Art Knowledge News - Keeping You in Touch with the World of Art...

---

• So...You Better Watch Out . . . Santa Claus Is Coming Town !
• Tate Britain to Show the Influence of Migration on British Art
• Radford University Art Museum to Show Selected Art From the Virginia Museum of FIine Arts
• The Musée de l’Elysée Cancels the Elysée Prize as Lacoste Pulls out of Sponsorship Over "Too Palestinian" Photos
• The Hofstra University Museum to Show Landscapes From its Collection
• The First Street Gallery To Present Recent Works by Margaret Noel
• Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s Phantasmagorical Paintings at Hauser & Wirth
• The Clark Art Institute Exhibits Rarely Seen Italian Drawings
• A Collector's Eye ~ "Cranach to Pissarro" Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool
• LACMA Displays Most Extensive Presentation of Museum's Contemporary Collection in Ten Years
• Djanogly Art Gallery exhibits 'The American Scene ~ From Hopper to Pollock'
• Rodin's "The Kiss" Leaves Tate Liverpool and Sir Jacob Epstein's Masterpiece Arrives
• Crocker Art Museum Announces Inaugural Exhibitions for Expanded Museum
• 'From Vessel to Sculpture' at the Speed Art Museum
• Yale University Art Gallery opens Special Exhibition Exploring Techniques in Intaglio Printmaking
• Victor Kord at June Kelly Gallery
• "Way Stations II: The Sculpture of Alan Binstock" at Causey Contemporary in NY
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago Presents "Picturing the Studio"
• Allegory and Realism in Contemporary Painting at Montserrat College of Art
• This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

So...You Better Watch Out . . . Santa Claus Is Coming Town ! Posted: 22 Dec 2011 07:59 PM PST Greetings - Art Knowledge News has published daily since November of 2004. We are so very pleased that our daily content and excellent art images are provided to us by museums, art galleries, universities, art schools, government agencies, news wire services, PR organizations, RSS art feeds, artists, freelance writers, and occasional tips from readers . . . worldwide. In 2012 we hope to welcome our one millionth registered subscriber. As you may know subscriptions have always been Free and we accept no paid advertising. All of our overhead expenses are covered by a grant from a non-profit foundation, the Art Appreciation Foundation. We therefore can deliver un-biased art related news to our readers . . daily. We are also very grateful to Google, and ther subsidiary Feedburner for handling our automated subscription enrollments and daily delivery.

Tate Britain to Show the Influence of Migration on British Art Posted: 22 Dec 2011 07:59 PM PST London.- Tate Britain is pleased to present "Migrations", on view at the museum from December 31st through August 12th 2012. This exhibition explores how British art has been shaped by migration. Featuring artists from Van Dyck, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Piet Mondrian to Steve McQueen and Francis Alÿs , Migrations traces not only the movement of artists, but the circulation of art and ideas. Beginning with works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the exhibition will show that much British art from this period was made by artists from abroad, including Antwerp-born Anthony Van Dyck , the court painter whose famous portraits such as Charles I 1636 (The Chequers Trust) have come to shape our perceptions of the British aristocracy of this time. It also explores the establishment of the Royal Academy, with works by the Swiss-Austrian Angelica Kaufmann, the Anglo-American Benjamin West and others who were fundamental to its foundation in 1768. Artists were involved in an extensive interchange of ideas between Britain, France and America in the late-nineteenth-century, as demonstrated in works such as John Singer Sargent 's Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children 1896.  Other important figures who marked the course of British Art include Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy , who sought refuge in Britain whilst escaping political unrest and war in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Artists from the 50s and 60s who moved to the UK from the commonwealth, conceptual artists who considered themselves 'stateless' global citizens rather than tied any one place, and groups such as the Black Audio Film Collective, whose work sought to unearth the possibilities of being both 'Black' and 'British' in the 1980s, will show how British art has, directly or indirectly, come to reflect a much wider international stage over time. The exhibition will feature recent work by contemporary artists who use the moving image as a versatile tool for both documenting and questioning reality, including Zineb Sedira's fourteen screen installation Floating Coffins 2009 and Steve McQueen's Static 2009, which probes ideas of freedom and migration through the potent symbol of the Statue of Liberty. Over 500 years, developments in transport, new artistic institutions, politics and economics have all contributed to artists choosing to settle temporarily or permanently in Britain. Migrations examines how British art has been informed by a long and intricate history of the movement of people to and from the country, raising questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic. 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

