10490 - 20170528 - Exhibition in Dresden presents 19th-century paintings of Italy between Claude Lorrain, Turner and Böcklin - Dresden - 10.02.2017-28.05.2017

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Jakob Philipp Hackert, Tempel der Sibylle bei Tivoli.

 

During the 19th century, Italy was a magnetic destination for many travellers from Northern Europe, including artists such as Carl Blechen, Camille Corot and William Turner, Oswald Achenbach and Max Klinger. In Germany, Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe fuelled the compulsion to head South with his "Italienische Reise" ("Italian Journey"), published in 1816/17 for the first time.

"Italian" was the word Heinrich von Kleist used in a letter to describe the blue sky over Dresden, thereby expressing a deeply rooted yearning for the bright light of a country which, in equal measure, cast a spell with its ancient and Christian historical sites, its wealth of Renaissance art and its landscapes. The city of Rome became an artistic focal point in this context. Artists of various nationalities hoped to find impulses that would give direction to their creativity here.

The exhibition "Beneath Italian Skies. 19th-century paintings of Italy between Claude Lorrain, Turner and Böcklin" in the Albertinum in Dresden traces this enthusiasm – which has continued uninterruptedly to this day – for the "land where the lemon trees bloom". With 130 works, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview and invites its public to take a visually powerful journey through the bel paese. The rich holdings of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden are the focal point here. Numerous paintings have been restored for the exhibition and can now be seen for the first time anywhere.

The presentation takes place in the context of paragons from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and ancient and 19th-century sculptures from the Skulpturensammlung. At the entrance, visitors are immediately greeted by the painting "Coastal landscape with Acis and Galatea", completed in the mid-17th century by Claude Lorrain, who turned landscape painting into a leading genre and, alongside Nicolas Poussin, set the standard for many artists over several centuries to come. An impressive panorama of varied images of Italy follows, from the epochs of Classicism and Romanticism (Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Ludwig Richter, Carl Blechen), through to the currents of Realism, in which the Arcadian dream gradually gives way to an increasing engagement with reality through a conception of nature based on studies completed in the open air (Oswald Achenbach, Adolph Menzel). The so-called German-Romans, by contrast, drew closely on the art of antiquity and the Renaissance in the second half of the century (Arnold Böcklin, Anselm Feuerbach, Hans von Marées). The sequence of artistic positions thus provides an insight into the changing world as it moved from agrarian culture to industrial landscape, from the early development of tourism by coach or foot to steam ship or train in the late 19th century.

In this context, works by German-speaking artists are in dialogue with the works of outstanding contemporaries such as Camille Corot, Johan Christian Dahl and William Turner. Their paintings shaped the expectations and attitudes of many generations of travellers to Italy. The paintings take visitors on a journey through a land of lush vegetation and striking wastelands, Mediterranean climate and intense light, capable of inspiring anyone’s wanderlust and imagination.

At the end of the exhibition, the focus shifts to the fascination for Italy in the present and visitors become part of the exhibition themselves. A panorama of highly individual and contemporary holiday impressions is created through a photo campaign aimed at visitors.

The exhibition combines valuable works that are on loan from the Tate in London, Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, the Berlin State Museums, the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, among other places.

A broad-based education and communication programme has been designed for visitors of all ages. Themed guided tours and workshops specifically for kindergartens, schools and families, groups and individual visitors convey the 19th century’s fascination with Italy. There are various formats to choose from, depending on the target audience: a lecture by Florian Illies, for example, a film evening with a showing of the legendary film "Go Trabi Go" in the presence of its star Wolfgang Stumph, a promenade concert with the Vocal Concert Dresden ensemble or a literary voyage of discovery, followed by a writing workshop for school students.

