The 30ft (9m) sculpture, The Writer, will be on Parliament Hill for four months before returning to Italy. The tribute to the loneliness of writing is meant to inspire visitors to the heath, which has associations with writers Keats and Coleridge.
An exhibition celebrating the British landscape opens at Tate Britain later this month with an accompanying series starting on BBC 1 tomorrow. Lisa Allardice asks five modern artists about the places that have fired their imaginations.
Like so many artists, Congo spent most of his life being misunderstood. Although Picasso is reputed to have framed one of his works and hung it in his studio, most people dismissed the diminutive painter as nothing more than a brush-wielding chimp. But Congo, who was indeed a brush-wielding chimp, had the last laugh yesterday as three of his paintings sold for more than £14,000.
It is an unusual place for an Antony Gormley art installation: a windswept and rain-soaked beach on Merseyside. But yesterday, the first of 100 iron figures was put in place on Crosby beach. Seawater lapped around the feet of one of the statues, which became almost submerged at high tide, as an Irish ferry chugged past in the distance.
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1st Prize - Dean Marsh
Dean Marsh (b.1968) is a London-based artist who following a Foundation course at Ravensbourne College of Design exhibited several times in the BP Portrait Award - in 1993, 1994, 1996 and 2000. He won fourth prize in 2003 for Man with Grey Scarfe and was commended in 2002 for his portrait of Rosalind Savill.
2nd Prize - Saul Robertson
Saul Robertson (b.1978) lives and works in Glasgow. In the past two years he has won both the David Cargill Senior Award and the David Cargill Award at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and was Young Artist of the Year at the Hunting Art Prizes in 2001. He has exhibited extensively throughout Britain.
3rd Prize - Gregory Cumins
Gregory Cumins (b.1973) graduated in sculpture in 1999 from Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he was taught by British sculptor Richard Deacon. He then worked in a website agency as a graphic designer and web-designer. In 2003 he started painting and has won the Prix spécial du Jury at this year’s Salon de Montrouge exhibition.
4th Prize - Conor Walton
Conor Walton (b.1970) lives and works in County Wicklow. Born in Dublin, he studied at the National College of Art and Design. Following his MA in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, he went to Florence to study painting and old master techniques. He returned to Dublin in 1996, where his fourth solo exhibition will be held in June 2006.
The eccentric inhabitants of a crumbling Irish manor house have invited in the reality TV cameras in a desperate attempt to avert its collapse. The plot of a new play by Belfast’s award-winning Marie Jones echoes the real-life battle of the Lyric Theatre in the city, which has for years been struggling to raise funds to prevent its roof caving in. Yesterday, after a struggle in which the actor Liam Neeson begged New York’s literati to save his spiritual home, the theatre was finally assured of a new £12m building.
Artists who want their work to boldly go beyond the upper atmosphere have three weeks to come up with ideas for the planet’s most unusual gallery.
Initial consultation on a cultural use for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth 250 miles into space, finishes at the end of this month.
In the wonderful world of contemporary art the nominations for this year’s Turner prize are suitably bizarre. A collagist who customises bicycles, a photographic artist who films digital clocks, and a musician who works with plastic bags, wool and safety pins.
But the most subversive element on the shortlist announced yesterday is the appearance of a conventional painter whose subject matter is traditional - the landscape, the bunch of flowers, the sunset - and whose medium is the choice of Joseph Mallord William Turner himself, oil paints. As Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, announced the artists on the shortlist for the £25,000 prize, the bookies William Hill made Gillian Carnegie, 34, from London, the even-money favourite as the first artist who exclusively uses paint as a medium to be nominated for the prize in five years.