Art Knowledge News - Keeping You in Touch with the World of Art... |
- The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid opens Marc Chagall retrospective
- Blain|Southern features Works on Paper by Lucian Freud
- Inaugural Art Wynwood Contemporary Art Fair opens in Miami
- The Museum of International Folk Art Presents "The Arts of Survival"
- Swann Galleries to Auction an Oustanding Selection of African American Art
- Saffronart Offers Western Art with its Inaugural Auction of Impressionist & Modern Art
- The Innaugural Palm Springs Fine Art Fair Features More Than 2,000 Post-War & Contemporary Works
- The Kunsthalle Wien to display Urs Fischer's Multimedia Art
- Aicon Gallery New York is Showing Contemporary Pakistani Art
- Tate Britain Showcases "Picasso and Modern British Art"
- The Dallas Art Museum ~ A Texan 'Round-Up' Of Fine Art
- Michael Kessler ~ New Works at Butters Gallery in Portland
- Tapani Raittila Retrospective at Kunsthalle Helsinki
- The Lille Palais des Beaux Arts Presents the First Retrospective of Louis Boilly
- The Herakleidon Museum Showcases "Sol LeWitt: Line and Color"
- Gary Snyder/Project Space shows Janet Sobel who influenced Jackson Pollack
- Artist Jeff Koons Presents His 'Cracked Egg' Sculpture at the Pinchuk Art Centre
- "Workshop Missoni ~ Daring to be Different" opens at The Estorick Collection
- Works by Phyllis Bramson & Judith Geichman at Carrie Secrist Gallery
- Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid opens Marc Chagall retrospective Posted: 15 Feb 2012 11:18 PM PST Madrid.- The first retrospective on the Russian artist Marc Chagall to be organised in Spain will open in February at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid. More than 150 works from public and private collections and institutions around the world will be on display in the two venues, offering a complete overview of the career of one of the leading artists of the 20th century: a unique creative figure with a highly distinctive style who played a key role in the history of modern art. The MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Kunstmuseum Berne, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Tate Modern in London are among the twenty international museums that have lent key works from their collections, to be seen alongside others from private collections. Particularly important is the loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is sending 20 works, and that from the artist's family, which has been particularly generous in this respect. The result is a large and comprehensive group of masterpieces selected by the exhibition's curator, Jean-Lous Prat, President of the Comité Chagall. Together they will make this exhibition a major and unrepeatable artistic event and one that will offer visitors a unique opportunity to appreciate the wide-ranging and incomparable oeuvre of this essential figure. "Chagall" will be on view at both venues from February 14th to May 20th. Marc Chagall developed a highly expressive and colourist pictorial style that was closely linked to his own life and to the religious and popular traditions of the Russian Jewish community. Chagall combined elements from Cubism, Fauvism and Robert Delaunay's Orphism to create a personal style that is difficult to categorise. Born in the small Russian town of Vitebsk, Chagall's long life (he lived to be almost 100) was marked by the major historic events of the first half of the 20th century. A tireless creator and one always open to new experiences and to learning, Chagall's output is rich and varied. Using his particular and unique style, he was permanently open to exploring new techniques (oil, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, stained glass, etc) and to undertaking new projects. One important section of this exhibition, for example, is devoted to his significant activitie s as a book illustrator. Throughout his life Chagall was surrounded by poets and writers who were his friends and with whom he maintained close and mutually creative relations. Breton, Malraux, Cendrars and Apollinaire were among those who considered him a "literary painter" and it is evident that Chagall loved literature, particularly the message of freedom contained within words, which he was able to enrich with his fantastical and colourful compositions. Chagall was essentially a master of colour; his tones vibrate in different intensities and function to highlight the subjects of his paintings. His blues, greens, reds and yellows fill with life his real or imaginary characters, who inhabit a special universe of their own. Everything is possible in this constantly surprising world based on real or imagined stories: a violinist, a rabbi, two lovers, an acrobat, a landscape and a wide range of fantastical animals fill his compositions. In this world, colours and surprising figures and animals come together in previously unknown ways, resulting in a unique combination that made Chagall a forerunner of Surrealism, as that movement's theoretician, André Breton, noted: "With Chagall, metaphor made its triumphant entry into modern painting." In the summer of 1911, the young Chagall arrived in Paris from the remote provincial city of Vitebsk in Russia with the aim of making his way in the international capital of the art world at that date. He made friends with the painters Léger, Modigliani and Soutine and with the poets André Salmon, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire among others. Over the next few years he exhibited at the Salon d'automne and at the Salon des Indépendants. Through Apollinaire, Chagall met the Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden who chose three of his works for the first Herbstsalon in Berlin in 1913. Chagall held his first solo exhibition in Walden's gallery in 1914. Accustomed to Expressionism, the German public received his works with enthusiasm and Chagall progressed from being a young and talented painter to one who enjoyed international recognition. From Berlin the artist went back to his native city where he was surprised by the outbreak of World War I. In 1915 he married his fiancé Bella Rosenfeld and following the Russian Revolution was employed as Director of the Vitebsk Art School for two years. Due to differences of opinion with Kazimir Malevich he was obliged to leave the academy and in 1920 began to work for the State Jewish Theatre in Moscow for which he created sets and costume designs. In 1922 Chagall left Russia for ever and after a short period in Berlin settled in France in 1923. He lived there for the rest of his life with the exception of a brief period between 1941 and 1948 when he lived in the USA in order to avoid deportation by the Nazis. It was during this period, in 1946, that the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective exhibition of his work that fully established his international reputation. Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired his first painting by Chagall, "The Madonna of the Village", in 1965, followed by three further exceptional works that are now part of the Museum's Permanent Collection, namely "The Cockerel", "The Grey House" and "Nude". In one of the biographies of the family, the Baron recalled: "I once asked Chagall why he always painted cows playing the violin in the skies in his paintings. Very simply, he replied that he had grown up in the countryside and had therefore always been surrounded by cows, 'which is why I always paint cows in the sky'". The present exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid follows a chronological order. The first part, "The Path of Poetry", runs from Chagall's earliest years in Russia and his early period in Paris to his enforced exile in the USA and includes his experiences in revolutionary Russia and his return to France in 920. The second part, "The Great Play of Colour", to be shown at the exhibition space of Caja Madrid, analyses Chagall's artistic evolution from 1950 onwards, focusing on the principal themes within his work in his final decades including the Bible and the Circus, his relationships with contemporary poets and his sculptures and ceramics. