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

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• Karin Weber in Hong Kong Shows New Works by Bobit Segismundo
• Sperone Westwater Presents a Survey Of Portraits & Self-Portraits
• The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Presents "Marc Quinn: All of Nature Flows Through Us"
• The Lumiere Brothers Photogallery Displays Italian Neorealism Photography
• Major Exhibition to Showcase David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts
• Vienna's Belvedere marks 2012 as the Klimt Year on his 150th Birthday
• Ultimate in Classic Era Design Cars headed to RM's Amelia Island sale in March
• C'est la vie: Press Photography Opens at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich
• Christie's to sell Elizabeth Taylor art including a Vincent van Gogh landscape
• One Of The USA's Leading and Most Comprehensive Art Museums ~ The Saint Louis Art Museum
• Long Beach Museum of Art Celebrates 60th Anniversary of the Museum's Impressive Collection
• Guy Hepner Contemporary Presents ~ Photos by Mark Seliger
• Schirn Kunsthalle Addresses the Complex World of Contemporary Art in "The Making of Art"
• Norton Simon Museum displays " The Art of War: American Posters from World War I & World War II "
• Tate Modern presents 'UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980's'
• Woodward Gallery to Show Lady Pink's Graffiti Based Art
• Iris Apfel ~ Legendary Fashion Icon Holds Court at Peabody Essex Museum
• American Red Cross To Sell Pieces of Its Historic Collection to Cut Deficit
• The Museum of Contemporary Art Shows Joseph Cornell in Dialogue With MCA Collection
• This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

Karin Weber in Hong Kong Shows New Works by Bobit Segismundo Posted: 17 Jan 2012 10:42 PM PST Hong Kong.- The Karin Weber Gallery is pleased to present "Bobit Segismundo: Hatching, Dotting and Other Things" on view at the gallery until February 7th. The mystery of Leonard da Vinci, the emotion of Francis Bacon, the 3-dimensional cubism of Pablo Picasso, the sadness of Frida Kahlo, the imaginary concept of Salvador Dali and the playfulness of Joan Miro are the inspiration and influence behind the artist Bobit Segismundo's works. As an artist, how can one fail to be touched by these masters? Bobit uses some of the masters' elements, projections and approach and incorporates them into his works. The result is emotional, strong, intriguing and amusing but most of all, bearing his own stamp of identity.  The use of cross-hatching method plus an occasional touch of pointillism coming from the tip of ink pens show the interaction and thick layering of lines. The artist creates an almost solid rendering of elements and projects his visual ideas with just red, blue and black producing a somber dark result that identifies his work. Bobit Segismundo was born in the Philippines and studied fine art in The University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines.  He is the current chairman of the HARAYA Group of Hong Kong-based Filipino Artists. He has been invited to participate in 2011 Florence Biennale with his paintings, ink drawings and public installations. He has had previous exhibitions in Osage, Fringe Club, Hong Kong Central Library, Hong Kong Centre for Visual Arts and Hong Kong Cultural Centre. The Karin Weber Gallery was founded in 1995 by German-born Karin Weber, who worked for more than 15 years in the antiques and art business in London. The gallery curates and introduces the work of emerging and established Asian and Western artists. "It is very important to us to maintain or reputation as an energetic, outgoing and accessible art gallery, to continue to inspire, interest and provide enjoyment and cultural enrichment to our collectors and the general public alike," says Karin. The Gallery is dedicated to showing fine international contemporary art by both emerging and established artists, representing the taste of their Hong Kong and International clients. Exhibitions throughout the year introduce works by new artists, with regular representation from Burma. Many of their artists' works are in private and public collections worldwide. Karin Weber Gallery carries a comprehensive selection of works in oil, acrylic, watercolors, pastels, gouache, ink on paper and mixed media works. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.karinwebergallery.com

Sperone Westwater Presents a Survey Of Portraits & Self-Portraits Posted: 17 Jan 2012 10:24 PM PST New York City.- Sperone Westwater is pleased to present "Portraits/Self-Portraits" on view at the gallery until February 25th. The exhibition features portrait and self-portrait paintings by notable European and American artists from the sixteenth century to the present. This survey includes Old Master paintings from Italy, France, England, and The Netherlands, as well as works by modern and contemporary artists. The breadth of the works in "Portraits/Self-Portraits" demonstrates that portraiture has been an on-going and reoccurring theme in art history, especially in Western culture, for centuries. The earliest portraits were created to illustrate physical or material attributes of the sitter, which historically included  nobility, family, friends, lovers, and the self. According to Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art – who has written the essay for the "Portraits/Self-Portraits" catalogue – in the seventeenth century, the focus of portraiture shifted to capturing the character or essence of the person.

The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Presents "Marc Quinn: All of Nature Flows Through Us" Posted: 17 Jan 2012 10:02 PM PST Aalborg, Denmark.- The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art is pleased to present "Marc Quinn: All of Nature Flows Through Us" on view at the museum from January 21st through April 29th. Marc Quinn belongs to the generation of Young British Artists, who in 1990 broke through with a bang on the art scene. Since then, Marc Quinn has worked with sculpture and painting in a sometimes violent and direct idiom. "All of Nature Flows Through Us" is Marc Quinn's first exhibition in Denmark. The exhibition takes as its starting point a series of new works, created under the inspiration from a trip to India. A number of skeletons cast in bronze entitled Matter Into Light is located on large betonpodier with fire around it. Around these works creases Quinn's works from the past year out. Themes such as death, passion, beauty and sexuality unfold in seemingly classical sculptures and paintings, all with a special twist. The entire exhibition brings its different expressions a series of existential and religious themes up to date.

