Neave Brown awarded 2018 Royal Gold Medal for architecture

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Neave Brown wins Royal Gold Medal for architecture | RIBA has named Neave Brown as the winner of its 2018 Royal Gold Medal for architecture. Brown is the only living architect to have had all his buildings in the UK listed. Perhaps best known for the Alexandra Road estate on Rowley Way, in the London Borough of Camden, Brown was a pioneer of high-density, low-rise schemes in the 1970s. Responding to this award for lifetime achievement, Brown said, ‘All my work! I got it just by flying blind. I seem to have been flying all my life.’ Among the citations by leading architects and critics was the Alexandra Road Residents Assocation.

Police end occupation of the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin | Around 20 members of the ‘Dust and Glitter’ collective were removed from the Volksbühne Theatre by the police on Thursday afternoon. The group had been occupying the theatre since last Friday in protest at what they see as the elitist direction in which it is being taken by the new director Chris Dercon. Rehearsals at the theatre are set to resume at once, Dercon announced in a statement.

MCA Chicago and Nasher Museum split Sotheby’s Prize | The inaugural $250,000 Sotheby’s Prize has been awarded jointly to MCA Chicago and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina. The award, intended to recognise ‘exhibitions that break new art historical ground’, had a longlist of 92 applicants from 15 countries, and the jury was split between the two US institutions. The Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Cummer Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania will also receive $10,000 each.

Three centuries of watercolours to be digitised | HRH the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have both given their blessing to a project to digitise thousands of watercolour drawings dating from before 1900. Called The Watercolour World, the initiative aims to create a visual history of the world from the era before photography became the standard medium of documentation. Tens of thousands of watercolours have already been digitised and are in the process of being uploaded.

Lis Rhodes awarded Freelands Prize | The second Freelands Prize has been awarded to Nottingham Contemporary, which will stage a solo show by Lis Rhodes with the proceeds. Rhodes, who is not represented by a gallery, will receive £25,000 of the £100,000 prize, and the exhibition will take place in 2019. The prize was founded to help a UK regional arts organisation to mount a major solo show by a mid-career female artist.

Thomas Dane Gallery to open Naples space |  Thomas Dane Gallery is to open a new space in Naples, complementing its two venues in London, in January 2018. The gallery statement says that the Naples branch will be ‘part residency, part project space, part exhibition space’. The gallery director will be Federica Sheehan, and the first exhibition in Naples will include work by Bruce Conner, Steve McQueen, Catherine Opie, Caragh Thuring, and Kelley Walker.

Recommended reading | The latest edition of the Turner Prize, now on display at Hull’s revamped Ferens Art Gallery, has rather divided the critics. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle thinks it is ‘uneven and at times frustrating’, while the Daily Telegraph’s Mark Hudson is better disposed towards the show. The highest praise comes from the Rachel Campbell-Johnston in Times, who considers it ‘politically apposite and socially relevant’. On a different note, the New York Times has delved into Jean-Michel Basquiat’s record collection and, perhaps unsurprisingly, discovered that he had an impeccable taste in music.