Radford University Art Museum to Show Selected Art From the Virginia Museum of FIine Arts Posted: 22 Dec 2011 07:59 PM PST Radford, Virginia.- For the second consecutive year, the Radford University Art Museum is honored to be named host of a special traveling exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond with "Goya, Dali, Warhol: Masterpieces of World Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts" coming to RU from January 19th through March 2nd 2012. The traveling exhibition continues the VMFA's 75-year anniversary celebration showcasing dozens of timeless pieces from the museum's permanent collection. Since 1936, the Richmond-based museum has shared its collections with citizens across the commonwealth. In honor of its 75th anniversary, VMFA organized two special exhibitions of about 50 works to travel across Virginia. Last January 2010, the university hosted the debut of the VMFA's first touring exhibition: "Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Whistler: Masterpieces of World Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts." Hosting both exhibitions further strengthens the relationship between the university and the commonwealth's most prestigious art museum, said Professor Steve Arbury, director of the Radford University Art Museum. "This is indeed an honor for the RU Art Museum," Arbury said. "As far as I know, we are the only institution that will have hosted both shows.

The Musée de l’Elysée Cancels the Elysée Prize as Lacoste Pulls out of Sponsorship Over "Too Palestinian" Photos Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:07 PM PST London (The Independent).- French luxury goods firm Lacoste last night dramatically terminated its sponsorship of a £21,000 photography prize after it was accused of attempting to censor the work of a London-based Palestinian artist. The company made its announcement minutes after the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, which was administering the award, had issued a statement appearing to distance itself from a decision to remove Bethlehem-born artist Larissa Sansour from the prize shortlist. The museum and Lacoste faced claims on Monday of attempting to censor art after Ms Sansour, who has exhibited at the Tate Modern, had her status as one of eight nominees for a 25,000 euro (£21,000) award sponsored by the French company revoked last week. Ms Sansour, 38, who has received critical acclaim for her body of work tackling the issues facing Palestinians, told The Independent that she had been told by senior staff at the museum that the reason for her removal from the shortlist was allegedly because her work was considered by Lacoste to be "too pro-Palestinian".

The Hofstra University Museum to Show Landscapes From its Collection Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:06 PM PST Hempstead, New York.- The Hofstra University Museum is proud to present "The Disappearing Landscape: Selections from the Hofstra University Museum Collection" on view at the museum from January 23rd through March 18th 2012 in the Hofstra University Museum's David Filderman Gallery, located in the Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library. The exhibition will feature works from the Museum's permanent collection that capture the ever-changing global landscape. This original exhibition curated by the Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections Karen T. Albert, includes 27 drawings, paintings, photographs, prints and sculpture created by artists from a range of countries including the United States, Russia and Japan.