The Lumiere Brothers Photogallery Displays Italian Neorealism Photography Posted: 17 Jan 2012 09:28 PM PST Moscow.- The Lumiere Brothers Photogallery in Moscow is proud to present "Italian Neorealism in Photography" on view from January 17th through January 26th. The new project of the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography is a unique possibility to plunge into the world of the Italian Neorealism, the unique cultural phenomenon which arose in the 1940s. Its creative principles were formulated by the playwright and film critic Zavattini. During these austere post-war years for Italy he urged not to be distracted by a romantic plot and happy-endings, but to pay attention to the real destinies of simple people, unemployment and the contrast between poverty and riches. The main features were the documentary nature, ordinariness, denial of decoration and studio shootings. Neorealists acted as chroniclers, telling about the tragedy of their people, who had endured fascism and defeat in the war.

Major Exhibition to Showcase David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts Posted: 17 Jan 2012 09:04 PM PST LONDON.- On January 21st the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase David Hockney's landscape work. Vivid paintings inspired by Yorkshire landscape, many large in scale and created specifically for the exhibition, will be shown alongside related drawings and films. Through a selection of works spanning fifty years, this new body of work will be placed in the context of Hockney's extended exploration of and fascination with landscape. Highlights will include three groups of new work made since 2005, when Hockney returned to live in Bridlington, showing an intense observation of his surroundings in a variety of media. The exhibition will reveal the artist's emotional engagement with the landscape he knew in his youth, as he examines on a daily basis the changes in the seasons, the cycle of growth and variations in light conditions. The exhibition will take the visitor on a journey through Hockney's world. The exhibition will address the various approaches that David Hockney has taken towards the depiction of landscape throughout his career. Past works from national and international collections will include Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, 1965 (Acrylic on Canvas), Garrowby Hill, 1998, (Oil on Canvas) and the ambitious (Oil on 60 Canvases) A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998. . . . David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture will also highlight the artist's vast knowledge and research of the old masters and their techniques. Hockney's involvement with the depiction of space is traced in this exhibition from the 1960s, through his photo-collages of the 1980s and the Grand Canyon paintings of the late 1990s, to the recent paintings of East Yorkshire, many of which have been made en plein air. He has always embraced new technologies; recently he has used the iPhone and iPad as tools for making art. A number of iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using eighteen cameras will be displayed on multiple screens, providing a spellbinding visual experience. Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney's stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.

Vienna's Belvedere marks 2012 as the Klimt Year on his 150th Birthday Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:32 PM PST VIENNA.- Owning the largest collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt worldwide, the Belvedere is preparing a very special presentation for this anniversary year. The show Masterpieces in Focus: 150 Years of Gustav Klimt on the Upper Belvedere's piano nobile will display all of the artist's paintings preserved in the museum in an extraordinary fashion. Unlike most exhibitions of recent years, it will not deal with stylistic relationships or art historical contexts, but will concentrate on the individual works as such – on the message each of these masterpieces conveys to the spectator.

Ultimate in Classic Era Design Cars headed to RM's Amelia Island sale in March Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:20 PM PST BLENHEIM, ON.- RM Auctions, the official auction house of the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, has announced an exceptional roster of automobiles for its highly-anticipated Amelia Island sale, March 10th in Northeast Florida. Returning to the prestigious Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the well-established sale – now in its 14th year – will present a magnificent roster of 100 blue-chip automobiles as it looks to build upon RM's strong track record in Northeast Florida. In 2011, the company once again enjoyed the top auction results posted during the Amelia Island Concours weekend, generating a remarkable $24.3 million in sales with a superb 96% of lots sold – the highest tally ever achieved during the event's history. The 2012 event promises to continue the momentum with a stellar list of early entries, including a handsome 1934 Packard Twelve Dietrich Convertible Victoria and a stunning 1929 Cord L-29 Hayes Coupe. Both are considered the ultimate in Classic Era design, rarity and desirability.

C'est la vie: Press Photography Opens at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich Posted: 17 Jan 2012 08:09 PM PST ZURICH.- For the first time, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich presents its extensive archive of press photographs. The exhibition looks at recent Swiss history from the perspective of the press photographer and reveals how, in the second half of the 20th century, press photography developed into the photojournalism we know today.  Château de Prangins is the only venue in French-speaking Switzerland to host the Swiss Press Photo 11 exhibition, which offers an overview of events at home and abroad through the eyes of the nation's best photographers. With categories ranging from current events to portraits, sport and everyday life, the exhibition also features the reportage by Christian Lutz, whose images of the oil business in Nigeria reveal the truth behind the stereotypes. Swiss Press Photo 11 also pays homage to René Burri, one of the key figures in 20th-century photography.

Christie's to sell Elizabeth Taylor art including a Vincent van Gogh landscape Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:50 PM PST LONDON - A Vincent van Gogh landscape and other paintings from the collection of Elizabeth Taylor are up for auction in London next month. Christie's auction house says 38 works belonging to the late actress will be included in Impressionist and modern sales Feb. 7 and 8. They include van Gogh's autumn landscape "Vue de l'Asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Remy," estimated at 5 million to 7 million pounds ($7.6 million to $11 million), as well as an Edgar Degas self-portrait and works by Camille Pissarro and Auguste Renoir. The screen goddess — whose films included "Cleopatra," ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" — died in March aged 79.

