Or even less likely: “That was better than the book.” We’re more likely to shake our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably cast somebody with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character, as with last year’s Thursday Murder Club debacle. But what makes a good adaptation? Like Odysseus himself, and as every Nancy Meyers fan knows: it’s complicated.

What could be more disorientating for a comedian than not being able to laugh – for nine hours! – nor elicit laughter from anyone else in the room? I’ll tell you. Try all of the above on a sunny summer weekend while pretending it’s Halloween. Then force the comics to return to the scene of what one of their number, Phil Wang, calls “a cross between a gameshow and a psychological experiment”, and relive the whole ordeal for a man from the Guardian. Is it any wonder Wang, Lou Sanders, Tom Allen and others come across as a little punch-drunk 24 hours after emerging from televised captivity on the smash comedy hit Last One Laughing? It’s the day after filming, at Elstree Studios, the show’s Halloween special which sees a unique tweak to its winning formula: contestants must not only refrain from laughter but from screaming. “Which I thought might be a non-event,” says Wang, “but it’s actually harder. I didn’t know I was a screamer. Turns out I am.” The participating comics – including paranormal obsessive Daisy May Cooper and that maestro of comedy-horror, Reece Shearsmith – seek not only to amuse each other but spook them too. Which makes sense, says host Jimmy Carr.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say have recorded Say’s music together before, but this is their first recording to feature Kopatchinskaja as a composer as well, but this is no vanity project: Say’s and Kopatchinskaja’s pieces make good complements to Szymanowski’s three Mythes and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 1. Album artwork for Patkop & Say. Photograph: Courtesy of Marco Borggreve for Alpha ClassicsSay’s Lost Screams Sonata is driven by repeated piano rhythms, its fierceness tempered by an episode in which Kopatchinskaja plays low, ghostly harmonics and Say gently plucks the strings of the piano so it almost sounds like a second violin. Kopatchinskaja’s three-movement piece UniSolo is an impish work with a searching, thoughtful playfulness that comes from the parallel world to the Kurtág miniatures she plays so well. These two frame a haunting performance of Mythes that embraces the strange sumptuousness of these pieces, with playing of beguiling delicacy from both musicians. With an even bigger scope, Prokofiev’s wartime Sonata No 1 has moments in which Kopatchinskaja turns her tone almost ugly, even in places where other violinists might choose to soar heroically.

Ella Fleck at Ehrlich SteinbergThe raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies. It’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts, interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on. It’s a greasy, gross, uncomfortable exploration of sex work on an industrial scale. Yuli Serfaty at Xxijra HiiYuli Serfaty’s headless metallic dog sculptures guard this booth, their claws sharp, their heavy teats dragging on the floor. It’s a surreal symbol of femininity pushed to an extreme, a body devalued and exploited. A video shows the creature trying to escape the booth, and succeeding. The whole installation looks like HR Giger meets Wolfenstein 3D, but with a nasty, satirical edge. Rirkrit Tiravanija at David ZwirnerRepetitive, meaningless … Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2026 (a bitter pill). Photograph: Jack Hems/courtesy the artist/David ZwirnerFinally, something to help you get through Frieze.

Luxury tower blocks, those potent symbols of hyper-gentrification, the increasing wealth gap and the displacement of existing communities, are a gift to novelists. Rankin’s first standalone thriller in almost two decades centres on The Heights, 18 storeys high and facing London’s Hyde Park, where DS Gillian Gish is investigating the suspicious death of night-shift security guard Dwayne Hogarth. The high-net-worth individuals who live there, including a young singer, a gangster’s wife, a man who “made a mint in post-glasnost Russia” and the daughter of a very well-connected Zimbabwean, are either uncontactable or tight-lipped, and it soon becomes clear that the developer, despite his bravado, is in financial trouble. Everyone, it appears, has something to hide – and then a second corpse is discovered. Rankin is a superb storyteller, and this is well up to his usual high standard, while DS Gish – less complex, but considerably more relatable than John Rebus – is worthy of her own series. The Mortons by Scott Westerfeld & Justine Larbalestier (Viking, £18.99) There are shades of both The Sopranos and Wednesday Addams in this tale of a powerful old American family whose trade is

Up next My Piledriver Heart album out now; UK tour beginning 4 NovemberMaking coming-of-age music as a young person can feel strange after a pandemic. So here are a few more curveballs. Imagine the breezy, youthful indie you post online in your early teens gets you a record deal. Covid happens. You move to New York, change your artist name, and then Julian Casablancas eyes you at an open mic and invites you to open for the Strokes in Colorado, aged 18, solo. This pinball game of life is the music career of Superfan, AKA Kali Flanagan, who is now 21 and whose latest album, My Piledriver Heart, offers up a codex of miniature bildungsromans worth the buzz. Flanagan’s primary tools are some of the simplest: drop-tuned, condensed acoustic guitars (which he calls “acousticellos”) and quietly strong vocals reminiscent of Elliott Smith or Alex G. Roomy drums and distortion on tracks such as In the Gold Room or Keeping Your Smile add a welcome noisy edge.