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Spanish), is one of the three Madrid museums that make up the "Golden Triangle of Art", which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia (modern and contemporary) galleries. The collections's roots lie in the privately owned Thyssen-Bonremisza collection, once the second largest private art collection in the world (after the British Royal Collection). The collection started in the 1920s as a private collection by Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon (1875–1947). In a reversal of the movement of European paintings to the United States during this period, one of the Baron's sources was the collections of American millionaires coping with the Great Depression and inheritance taxes, from which he acquired such exquisite old master paintings as Ghirlandaio's 'Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni' (once in the Morgan Library) and Carpaccio's 'Knight' (from the collection of Otto Kahn). The collection was later expanded by Heinrich's son Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002), who re-assembled most of the works from his relatives' collections (distributed after his father's death) and proceeded to acquire large numbers of new works. In 1985, the Baron married Carmen Cervera (a former Miss Spain 1961) and introduced her to art-collecting. Carmen's influence was decisive in persuading the Baron to decide on the future of his collection and cede the collection to Spain. When Baron Thyssen decided to open his collection to the public, he initially tried to have his museum in the Villa Favorita in Switzerland expanded, when this proved impossible, a Europe-wide search for a new was home started. The competition was won in 1986 when the Spanish government came to an agreement to provide a home for the collection (the 19th century Villahermosa Palace close to the Prado in Madrid) and fund the museum in return for the loan of the collection for a minimum of nine and a half years. Pritzker prize winning Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo was employed to redesign and extend the building and the museum opened in 1992. However, so impressed were the Thyssen-Bornemiszas with the building and Spain's commitment to the collection, that even before it opened, they were negotiating with the Spanish government to make the museum permanent. In 1993, the Spanish government agreed to buy the collection (valued at up to 1.5 billion dollars) for $350 million and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum became a permanent fixture in Madrid. The museum currently houses two collections from the Thyssen-Bornemiszas, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, acquired by the Spanish government from Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza on permanent display since the museum opened in 1992 and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, owned by the baron's widow and held by the museum since 2004 on loan. These two collections comprise over one thousand works of art (mostly paintings), with which the museum offers a stroll through the history of European painting, from its beginning in the 13th century to the close of the 20th century. The Baroness remains involved with the museum, deciding the salmon pink tone of the interior and in May 2006 campaigning against plans to redevelop the Paseo del Prado as she thought the works and traffic would damage the collection and the museum's appearance. A collection of works from the museum is housed in Barcelona in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Visit the museum's website at … http://www.museothyssen.org |
Blain|Southern features Works on Paper by Lucian Freud Posted: 15 Feb 2012 11:06 PM PST London.- Blain|Southern is delighted to present the most comprehensive survey of works on paper by Lucian Freud (b.1922 – 2011). Beginning in the 1940s and spanning the artist's career, "Lucian Freud: Drawings" brings together more than 100 works, many of which have never been shown in public before. "Drawings" will be on view at the gallery from February 17th through April 5th. It will then travel to Acquavella Galleries, New York, where it will be exhibited from April 30th through June 9th 2012. Curator William Feaver, who presented Freud's acclaimed retrospectives at Tate Britain, London (2002) and the Museo Correr, Venice (2005), worked closely with the artist on this exhibition for the last five years, until his death in July 2011. Freud always prided himself on his drawing, and Feaver believes that the 'interplay between the works on paper, both drawings and etchings, and the paintings of the past 70 years' was crucial to his artistic achievement. The curator emphasises that he has aimed 'to accomplish not so much a retrospective overview as a study of Freud's development from prodigy onwards.' |
Inaugural Art Wynwood Contemporary Art Fair opens in Miami Posted: 15 Feb 2012 10:37 PM PST Miami, Florida.- Art Miami, LLC. is pleased to announce its confirmed exhibitor list in association with the launch of Art Wynwood, taking place President's Day Weekend, February 16th through 20th. Held in the spacious 100,000-square-foot Art Miami Pavilion, which attracted more than 55,000 attendees during the 2011 edition of Art Miami, the inaugural five-day International Contemporary Art Fair will showcase a compelling array of cutting-edge, contemporary and modern artwork by both emerging and established artists from more than 50 galleries, including "the flying murals of Wynwood" commissioned by the district's own Tony Goldman. |
The Museum of International Folk Art Presents "The Arts of Survival" Posted: 15 Feb 2012 10:08 PM PST Santa Fe, New Mexico.- The Museum of International Folk Art is proud to present "The Arts of Survival: Folk Expression in the Face of Disaster", on view at the museum until May 6th. "The Arts of Survival" explores how folk artists helped their communities recover from four recent natural disasters: the Haitian Earthquake; Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast; Pakistani floods; and the recent volcanic eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia. The exhibition features work by folk artists—some of whom have also won a coveted spot at the 2011 Santa Fe International Folk Art Market—with monumental artifacts, poetry, spoken word, and photographic and video documentation to explore the many ways in which a country's traditional arts and artists rally in times of disaster. |
Swann Galleries to Auction an Oustanding Selection of African American Art Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:29 PM PST New York City.- Swann Galleries will conduct their annual winter auction of African-American Fine Art, with highlights ranging from important 19th century landscape paintings to prints by celebrated contemporary artists. In all, there are more than 160 works by prominent black artists. The lot with the highest pre-sale estimate is a significant Charles White drawing—the first from the artist's famous J'Accuse! series to come to auction—J'Accuse! No. 10 (Negro Woman), charcoal on paper, 1966. A powerful depiction of African-American women, it was the cover illustration for a 1966 issue of Ebony magazine (estimate: $150,000 to $200,000). Also among the sale's top lots is the first William T. Williams painting to appear at auction, a large 1971 acrylic on canvas titled Eastern Star, which is an excellent example of the artist's unique abstract vision ($75,000 to $100,000). And, there is a complete copy of Kara Walker's monumental portfolio Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), with 15 screenprints and offset lithographs, 2005 ($75,000 to $100,000). The auction will take place on Thursday, February 16th at 2:30 p.m. The works of art will be on public exhibition at Swann Galleries on Saturday, February 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday, February 13th through Wednesday, February 15th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Thursday, February 16th from 10 a.m. to noon. |