 

 

Website : Albertinum

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10489 - 20170507 - MSK Ghent exhibits works by Francisco Goya & Farideh Lashai - Ghent, Belgium - 11.02.2017-07.05.2017

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In 2016, the MSK welcomed 137,132 visitors. With this record year, the museum continues the positive trend that began in 2015. Catherine de Zegher, director, says: “It’s clear that ‘The Open Museum’ is growing: as a social meeting place for old and young, as a museum with a focus on art from the past and the present, and as a place of reflection on art, beauty and society. In February, we open the Goya / Lashai exhibition, which connects the present with the past in the fight against injustice and pain ... Whoever visits the museum in the weeks leading up to the opening might encounter the Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar making a work in situ.”

During the spring of 2017, the MSK brings together two artists in the newly established Drawings Cabinet. The exhibition Eyewitnesses links the social criticism of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) to the social commitment of the Iranian artist Farideh Lashai (1944-2013), in a shared indictment against violence and oppression.

In 2015, the MSK acquired a copy of Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) by Francisco Goya. This series of engravings depicting the horrors of war was created between 1810 and 1820, during the Spanish War of Independence against the Napoleonic occupation. It was never shown by Goya during his lifetime.

Working in an era of war and oppression, Goya explicitly broke away from the bombastic rhetoric of classical painting: instead of glorious heroes he depicted ordinary citizens struggling to survive during the war. The cycle is considered a universal indictment against all forms of violence.

The Iranian artist and writer Farideh Lashai also worked in a time of conflict and oppression. In her drawings and prints, she combined the picturesque landscapes of her homeland with the techniques of contemporary art. For her last work, When I Count, There Are Only You ... But When I Look, There Is Only a Shadow (2011-2013), Lashaiunited Goya’s Desastres with her own video projections. In her subtle but subversive video installations, she takes a critical look at the political situation and difficult living conditions in Iran. For this reason, her oeuvre remains of great contemporary relevance.

In Eyewitnesses, the MSK demonstrates how the past and present are intimately intertwined. Born almost exactly 200 years apart, Goya and Lashai were chroniclers of the conflicts in their respective countries.

Both experienced radical social upheavals and were forced to work in periods of repression and censorship. They both used art, and even humour, to take their own unique stands against the injustices that they witnessed.

To do this, they employed a variety of techniques and visual languages. By placing their work in dialogue, the MSK aims to encourage visitors to see the positive change in contemporary society through a better understanding of the past. Two centuries have elapsed since Los Desastres was created but the message remains internationally relevant, especially in the light of the numerous conflict situations that have arisen in recent years…

 

Website : MSK GENT

 

Source : Artdaily

 

 

10488 - 20170423 - Exhibition shows painters and sculptors engaged in their everyday work - Lausanne - 10.02.2017-23.04.2017

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Installation view. Photo: Nora Rupp.

 

This exhibition shows painters and sculptors engaged in their everyday work. Swiss drawings from the 1780s to the 1950s are presented in three sections – Portfolios, The Path to Creation, Innermost Thoughts – and introduce the visitor to some of the stages in the genesis of a work of art. Academic drawings, projects, roughs, composition sketches and figure studies reveal avenues explored and dead ends sometimes arrived at. The exhibition closes with more personal images bridging the gap between the public and private spheres.

On show are works by Albert Anker, René Auberjonois, Alice Bailly, Balthus, Ernest Biéler, François Bocion, Gustave Buchet, Paul Cézanne, Émily Chapalay, Jean Clerc, Louis Ducros, Alberto Giacometti, Giovanni Giacometti, Charles Gleyre, Ferdinand Hodler, Giuseppe Mazzola, Auguste de Niederhäusern (known as Rodo), Léo-Paul Robert, Louis Soutter, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Félix Vallotton.

Room 1_Portfolios
Over the years artists build up a stock of works that never leave the studio: drawings from their training years, for example, or unfinished projects. In the first room the visitor finds a portfolio belonging to Émily Chapalay, a young art student in late 19th-century Paris. Big charcoal drawings reveal the classical stages of academic teaching, whose primary aim was the mastery of drawing technique and the inculcation of “taste” through the study of classical models. A second portfolio documents a series of projects prepared by Gustave Buchet for a 1927–1928 advertising campaign for varicose veins stockings. Rising to the challenge, Buchet came up with all sorts of ideas, but none of his big colour pages ever became actual posters and his drawings ended up as minor inserts in the press.