The First Street Gallery To Present Recent Works by Margaret Noel Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:05 PM PST New York City.- The First Street Gallery is pleased to present "Margaret Noel: Second Shift", an exhibition of recent works by this Brooklyn artist and recipient of the Gallery's 2011 National Juried Show Award. "Second Shift" will be on view at the gallery from January 10th through January 28th 2012. The densely layered surfaces of Noel's compositions document the varied American landscape, seen here in rolling expanses and spaces fractured by industry. Beginning with observational drawings done on site, the pieces fuse traditional techniques with new media: combining silverpoint with ink, collage with encaustic. Viewed as a series, the repeated forms echo the abstraction of memory-- as each image evolves from drawing to collage to painting, the resulting distortions parallel the blur and shift of memory over time. The depicted structures are empty factories that have lost much of their relevance to the communities around them, but continue to dot the post-industrial American landscape. Similarly, pentimenti – obscuredbut visible traces of the history of the painting process-- remain etched into the surface of the wax. Both the pentimenti and the abandoned structures are metaphors for the act of painting itself, often considered obsolete in the landscape of contemporary art, but still tenacious, compelling, and influential. Noel currently divides her time between her studio in Brooklyn and her position as Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. An artist-run gallery, First Street's dual mission is to exhibit and promote the work of talented artists and to provide the public with an opportunity to see and learn about contemporary art in a more accessible milieu than that offered by commercial galleries. The gallery remains focused on the presentation of art in the figurative tradition but embraces a wide diversity of styles, media, and interpretations of 'figuration'. First Street Gallery gives artists exhibition opportunities (solo shows every 2-2 1/2 years/group shows every year), exposure on the gallery's website and in the gallery's presentation books of members' work. In addition, First Street Gallery provides a wealth of ongoing professional services to its members which are virtually unmatched by other non-commercial galleries. First Street Gallery takes no commission on artwork sold in the gallery. Contact the gallery for information pertaining to dues and other fees. Each season, the gallery reviews work of membership applicants at monthly member meetings, September - June. In addition to services for its members, First Street Gallery provides opportunities for non-member artists to exhibit, through annual Juried Shows and Invitational exhibitions (for information on these programs, contact the gallery); presents special exhibitions to engage local residents who in the past may have had little exposure to the arts community; and presents Artist Talks to enhance the art-viewing experience for art students and other members of the public. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.firststreetgallery.net

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s Phantasmagorical Paintings at Hauser & Wirth Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:42 PM PST New York, NY - Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's phantasmagorical paintings roil with colorful mutant life: plants sprout eyeballs, bodies go about their business while sloughing off limbs and disgorging organs, and dense vegetal landscapes transform into visceral surgical tableaux. Vibrant and perverse, anthropomorphic and surreal, Ziolkowski's private language is the symbolic expression of a highly concerted imagination that also was shaped by life in a very small town: Zamosc, where the artist was born in 1980, is a remote Renaissance city that began as a fortress in the middle of the lush Roztocze plateau in southeast Poland. Here wild nature penetrates the edges of an idealized urban microcosm that was once a center of intellectual life and seat of Eastern Europe's Chasidic Jewish community, later stained by Nazi atrocities, and today is home to a concentration of food factories. Influenced by Zamosc's dream-like intersection of preserved history and encroaching modernity, Ziolkowski has nurtured an inner world where poetry and ornament, religiosity and eschatology, flourishing life and decay intertwine. This is the universe of Ziolkowski's art. On June 30, Hauser & Wirth New York unveiled the first American solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, bringing together more than 50 new works. The exhibition will be presented on two floors of the gallery and will remain on view through July 30. The exhibition is titled 'Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains,' named for a fictional rock band that appears in some of the artist's images (the word galoty in Polish means 'short pants' of the sort worn by Eastern European circus clowns). Among the paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth are several that evoke promotional posters for such fantasy bands. Their members can be counted among the large and colorful population of characters inhabiting Ziolkowski's work, standing in for the artist's own moods and serving as composite portraits of both human types and states of mind. These include jaunty skeletons and autonomous eyeballs that return the viewer's gaze; implement-wielding doctors in white coats; women with pendulous breasts and animal heads; monks with even more pendulous earlobes, regarding the universe; fat drinkers defecating gold coins; a host of political figures and everyday citizens going about strange business; and Ziolkowski himself, bespectacled and smoking a cigarette as he surveys the scene and waves to us. 'Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains' includes surreal portraits, lavishly detailed fantasy landscapes, and works of eccentric figuration that combine the two. Ziolkowski has been profoundly influenced by his small town upbringing, the folk traditions and stories of Poland, and his nation's more recent and dark history. But while these permeate the atmosphere of his oeuvre, Ziolkowski's paintings do not dwell in the past. In this regard, Ziolkowski departs definitively from immediate predecessors among leading Polish artists, including Pawel Althammer, Wilhelm Sasnal and Monika Sosnowska, who have used their work to deconstruct and critique Polish identity. Ziolkowski's work is less overtly about history – his own as well as that of his troubled homeland – than about escape from a bleak personal and cultural inheritance, and a simultaneous celebration of art and artmaking. Ziolkowski's work principally emerges from his fantasies, which are translated into imagery that appears as if in a psychedelic dream – by turns funny and frightening, confounding yet familiar. In the midst of this, Ziolkowski is careful to remind us that he is no naïf, but is tethered to reality and engaged in the centuries of artistic practice and innovation from which he descends. One painting matter-of-factly depicts a whirlpool of feces. Another shows a well-attended surgical procedure with many recognizable public figures. And in another work, the eyes of a Vietnamese man reflect a threatening policeman, presumably a reference to the artist's travels in Asia in 2009. In all of these, viewers can find references to milestones in the history of art, with Ziolkowski cannily connecting the dots between Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Pablo Picasso and Philip Guston. Visit Hauser & Wirth New York at : http://www.hauserwirth.com/