Saffronart Offers Western Art with its Inaugural Auction of Impressionist & Modern Art Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:08 PM PST Mumbai, India.- Saffronart, India's leading auction house announces its entry into Western art with its Inaugural Auction of Impressionist and Modern Art. As part of its long-term commitment to provide art connoisseurs inIndia and across the globe with access to the finest art works, Saffronart now introduces this landmark auction of Western art, a first for India. The auction offers a unique opportunity for collectors to acquire significant works by the legends of the art world including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and others. With a total of 73 lots, the sale includes a wide variety of paintings, works on paper and sculptures of exceptional provenance and quality by leading Western artists. The auction will take place online at www.saffronart.com on February 15th -16th. A selection of lots from this auction will be previewed at Saffronart's galleries in New Delhi and Mumbai. |
The Innaugural Palm Springs Fine Art Fair Features More Than 2,000 Post-War & Contemporary Works Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:10 PM PST Palm Springs, California.- Hampton Expo Group announces the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, a sparkling new addition to its growing family of art fairs, from February 17th through February 19th, at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Featuring more than fifty top international art galleries exhibiting more than 2,000 carefully-culled works of post-war and contemporary art, the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair appeals to the sophisticated collector and casual fan alike. Punctuated by an Opening Preview Party on February 16th, as well as an exquisite program of special events and exhibitions throughout the run of the show, the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair is a Presidents Day weekend retreat for art lovers near and far.The annual Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes and honors an artist and arts patron who has long pioneered in the field, making remarkable contributions to the world of art and the region. This year's inaugural honoree is Judy Chicago. In conjunction with the award, David Richard Contemporary of Santa Fe, who represents Chicago, will present Judy Chicago, Material Girl, highlighting the artist's 50 year art making practice, featuring work in acrylics, needlework, paper and glass. Judy Chicago will be in attendance on Opening Night. |
The Kunsthalle Wien to display Urs Fischer's Multimedia Art Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:09 PM PST Vienna.- The Kunsthalle Wien is proud to present "Urs Fischer", on view from February 17th through May 28th. Urs Fischer's multimedia art, which is deeply rooted in sculpture despite the artist's training as a photographer, unfolds grand gestures with a pop attitude. Born in Switzerland in 1973 and living and working in New York, the artist grapples with scale in a sculptural balancing act. Whether playing with light and shadow, gravity, or materiality, Fischer's subtle and striking artworks engage in radical spatial interventions that situate his work in the aesthetic tradition of artists like Francis Picabia, Dieter Roth, and Gordon Matta-Clark. His equally abstract, representational, and figurative art probes formal solutions and challenges static art representations by depicting (mechanical) processes in various installations. Searching for each work's own internal dynamics, the artist cultivates apparent failure and makes chance an integral part of his production. As exemplified by his wax sculptures, whose candlelike forms evolve and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition, Fischer endows unconventional materials such as styrofoam, mirror glass, and glue with temporality, while the vanitas motifs in his still-lifes and skeletons memorialize the transience of the world. |
Aicon Gallery New York is Showing Contemporary Pakistani Art Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:17 PM PST New York City.- Aicon Gallery New York is proud to present "Méré Humd(r)um", a exhibition of Contemporary art from a new wave of young Pakistani artists, on view at the gallery until February 25th. The Urdu word Humdum, one syllable removed from its mundane English cousin, means someone who is so close that their breath and yours are one. The word Méré, with even less separating it from the minimal, almost pejorative, "mere" of the English language, is infused with belonging - it means mine. Together, "Méré Humdum" becomes a term of endearment for a mentor, a friend or a lover. But in a linguistic coincidence it is just a syllable away from the English "mere humdrum." Today, more than sixty years after Pakistan's independence, the ordinary, the everyday, the humdrum, remains an object of longing for most Pakistanis - the type of longing one might reserve for a lover. A day when there is no bombing, no violence on the streets - a day when the school bus is delayed only by traffic is a day of thanksgiving and celebration. The twelve artists in this exhibition have created work in direct response to the chaos and violence surrounding them, yet much of this work is imbued with an intrinsic and eternal optimism that stands in defiant contrast to the instability and uncertainty from which it has emerged. Much like Germany's Weimar Republic of the 1930s, an odd dichotomy is in place with today's generation of young Pakistani artists. While on the one hand, their political, economic and social situations are spinning out of control, the visual arts, in this landscape of circumscribed opportunities, is undergoing a transformation and creative flowering never before seen. This younger generation largely departs from the more traditional methods of their artistic heritage, such as miniature painting, and combines local materials and themes with progressive modes of post-colonial art practice, offering new interpretations and posing new questions for a society mired in political turmoil, social upheaval and violence both foreign and domestic. Abdullah M. I. Syed's Flying Rug works arise from Oriental myths and legends of the flying carpet and our desire for instant gratification. Made of folded U.S. dollar bills and box-cutter blades assembled into squadrons of drone-like airplanes, the rugs reference the dark and multilayered political implications of terrorism, capitalism and American hegemony, yet are intertwined with a poetic counterpoint that transmutes them and charges the works with the phenomenal capability of a magic carpet or the sublime stillness of a prayer rug. The works question not only the roots and consequences of 9/11 and the ongoing War on Terror through the prism of oversimplified Eastern and Western perceptions of one another, but also the complex relationship between capital and Contemporary art. Cyra Ali's haunting sculptures of disembodied intertwined limbs adorned in bright fabrics obtained from Karachi bazaars are a daring subversion of the overtly clad female body of Islamic tradition. The work stems from her desire to overturn the conventional trappings of femininity in Pakistani society and combat longstanding patriarchal desires to repress female sexuality. Ali's bizarre doll-sized mash-ups of female legs blur the line between the most ordinary of body parts and the sinister and monstrous proportions they are capable of taking on when continually contextualized as taboo objects of desire to be both coveted and suppressed. More straightforwardly, Sarah Khan's art is born from her resolute devotion to Pakistan, her beloved State, and her desire to see its artistic traditions, mainly miniature painting, evolve to address the socio-political complexities of its contemporary reality. She addresses her humdum (her Pakistan) for its charm and fading glory as she fortifies her wish for its resurrection from a negative entity to a positive one. Ehsan Ul Haq creates Duchampian assemblages of found everyday objects in which the individual components, though ordinary enough, are re-contextualized as dysfunctional or symbolic elements in what he calls "flawed systems." Ul Haq sees his installations as operating "on a plane where art and life exist as parallels within ambiguous