“I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals. And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy”, artist Niki de Saint Phalle once declared.

The venerated French painter sculptor died on this day in 2002, aged 71, after a lifetime filling the world with her joyful and exuberant creations, from her dancing nanas, womanly forms that are both playful and assertive, to her fountains and public art – but surely the most ambitious and impressive among them is The Tarot Garden (Il Giardino dei Tarocchi) in Tuscany. The artist considered it her life work.

The vast sculpture park is built on land de Saint Phalle acquired in 1979, and took almost two decades to complete. De Saint Phalle funded the construction herself, and worked with a local team – many are still employed at the park today. The project was so all-consuming that before it opened to the public in 1998, the artist lived inside one of the sculptures, the Empress, for several years.

The 22 sculptures – reinforced concrete, adorned with mirrors and mosaics – each represent 22 major arcana of the divinatory, esoteric tarot. De Saint Phalle said she wanted to create a “dialogue between nature and the sculptures”, and after her death that the park should always be accessible to the public, to exist as ”a garden of joy.” Today, it easily rivals the power of Parc Güell or Parco dei Mostri – two landmark locations that inspired de Saint Phalle. It is a reminder that you can never dream too big.

Tea has long played an integral role in the life and work of artist Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck. The transdisciplinary and cultural practitioner, who lives in rural Oxfordshire, even founded Journal du Thé – a magazine paying homage to tea cultures and their positive impact in communities around the world.

This painting, Rahel, is part of a larger body of work Safe Space, made during the pandemic year. The paintings are close-up, cropped views of Tagada Hoffbeck’s close friends, tenderly holding teacups in bold, minimal brush strokes; a tribute to the traditions of taking tea and their potential to create space for conversation and healing. For each of the paintings, Tagada Hoffbeck also created a soundscape – three minute monologues narrated by the subjects of the works. (The accompaniment for Rahel can be heard here).

Safe Space embodies Tagada Hoffbeck’s broader interest in compassion and care, and the ideologies underpinning her practice as an artist. Theories on Art therapy, Deep Ecology and Permaculture all intertwine in Tagada Hoffbeck’s sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations, as much as they are evident in her community-oriented and gardening workshops and collaborations. With soft poetry and soothing palettes, Tagada Hoffbeck not only creates an evocative visual space, but invites the viewer to create a space within them.

Works by Tagada Hoffbeck are on view, alongside pieces by her partner, artist Jatinder Singh Durhailay, and potter Jynsym Ong, in an exhibition Ponderings Over Tea, at GALLERY 1+5, Oxford, from 11 – 24 May, 2024.

This zesty new supergloss print is a limited edition exclusively for Dulwich Picture Gallery by artist duo Rob and Nick Carter as part of their Dutch Golden Age series (2012 - 2018). In response to a painting by a follower of Jan Pauwel Gillemans the Elder, known as Still life with Crayfish (1686) held in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection, the husband and wife duo created their own rendition.

Honing in on the half-peeled, exquisitely rendered lemon, seen in the bottom right hand corner of the original oil painting, Rob and Nick Carter extracted the image of the fruit, manipulated the image using digital technology to enhance the colour, and producing a limited edition print. The resulting work magnifies a moment from art history, encouraging a prolonged view on this detail of the still life tableau, and prompting a fresh way of engaging with the historical work.

The London-based duo, who are known for their adapting new technologies while referencing historical processes in a range of media – said: "Our preoccupation with the Dutch Golden Age series primarily lies in the interest with the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the analogue and the digital, and the traditional and the contemporary.”

The prints are £1,100 + VAT unframed and £1,300 + VAT framed.
For all sales enquiries, please contact [email protected].

Today is National Shakespeare Day – a celebration of The Bard of Avon and his indelible, unmatched contributions to culture. The great English playwright died on 23 April, 1616, aged 52, and although his exact date of birth is unknown, his birthday is also celebrated on 23 April. Shakespeare’s vivid themes and characters have inspired artists since the 17th century – including the late English painter and printmaker, Stanley William Hayter.

Hayter dabbled in Surrealism, but by the 1940s had turned towards an Abstract Expressionist language, and founded the Atelier 17 studio in Paris. He went on to become a renowned printmaker, celebrated for his advancements in viscosity printing. Hayter was equally active as a painter; this work, Ophelia, is an abstract interpretation of Ophelia’s iconic death scene in Act 4 of Hamlet. A reinvention of Sir John Everett Millais’ 1851-52 painting of the same name after the same scene, Hayter’s fragmented forms and bright colours prove that Shakespeare’s influence even extends into modern art, perennial human themes that continue to be reimagined by artists today.

Showing a Shakespearean sensibility for understanding the human condition, in 1969, the artist said: “what is the intention of art? Perhaps it is to lead man toward a fuller understanding of his terms of existence; to aid all people to live more completely and escape from the history of human error; to demonstrate by example that the human mind has unlimited capacity to go further and further the more one demands of it.”