The Clark Art Institute Exhibits Rarely Seen Italian Drawings Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:41 PM PST   WILLIAMSTOWN, MA -  A magnificent group of rarely seen and unpublished sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Italian drawings will be highlighted in Drawn to Drama: Italian Works on Paper, 1500 - 1800, an exhibition on view the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute October 12, 2008 to January 4, 2009. Selected from the Clark's impressive collection of Old Master drawings and the private collection of Robert Loper, Drawn to Drama  will offer a unique opportunity to view this special group of Italian drawings that are dramatic in subject, composition, and execution. Sixty-five drawings including those by Giorgio Vasari, Guercino, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo are featured in the exhibition.

A Collector's Eye ~ "Cranach to Pissarro" Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:40 PM PST LIVERPOOL,UK - "A Collector's Eye: Cranach to Pissarro" is a unique exhibition of paintings from a stunning private collection. Running from Friday 18 February to Sunday 15 May 2011 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, A Collector's Eye: Cranach to Pissarro exhibits five centuries of art and 64 works ranging from tender 15th-century devotional images to 19th-century French Impressionist landscapes. Old Master artists Rubens, El Greco, Delacroix and Cranach are included alongside Impressionists such as Pissarro and Sisley. Free admission to the gallery and all exhibitions and events.

LACMA Displays Most Extensive Presentation of Museum's Contemporary Collection in Ten Years Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:39 PM PST LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) displays the most extensive presentation of the museum's permanent collection of contemporary art in ten years. Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection features approximately seventy-five pieces, representing a striking variety of works in diverse media—painting, drawing, photography, video, and audio. Borrowing its title from a work by seminal artist Bruce Nauman, Human Nature surveys works by several generations of artists who have made defining contributions to the recent art landscape, from 1968 to the present. Many of the works are on view for the first time since their acquisition, including pieces by Haegue Yang, Leslie Hewitt, Rachel Harrison, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer, and Zhang Huan, among others.

Djanogly Art Gallery exhibits 'The American Scene ~ From Hopper to Pollock' Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:38 PM PST NOTTINGHAM, UK.- Djanogly Art Gallery presents The American Scene - From Hopper to Pollock, on view through April 19, 2009. The American Scene: From Hopper to Pollock features spectacular images of American society and culture made during a period of great social and political change from the early 1900s to 1960 and charts the emergence of a consciously American subject matter and artistic identity in the twentieth century.

Rodin's "The Kiss" Leaves Tate Liverpool and Sir Jacob Epstein's Masterpiece Arrives Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:37 PM PST Liverpool, UK - Auguste Rodin's seminal work The Kiss (1901-14) has graced the foyer of Tate Liverpool since September 2007, as part of DLA Piper Series: The Twentieth Century – How it looked & how it felt. As the display draws to a close, Rodin's famous sculpture will leave the foyer as it arrived - through the window - and will make way for a new work. Sir Jacob Epstein's "Jacob and the Angel" (1940-41) will take up residence in the Tate Liverpool foyer from Monday 16th March as part of the forthcoming display DLA Piper Series – This is Sculpture which opens to the public on 1 May 2009.