forms." Through installations such as Fan and Water, man-made objects are stripped of their utility and repurposed in creations demonstrating both man's god- like ambition to create new systems of life and the resulting absurdities brought into being when such attempts misfire. Ultimately, this exhibition presents an examination of how a new generation of Contemporary Pakistani artists, through a range of disparate media and practices, continue to develop new methods of questioning the space between art and life in the often violent and chaotic reality they are faced with every day. Their work addresses not only the chasm and interstices between the two, but the extraordinary possibilities of art created in extraordinary surroundings. Aicon Gallery's vision begins in the Indian Subcontinent but reaches outwards internationally from there. The two gallery spaces are located in New York and London, and each provides a unique platform for Indian and Pakistani artists to exhibit in the United States and Europe. Alongside in-depth, focused solo shows, the galleries present a programme of curated group exhibitions that are international in their scope and ambition. Aicon Gallery was developed from Gallery ArtsIndia, which was one of the first major outlets in the United State for art from India. Initially Gallery ArtsIndia connected collectors, critics and curators to artists in India via an on-line platform, and after the initial positive feedback, opened as a gallery space in New York in 2002. Aicon Gallery was launched when our second major space opened in London in 2007. The New York space shifted location to its new premises in the Lower East Side in 2008. The gallery has presented significant solo exhibitions of a number of artists - many of which have been their first major exhibitions outside the subcontinent. Solo shows have included G.R.Iranna, Bose Krishnamachari, Anandajit Ray, Talha Rathore, Muhammed Zeeshan, Adeela Suleman and Atul Bhalla . It has also re-examined the oeuvres of artists working from the 1950s onwards, including F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, K. Laxma Goud, S.H. Raza and Shyamal Dutta Ray. More recently the gallery has started participating in international art fairs such as Arco, Art Dubai, India Art Summit and Art Hong Kong and will be developing further participations going forward. Aicon Editions, launched in 2008, is the first venture to enable artists from the Subcontinent to work with limited edition projects. In 2002 the gallery acquired a substantial part of the Herwitz collection, comprising of works collected over a 35 year period. This has enabled the gallery to curate in-depth solo presentations but also to contextualise a rich period in art production in India. This has been a particularly important task in light of the lack of a museum infrastructure within India. In part through this acquisition the gallery has been able to loan works to major exhibitions at Tate Britain, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum. The gallery has supported major museum presentations of art from South Asia - recent support has included the Serpentine Gallery, London, Asia Society, New York and a major presentation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Furthermore the gallery has been able to draw on its expertise in order to manage three art funds specifically focused on Indian art. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.aicongallery.com |
Tate Britain Showcases "Picasso and Modern British Art" Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:16 PM PST London. Tate Britain is proud to announce "Picasso and Modern British Art", on view at the museum from February 15th through July 15th 2012. This will be the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso's lifelong connections with Britain. "Picasso and Modern British Art" will examine Picasso's evolving critical reputation here and British artists' responses to his work. The exhibition will explore Picasso's rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated. After Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art. This exhibition will examine his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It will be presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso's art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists' responses to his work. "Picasso and Modern British Art" will comprise over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso. Picasso and Modern British Art will include key Cubist works such as "Head of a Man with Moustache" 1912 (Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry's two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It will also include Picasso's "Man with a Clarinet" 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) and "Weeping Woman" 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation. While many British artists have responded to Picasso's influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso's major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso will be shown. In addition Francis Bacon's "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" 1944 (Tate) will be compared with Picasso's paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously. The exhibition will look at the time Picasso spent in London in 1919 when he worked on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev's production of The Three-Cornered Hat. It will assess the significance of his political status in Britain, from the Guernica tour in 1938-9 to the artist's appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section will also consider the artist's post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by the 1945-6 V&A exhibition which re-ignited many of the fierce debates about modern art that first raged before the First World War, to the phenomenally successful survey of his career at the Tate in 1960. Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art. Located in London, it is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection. The other three galleries are Tate Modern, also in London, Tate Liverpool, in the north-west, and Tate St Ives, in Cornwall, in the south-west. The entire Tate Collection is available online. Tate Britain is the world centre for the understanding and enjoyment of British art and works actively to promote interest in British art internationally. The displays at Tate Britain call on the greatest collection of British art in the world to present an unrivalled picture of the development of art in Britain from the time of the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, to the present day. The Collection comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and international modern art. Some of the highlights of the Tate collection of British art include rich holdings of portraiture from the age of Queen Elizabeth I; of the work of William Hogarth, sometimes called the father of English painting; of the eighteenth-century portraitists Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds; of the animal painter George Stubbs; of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised British art in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth century of the work of Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. The very latest contemporary art is presented through the Art Now programme and the annual Turner Prize exhibition. Special attention is given to three outstanding British artists from the Romantic age. William Blake and John Constable have dedicated spaces within the gallery, while the unique J. M. W. Turner Collection of about 300 paintings and many thousands of watercolours is housed in the specially built Clore Gallery. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.tate.org.uk/britain |
