The Hepworth Wakefield art gallery is the 2017 museum of the year
The West Yorkshire-based Hepworth Wakefield art gallery was named the Art Fund Museum of the year 2017 by a jury consisting of Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar, British museum director Hartwig Fischer, BBC Radio 2 host Jo Whiley, art advisor Munira Mirza and sculptor Richard Deacon. The prize, awarded each year to one outstanding UK museum, is the leading award for institutions of the kind.
Opened in 2011, the Hepworth Wakefield museum has established a strong reputation for itself over the course of the last six years, with the institution launching its own prize for sculpture — the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture — whose first laureate, Helen Marten, also took home the Turner Prize. The Hepworth Wakefield will be awarded a cash prize of £100,000, whilst the other finalists — the Lapworth Museum of Geology, (Birmingham) National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, (Newmarket) the Sir John Soane’s Museum (London) and the Tate Modern (London) — will be awarded, for the first time ever, £10,000 each. The Guardian has more information.
Helen Marten, Poetry from junk. Winner of the inaugural Hepworth prize for sculpture with her artwork at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery. Photograph, Anthony Devlin/PA
Sprüth Magers to reopen in London
The London branch of the mega-gallery is set to reopen at the end of September after an eighteen-month refurbishment.
The expanded gallery, which extends over the whole three floors of the eighteenth-century building it has occupied for over a decade, will reopen with a show by artist Gary Hume — the artist’s first UK exhibition since its Tate retrospective in 2013. Details via The Art Newspaper.
Sprüth Magers in Mayfair, London
Stuart Semple’s back at it again
The color war doesn’t seem to end. After creating a “better black” than Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack and the “world’s pinkest pink” British artist Stuart Semple has now launched its very own “color-changing rainbow paint”, which Kapoor is — of course — banned from using.
Semple created two new paints: the “Shift” paint, made using using a type of Chiral Nematic liquid crystal, to be used over Semple's matte Black 2.0, and the “Phaze” paint, which combines Semple’s pinkest pink and his Purple Haze paint. Both colors were created by Semple in support of the Camberwell residents who have launched a petition against Kapoor to stop him from building an extra floor in his studio block, preventing them from enjoying natural light. More via Vice.
Stuart Semple's color-changing Phaze and Shift paints in action. Courtesy of Stuart Semple.