One Of The USA's Leading and Most Comprehensive Art Museums ~ The Saint Louis Art Museum Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:39 PM PST The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) began as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, an independent entity within Washington University in St. Louis. Originally housed in a building in downtown St. Louis, the Museum moved to its current home in Forest Park after the 1904 World's Fair. The Saint Louis Art Museum's building was designed by renowned American architect Cass Gilbert for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the World's Fair. Originally part of the Palace of Fine Arts, the Museum was the only building from the Fair designed to be a permanent structure, the "one material monument of the Exposition." It stands as a reminder of that defining event in the history of the city of St. Louis and the State of Missouri. In 1909 the museum separated from Washington University and was renamed the City Art Museum of Saint Louis. During the 1950s, the museum added an extension to include an auditorium for films, concerts and lectures. In 2005, noted British architect David Chipperfield was appointed to design a further expansion of the museum. Chipperfield has won some of Europe's most prestigious commissions, including the restoration of the Neues Museum and master plan for Museum Island in Berlin and the redesign of Venice's historic cemetery island, San Michele. He was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007 for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany. His U.S. projects include the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa; the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center; and the Des Moines Central Library. The expansion will include more than 224,000 square feet (20,800 m2) of gallery space, including an underground garage, within the lease lines of the property. The expansion is expected to cost $125 million. The project officially broke ground in early 2010 and will be completed in 2012. The museum will remain open during construction. The museum's mission is to collect, present, interpret, and conserve works of art of the highest quality across time and cultures, to educate, inspire discovery, and elevate the human spirit and to preserve a legacy of artistic achievement for the people of St. Louis and the world. Through generations of public support and private benefaction, the Saint Louis Art Museum has assembled one of the finest comprehensive art collections in the country, totaling more than 32,000 works, and the museum is visited by more than half a million people every year. Visit the museum's website at … http://www.slam.org The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation's leading comprehensive art museums with collections of artworks that include those of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. The American art collection features masterworks of paintings and sculpture from Colonial portraiture through modernist and abstract art of the first half of the 20th century. The Museum's American holdings reflect the nation's longstanding fascination with landscape and include Hudson River School paintings by Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, and John Frederick Kensett, as well as scenes of the Western frontier. The local landscape is well represented in the work of Missouri artists Henry Lewis, Charles Ferdinand Wimar, and George Caleb Bingham. The Election Series, illustrating three stages of the Missouri electoral process, is one of the highlights of the Museum's paintings by Bingham. The collection also includes major works by the late nineteenth-century artists Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh as well as Impressionist compositions by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman. Important twentieth-century work by Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Philip Guston is also presented. The Collection of European Art to 1800 includes exceptional examples of art made across the continent of Europe and the British isles from the seventh through the eighteenth centuries. The earliest pieces in the collection are a pair of toga pins made in Spain in the seventh century. Other examples from the medieval period include enamels and metalwork; architectural fragments; stone, wood and ivory sculpture; manuscript illuminations; and stained glass. The Museum's medieval holdings are strongest in French and German Romanesque (c.1050–c.1200) and Gothic (c.1200–c.1500) art. Highlights include a French St. Christopher, a superb alabaster Madonna, an exquisite head of St. Roch, and a German gilded Christ of exceptional quality.The collection of paintings and sculpture comprises work made in Europe between 1300 and 1800. Highlights include a late Titian masterpiece (1570–76) left in his studio at his death; a marble Pan made in Michelangelo's workshop in the 1530s; one of only 37 known works by the baroque master Bartolomeo Manfredi painted around 1615; a copper painting made in 1612 by Artemisia Gentileschi; an important Neo-Classical narrative painting by François-André Vincent exhibited in 1785; and a stunning portrait by Hans Holbein depicting the wife of King Henry VIII's comptroller of 1527. The Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs houses more than 13,000 works of art on paper. There are approximately 8,500 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 1,500 drawings, watercolors, and collages from a wide range of periods and cultures. The department has particular strengths in art from Western Europe and the United States. It is internationally known for its German works on paper, and houses the largest public collection of Max Beckmann's prints in the world. The print collection also has impressive holdings by Albrecht Dürer, Max Klinger, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jacques Callot. The collection of drawings features significant works by George Caleb Bingham, Edgar Degas, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photography collection is strong in 20th century American with large holdings of works by Edward Curtis, Paul Strand, Andreas Feininger, and Moneta Sleet Jr. The Museum's collection of Modern art is one of the largest and most distinguished components of its holdings, spanning more than 150 years of European painting and sculpture. Among the highlights from the 19th century are paintings by Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne as well as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterworks by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. The 20th century holdings include the largest public collection of paintings by Max Beckmann in the world. Many of these and numerous works by German Expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky were part of a significant bequest by St. Louis collector Morton D. May. Also in the Modern collection are signature works by Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henry Moore, as well as notable paintings by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Amadeo Modigliani. The Contemporary collection spans the post-war period to today. The department has particular strengths in American painting and sculpture from Abstract Expressionism through Minimalism. Highlights from the 1950s and 1960s include works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly. Also from the mid-twentieth century are significant examples by Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. Internationally known for German art from the 1970s and 1980s, the collection houses signature works by Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter. Acquisitions of art made in the past two decades, including video, mixed media, and installation, reflect the growing dynamism and international nature of contemporary art. Since 2000 the Contemporary department has acquired over ninety works by artists such as Glenn Ligon, Thomas Scheibitz, Rivane Neuenschwander, El Anatsui, and Julie Mehretu. The Saint Louis Art Museum also has major collections of ancient art including works from the Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Classical civilizations, mainly Greek and Roman, African art, Oceanic art, Pre Columbian and American Indian art, Asian art from across the vast continent of Asia, with particular strengths in the arts of East Asia and decorative Arts and Design featuring European and American furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, arms and armor, architectural elements and period rooms. The Saint Louis Art Museum hosts a constantly changing program of temporary exhibitions, highlighting works from their collections or major travelling exhibitions. Currently on display is "Glimpsing History through Art: Selections from the Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt Collection of Japanese Prints", which features Japanese works from the collection. Until April 10th 2011, this exhibition features selected highlights from the Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt Collection of Japanese Prints. The Lowenhaupts generously donated their entire collection of 1,357 Japanese prints and related works of art to the Museum in 2010. The collection includes works of art from the Meiji period (1868–1912), focusing on color woodblock prints that depict scenes from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Both conflicts were fought and won by a rapidly modernizing Japan over its neighbors China and Russia. "Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea" until April 10th 2011, brings together over 90 works, many never before seen in the United States, to offer exciting insights into the culture of the ancient Maya. Surrounded by the sea and dependent on the life-giving power of rain and clouds, the ancient Maya created fantastic objects imbued with the symbolic power of water. This exhibition presents four thematic sections: Water and Cosmos; Creatures of the Fiery Pool; Navigating the Cosmos; and Birth to Rebirth, that explore the different ways Maya artists represented water, from setting religious narratives in watery domains to using shells and other exotic materials acquired through coastal trade networks. Internationally renowned artist William Kentridge received a Dean's Medal from Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts this March. To celebrate, the Saint Louis Art Museum will present his work in two related exhibitions, one of film, the other of prints. Kentridge works fluidly between the realms of drawing, printmaking, animation, and theater. His imaginative visual narratives interweave personal, artistic, and political themes. "Visual Musing: Prints by William Kentridge" and "William Kentridge: Two Films" can both be seen until May 22nd 2011. These exhibitions bring together 44 works from two recent series of prints by Kentridge, Thinking Aloud (2004) and Nose (2007–2009). Both bodies of work blend his own visual iconography with that of stories from literature and theater. Composed of his expressive and richly layered marks, the prints demonstrate his mastery of intaglio processes. Kentridge's works reveal a lively sense of improvisation and the unexpected unfolding of metaphorical associations. Alongside these the Saint Louis Art Museum is offering two short animated films, 'Weighing...and Wanting' (1998) and 'Journey to the Moon' (2003). In both films, Kentridge investigates two ongoing themes in his art: the political and the personal.