The Dallas Art Museum ~ A Texan 'Round-Up' Of Fine Art Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:08 PM PST The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas. In 1984, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the Arts District, Dallas, Texas. The new building was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, the 2007 winner of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The Dallas Museum of Art collection is made up of more than 28,000 objects, dating from the third millennium BC to the present day. The museum's library contains over 50,000 volumes available to curators and the general public. The Dallas Museum of Art's history began with the establishment in 1903 of the Dallas Art Association, which initially exhibited paintings in the Dallas Public Library. The Museum's collections started growing from that moment on, and it soon became necessary to find a permanent home. The museum, renamed the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1932, relocated to a new art deco facility within Fair Park in 1936, on the occasion of the Texas Centennial Exposition. This new facility was designed by a consortium of Dallas architects in consultation with Paul Cret of Philadelphia. In 1943 Jerry Bywaters became the director of the DMFA and under his tenure, impressionist, abstract, and contemporary masterpieces were acquired and the Texas identity of the museum was emphasized. In 1963 the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts merged with the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art. The permanent collections of the two museums were then housed within the DMFA facility, which suddenly held significant works by Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Gerald Murphy, and Francis Bacon. By the late 1970s, the greatly enlarged permanent collection and the ambitious exhibition program fostered a need for a new museum facility. The museum moved once again, to its current venue, at the northern edge of the city's business district (the now designated Dallas Arts District). The $54 million dollar facility, designed by New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, gave the museum a new 370,000-square-foot facility when it opened in January 1984 (the museum's Sculpture Garden opened a year before in October 1983). At the same time the name was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1985 the new decorative arts wing, built to house 1,400 objects from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection, opened. In 1991, construction began on the addition of the Nancy and Jake L. Hamon Building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. When this opened in 1993 the museum gained an extra 140,000 square feet. In 2003, the Dallas Museum of Art marked its 100th birthday on January 19, and celebrated by remaining open for 100 continuous hours with 45,000 visitors in attendance. The museum collects, preserves, presents, and interprets works of art of the highest quality from diverse cultures and many centuries, including contemporary. As well as its galleries and library, the Dallas Museum of Art contains a café, museum shop and a unique 12,000-square-foot learning environment, the Center for Creative Connections. Visit the museum's website at … www.dallasmuseumofart.org The Dallas Museum of Art's collections include more than 24,000 works of art from around the world ranging from ancient to modern times. The collection of ancient Mediterranean art includes Cycladic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Apulian objects. The museum's collections of South Asian art range from Gandharan Buddhist art of the 2nd to 4th centuries AD to the arts of the Mughal Empire in India from the 15th to the 19th century. Highlights include a 12th century bronze Shiva Nataraja and a 10th century sandstone representation of the god Vishnu as the boar-headed Varaha. Objects in the museum's highly regarded African collection come from West and Central Africa.The objects date primarily from the 16th to the 20th centuries, although the earliest object is a Nok terracotta bust from Nigeria that dates from somewhere between 200 BC to 200 AD. The museum's significant collection of European art starts in the 16th century. Some of the earlier works include paintings by Giulio Cesare Procaccini ("Ecce Homo"), Pietro Paolini ("Bacchic Concert"), and Nicolas Mignard ("The Shepherd Faustulus Bringing Romulus & Remus to His Wife"). Art of the 18th century is represented by artists like Canaletto ("A View from the Fondamenta Nuova"), Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre ("The Abduction of Europa"), and Claude-Joseph Vernet ("Mountain Landscape with Approaching Storm"). The 19th and 20th century collection of European art also stands out. Among significant works in this collection are "Fox in the Snow" by Gustave Courbet, "The Seine at Lavacourt" by Claude Monet, "I Raro te Oviri" by Paul Gauguin, "Beginning of the World" by Constantin Brâncuşi, "Interior", and "Les Marroniers ou le Vitrail" by Edouard Vuillard. The collection of works by Piet Mondrian is also particularly noteworthy (with works like "The Windmill", "Self-Portrait", and "Place de la Concorde"). In 1985 the Dallas Museum of Art received a one-of-a-kind gift from Wendy Reves in honor of her late husband, Emery Reves. The Reves collection is housed in an elaborate 15,000-square-foot (1,400 m²) reproduction of the couple' home in France, Villa La Pausa (originally created for Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel), where the works were originally displayed. Among the 1,400 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper Emery Reves had collected are works from leading impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modernist artists, including Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. Another part of the Reves wing is devoted to decorative arts and includes Chinese export porcelain, European furniture, Oriental and European carpets, iron, bronze, and silver work, antique European glass, and rare books. The Dallas Museum of Art has significant holdings of ancient American art. The collection covers more than three millennia, displaying sculptures, prints, terracotta, and gold objects. Works in the ancient American collection span 3,000 years and represent twelve countries. Highlights include ceramics from the southwestern United States, ceramics and stone sculpture from Mexico and Guatemala, gold from Panama, Colombia, and Peru, textiles and ceramics from Peru and the Head of the god Tlaloc (Mexico, 14th-16th century). The American art collection includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the United States, Mexico, and Canada from the colonial period to World War II. Among the highlights of the collection are "Duck Island" by Childe Hassam, "Lighthouse Hill" by Edward Hopper, "That Gentleman" by Andrew Wyeth, "Bare Tree Trunks with Snow" by Georgia O'Keeffe and "Razor" and "Watch" by Gerald Murphy. One of the most beautiful pieces in the collection is "The Icebergs" by Frederic Edwin Church. This painting had long been referred to as a lost masterpiece. The painting was given to the museum in 1979 by Norma and Lamar Hunt. The Dallas Museum of Art also has one of the most thorough collections of Texas art. This is in great part thanks to Jerry Bywaters, director of the DMA from to 1943 to 1964, who was also one of the Dallas Nine, an influential group of Texas artists. In addition to paintings by Bywaters, the DMA has great works by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, Julian Onderdonk, Alexandre Hogue, David Bates, Dorothy Austin, Michael Owen, and Olin Herman Travis. The Museum's growing collections are the foundation for a broad range of special exhibitions organized by the DMA -- from nationally traveling shows such as Thomas Struth and Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century to focused exhibitions such as the recent Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg and the upcoming Van Gogh's Sheaves of Wheat. From its establishment in 1903 as the Dallas Art Association, one of the Museum's missions was to collect and exhibit the work of living artists. However, it was only with the 1950 acquisition of Jackson Pollock's "Cathedral" that the collection really started. Every important artistic trend since 1945 is represented in the Dallas Museum of Art's vast collection of contemporary art, from abstract expressionism to pop and op Art, and from minimalism, and conceptualism to installation art, assemblage, and video