Room 2_The path to creation
The second room offers seven sections dedicated to the genesis of works of art. We see how, in 18th-century Rome, the making of large topographical pictures required a division of labour between landscape painters and figure specialists (Louis Ducros, Giuseppe Mazzola). We are reminded, too, that in the academic tradition of the 19th century, a history painting was preceded by detailed studies from life and squaring-up of the composition (Charles Gleyre, Albert Anker, François Bocion). The quest for the most appropriate images for a big Symbolist painting is retraced through Ernest Biéler’s pencil and watercolour sketches for L’Eau mystérieuse. Paul Robert’s preliminary work for the decoration of the Federal Courthouse in Lausanne, Ferdinand Hodler’s for the big Einmütigkeit fresco in Hanover’s new City Hall, and Rodo’s for the Monument Verlaine in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris all illustrate the sheer effort that went into meet large-scale public art commissions as the 20th century dawned. A comparison of Félix Vallotton’s open-air sketches with the summary handling of his landscapes of the 1910s and 1920s, shows just how radically modernism broke with the scrupulous rendering of reality. And last but not least, the drawings of Giovanni Giacometti reveal the influence of Cézanne: the quest for the original subject is abandoned in favour of exploration of the interplay of light and atmospheric colour; now familiar landscapes and portraits of family and friends are all Giacometti needs as a basis for his formal explorations.

Room 3_Innermost thoughts
The exhibition’s final section takes the visitor into the private sphere. In the studio the artist, in this case Balthus, observes himself via the self-portrait. Or he draws those close to him, like Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen who, surrounded by women and cats, discerns links between femininity and animality and thus gives expression to passion and erotic impulses. In her Chants Alice Bailly speaks in large watercolours and coded poems of her “love at first sight” for art patron Werner Reinhart, whom she met in 1918. In the 1930s Jean Clerc’s erotic fantasies, unleashed by his reading of Baudelaire, find repeated expression in figurines of couples embracing. Meanwhile Louis Soutter, confined to an asylum, vents his emotional solitude and sexual distress in big, baroque drawings of bands of naked women enticing men who vie for their attention. Lastly comes the artist observing the world: with old age looming, René Auberjonois, artistically isolated and obsessed by the disasters of the Second World War, portrays violent struggles between men and animals, corridas in which the bull-victim systematically proves invincible.

The exhibition is on view from February 10 through April 23, 2017 at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts.

 

 

Website : Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts.

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10487 - 20170430 - Kunsthalle Basel presents a new series of fifty-five panels by Sadie Benning - Basel - 10.02.2017-30.04.2017

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Sadie Benning, installation view Shared Eye, Kunsthalle Basel, 2017. Photo: Philipp Hänger.

 

Videos are what Sadie Benning first became known for; they won the then-teenage artist awards and visi- bility throughout the 1990s on the experimental art and video circuit. Lo-fi and black and white, they explore aspects of memory, identity, and the anxiousness of growing up queer in the Midwestern United States. “I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do them for me,” the artist once explained in an interview. Improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera, the adolescent Benning constructed fragmented, highly personal moving images, portraying the artist amid everyday objects, drawings, and scraps of handwritten text.

More than two decades later, the homespun poetics, grainy images, and durational logic explored in these earlier video works has expanded and taken on quite a different form as it confronts the political, conceptual, and material concerns of another moment in history. This exhibition, the artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe, is a collaboration between Kunsthalle Basel and The Renaissance Society in Chicago. It is also the first institutional exhibition to focus on the importance of what are often referred to, for lack of a better term, as the artist’s “paintings.”