Reflecting on the most controversial and memorable works of sixty Venice Biennales, one work stands out: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden. In 1966, Kusama installed 1500 plastic reflective spheres – a “kinetic carpet”, as the artist referred to it – on the grass outside the Italian Pavilion during the 33rd Venice Biennale. Kusama had not been invited to participate in the Biennale – but she showed up in a gold kimono fastened with a silver obi, and handed out printed praise for her work, attempting to sell her scintillating balls at 1200 lire a piece (equivalent to about 50p in today’s currency, the buy of the century for those who purchased).

In 1966, Kusama wasn’t very well known in Europe, though in New York her first mirrored installation, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (1965) had attracted a lot of attention in the US. According to Kusama, Lucio Fontana supported Narcissus Garden, and they had secured permission from the Chairman of the Biennale – but the installation caused an uproar nonetheless. Kusama said: “They made me stop, telling me it was inappropriate to sell my artworks as if they were ‘hot dogs or ice cream cones’. But the installation remained.”

A comment on the commercialisation of art, Narcissus Garden had all the hallmarks of Kusama’s now world-famous works: hallucinatory, expansive installations that immerse the viewer and invite self-reflection and even self-obliteration. In the years that followed, Kusama continued to restage Narcissus Garden all over the world in different ways. Thirty years later it all came full circle when, in 1993, Kusama was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale – becoming both the first individual artist and the first woman to represent her country. But it’s Narcissus Garden – one of the works that kickstarted Kusama’s international career – that remains one of the icon moments in the history of the Biennale.

As the chill in the air ebbs away and is replaced with the scent of spring blossom, the idea of swimming outdoors seems reasonable once again. Surely on every swimmer’s bucket list is Joana Vasconcelos’ spectacular Gateway, an artwork to bathe in: a fully functioning, nine-metre diameter pool made with 13,000 scintillating hand-painted, hand-glazed Viúva Lamego tiles, made exclusively for the Portuguese artist. Vasconcelos is renowned for her collaborative works with artisans and craftspeople, incorporating a variety of craft techniques into her practice in her Lisbon studio. The Gateway pool is surrounded by a lush, landscaped garden at Jupiter Artland, Scotland. The pool is open daily and public swim sessions are available to book for £15.

Gateway was created to coincide with the artist’s 2019 exhibition at Jupiter Artland, which also marked the tenth anniversary of the contemporary sculpture garden located just outside Edinburgh. Fully embracing the spiritual potential of communing and immersing in water, the pool was deliberately constructed along Ley lines, said to intersect across the site of Jupiter Artland, believed to channel earthly energy. The design of the pool was also based on the artist’s astrological charts.

Vasconcelos said of the work: “Gateway is a big splash that invites the public to immerse in a joyful and spirited dimension, leading to a connection with the energy of the Earth. It’s like a threshold to another universe that we’re not conscious of but through which we can flow.”

American artist James Turrell has long made light his primary medium to encourage us to sharpen our senses to the world around us. He is best known for his series of Skyspaces, minimalist experiences centred around apertures that frame the ever-changing sky. The first – produced in 1974 and on permanent loan to Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano from the Guggenheim Museum – is a square room with a large square opening in the ceiling, in which the sky is framed by a small slither of white ceiling. The low, concealed fluorescent lights and white floor reflect and intensify the experience.

“With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” Turrell once asked. “You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”

Over the years, Turrell has created nearly 90 Skyspaces around the world, with one set to be unveiled in Kansas City in 2024. They recall ancient building techniques that used natural light—and the cycles of the cosmos—to create symbolic architecture. As the clocks change and the days get longer, it feels fitting to channel the Arizona-based artist this week and look at the sky anew.

Gavin Turk has created over 600 odes to the egg over his lifetime, following in the footsteps of artists such as Dali, Magritte and Brancusi. These fragile symbols of life and creation appear in the YBA artist's work in all manner of guises: as surreal faces, broken shells depicting his signature and in liquid form as mayonnaise and egg tempera paint.

“Oeuvre (Verdigris),” 2018, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is made from patinated bronze and resembles a giant duck egg. In the leafy surrounds of the Lower Lake, it could almost be real, though comic in scale. The work’s title toys with the similarity between the word for an artist’s life’s work – ‘oeuvre’ – and the French word for egg – ‘oeuf’. It will be a fitting sculpture to stumble across as you take a spring stroll around the park this Easter.

We’re welcoming the onset of spring this week with a little help from David Hockney. In the midst of the pandemic, the British artist captured the season unfolding at his home in Normandy in a series of works ‘painted’ with app brushes on his iPad. You can literally sense his delight in the burgeoning blossom, vivid greenery and bright skies in the pieces, which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in the exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, staged a year later. They feel loaded with optimism despite the strange times we were living through.

Hockney has been using the iPad to create works since the Noughties. Throughout his life, he has embraced technology – including cameras, photocopiers and fax machines – so it is no surprise that he should regard the tablet as just another tool for drawing and painting. His Normandy works capture the wild intensity of Spring, while giving it with a thrilling new electricity.