art. The collection is now the largest in the world outside of specialist modern and contemporary art museums. Contemporary artists within the collection whose reputations are well established include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson. Among photographers represented in the collection are Cindy Sherman, Nic Nicosia, Thomas Struth, and Lynn Davis. When the current Museum facility opened in the mid-1980s, several artists were commissioned to create site-specific works especially for the Dallas Museum of Art: Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Richard Fleischner, and Claes Oldenburg with Coosje van Bruggen. In recent years, the museum has shown a strong interest in collecting the work of contemporary German artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer, while simultaneously collecting works by young contemporary artists. Amongst the highlights of the collections are Jakson Pollock's "Cathedral", Steve Wolfe's "Untitled (Piano Music for Erik Satie)", John Chamberlain's "Dancing Duke" and Alan Saret's "Deep Forest Green Dispersion". The museum's collection of works on paper, includes photographic works from the earliest pioneers, such as Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le Secq through to Cindy Sherman. Temporary exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art reflect the breadth of its collections and its educational role. Currently on view is "Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement" (until May 8, 2011). This exhibition offers the first comprehensive examination of the life and work of the recognized patriarch of the American Arts & Crafts movement, Gustav Stickley. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will explore Stickley as a business leader and design proselytizer, whose body of work included furnishings, architectural and interior designs, and related imagery that became synonymous with the movement that was at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910. This exhibition will include over 100 works produced by Stickley's designers and workshops, including furniture, metalwork, lighting, and textiles, along with drawings and related designs. Also featured in the exhibition is a re-creation of Stickley's seminal model dining room from his 1903 Syracuse Arts & Crafts exhibition. "Line and Form: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Wasmuth Porfolio" (until July 17th 2011), features sixteen works drawn from a rare example of a portfolio within the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1910 Frank Lloyd Wright and Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth issued 'Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright)', a portfolio of one hundred stylishly rendered lithographs of plans, details, and perspective views produced by the architect and his assistants. Including defining works such as the architect's Oak Park home and studio, Unity Temple, and the Larkin Company Administration Building, among other projects, this portfolio served as the first and most important publication of Wright's innovative Prairie school creations and an inspiration for European and American architects in the decades to follow. This is a rare opportunity for the public to see these design illustrations from a pivotal time in Wright's career. A third design exhibitiojn, "Form/Unformed: Design from 1960 to the Present" is on show until 29th January 2012, and features more recent design works. Including over thirty works drawn largely from the Museum's collections dating from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition reveals the transformation of ideology and forms that have shaped international design of the last half century. From the technological and formal ideals of modernism to the influence of the handmade object, the works reflect increasingly complex and vibrant relationships between concepts of function, aesthetics, and material expression. Featured are designs by Raymond Loewy, Verner Panton, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi, Ettore Sottsass, Robert Venturi, Donald Judd, Zaha Hadid, Louise Campbell, and Fernando and Humberto Campana. In the Center for Creative Connextions, "Encountering Space" runs until August 31st 2011 and presents works of art from the Museum collections and asks visitors to consider how space is used to invite engagement, raise questions, and create meaning. As viewers begin to encounter works of art this way, they are no longer passive observers but active participants. Until April 17th 2011, the museum is offering visitors the opportunity to see "2011 Young Masters Exhibition", selected works created by Advanced Placement® Studio Art, Art History, and Music Theory students participating in the O'Donnell Foundation's AP Fine Arts Incentive Program™ in the Concourse beginning February 26. |
Michael Kessler ~ New Works at Butters Gallery in Portland Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:07 PM PST Portland, OR.- Butters Gallery in Portland presents new works by Michael Kessler from April 7th to 30th 2011. Rome Prize and Pollock/Krasner Award recipient Michael Kessler interweaves organic motifs and rectilinear structure in "New Works," his virtuoso suite of mixed-media paintings. The organic forms are reminiscent of vines, plants, lichen, and the splattery ooze of raindrops and lava flow. They sprawl across, over, and under squares and rectangles that seem intent on containing them but prove unable to halt their Manifest Destiny. The paintings call to mind Alan Weisman's cautionary 2007 book, The World Without Us, which outlines the gradual decay that could befall great metropolises if human beings died en masse or were forced to flee urban centers for the country: an inevitable crumbling of city life as nature encroaches upon once-pristine geometric grids. |
Tapani Raittila Retrospective at Kunsthalle Helsinki Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:06 PM PST
HELSINKI, FINLAND - Kunsthalle Helsinki presents Tapani Raittila, on view through March 30, 2008. The artist Tapani Raittila (b. 1921) is one of the greatest influences in Finnish modernism. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle presents work by Raittila in thematic wholes that cover his entire career of over 60 years. The pictures include fine early portraits and landscapes, keenly observed laconic drawings and commissioned portraits of writers, presidents and other luminaries. Apart from paintings, the show includes a great number of drawings and watercolours. Many rarely seen works have also been given on loan from private collections. |
The Lille Palais des Beaux Arts Presents the First Retrospective of Louis Boilly Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:05 PM PST Lille, France.- The Lille Palais des Beaux Arts is proud to present "Louis Boilly (1761-1845)", on view at the museum through February 6th 2012. Louis Boilly was one of the finest French painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. He was at the heart of the historic events which shook France and Europe, but his fame allowed him to play with the fluctuating conditions of his country, from the "Ancien Régime" to the French Revolution, from the Napoleonic era to the Bourbon monarchy Restoration. Boilly was 28 years old in 1789 and died three years before the 1848 revolution at the age of 84. All through his career Boilly never ceased to use the changes in society as his preferred themes. Whoever thinks of pictures of everyday life or descriptions of the Parisian social customs sees paintings, drawings, and engravings by Boilly: from "Marat's Triumph" (Lille Palais des beaux-arts) to the "Palais Royal Galleries" (Carnavalet Museum, Paris ; The Art Institute, Chicago), from "Boulevard Scenes" (National Gallery Washington) to "Politicians in the Tuileries Gardens" (The State Hermitage, Saint-Pétersbourg). Enjoying the advantages of undeniable popularity, Boilly's works were already appreciated during his lifetime. His exquisite painting was inspired by 17th century Dutch masters as well as by his admiration for David's art, and this style appealed to the collectors of his time. They sought smooth, clearly