Entitled Shared Eye, the presentation consists of a new series of fifty-five panels. Each is composed of mounted digital snapshots taken with the artist’s smartphone, embedded with painted aqua-resin elements and found photographs (drawn from a variety of sources, from Internet-found images of strangers to 1960s newspaper telefax images), occasionally punctuated by miniature toys or inexpensive keepsakes nestled upon tiny sculpted shelves. There is a felt intensity to the labor involved in making each piece, and a decided (willfully imperfect) hand detectable in the rough-hewn forms, sanded edges, and incorporated elements. A nervous pic- torial energy is built up through this process, and inexplicable connections emerge among a work’s different elements.

A gathering of protesters, the artist’s own vinyl collection and bedroom, a film still from Citizen Kane, a desolate alleyway, Benjamin Franklin’s visage on a US banknote, a miniature calendar, a toy robot, Ku Klux Klan members marching together: these describe just some of the images, objects, and re- ferences embedded in the works. They juxtapose the intimate and the anonymous, the digital present and an indeterminate analog past, the miniature and the extreme close-up, putting viewers in front of Benning’s highly personal response to the state of the world at a moment of deep political uncertainty. They are also imbued with the charge of what has come before and what is yet to come, since each piece, the artist attests, “serves as a visual represen- tation of the past, the present, and the future, colliding.”

The resultant pieces hover between mediums, defying easy categorization, acting simul- taneously as drawings, sculptures, photo- graphic works, and even paintings. When speaking of them Benning persistently evokes film editing techniques, and it is tempting to read this show as a kind of film loop. The rhythm of the display is inten- tionally cinematic in nature, mimicking the cuts, pans, fades, pauses, and staccato transitions of time-based media. Here, meaning is produced not only from within the composition of each still image-panel and the dialogues between them (notice how in the first room the found photograph of the “person with package” in that eponymous work seems to walk toward the figures in Crosswalk). Meaning is also built through the spacing and the deliberately vacant areas in the exhibition, like leader punctuating a film. Notice how in the first rooms the spacing is wide and blank wall spaces are abundant, like the start of a film in which clues are being left, a scene set, a mood established. By the end, the pace has quickened and the density of arrangements and flicker of images becomes more intense, even willfully aggra- vated. The experience of the ensemble is thus spatial and textural, but also temporal.

Since the first galleries are seen twice—upon entering and exiting the space—Benning conceived the pieces in rooms 1 to 3 as both a prologue and an afterword to the core of the exhibition: an installation that bears the title of the show itself, Shared Eye. The last two galleries, rooms 4 and 5, contain an in- stallation made in response to the 1976 series of paintings To the People of New York City by the late German artist Blinky Palermo. Made shortly before Palermo died and never exhibited in his lifetime, To the People of New York City left an impact on Benning. Palermo’s installation is composed of forty seemingly nonrepresentational paintings, presented in a rhythmic pattern of different scales and proximities, and arranged in fifteen sequences for which he left annotated sketches. Benning’s installation uses the frame ratio of each panel of Palermo’s series as well as the same total number of panels and grouping arrangements, appropriating the late artist’s idio- syncratic specifications. There is no intentionally overt relationship between the content of Benning’s and Palermo’s works, but in their mathematical connection (or “mathematic mania,” as Benning puts it), there is a numerology that quietly binds them. And in so doing, Benning highlights the ways that we insert our own histories and ideas into the frames we encounter.

The title Shared Eye evokes the idea of seeing as an ongoing collaboration between individuals, which cannot be extricated from its many, often conflicting, sources. These works emphasize how rampant capitalism and its adjoining structures of patriarchy, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia inform the subconscious—redirecting the imagination and one’s sense of what is true. The body of presented work was designed to draw attention to how we experience, collectively and alone, and each piece functions individually and as part of the larger group. Cumulatively, the show is meant to generate the fragmented, filmic quality of memory and dreams, inviting a distinctive response in the viewer who encounters them. The body and the mind complete each work.

Sadie Benning was born in 1973 in Madison, USA; the artist lives and works in New York, USA.

