Art news daily: 11 March | Apollo Magazine

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Hermitage Museum first institution to curate pavilion at Venice Biennale | The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will be the first institution to curate a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Inspired by the museum’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (1669) by Rembrandt the pavilion’s exhibition will be titled ‘Lc.15: 11–32’, after the passage in St Luke’s Gospel. Overseen by director of the museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the pavilion located in the Giardini della Biennale will also include an installation by the film-maker Alexander Sokurov inspired by the same parable.

Jorge M. Perez donates $1.5m to Reina Sofia | Art News reports that American real-estate developer and collector Jorge M. Pérez has donated $1 million worth of art by Spanish artists to the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. He has also gifted the museum $500,000 in cash, which must be spent on emerging contemporary, Spanish or Latin American artists.

Robert Maguire (1931–2019) | The British architect Robert Maguire has died aged 87, reports The Guardian. Known for his design of St Paul’s church in Bow Common in 1960, Maguire’s architectural style reflected a modern post-war aesthetic. Apart from co-founding his own architectural firm Maguire & Murray with partner Keith Murray, he was also head of the school of architecture at Oxford Brooke’s/

Recommended reading | The Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam speaks to Gareth Harris at The Art Newspaper about his imprisonment and torture | Helen G Anderson’s photographs for The Guardian reveal the fascinating Arts and Crafts interiors of the David Parr house in Cambridge (which Martin Oldham wrote about in Apollo in 2015).