Crocker Art Museum Announces Inaugural Exhibitions for Expanded Museum Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:36 PM PST SACRAMENTO, CA.- This fall the Crocker Art Museum will celebrate the opening of its 125,000-square-foot expansion, designed by Charles Gwathmey, with a retrospective of the work of Sacramento native Wayne Thiebaud. On view beginning October 10, 2010, Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming is one of a series of special exhibitions that will inaugurate the galleries in the Crocker's new Teel Family Pavilion. Featuring more than 50 paintings and drawings spanning the artist's career, Wayne Thiebaud celebrates the work of Sacramento's most renowned artist. The opening exhibition program also includes: A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, an exhibition drawn from one of the finest early collections of master drawings in the United States; and Tomorrow's Legacies: Gifts Celebrating the Next 125 Years, a diverse display of 125 promised gifts to the Crocker, including Tang Dynasty sculpture, French Barbizon paintings, American Impressionism, and contemporary California art. "To celebrate the opening of the new Crocker, we've organized a series of exhibitions that embrace our history and look toward our future," said Lial Jones, The Mort and Marcy Friedman Director of the Crocker Art Museum. "Our opening program encompasses longstanding collecting areas, including master drawings and ceramics, and also debuts new collections that have come to the Crocker through the generous support of our donors. We're especially thrilled to be presenting a survey of the work of Wayne Thiebaud, an extraordinary artist and longtime friend of the museum." Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming October 10, 2010 to November 28, 2010 This new exhibition is a homecoming for both the artist and the Crocker Art Museum. In 1951, the Crocker presented Thiebaud's first solo exhibition, Influences on a Young Painter. The Museum's current major retrospective, featuring approximately 50 paintings and drawings, spans the entirety of Thiebaud's career from the artist's early works to new paintings created in 2010. Organized by Thiebaud and Crocker Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, and drawn in part from the traveling exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting, the Crocker exhibition will include many works not previously displayed, with special attention given to Sacramento places and personalities. A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum October 10, 2010 to February 6, 2011 The Crocker Art Museum holds one of the finest early collections of master drawings in the United States, purchased for the most part in 1869–71 by the Museum's founders, E. B. and Margaret Crocker. A Pioneering Collection explores the beauty, quality and scholarly importance of the collection with 56 drawings, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolommeo, Anthonie van Dyck and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. New acquisitions and new discoveries are also featured. The exhibition opens in conjunction with the Museum's new Anne and Malcolm McHenry Works on Paper Study Center, and was organized by Crocker curator William Breazeale, who is the lead author for the exhibition catalogue. Tomorrow's Legacies: Gifts Celebrating the Next 125 Years October 10, 2010 to January 9, 2011 Looking toward the future of its collection, this opening exhibition features 125 gifts that have been promised to the Crocker in celebration of its expansion and 125th anniversary. Given by donors throughout California and across the United States, the works include sculpture, painting, works on paper, ceramics, and photography spanning the history of material culture worldwide. All of these works will one day become part of the Crocker's permanent collection. Among the works in the exhibition are: Viola Frey, Standing Man, 2000. Stoneware, 101 x 33 x 22 in. Promised gift of Mort and Marcy Friedman Amedeo Modigliani, Nude, n.d. Blue and red crayon on beige wove paper, 10 3/8 x 13 1/8 in. Promised gift of the Elkus Family in memory of Ben Britton Elkus Robert Mapplethorpe, Tulips in a Box, 1983. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. Promised gift of Jon Stevenson and John Silici John Twachtman, Artist's Home, Greenwich, Connecticut, ca. 1890. Oil on canvas, 15 1/2 x 18 7/8 in. Promised gift of Dorothy and Norm Lien Theodore Butler, Train in Flood, 1910. Oil on canvas, 26 x 31 1/2 in. Promised gift of Anne and Malcolm McHenry Teel Family Pavilion The 125,000-square-foot Teel Family Pavilion, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, will more than triple the size of the Crocker Art Museum, adding four times the space for traveling exhibitions and three times the space for the Museum to showcase its permanent collection. The new building will expand the Crocker Art Museum's ability to originate and present traveling exhibitions and educational programs, exhibit significantly more of its growing collection, and enhance its role as a cultural resource for California and the state's many visitors. The expansion was designed to establish a new architectural icon for the Museum and Sacramento, and to complement the Museum's original Victorian Italianate Art Gallery building and engage with the surrounding cityscape

