In need of some inspiration for your festive firework display? Look to Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who uses gunpowder as a tool to create floating paintings in the sky. In June this year, the Yotsukura Beach in Iwaki City, Japan, was the stage for When the Sky Blooms with Sakura, his 30-minute, daytime installation featuring 40,000 choreographed firework shells between the sea and the sky.

Made with support of Saint Laurent, the 400 metre-wide artwork represented his belief in reawakening dreams of hope for the region, which has suffered from the effects of an atomic bomb, the tsunami and a recent earthquake. Blue and black waves gave a nod to the pain of the past, while blooming clouds of iridescent colours suggested a brighter future.

“Through the sakura in the sky, I was expressing the story of the friendship between the people of Iwaki and me, which transcends politics and history, and I hope that the artwork will inspire the world with faith and hope,” said the artist, who lived in the Japan for many years. The Wick is resharing it on New Year’s Eve to spread hope and joy in 2024. We wish a happy New Year to all!

To mark the festive season in 1952, the Time Life Company commissioned Henri Matisse to create a stained-glass window for the celebrations at the Rockefeller Center. The artist made a maquette of cut-and-pasted paper for the work, in which a constellation of stars appears in the sky over a landscape of organic shapes. The Nuit de Noël (or ‘Christmas Eve’) artwork was handed over to the stained-glass craftsman who had made the windows at Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence. Many months later, the nearly 11 ft-high window was completed and sent to the Rockefeller Center in time for Christmas Eve.


Matisse described the maquette and the window as “like a musical score and its performance by an orchestra”. The soul stirring duo are now in the collection of MoMA New York and were exhibited in Tate Modern’s show, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs in 2013, with the maquette even starring on then Tate director Nicholas Serota’s Christmas card that year. “Nuit de Noel is an astonishing creation celebrating the ‘joy of life’ by an artist in his eighties,” he said.

Exactly eight years after the ink dried on the draft of the landmark Paris Climate Agreement at COP21 – and with the outcome of COP28 still hanging in the balance – it seems an apt moment to contemplate our place on the planet, with a little help from Olafur Eliasson. In 2020, the Danish-Icelandic artist perched a huge optical device atop the Hochjochferner glacier in South Tyrol, Italy, to encourage people to see man-made climate change from wider “planetary and glacial perspectives”. The permanent installation was designed to resemble an oversized armillary sphere – an ancient astronomical instrument made of concentric brass rings arranged into a globe to represent the movement of celestial bodies around the earth. To reach it, visitors must hike up the mountain, passing through metal archways representing a different ice age in Earth’s history.

Eliasson designed the sphere to make the abstract idea of climate change tangible in a region directly affected by it. As global superpowers continue to spew emissions and temperatures keep rising, the need for increased action is urgent. Governments must do more, but we all have a role to play, as Eliason’s work suggests. A bit of humility from humanity wouldn’t go amiss.

A 10m-tall hibiscus flower has bloomed in the heart of Leeds, its vibrant petals bringing a splash of colour to the dark, redbrick surrounds. This giant bloom – unveiled last week as part of the city's year of culture, Leeds 2023 – is the vision of artist Yinka Shonibare. Adorned with African-inspired batiq patterns, its petals appear to flap in the breeze.

The sculpture celebrates the cultural diversity of a city that was the birthplace of Europe’s oldest Caribbean carnival, while also acknowledging a dark chapter in Leeds’ history. It was commissioned in memory of David Oluwale, a British Nigerian and a local resident, who drowned in the River Aire in 1969, after being systematically harassed by members of the Leeds City police force. His story has left a mark on the city he came to from Nigeria to find a better life.

Rather than look back with sadness, Shonibare wanted Hibiscus Rising to be a symbol of hope, “an everyday reminder of our desire to improve the lives of all and a place for people to come together,” as he put it. The sculpture is also a riposte to the feats of white men commemorated in other parts of the city.

Here’s one for our American friends celebrating Thanksgiving this week: a delectable turkey, dished up by the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. The original 1961 version was inspired by an advertisement for turkeys in a newspaper. Three years later, Lichtenstein worked with screen printers to reproduce it on a series of shopping bags for the exhibition American Supermarket at New York’s Bianchini Gallery, which highlighted the differences and similarities between the actual consumer objects and pop artists’ depictions of them. Warhol was among them, of course.