defined paintings, done with a skilful and illusionist technique, that were beautifully crafted. Today the most important international museums hunt for works of art by Boilly, and acquire them at auctions, often at extremely high prices. The Lille Palais des Beaux Arts exhibition, honoured with the mark "of national significance," will be the first large international retrospective devoted to Boilly. It is intended to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in La Bassée, near Lille. The reference works by Henry Harrisse (1898), by Paul Marmottan (1913), and by Mabille de Poncheville (1931) gave the opening moves towards research on Boilly. The first exhibition, organized by the Friends of the Carnavalet Museum (1930), then those by other museums, the Marmottan (1984), Lille (1989), and Fort Worth in the United States (1996), put a spotlight on a number of chosen works. Presenting more than 170 paintings, drawings, lithographs, miniatures, and pieces of furniture from the most prestigious international museums, the Lille exhibition offers a new and complete view of Boilly's artistic production. In seven chronological and thematic sections following the painter's career, the event will bring together Boilly's great masterpieces kept in Paris and the Nord/Pas de Calais region, as well as those in England, the United States, Russia, Germany, and in numerous private collections. Among the effervescent elements of Boilly's vast pictorial world are his feelings touched with romantic notes, close to the British temperament, his humanist and incisive observations, a reflection of his northern origin and of David's neoclassical spirit, and his technical interest in lithography and optics. The exhibition will naturally recall his brilliant portrait art, the most well-known aspect of his work. However, the show will especially reveal the wideranging talent of this remarkable painter. He was a mischievous commentator, constantly alert to the events of his time and how they affected his contemporaries. Boilly was never far from the delightful art of caricature. Witty, Boilly also liked to work on painting trompe-l'oeil, renewing this art with exceptional talent. He joyfully delved into the sardonic alteration of faces and bodies, heralding Daumier and the modern development of 19th century painting. The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Lille Palace of Fine Arts) is one of the largest museums in France, and the largest French museum outside of Paris. It was one of the first museums built in France, established under the instructions of Napoleon I at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the popularisation of art : Jean-Antoine Chaptal's decree of 1801 selected fifteen French cities (among which Lille) to receive the works seized from churches and from the territories occupied by the armies of Revolutionary France. The painters Louis Joseph Watteau and François Watteau, known as the "Watteau of Lille", were heavily involved in the museum's beginnings - in 1795 Louis Joseph Watteau made the first inventory of the paintings confiscated during the Revolution, whilst his son François was deputy curator of the museum from 1808 to 1823. The museum opened in 1809 and was initially housed in a church confiscated from the Récollets before being transferred to the city's town hall. In 1866, the "musée Wicar", formed from the collection of Jean-Baptiste Wicar, was merged into the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Construction of the Palais's current Belle Époque-style building began in 1885 under the direction of Géry Legrand, mayor of Lille, and it was completed in 1892. The architects chosen to design the new building were Edouard Bérard (1843 - 1912) and Fernand Etienne-Charles Delmas (1852 - 1933) from Paris. The building is located on the place de la République, in the center of the city, facing the préfecture of Lille. It was renovated during the 1990s and reopened in 1997. This allowed the creation of a new 700 m² basement room for temporary exhibitions, as well as departments for the relief models and for 19th-century sculpture. Overall the museum covers 22000 m², the second largest collection in France after the Louvre. Its sculptures, paintings, drawings, ceramics and so on include works by Raphael, Donatello, Van Dyck, Tissot, Jordaens, Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, David, Corot, Gustave Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Rubens, Rodin, Claudel and Jean-Baptiste Chardin. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.pba-lille.fr |
The Herakleidon Museum Showcases "Sol LeWitt: Line and Color" Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:04 PM PST Athens, Greece.- The Herakleidon Museum is proud to present "Sol LeWitt: Line and Color", on view from October 1st through January 29th 2012. "Line and Color" showcases works by the American artist Sol LeWitt, all of which were donated by the artist himself, and are on loan from the New Britain Museum of American Art (Connecticut, USA). The exhibition has the support of the U.S. Embassy in Athens. The exhibition comprises 115 works by Sol LeWitt are mainly prints (such as lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts), but his first oil painting as well as gouache, monotypes, and photographs are also included. The artist's works are known for their geometric shapes and rich colors. A private museum space in the heart of Athens, under the shadow of the Acropolis, the Herakleidon Museum opened its doors to friends of the fine arts in the summer of 2004. |
Gary Snyder/Project Space shows Janet Sobel who influenced Jackson Pollack Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:03 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.-Gary Snyder/Project Spaceis showing a one-person exhibition of drip paintings and works on paper by Janet Sobel (1894 - 1968). She is best known as the self-taught artist whose drip paintings of the early 1940s influenced Jackson Pollock. Her work has been acclaimed both in the "high" art world of Abstract Expressionism and in the "Outsider" or "Folk Art" world of self-taught artists.Sobel was born in 1894 in the Ukraine, emigrated to New York in 1908, and married and raised a family of five children before becoming "one of America's most talked about surrealist painters…" Completely untrained, Sobel first painted in 1937 at the age of 43. On exhibition through 27 February, 2010. |
Artist Jeff Koons Presents His 'Cracked Egg' Sculpture at the Pinchuk Art Centre Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:02 PM PST KIEV.- The Pinchuk Art Centre presents a major international group exhibition with 19 leading artists of our time, devoted to Sexuality and Transcendence as a central theme of contemporary art. On view from April 24, 2010 through September 16, 2010 the exhibition examines the diversity and complexity of the art produced on this theme today. The show displays the sparkling dialogue of various artistic approaches in the tension field between the two extremes of raw sexuality and a sublime transformation into transcendence. Featuring loans from both artists' studios and private collections the exhibition includes nineteen major work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. Many works have never been shown publicly before. The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer. In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F. Inspired by the great affinity to the exhibition theme and for the PAC as a leading institution for contemporary art all of the artists created special contributions partly in the form of new productions, of a special reappraisal of existing works or the selection of rare most recent work groups that have never been displayed as part of a major international exhibition. Jeff Koons' Balloon Rabbit a monumental sculpture from his famous celebration series will has his world premier at the PAC together with other key works created over twenty years. 