'From Vessel to Sculpture' at the Speed Art Museum Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:35 PM PST Louisville, Kentucky - The Speed Art Museum is proud to present From Vessel to Sculpture: Ceramics at the Speed on display through June 24, 2007.  Admission is free to this exhibition An international survey of 20th- and 21st- century ceramics, objects presented in From Vessel to Sculpture range from production pieces to important contemporary sculptural works selected from the Speed's permanent collection.  Highlights of the exhibition include Awakened Man by Viola Frey and an iconoclastic 1954 Jim Leedy piece, Colorful Vessel.  In the late 1970s, Frey was among a contingent of California ceramists who began dramatically expanding the scale of their work.  Frey's monumental—but rarely heroic—figures came to define her work.  Awakened Man shares the detached gaze typical of Frey's sculptures.

Yale University Art Gallery opens Special Exhibition Exploring Techniques in Intaglio Printmaking Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:34 PM PST NEW HAVEN, CT.- For printmaking in America, the twenty years following the Second World War were a dynamic and innovative period during which artists fundamentally reconsidered the boundaries of the medium. The Yale University Art Gallery offers a special exhibition featuring American and European émigré artists whose work in intaglio printmaking was marked by this new impulse for experimentation. The Pull of Experiment: Postwar American Printmaking, on view from September 25, 2009, through January 3, 2010, examines the creative spirit inspired by interactions among these artists following the war and explores these artists' experimentation with style, techniques, tools, and materials. The forty-two prints in the exhibition are drawn largely from the Gallery's permanent collection and include a recent donation of works, as well as several loans, from the collection of Yale alumnus James N. Heald II, b.s. 1949.

Victor Kord at June Kelly Gallery Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:33 PM PST   New York City - The June Kelly Gallery opens its fall season with an exhibition of paintings by Victor Kord entitled Algorithm and Blues - new work that teems with provocative color, form and imagery. Kord's paintings will be on view at the gallery, through September 30.

"Way Stations II: The Sculpture of Alan Binstock" at Causey Contemporary in NY Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:32 PM PST Brooklyn, NY.- Causey Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of their May exhibition, "Way Stations II" by Maryland Sculptor, Alan Binstock.  This exhibition marks a return of Mr. Binstock's work to the gallery after several years hiatus during which he not only created a new large scale body of outdoor work but also exhibited at the Katsen Center at American University in Washington. D.C., the American Center for Physics in College Park MD, Zenith Gallery in Washington, D.C. and in a solo retrospective at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. The exhibition also marks Alan's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Way Stations II opens with an artist's reception on May 20 from 6-9 pm and continues through June 12. Alan Binstock's exhibition title "Way Stations II" refers to Clifford D. Simak's classic 1960's science fiction novel.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Presents "Picturing the Studio" Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:31 PM PST CHICAGO, IL.- Curated by Michelle Grabner at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago(SAIC) and Annika Marie (Columbia College), "Picturing the Studio" is presented in conjunction with the College Art Association's 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 10-13, 2010. With works by more than 30 artists spanning the past two decades, the exhibition is testament to the compelling nature that the studio itself holds as subject as well as place of production.