Long Beach Museum of Art Celebrates 60th Anniversary of the Museum's Impressive Collection Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:38 PM PST LONG BEACH, CA.-The Long Beach Museum of Artannounced that 2010 marks the 60th Anniversary of the Museum's impressive permanent collection. To celebrate this exciting milestone, the Museum will present an extended exhibition series titled Celebrating Sixty, which will feature eight rotating exhibitions that respectively highlight specific elements of the rich history of the Museum's collection.The first installment of Celebrating Sixty will offer a glimpse into the past of the Long Beach Museum of Art when they open to the public on Friday, February 5, 2010. The exhibitions will highlight the extraordinary legacy of the Museum, offering the public an opportunity to view a variety of works from the permanent collection and gain a more thorough understanding of the tremendous impact that the Museum has had on the history of contemporary art in Southern California since 1950. Many of the works presented in Celebrating Sixty have not been seen in decades.

Guy Hepner Contemporary Presents ~ Photos by Mark Seliger Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:37 PM PST WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA.- Photographer Mark Seliger's 2002 "Heidi Does Hollywood" series for GQ is now for sale at Guy Hepner Contemporary. As one most celebrated editorial photographers of today, Mark Seliger has had the rare opportunity to photograph the world's most famous faces. Mark Seliger is currently under contract with Conde Nast Publications where he has shot countless covers for Vanity Fair and GQ. In 2002, Mark Seliger created a stunning collection of photographs for GQ of Heidi Klum.

