https://www.facebook.com/115593594472573/

Gut Leer, проспект Степана Бандери, 11A, Kyiv (2026)

18/05/2022

Why the Queen is the last Royal icon
From fairytale and formal to satirical and subversive – the art and photography that depict Her Majesty the Queen reveal some interesting truths. Holly Williams takes a look.
W
When Cecil Beaton photographed Her Majesty the Queen to mark her Coronation, in 1953, it was – as you might expect – in full pomp, with orb and sceptre, crown and robes, her golden throne standing tall amid the grandeur of Westminster Abbey… Except, well, it wasn't. The backdrop is fake; a mere image of the place where she was crowned queen. The picture was actually shot in a room at Buckingham Palace, with Westminster Abbey represented by a theatrical cloth: a stage set on which the Queen plays her part.

More like this:

- How the Queen conquered fashion

- Dressing the on-screen Royal family

- A misunderstood icon of Scottishness

Looking at it today, it seems faintly preposterous – a fairy-tale image, the backdrop something that could practically have come out of an early hand-painted Disney film. But it's also the perfect set-up for the monarch's lifetime of being photographed and painted – its very unreality both elevating and protecting her

14/05/2022

Why are there continent-sized 'blobs' in the deep Earth?
They're among the largest physical structures on the planet – and they're a total mystery.
I
In a strange corner of our solar system live two alien blobs.

With sprawling, amorphous bodies the size of continents, these oddities are thought to spend their time lying in wait for their food to rain down upon them – then simply absorbing it.

But their natural habitat is, if anything, even more unusual than their diet. It could be described as "rocky" – all around, there are exotic minerals in unknown shades and forms. Otherwise it's fairly barren, except for a glittering sea in the far distance – one so large, it holds as much water as all of Earth's oceans put together.

Every day the "weather" is the same: a balmy 1827C (3321F), with some areas of high pressure – equivalent to around 1.3 million times the amount at the Earth's surface. In this crushing environment, atoms become warped and even the most familiar materials start to behave in eccentric ways – rock is flexible like plastic, while oxygen acts like a metal.

But this blistering wonderland is no extra-terrestrial planet – and the blobs aren't strictly wildlife. It is, in fact, the Earth itself – just very, very deep underground.

In particular, the setting in question is the lower mantle – the layer of rock that sits just above Earth's centre, the core. This mostly-solid mass is another world, a place that's swirled and flecked with a kaleidoscope of crystals, from diamonds – there are around a quadrillion tonnes of them in the mantle in total – to minerals so elusive, they don't exist on the surface.

11/05/2022

The UK landscape that hid a criminal enterprise
The story of "King" David Hartley, whose forgery empire brought the UK economy to its knees in the 18th Century, will soon spread far beyond West Yorkshire.
F
February is as unpredictable as it is breath-taking in Cragg Vale, a village of cobbled streets and immense natural beauty in the sprawling West Yorkshire countryside. A week before I'd planned to trek a five-mile trail known locally as the Coiners route, Cragg Vale was battered by two storms that left flooded rivers and uprooted trees in its wake.

When I finally made it, however, the skies were clear blue and the hills glistened in burnt yellows and rich greens. This is an imposing landscape largely untouched by time, where a handful of wind turbines dotted along the horizon are the only obvious markers of modern life.

I'd come to Cragg Vale to walk in the footsteps of "King" David Hartley, who once forged a criminal empire in this part of Yorkshire, a county affectionately nicknamed "God's own country". I strolled up steep, forest-covered hills and meandered along bridlepaths lined with wildflowers. Hillside cottages were nestled within the valleys, cocooned from the outside world. Birds sang, brooks babbled and sheep grazed in frost-dusted fields.

These were the same views that inspired Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and where the only Brontë brother, Branwell, worked the railways. On first sight, there was little to suggest that this expansive patch of countryside once harboured a gang known as the Cragg Vale Coiners, whose counterfeiting enterprise in the 18th Century took on the establishment and brought the Bank of England to its knees.

At the time, ongoing trade between England, Spain and Portugal meant both English and foreign coins were accepted as legal tender in England. In this, the Coiners found an opportunity, albeit an illicit one.

07/05/2022

The women who redefined colour
Five years before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colours, the English artist Mary Gartside published her own challenge to the ideas of Isaac Newton – but, writes Kelly Grovier, she has disappeared from history.
I
In 1805, a little-known English artist and amateur painting instructor did what no woman before her ever had: publish a book on the subject of colour theory. Though frustratingly few details of the life and career of Mary Gartside have survived, her unprecedented volume An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General reveals evidence of extraordinary creative genius. Modestly introduced by its obscure author as little more than a guidebook to "the ladies I have been called upon to instruct in painting", Gartside's study is accompanied by a series of strikingly abstract images unlike any produced previously by a writer or artist of any gender.

More like this:
- The woman written out of history
- A painting with a mysterious message
- Exposing the evil in the ordinary

At first glance, you could easily mistake Gartside's eight watercolour "blots" for magnified floralscapes that anticipate the outsized stamens and pistils that the US artist Georgia O'Keeffe would begin exploding out of all proportion more than 100 years later. But look again at these lucent surges of almost petals, whose vibrancy of colour is unshackled to tangible shape, and any certainty you may have had about what it is that these images portray or what they mean begins to break down. Neither fragrant blossoms plucked from the real world nor imaginary blooms unfolding in the mind, Gartside's abstract blots burst beyond the borders of themselves a full century before non-figurative painting established itself on the better-known canvases of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

Address

проспект Степана Бандери, 11A
Kyiv
02000

Website

facebook.com

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Gut Leer posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Gut Leer