 

 

Website : Kunsthalle Basel

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10486 - 20170508 - First large-scale solo show in France by Taro Izumi at Palais de Tokyo - Paris - 03.02.2017-08.05.2017

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Taro Izumi, Candidate (Can not see the shadow of the rainbow) 2015. Video installation, mixed media. View of the exhibition « In Our Time: Art in Post- industrial Japan » 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japon). Courtesy Galerie GP&N Vallois (Paris) and Take Ninagawa (Tokyo). Photo: Keizo Kioku.

 

Palais de Tokyo is presenting the first large-scale solo show in France by Taro Izumi.

In Japan, Taro Izumi is a singular artist. He has developed a world which is expressed in installations, sculptures and videos, whose appearance processes are associated with accidents, play or perturbation.

The installations that he constructs from ludic hypotheses are a source of forms, sculptures and murals which, often thanks to their absurdity, become extraordinarily unexpected items that humorously thwart our artistic and social customs. For example, the invention of mounts composed of everyday elements – chairs, tables, stools, cushions – which are rapidly assembled so as to welcome a body imitating the vigour of a sportsman in action, leads to something which is at once astonishing, a parody of the dream bodies of stadium heroes and a fascinating commentary on the history of the plinth in sculpture.

In a context such as Japan, which is quite normative because of its culture and its social organisation, the turbulence of reality, unexpected noises, paradoxical behaviours, and the performed situations that Taro Izumi presents, all create the impression of having been produced by wicked spirits that meddle with our lives and make fun of our customs.

Curator: Jean de Loisy

“In the Shinto religion of Japan, some kamis or venerated natural spirits play this same role as occasionally dangerous tricksters. They slip into familiar spaces and make havoc of our lives and habits, and this is just what Taro Izumi, trickster-artist, “enfant terrible”, conceptual rogue, does while deliciously imagining that everything could be so different.” --Jean de Loisy

Born in 1976 in Nara, Taro Izumi lives in Tokyo. His work has been featured in several solo shows, in particular at Ongoing, Tokyo (2015), The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2014), Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden (2014). The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, are also exhibiting his work in 2017. He has appeared in a large number of group exhibitions, such as “Une forme olympique”, HEC – Espace d’Art Contemporain, Jouy-enJosas, France (2016); “Voice of images”, Palazzo Grassi – Fondation Francois Pinault, Venice, Italia (2012); “Waiting for Video: Works from the 1960s to Today”, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (2009); “Between Art and Life, Performativity in Japanese Art”, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2008); “Out of the Ordinary: New Video from Japan”, MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (2007); “After the Reality”, Deith Projects, New York, USA (2006). His artworks are part of several major collections, including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the Fondation François Pinault, the Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, the Conseil Général de Seine-Saint-Denis, the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris and the Fondation Kadist.

“While video images cannot be transformed, I can always shake them up. I try to made pieces you can touch. When I press on the ‘play’ button, images then appear like ‘zombies’.” --Taro Izumi

1 Interview with Paloma Blanchet Hidalgo, Slash/Magazine , February 2013

 

 

Website : Palais de Tokyo

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10485 - 20170528 - Exhibition reveals a fresh and sometimes unexpected facet of Claude Monet - Riehen/Bsel - 22.01.2017-28.05.2017

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In the year of its 20th birthday, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to Claude Monet, one of the most important artists in its collection. Selected aspects of Monet’s oeuvre will be presented in a distilled overview. By concentrating on his work between 1880 and the beginning of the 20th century, with a forward gaze to his late paintings, the show will reveal a fresh and sometimes unexpected facet of the pictorial magician, who still influences our visual experiencing of nature and landscape today. The leitmotif of the “Monet” exhibition will be light, shadow, and reflection as well as the constantly evolving way in which Monet treated them. It will be a celebration of light and colors. Monet’s famed pictorial worlds - his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, various locations places along the course of the River Seine, his flower meadows, haystacks, cathedrals and fog-shrouded bridges - are the exhibition’s focal points.  

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In his paintings, Monet experimented with the changing play of light and colors in the course of the day and the seasons. He conjured up magical moods through reflections and shade. Claude Monet was a great pioneer in the field of art, finding the key to the secret garden of modern painting and opening everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world.