Schirn Kunsthalle Addresses the Complex World of Contemporary Art in "The Making of Art" Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:36 PM PST FRANKFURT.- The exhibition The Making of Art offers a look at the web of relationships of contemporary art, where the triangle of the artwork, the artist, and the viewer has long since been expanded in many ways. Not infrequently, the relationships between artists, collectors, dealers, curators, and critics influence the content of the works; often this is also illustrated: In a large survey from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition presents the positions of artists such as John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Tracey Emin, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Ryan Gander, Peter Doig, Christian Jankowski, Louise Lawler, and Jonathan Monk, These artists reflect on an increasingly elaborate system, question the criteria of art, examine its methods and its institutions as sites, and shed light on the diverse connections and networks. With approximately 150 paintings, drawings, objects, installations, and videos, the exhibition addresses the complex system of the art world in the era of upheaval we are currently experiencing. On view through 30 August, 2009 at the Schirn Kunsthalle. In a work from 1972, Jörg Immendorff described his dream of being an artist: Ich wollte Künstler werden (I wanted to become an artist) was the title of his self-portrait. In a romantic vision, Immendorff portrayed himself sitting on the floor in an attic before an easel. By moonlight and a burning candle, he plays the "impoverished poet" as painter, as if he were Carl Spitzweg. In this deliberately pathos-laden painter's idyll, we are confronted with familiar ideas that have long since influenced the image or idea of artists as bohemians beyond all conventions whose only goal is making their visions, their genius, reality. It is an idea that is found in today's art only as a caricature. Jonathan Monk treats Sigmar Polke's Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! (Higher beings ordain: Paint the upper right corner black!) with irony by painting the corner, pink, blue, and mauve. In the meanwhile, the exemplary character of the artist's existence has since spread to broad swaths of society: If one believes recent sociological studies, the democratization of the values of creativity, freedom, and authenticity did not begin only yesterday. These days, everyone wants to be unique and innovative. "Everyone is an artist," asserted Joseph Beuys in the 1960s, a statement that was as revolutionary as it was provocative, and put forward the anticapitalist equation Creativity = Capital. Meanwhile, artists no longer seem to be in opposition to society but have arrived at its center. Currently, an image of the artist as networker is crystallizing. Working in groups is just one possibility among many. The models for cooperation are manifold: For example, four artists have joined together in the Polish collective Azorro to produce films together, such as Portrait with a Curator. The artists' group Chicks on Speed work in different constellations with other figures. The product can be a performance—like Art Rules! —a film, or a piece of music. The Scottish conceptual painter Peter Davies captures this "who with whom, when, and why" in gigantic cartographic depictions that are almost too large to take in visually. In fact, the world of contemporary art is closer to the industry based on the division of labor in the film world than it is to the romantic, isolated studio of the artist inspired by genius, and so some artists come across like small businesspersons. The triad of the artist, the work, and the spectator has long since broken down. These works reflect on an apparatus that is becoming ever more complex, almost represent a separate genre, a late modern tradition that extends from the early 1960s into the present. The 1960s marked the birth of the artwork based on institutional critique. The result was interventions, works, and objects that for the first time directly addressed their relationship to their context. In the wake of social revolutions, the works even opposed their own nature as commodities. When Piero Manzoni, for his work Merda d'artista (1961), filled ninety tin cans with his own excrement, Manzoni expanded the concept of the work of art almost to infinity, in a way that was as spectacular as it was anarchic. The work operated with the superelevation of the role of the artist and was also a subversive gesture directed toward the art market. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a second generation of institutional critique followed, without which art since the 1980s can scarcely be understood or explained. The context of the work of art became the central theme of the work of a whole series of artists, and especially woman artists, in which they explored institutional functions and border zones in art. Louise Lawler's theme is the extended institutional framework of the work of art. She dedicates herself to the museum space, which she demystifies as the sublime space of high culture. She shows the preparations for a museum; seen in this way, the museum seems not like a finite form as much as one context among many. Candida Höfer also photographs museum and exhibition spaces, which she presents as empty, either in anticipation of being used or after the visitors have gone. She is interested in the side of the art world that is not on display. The artist shows the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the perspective of an insider, not as a place for presenting museum art: Preparations are being made on Mount Olympus. The Russian conceptual artists Komar & Melamid take it a step farther: their series Scenes from the Future presents the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York of the distant future as ruins in a pastoral idyll. Other symptoms of decadence beyond the museum, which has recently been at risk of losing its leading role to private collectors and art fairs, have been chronicled by photographers from Martin Parr to Jessica Craig-Martin, documenting the party people at art fairs such as the Frieze in London, the life of luxury at Art Basel Miami Beach, and the glamour at Art Dubai. Whereas the second wave of institutional critique had its center in New York, such geographic filters have become almost entirely obsolete today. The art world appears to be truly globalized or is at least organized around a number of centers, and so artistic positions from Düsseldorf and Beijing, London, Kinshasa, the Philippines, Zurich, Glasgow, and Moscow all meet. Bucharestbased Dan Perjovschi caricatures the art world in cartoonlike wall drawings. His Bulgarian colleague Nedko Solakov sounds out the art world with subtlety and irony in equal measure with his large installation Leftovers —a selection of my unsold pieces from a private gallery I work with, treating his own success as a "leftover." Using hidden surveillance cameras, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei films a visit by an international consulting group from MoMA to his "out-of-theway" studio in Caochangdi and presents their discussions to an international audience in the form of a video installation. Mladen Stilinovic plays with the parameters of success and cries out ostentatiously to the (still Western-dominated) art world: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist. The Moscow Conceptualist Yuri Albert roguishly turns a little painter on his head and states: I Am Not Baselitz! In the end, it is above all irony and subversion that today's artists employ as they move between the poles of the museum and the market, success and crisis, romanticism and realism. LIST OF ARTISTS: Yuri Albert, Pawel Althamer, Azorro, John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Tamy Ben-Tor, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Stefan Brüggemann, Chris Burden, Chicks on Speed, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová, Claire Fontaine, Clegg & Guttmann, Phil Collins, Jessica Craig-Martin, Peter Davies, Jirí Georg Dokoupil, Michael Elmgreen/Ingar Dragset, Tracey Emin, Dan Fischer, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Peter Doig, Dieter Hacker, Candida Höfer, Bethan Huws, Jörg Immendorff, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Komar & Melamid, Jeff Koons, Sean Landers, Louise Lawler, Marcin Maciejowski, Piero Manzoni, Jonathan Monk, Dave Muller, Manuel Ocampo, Martin Parr, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon, William Powhida, Tom Sachs, Chéri Samba, Nedko Solakov, Mladen Stilinovic, Thomas Struth, Goran Trbuljak, Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Waters, and Ai Weiwei