Allegory and Realism in Contemporary Painting at Montserrat College of Art Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:30 PM PST BEVERLY, MA.- Montserrat College of Art Galleries presents the works of Julie Heffernan, David Ording, Shelley Reed, Erik Thor Sandberg, and Anne Siems in a provocative exhibition of contemporary painting, "A Debt to Pleasure," curated by Gallery Director Leonie Bradbury. Inspired by the visual and symbolic richness of such diverse painting practices as 17th-century Dutch still lifes, Italian Renaissance master paintings and American folk art, the participating artists integrate the sensual and the sinister, the vulgar and the mysterious to question meaning-making in contemporary art. The exhibition is on view through April 2 in the Montserrat Gallery. An exhibition of technical skill, visual indulgence, and timelessness, "A Debt to Pleasure" presents a series of works that question their place in history. Beyond their flawlessly rendered surfaces, each artist explicitly references stylistic techniques and aesthetics of the past to create a provocative body of work. Allegory and realism are employed to investigate symbolism in painting (past and present), cultural history and the art world's insistence on originality and obsession with everything new. By adopting 17th and 18th-century American folk motifs, Seattle-based Anne Siems' portraits and still-lifes emit a haunting awkwardness. With rosy cheeks, haunted gaze and flattened features, Siems' highly stylized figures inhabit a dreamy colonial landscape. As the world itself seems frozen in time, the transparent figures float in the foreground, forever youthful and mysterious. The delicate patterning found in traditional embroidery is the main element used to define their clothing. A thick application of paint, at times intentionally crackled to create the effect of an aged surface, emphasizes folk painting and faux antiquity. Siems' paintings 'borrow backwards' with a refreshing whimsy and off kilter grace, participating in the current revival of 'old, weird America.' Based in Washington DC, Erik Thor Sandberg's subjects, primarily female nudes, pose in allegorical gesture amidst nature. These large figurative paintings are rich in detail, the physicality of folds in flesh and surrounding fabric. Flesh and futility run rampant as figures exercise dramatic, mindless acts of folly that, more often than not, result in pain or suffering. Resembling Breughel's parables and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the figures are caught in the moment before or after immeasurable torture or in the midst of acts of sin. There is a dark humor to Erik Sandberg's archaic sense of mortality and symbolism as we look back at our evolving interpretation of the female figure, its corporal nature, and how we covet our displays of beauty, forever indebted to pleasure. Boston-based painter Shelley Reed is known for her lavishly painted still lifes of spectacular flora and fauna that echo the extravagance of the 17th-century Dutch Baroque. Monkeys, tigers, deer, and various birds of paradise are set against a background of Romanesque courtyards, puti are surrounded by exotic fruit and wild flowers painted with the utmost eloquence. Yet, what would be so vivid in color is ironically painted in grey scale. Evoking the black and white representations of works in art historical texts, Reed's works silently reference the explosion of color in 17th-century painting. The animals, petrified in mid-movement, seem captured in a time and place infinitely removed from our own, patiently waiting for the moment Reed's vision comes to life. New York based painter David Ording actively rejects contemporary painting practice by referencing art history directly. Reinventing master works, pulling bits and pieces of original Courbet's, Rubens' and Degas'; by cropping their canonical works Ording emphasizes certain ideas, details or stylistic techniques. This appropriation gives new context to the original work, emphasizing the nature of Sergeant's technique by assimilating a number of his images, or painting only the often overlooked blank page in Velasquez's The Surrender of Breda. Ording poses a constant historical inquiry, asking the viewer to step back, question how we arrived at the art historical canon we have, and see what has gone overlooked in past master paintings. "A Debt to Pleasure" finds its opus in New York based painter Julie Heffernan's "Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary." In the center of the massive painting, is a life-sized nude figure, clad in flora, a great chandelier sprouting from her head and rising upwards. At the god-like figure's feet is calamitous wildlife, frolicking amidst a crumbling 18th-century tower. The image is filled with symbolism and exhibits an awareness of hundreds of years of classical painting. Heffernan is not only paying an homage to the intricacies and metaphors of grand history painting, but intentionally reacting against the starkness of Modernist formalism. The artist's self portrait can be read as a response to the bleakness of today's conceptual world and a simultaneous reveling in the richness of paintings past.

This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:29 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.

You are subscribed to email updates from Art News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610