Art lovers: Valentines gifts for Londoners from original Pop Art to personalised prints
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Love from Sotheby’s
If you are seriously rich and seriously in love, the original artwork of Love, the Pop art sculpture by American artist Robert Indiana is for sale in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction on March 6.
The original was designed as a Christmas card, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.
It remains to this day one of the most recognised Pop images in the world, and this sculpture can be yours. The reserve starts at £550,000.
Gifts all sewn up
Teaching embroidery skills to prisoners, charity Fine Cell Work encourages independence on release.
Many of the products are created with leading UK designers — from Cath Kidston to Ben Pentreath to Bloomsbury Group granddaughter Cressida Bell. This cushion, £95, is designed by embroidery expert Karen Nicol and it takes six months to train in the skills needed to finish one of her works.
Nicol works for luxury brands including Kate Middleton favourite Alexander McQueen.
About 30 prisons are currently involved in the project. There’s now a workshop in Battersea to help with post-release support and training.
Picture your love nest
There’s just time to order a drawing of your home to give your loved one for Valentine’s Day.
Send an image through to the Letterfest illustrations team via Not on the High Street and one of their artists will draw an image of your home, including cars or pets if you like. It’s then scanned and digitally printed. From £40.
From one couple to another
Surreal sculptures and decorative arts by husband and wife François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne have reached cult status. Now, in a Valentine’s Day delight, husband-and-wife gallerists are showing the couple’s work in their own separate Mayfair galleries.
The Louisa Guinness Gallery is showing jewellery designed by wife Claude, now aged 94, who is still hand-making wearable sculpture from necklaces and earrings to handbags, based on flowers, animals and insects.
The Ben Brown Fine Arts gallery is displaying museum-quality sculpture, mirrors and furniture created by François-Xavier in collaboration with Claude.
The flowering of a photographic affair
A show perfectly timed for Valentine’s Day is inspired by a passionate art world affair. Photographer Edward Weston’s Twenties images of Italian actress Tina Modotti are super-sensual and now Maryam Eisler recreates that passion in her own photographic homage to the couple.
She felt close to them after staying at Weston’s California home and with her 19 platinum prints gives “a visual interpretation of how I imagined Edward looking at Tina”.