Norton Simon Museum displays " The Art of War: American Posters from World War I & World War II " Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:35 PM PST PASADENA, CA.- The Norton Simon Museum presents The Art of War, an exhibition featuring 33 government-sponsored posters created for the public during World Wars I and II. Chosen from the Museum's extensive collection of 20th-century war posters, these vibrant pieces of visual propaganda have rarely, and in some cases never, been on view. Together, they provide a unique opportunity to examine artworks commissioned by the U.S. government from some of the most important and popular artists of the 20th century. Timed to coincide with the presidential election season, the exhibition is also intended to encourage an exploration of the ongoing dialogue between contemporary politics and visual art. On view September 5, 2008 – January 26, 2009.

Tate Modern presents 'UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980's' Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:34 PM PST LONDON - A new display at Tate Modern, UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s, will offer an opportunity to re-appraise Neo-Expressionist painting a quarter of a century after its emergence. Drawing on the collections of UBS and Tate, Paintings from the 1980s, will bring together eleven large-scale works by the key international painters who were at the forefront of this new form of figurative painting. On exhibition 12 November 2008 through 13 April 2009.

Woodward Gallery to Show Lady Pink's Graffiti Based Art Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:33 PM PST New York City.- The Woodward Gallery is pleased to show "Lady Pink - Evolution", on view at the gallery from November 5th through December 30th, with an artist reception on Saturday, November 5th from 6-8pm. Lady Pink is the first woman in graffiti based art.  In her current solo exhibition "Evolution," Lady Pink re-masters work she once created as public murals. Lady Pink muses on old lettering outlines which have evolved from three decades of writing. To the cultured eye, Lady Pink's street tag can be identified from the period in which it was deliberately constructed. The colorful POP- surreal canvases today, have her trademark name interwoven throughout the elaborate image, as if to authenticate her mark in art history. Lady Pink's unique personal vision has been communicated throughout her evolution from subway writer to fine artist. Sandra Fabara, aka, Lady Pink, was born in Ecuador in 1964, raised in Queens, New York, and studied at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. While a student there, she met a group of graffiti artists and began writing at age fifteen. She was soon well known as the only prominent female capable of competing with the boys in the graffiti subculture. Lady Pink painted subway trains from the years 1979-1985.  She appeared in theaters in the starring role of Rose in Charlie Ahearn's 1983 film Wild Style and quickly acquired hip-hop, cult figure status. That same year, Lady Pink was featured in the landmark Graffiti exhibition at the West 57th Street Sidney Janis Gallery where she met the elite collectors of the art world. Lady Pink's canvases are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Groningen Museum, Holland. They were featured in the major exhibitions "Art in the Streets" at the LA MOCA and "Graffiti" at the Brooklyn Museum. Lady Pink continues to mature as an artist, selling work internationally and producing ambitious murals commissioned for universities, corporations and institutions.  This year, Pink's art has also been seen on television commercials for the search engine BING. Woodward Gallery is located in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a neighborhood with a rich history of art and culture. The gallery's 5000 square foot location offers two floors of exhibition space within walking distance of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The first floor of the gallery features a schedule of rotating exhibitions; the bottom floor offers an intimate viewing area for special events and private appointments. Since 1994, Woodward Gallery has specialized in developing private and corporate art portfolios with Contemporary and Modern Masters from Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol and through the unique painting of their acclaimed Gallery Artists. Woodward Gallery maintains an inventory of art by Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, Richard Hambleton and Jean Michel Basquiat. An extensive collection of important limited edition prints are available by New York '80's East Village Artists: (Richard Hambleton and Keith Haring); POP Artists: (Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol); and by their Gallery Artists: (Deborah Claxton, Margaret Morrison, Jo Ellen Van Ouwerkerk and Cristina Vergano). Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.woodwardgallery.net

Iris Apfel ~ Legendary Fashion Icon Holds Court at Peabody Essex Museum Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:32 PM PST SALEM, MA.- Any woman who has ever worn a pair of jeans has Iris Apfel to thank. In the 1940s, when only lumberjacks and field hands wore blue cotton denim, a persistent young girl hounded the owner of a Wisconsin Army & Navy store until he finally ordered her a pair of boy-sized denims. Her intent: to wear them with a turban and large hoop earrings. Such was an early milestone in the career of a fashion visionary and muse who quite possibly launched a trend in women's fashion — jeans — that now represents a 10 billion dollar industry yearly in the U.S. alone.  On exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum from 17 October through 7 February, 2010.

