Dirty Beauty

in Gowanus

Brooklyn

New York

Kiss Not War

Gustave Klimt's The Kiss 

on a ruined Damascus building

in war-torn Syria

Tammam Azzam

beauty & devastation

On Beauty

arab horse

donkey

Beauty

„The beauty which is inherent in the form of the world and is proven in geometry and expressed in all good art is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself... Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul... a way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives.”

Simone Weil

Beauty and Horror

Paradise Lost

2001-11

Oil, acrylic, glitter, enamel and rhinestones on birch wood

300x900 cm

Detail

A paradise with blossoming cherry flowers, mountainous nightscape lit by full moon, voluptuous carnival intoxicated by colourful lotus flowers and glittering precious stones  -  and all this populated with hedonistic and vampire predators in a carnal inertia and mutual bloody carnage. 

This is not a battle of Good and the Evil: this is nature's eternal, voracious, erotic and violate passing of the time.

The sense of a mesmerizing, glamorous luxury is increased with a special technique used in cloisonné: small pools of enamel and metallic paint delineated with a raised edge which is then finished in gold and filled with thousands of sparkling tiny rubies, emeralds and other precious stones - sometimes their value is far greater than what the works are sold for.

New Paintings of Raqib Shaw

Tate Interview

The Winner Is: Glamour, Elegance, Beauty

Threshold of a new era

David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg: "until today we were rivals and now we are colleagues".