The exhibition was designed to resemble a supermarket, with a check-out counter, aisles and shelves, stocked with real and plastic food items, displayed alongside the artworks. To blur the lines between art and commerce, the works were sold at cheap prices, with Lichtenstein’s bags selling for just $12. They now fetch around $2000 at auction.

We’re exploring the Technicolour visions of the late, great Sonia Delaunay today, to mark her birthday. Born on 14 November 1885 in the Russian Empire – in what is Ukraine today – she blazed a colourful trail through the worlds of art, fashion, textiles and set design. Alongside her husband Robert Delaunay, she spent decades at the centre of the avant garde in Paris, co-founding the Orphism art movement, which reimagined Cubism with geometric forms, bold colours and riotous energy. As she once said: “Abstract art is only important if it is the endless rhythm where the very ancient and the distant future meet.” For Prismes Électriques, painted in 1914, she took inspiration from railway architecture and electric light.

Delaunay's adventures in colour contrasts soon found their way onto clothing and textiles, including costumes for the Ballet Russes’ Cleopatre, an embroidered coat for the actress Gloria Swanson, and fabrics for Amsterdam luxury store Metz and Co, and Liberty. If only we could step out in them today.

Poppies are a recurring motif for Brian Clarke, an artist who has pushed the boundaries of stained glass over his five-decade career, taking it beyond the church into museums, hotels, airports and beyond. With Remembrance Day approaching, The Wick is honing in on his 42-sq-m glass installation ‘Ardath’ at Newport Street Gallery, in which a painterly meadow of poppies and other flowers bathes the gallery in ever-changing light and colour. Eleven columns of mouth blown and etched glass are suspended from the ceiling, spanning the width of the entire room and forming a rich tapestry.

Clarke is often dubbed the ‘rock star of stained glass’ thanks to the musicians he has collaborated with (including Paul McCartney) and his pioneering approach to the medium. He is drawn to its ability to transform a space. ‘It’s a kinetic medium - it never stays still,’ he says. Ardath is the centrepiece of his solo exhibition, A Great Light, at Newport Street Gallery, which runs until 31 December 2023.

It’s the art world’s most chilling painting – an emblem of horror that’s inspired films and Halloween costumes the world over, and has even been turned into an emoji. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is easily his most famous work, though in fact it is part of a series of four pieces made between 1893 and 1910 in paint and pastels. With hands clasped around its angst-ridden face, the haunting figure is thought to be standing on a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. Munch's sister Laura Catherine was residing in the mental hospital at the foot of Ekeberg at the time of painting.

On the frame of the 1895 version is a poem by Munch, in which he speaks of walking with two friends and pausing when he noticed the sky had turned blood red. ‘There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety.’ The figure in the work isn’t actually screaming – the shriek, he says, came from the surroundings. ‘I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.’ If the natural world could emit a collective scream today, imagine the din it would make.

Versions of The Scream can be seen at Oslo’s National Gallery and Munch Museum.

For over thirty years, the Black British artist Claudette Johnson has created larger than life drawings of Black women and men that are at once intensely intimate and powerful. Her figures — often depictions of herself, friends or relatives — usually adopt strong poses and gaze confidently beyond the frame at the viewer. Working in a variety of media, ranging from dark pastel to vibrant gouache, she looks to tell a different story of the Black British experience: ‘I felt that the figure could express everything; through figuration, abstraction and invention I could tell personal and in its widest sense political truths,’ she said in 2013.

Executed in 2018 and now held in Tate’s collection, Standing Figure with African Masks is a large-scale drawing in pastel and gouache of a female figure with her stomach exposed, hands on her hips. She looks brazenly at the viewer, with a bold expression on her face. She is standing in front of an abstract background featuring three figures wearing African masks, a nod to Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Drawn from life in the artist’s studio in East London, it is the first recognisable image that Johnson has made of herself. ‘But I’m not interested in portraiture or its tradition,’ she has said. ‘I’m interested in giving space to Black women presence. A presence which has been distorted, hidden and denied.’