American Red Cross To Sell Pieces of Its Historic Collection to Cut Deficit Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:31 PM PST WASHINGTON, DC (AP).- Rose Percy has a long history with the American Red Cross. Complete with an extensive wardrobe and her own Tiffany jewelry, this 23-inch wax doll was first sold for $1,200 back in 1864 to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission — the precursor to the Red Cross, one of best-known U.S. charities. Now, Rose Percy, is on the auction block again. On Tuesday, Rose Percy will be sold in one of the first rounds of an extensive sale of treasures the American Red Cross has amassed over the decades. The current bid online: $5,000. The Red Cross also is selling a rare four-faced Cartier clock lamp, nurse uniforms from World War I and what could be the last Civil War-era flag of the forerunner U.S. Sanitary Commission.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Shows Joseph Cornell in Dialogue With MCA Collection Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:30 PM PST Chicago, IL.- This summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents "Pandora's Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection" until October 16th. Featuring a selection of rarely seen work by the beloved American master Joseph Cornell placed in direct dialogue with works from the MCA Collection, it aims to illuminate his continuing relevance and influence. The exhibition is grouped into ten distinct themes pulled from Cornell's work, each given its own gallery: The Box as Altar, Feathered Fantasies, The Voyeur, Repetitions, Celestial Musings, A Reductive Language, Cut and Paste, Architecture and Art, The Lure of the Ocean, and Films.Joseph Cornell (1903-72) was an American artist and sculptor who is one of the most celebrated figures in modern art. His signature works -- boxed assemblages made with precious objects that he found on trips to New York bookshops and thrift stores – combined the formal rigor of Constructivism with the fantasy of Surrealism. Cornell is considered an American Surrealist, he came on the scene later than his European counterparts, but admired their work and borrowed from their absurd juxtapositions and evocation of nostalgia. Although he lived almost all of his life in a small house on Utopia Parkway in working-class Queens with his mother and brother, he nevertheless was shown in progressive galleries in New York, made contact with many of the most advanced artists of his day, and entertained curious visitors until late in his life. Cornell's work has been defined by the rectangular box, which he transformed into small, magical worlds by adding his collected  materials. Each box was assembled with great care and devotion, and in its finished state resembled a religious altar. Numerous artists have followed his example, building rectangular containers that create a real visual space, allow for the juxtaposition of objects, and draw viewers into deciphering their interior dramas. Contemporary artists such as Don Baum and Marisol share his spirit for thrift store salvation, assembling narratives from disparate cast-off parts. George Segal and Buzz Spector enlarged Cornell's small scale to more human dimensions, but retained his contemplative and philosophical tone. Jeff Wall's signature lightboxes, filled with detailed color photographs, inspire the same kind of looking and thinking that has come to be a hallmark of Cornell. Cornell was fascinated with birds for their exoticism and beauty, and their representation of flight, travel, and escape. Cornell rarely ventured far from home, but the freedom that birds possessed fostered dreams of other places. Two categories of bird-related boxes emerged over the years: Habitats, which appear as homes birds would develop in nature, and Aviaries which recall manmade birdhouses. The Habitats were filled with soil, bark, and insects, and often darkened with colored glass fronts, while the Aviaries tended to be bright, with painted perches, food and water dishes. Other Surrealists, such as Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, also turned to birds as avatars of strangeness, with flamboyant plumage, prehistoric movement, and often foreboding significance (as with Edgar Allen Poe and the raven). The erotic idea of caging beauty, especially songbirds, can often be found in Ernst's works of captive creatures such as in his painting Loplop Introducing a Bird. Chicago-based artist Nick Cave has also been drawn to birds in his resourceful scavenging and collaged sculptures, a new one of which was commissioned for the exhibition. Like Cornell, who switched from taxidermied birds to 3 reproduced images, Marlo Pascual plays with illusion, making a flat photograph appear to come to life with the addition of a sculptural perch. For Warhol, the repetitive images of celebrity figures, such as the  Troy (Donohue), speak to a culture of mass marketing and the tabloid image machine. But in Cornell's hands, the repetition has a quiet, meditative quality like a prayer chant, especially with his obsession over a handsome young boy from a Caravaggio painting. Other artworks in the MCA collection reveal what a seminal act duplication and replication has become in contemporary art, from the assemblages of Arman, which likewise address consumer culture and waste, to Wallace Berman who mixes spirituality with pop culture. In Rembrandt Head Details, Mike and Doug Starn's double photo of Rembrandt appears as an archeological relic of a bygone era, and in Christian Boltanski's epic installation repeated images of children take on a melancholy character. Longing and romantic desire run through Cornell's work, populated with beautiful maidens, nymphs, and ballerinas -- usually as objects of worship. In one of the works from his Hotel de l'Etoile series, he uses his signature deep blue glass to symbolize night, as he orchestrates a clandestine moonlight escapade with a voluptuous nude from a men's magazine emerging from the shadows. The artist William Copley, who was a friend and dealer of Cornell's, was also fascinated with the female form and, like Cornell, placed the viewer in an oddly voyeuristic position as in  Blue Mood where the privacy of a bath is interrupted by a policeman. Jeff Koons and Michelangelo Pistoletto also implicate the viewer in not-so-private bath times -- Koons in sculptural form with the emergence of a snorkeler in the tub, while Pistoletto uses mirrored aluminum to reflect an encounter with an Ingres-like beauty in The Turkish Bath. The story gets more complicated in  Henry Darger's complex narratives with the Vivian girls, where sexuality is confused in a bacchanalian fantasy. The 'female as temptress' is different for women artists: Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman come at this subject from different angles, although both use themselves as the protagonists of their staged scenarios. Before Andy Warhol made serial repetition a staple of visual culture, Cornell pioneered the use of repeating copies of the same image. In his Medici Boxes, Cornell would duplicate the same printed illustration in a gridded structure, predating Warhol. Despite myths about Cornell's hermit-like