Culture at home in March 2021
This month’s Cultural Diary is filled with more events and activities to enjoy at home, from an online exhibition devoted to the colour blue, to a charity auction of mini marvels by celebrated artists. There’s a new international programme that will consider the future of our planet and how we can draw on history to face the climate crisis. Plus, a sample of the best fiction and non-fiction hitting the shelves. Here’s what to see, watch, listen to and read in March.
Lucien Hervé: The Photographer with the Soul of an Architect, Michael Hoppen Gallery
Instead of simply documenting the built world around him, Lucien Hervé’s incisive pictures expressed it in a new language. The Hungarian photographer was the greatest visual advocate of modernist architecture – in particular that of Le Corbusier, whose idea that Hervé possessed “the soul of an architect” lends this exhibition its name. Included is a vintage series of the celebrated Swiss architect’s original maquettes for the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, which have never before been shown in public. With his tightly cropped compositions, keen eye for detail and the play of light and shadow, Hervé captured on camera the most revolutionary buildings of the 20th century. Online at Michael Hoppen Gallery until 13 March.
Art on a Postcard International Women’s Day Auction
Art on a Postcard is best known for its secret postcard auctions, which offer you the chance to buy a miniature masterpiece by a leading artist and raise funds for charity while you’re at it. To mark International Women’s Day, the platform has invited female-identifying artists to create original works in response to an initiative called I AM, created by Jane Shea, prison peer educator of The Hepatitis C Trust. The results celebrate the very many layers that make up every woman and include mixed-media pieces by Chila Kumari Singh Burman, a fluid composition by Yui Kugimiya, and an abstract portrait of two velvety green figures by Antonia Showering. Bidding starts at £50, and the auction runs until 11 March.
Pioneering Women, Oxford Ceramics
The modernist potter Lucie Rie, whose delicate designs set her apart from Britain’s rural craftsmen and their rustic ceramics, is one of 10 pioneering women included in this online exhibition. Spanning three generations, the show explores each maker’s reinterpretation of formal traditions and their contribution to the development of contemporary ceramics. Alongside Rie’s simple and elegant vases are the carefully constructed cylinder vessels of Danish designer Bodil Manz, the hollow clay forms of Dutch artist Deirdre McLoughlin, and Japanese-born Akiko Hirai’s modern take on the Korean moon jar. Created between the 1950s and the present day, the pieces on display spotlight the influential work of these women and make a case for ceramics as art.
The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue, Victoria Miro on Vortic
This group show takes its name from a large pastel made by the Portuguese artist Paula Rego in 2017. Inspired by a story about a boy who believes his father is the sea, the work captures the moment when the boy dies on the shore and his body turns the shade of the water lapping at his feet. The exhibition features new and existing blue works by 19 artists and explores the meaning and history of the colour. The American painter Milton Avery’s Two Poets (1963) presents an unidentified pair of men and a potted plant against an artificial blue backdrop, while Celia Paul’s Steve in His Rowing Boat, Austria (2019) is a monochrome marvel in which you can barely distinguish sea, mountain and sky.
Forecast by Invisible Dust
From 3 to 7 March, the arts and science organisation Invisible Dust is hosting a new online international programme that will consider the future of our planet. Comprising panel discussions, artist performances and film screenings about everything from our relationship with nature to adapting to uncertainty, Forecast will draw on the organisation’s dozen years of working on the climate crisis and bring together artists, scientists and thinkers from around the world. Participants include model and campaigner Lily Cole, architect Usman Haque and activist Daze Aghaji. Newly commissioned artworks by Hito Steyerl and Ryan Gander will premiere during the programme. All events are free but with limited availability, so be sure to book a ticket.
March fiction releases
Make room on your shelves for the many books being published this month. First up, the hotly anticipated new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go; Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Faber) is a brilliant exploration of humanity and what it means to love. A startling portrait of a life unravelling and the hard work to thread it back together again, Bright Burning Things (Bloomsbury) by the Irish playwright and novelist Lisa Harding is a tale of maternal love, control and a woman battling with addiction. Fellow Irish writer Megan Nolan’s debut Acts of Desperation (Jonathan Cape) explores another kind of addiction – love itself – while The House Uptown by Melissa Ginsburg (Faber) centres around the relationship between a painter and her recently estranged teenage granddaughter.
March non-fiction releases
What better book to mark the arrival of spring than In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing (Daunt Books Publishing); this unique collection brings together 14 writers and shows how gardening can help us slow down and look more closely. Speaking of which, Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) tells the story of a series of self-portraits made between the 16th and 20th centuries, and the women behind them. The follow-up to Craig Taylor’s Londoners, New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time (John Murray) is a bustling oral history of the Big Apple. And finally, for a look at last year’s most innovative building projects around the globe, seek out Architizer: The World’s Best Architecture 2020 (Phaidon).
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