'Sexuality combines the idea of a world of subjective emotional references, a world of the instant, of anticipation, of desire and becoming and of orientation and disintegration as well as the extremes of destruction and violence. Sexuality is associated with an image of the real, of warmth and intimacy, whereas transcendence implies a world beyond reality. The concepts of spirituality and transformation predominate the latter, a sophisticated consciousness far from any purely subjective object-relatedness' — Eckhard Schneider, the General Director of the PinchukArtCentre and the curator of the show. The issue of sexuality and transcendence touches on a fundamental conflict in art in general because, beyond mere appearance, behind it hides the general question of the relationship between reality (life) and imagination (image). And so the relationship between form and vision becomes a crucial issue for any artist dealing with sexuality and transcendence. Which direction is a particular work going for? Does it answer the challenge with a praise of distance (form/transcendence) or with a demonstration of intimacy (life/sexuality)? The answers to these questions are so varied because, in addition to the paradigms inherent in the theme, the concept of desire is of central importance here. The general idea is kept open, both in respect of a desire for an ideal mental clarity, intellectual penetration and clarified form, and in respect of a desire for an ideal of realism, emotional directness and dissolution of form. Something Janus-like clinging to desire means that the two poles of sexuality and transcendence can be reflected within each other. The desire for the two things, sexuality and transcendence, dominates our existence; it is the driving force behind our earthly performance and, especially for artists, the search for an appropriate form. The exhibition presents nineteen work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer; the central stairwell features an in-situ piece with her famous texts from the series Inflammatory Essays and a second staircase houses a work with LED. In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F, a group of artists from Moscow. With its intense sociocultural flavour and distinctive architecture, this historical site, which is of great importance for Kiev, provides an ideal public counterpoint to the artistic message propagating a new hybrid aesthetic of fusion. Inspired by their great affinity for the exhibition theme and for the PinchukArtCentre as a leading institution in contemporary art, all of the artists decided to create some special pieces, partly in the form of new productions such as those by, amongst others, Anish Kapoor, AES+F, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and Elmgreen & Dragset; of a special reappraisal of existing works by Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince, Boris Mikhailov, Suboda Gupta and Takashi Murakami; or the selection of rare or recent work groups that have never been displayed as part of a major international exhibition before. These last include pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Lucas, Annette Messager and Illia Chichkan. This allows the PinchukArtCentre exhibition to present arguments that are totally relevant to our own times. Jeff Koons takes a key role in the exhibition with a comprehensive presentation of works from the last twenty years. Spread over three different floors of the PAC building, they form the backbone of the exhibition. A total of ten key works, six sculptures and four paintings from the series Made in Heaven, Celebration, Popeye, Hulk Elvis are on display. Highlights of this selection are the early icon Rabbit, the sculptures Cracked Egg and Blue Diamond from the Celebration series and the world premiere of the first version of Balloon Rabbit, an astonishing new creation, surely becoming an icon like his key early work. Koons' contribution thus acts like a mini-retrospective on the theme that forms the core of his whole oeuvre, namely, the ambivalent relationship between sexuality and transcendence. This is where the driving force behind Koons' work has always been, especially when he transforms everyday objects into works of art by exaggerating brilliant surfaces, which then become both objects of trust and desire. This association of self-affirmation and acceptance in the reflection of one's own desire for beauty and perfection defines Koons' work as the perfect synonym for the ideal of a ubiquity of sexuality and transcendence. Visit The Pinchuk Art Centre at : http://pinchukartcentre.org/ |
"Workshop Missoni ~ Daring to be Different" opens at The Estorick Collection Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:01 PM PST LONDON.- Missoni is one of the leading and most distinctive fashion houses in the world. The Missoni style has evolved out of a long-standing collaboration between the husband and wife team of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni. In the late 1940s, Ottavio Missoni established a workshop producing jersey tracksuits that were sported by the Italian Athletic Team at the 1948 London Olympics, where Ottavio himself qualified for the final of the 400m hurdle race. The exhibition is curated by Luca Missoni. It is accompanied by The Black and White of Colour, a thirty-minute documentary profile produced by Maggie Norden of the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. On view at the Estorick Collection through 20 September, 2009. |
Works by Phyllis Bramson & Judith Geichman at Carrie Secrist Gallery Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:00 PM PST CHICAGO, IL.- The Carrie Secrist Gallery presents, Then is Now, a dual exhibition featuring works by Phyllis Bramson and Judith Geichman. The exhibit will open on March 20th and run through April 24th. Both Bramson and Geichman are interested in unconventional beauty and a certain kind of visual clarity in their work. Additionally, they share several common sources including including Chinoiserie, Toile de Jou, Chinese scholar rocks, Rococo, abstraction, and elements of collage. Yet for all their similarities these two artist have, the substance of their work differs significantly. Despite outright figuration in her paintings, Bramson claims to "plot narrative moves which involve abstraction as the backbone." Geichman's work, on the other hand, is outwardly about abstraction and modernism, though when she creates it, she is thinking of figuration. Some of the pivotal aspects of Bramson's art include eroticism, Orientalism, and a form or random "touring". Though she asserts that modernism is very important to her, she calls herself a Surface Surrealist, noting the undeniable influence of the Chicago tradition of figure painting, particularly Darger and Seymour Rosofsky. Geichman, on the other hand, relates to Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock and the New York school of painting. She sees herself as carrying on that tradition, but adds her own twist through her engagement with figuration as one aspect towards abstraction. Phyllis Bramsons work is in the permanent collections of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C. as well as many other major museums throughout the world. Among other notable accomplishments, she is a three time recipient of a NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Reward, and a Tiffany Award. Currently, Judith Geichman is teaching at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and has had solo exhibitions at The Chicago Cultural Center and The Illinois State Museum. Geichman has also been in group exhibitions at The Rockford Art Museum and the National Academy of Art, New York. Other accomplishments include two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, a Margaret Klimek Phillips Fellowship and a Gil Society Artist Fellowship Residency to Akureyri, Iceland in 2005. Visit The Carrie Secrist Gallery at : http://www.secristgallery.com/ |
Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review" Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:50 PM PST This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here . When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page. You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article. Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline. |
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