lifestyle, he entertained many visitors to his home over the years, including Warhol. Cornell was fascinated by the sky and the planets,  using circular forms (rings, rubber balls, corks, marbles) as metaphors for celestial bodies. In his boxes, star maps paired with looped rings or balls  could take on the significance of other realms, transporting the viewer into a world of science and wonder. Contemporary artists have taken up similar concerns, such as in the transformative work of Gabriel Orozco, whose "Ball on Water" liberates the common object of a ball to suggest the sky and  heavens. In Piotr Uklanski's collages with pencil shavings, trash can even suggest the Big Bang theory, and in Jeff Koons' sculpture Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, basketballs suddenly take on galactic overtones. The ambiguous circles in the work of artists  Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Liz Larner, and Mariko Mori are likewise transformed by association, while artists Louise Nevelson and Gary Simmons directly reference planetary activity. Using mud to paint a giant circle on the gallery wall of the MCA,  Richard Long clearly intended to transport the mysterious power of our planet into the gallery. Cornell found beauty in simplicity before Minimalism, but one of the lesser-known aspects of his work is that he didn't always fill his boxes with found imagery. A rhythm of rectangular grids, or an array of circular holes in works such as Multiple Cubes show a stripped down expression of space and solids that was a predecessor of Minimalist art in the 1960s. Seen alongside the plywood boxes of Donald Judd, or the mathematical progressions of Sol LeWitt, Cornell's work is revelatory. H.C. Westermann was also drawn to repetitive and algorithmic formats, which he used in his sculpture "Rosebud". Alfred Jensen was fascinated by the mystical qualities of nature, mathematics, and exotic cultures. In his canvas Let There Be Light, he tries to assign meaning to the numeric patterns as if unlocking an ancient secret, a pursuit that Cornell would have found worthwhile. Cornell's collages borrow from Surrealist visual games known for creating disruptions of meaning and nonsense. Clashing compositions of found imagery have come to characterize much of the defining work of the late 20th century. They took the form of Victorian fever dreams in the work of San Francisco Bay Area artist  Jess, and a cool conceptualism in the classic multi-panel works of John Baldessari. Robert Rauschenberg's silkscreened work Retroactive II and the politically charged hallucinations of Robert Heinecken show how long this method lasted. Collage returned with artists such as David Salle whose dissonant paintings are interrupted by objects attached directly to the canvas, and in the overwhelming detail and horror vacui of Lari Pittman's paintings. The vitality of recent work by artists Thomas Hirschhorn and John Stezaker prove that cutting and pasting remains a relevant way to reflect and process the modern media-saturated world. Cornell's boxes often suggest architecture in miniature -- built with wood, decorated with paint, and often including decorative moulding, wire screens, and glass. Some formats were literally derived from small-scale buildings like birdhouses or dovecotes, such as  Untitled (Compartmented Aviary Box). Architecture has also been a favorite reference point for contemporary artists. Christo's early work, Orange Store Front, is an architectural fragment that acts as a stage for narrative projections. Guenther Foerg's photographs of fascist architecture such as the Mussolini-era building depicted in E.U.R. Palazzo della Civilta, reveal the complexities of buildings which seem beautiful and orderly on the outside, but hold disturbing political agendas inside. The vast scope of Andreas Gursky's image Avenue of the Americas makes one wonder how it was possible to capture from a single vantage point. B. Wurtz pairs photography and objects, rooting the grandiosity of architecture in the familiarity of the everyday. Travel to exotic, faraway places and dreams of escape populate Cornell's work. The ocean was one of his favorite recurring themes, through the inclusion of boat forms, navigational maps, seashells, and the color blue. The Surrealists often used the ocean and the threshold between land and sea as a metaphor for the edges of civilization, and sometimes reason. This is certainly the case in René Magritte's  "Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature)", where a clipper ship painted to look like clouds sails by while two fish characters canoodle on the beach. One of the nation's largest facilities devoted to the art of our time, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) offers exhibitions of the most thought-provoking art created since 1945. The MCA documents contemporary visual culture through painting, sculpture, photography, video and film, and performance. Located in the heart of downtown Chicago, the MCA boasts a gift store, bookstore, restaurant, 300-seat theater, and a terraced sculpture garden with a great view of Lake Michigan. The mission of the MCA is to be an innovative and compelling center of contemporary art where the public can directly experience the work and ideas of living artists, and understand the historical, social, and cultural context of the art of our time. The Museum boldly interweaves exhibitions, performances, collections, and educational programs to excite, challenge, and illuminate our visitors and to provide insight into the creative process. The MCA aspires to engage a broad and diverse audience, create a sense of community and be a place for contemplation, stimulation, and discussion about contemporary art and culture. The Museum of Contemporary Art Collection has outstanding examples of visual art from 1945 to the present with a strong focus on surrealism, minimalism, conceptual photography, and work by Chicago-based artists. At the time of its opening, the Museum claimed 7,000 objects, including works by Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, and Alfredo Jaar. Today, the museum's collection consists of 2,345 objects, as well as about 2,500 artist's books. The collection features visual art from 1945 to the present, including work by artists from Lee Bontecou to Robert Smithson. Notable works in the museum's collection include, "Polychrome and Horizontal Bluebird" by Alexander Calder, "Cindy" by Chuck Close, "In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara" by Jasper Johns, "Study for a Portrait" by Francis Bacon and "Campbell's Soup Cans II" by Andy Warhol. During the 2008 fiscal year the MCA Celebrated its 40th anniversary, which inspired gifts of works from artists such as Dan Flavin, Alfredo Jaar, and Thomas Ruff. Additionally, the museum expanded its collection by acquiring the work of some of the artists it presented during its anniversary celebration such as Carlos Amorales, Tony Oursler, and Adam Pendleton. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.mcachicago.org

This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:29 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.

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