Dec 22, 2020

An Artistic Summary Of This Bizarre 2020

What happened in 2020? Artistically, I mean.

Lots of new works have seen the light, and lots of artists have been inspired by this peculiar year.

Let’s see, non-exhaustively, what happened, with 9 days until the end of the year.

January 20 - Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait as a Sick Person (August 1889) from the collection of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo is verified by experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as authentic.

February - A painting of a Head of an Old Man, previously rejected as an authentic Rembrandt, from the reserve collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, is confirmed through dendrochronology as painted on a board which had been in Rembrandt's studio.

February 11 - David Hockney's 1966 painting The Splash sells for £23.1m at an auction at Sotheby's in London.

March - COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland: The Rebel Bear and others paint street art in Glasgow.

April 15 - Banksy posts on his Instagram account a series of pictures showing stencilled rats causing mayhem in a private bathroom during the coronavirus lockdown.

May 7 - Quentin Blake's large artwork The Taxi Driver is the centrepiece of a one-man exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in England which opens on this day to be viewed only remotely due to the coronavirus lockdown.

July 14 - Banksy reveals in a video that he had decorated the interior of a car of London Underground rolling stock with graphics, If You Don't Mask, You Don't Get, relating to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, subsequently removed by Transport for London.

July 15 - A statue rendered in black resin by Marc Quinn of a British Black Lives Matter protestor, A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020, is installed clandestinely by the artist on the plinth vacated by overthrow of the Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol without official permission; it is removed from this location 24 hours later by Bristol City Council which tweets "This morning we removed the sculpture. It will be held at our museum for the artist to collect or donate to our collection".

July 30 - Heather Phillipson's sculpture The End on the Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London, is inaugurated.

October - Four museums; the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in canceling an upcoming Philip Guston exhibition, "Philip Guston Now" cite the works by the artist which employ depictions of hooded figures representing members of the American racist organization the Ku Klux Klan. After an enormous uproar the traveling exhibition is subsequently rescheduled for dates beginning in 2022 in an amended form to include the contributions of contemporary artists and historians.

November 16 - Work to dismantle the flanking walls of a pavilion erected by Tadao Ando at Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester city centre in England (2002) begins.

Photo taken via Apple Maps, 2020

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