The exhibition will show 62 paintings from leading museums in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Tate, London. 15 paintings from various private collections that are seen extremely rarely and that have not been shown in the context of a Monet exhibition for many years will be special highlights of the show.

Light, shadow, and reflection
Following the death of his wife in 1879, Monet embarked on a phase of reorientation. His time as a pioneer of Impressionism was over; while by no means generally acknowledged as an artist, he was beginning to become more independent financially thanks to the help of his dealer, as is documented by his frequent journeys. Through them, he was, for example, first able to concern himself with Mediterranean light, which provided new impulses for his paintings. His art became more personal, moving away from a strictly Impressionist style.

Above all, however, Monet seems to have increasingly turned painting itself into the theme of his paintings. His comment, as passed down by his stepson Jean Hoschedé, that, for him, the motif was of secondary importance to what happened between him and the motif, should be seen in this light. Monet’s reflections on paintings should be interpreted in two ways. The repetition of his motifs through reflections, which reach their zenith and conclusion in his paintings of the reflections in his water-lily ponds, can also be seen as a continuous reflecting on the potential of painting, which is conveyed through the representation and repetition of a motif on a canvas.

Monet’s representations of shade are another way in which he represented the potential of painting. They are both the imitation and the reverse side of the motif, and their abstract form gives the painting a structure that seems to question the mere copying of the motif. This led to the situation in which Wassily Kandinsky, on the occasion of his famous encounter with Monet’s painting of a haystack seen against the light (Kunsthaus Zurich and in the exhibition), did not recognize the subject for what it was: the painting itself had taken on far greater meaning that the representation of a traditional motif.

Monet’s Pictorial Worlds
The exhibition is a journey through Monet’s pictorial worlds. It is arranged according to different themes. The large first room in the exhibition is devoted to Monet’s numerous and diverse representations of the River Seine. One of the most notable exhibits is his rarely shown portrait of his partner and subsequent wife Alice Hoschedé, sitting in the garden in Vetheuil directly on the Seine.

The next room celebrates Monet’s representation of trees: a subtle tribute to Ernst Beyeler, who devoted an entire exhibition to the theme of trees in 1998. Inspired by colored Japanese woodcuts, Monet repeatedly returned to the motif of trees in different lights, their form, and the shade they cast. Trees often give his paintings a geometric structure, as is particularly obvious in his series.

The luminous colors of the Mediterranean are conveyed by a group of canvases Monet painted in the 1880s. In a letter written at that time, he spoke of the “fairytale light” he had discovered in the South.

In 1886 Monet wrote to Alice Hoschedé that he was “crazy about the sea”. A large section of the exhibition is devoted to the coasts of Normandy and the island Belle-Île as well as to the ever-changing light by the sea. It includes a fascinating sequence of different views of a customs official’s cottage on a cliff that lies in brilliant sunlight at times and in the shade at others. On closer examination, the shade seems to have been created out of myriad colors.

Monet’s paintings of early-morning views of the Seine radiate contemplative peace: the painted motif is repeated as a painted reflection in such a way that the distinction between painted reality and its painted reflection seems to disappear in the rising mist. The entire motif is repeated as a reflection. There is no longer any clear-cut differentiation between the top and bottom parts of the painting, which could equally well be hung upside down. In other words, the convention about how paintings ought to be viewed is abandoned and viewers are left to make their own decision. It is as if Monet sought to convey the constant flux (panta rhei) that is such a fundamental characteristic of nature, capturing not only the way light changes from night to day but also the constant merging of two water courses.

Monet loved London. He sought refuge in the city during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As a successful and already well known painter, he went back there at the turn of the century, painting famous views of Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridge as well as of the Houses of Parliament in different lights, particularly in the fog, which turns all forms into mysterious silhouettes. A tribute not only Monet’s famous hero/forerunner William Turner, but also to the world power of Great Britain with its Parliament and the bridges it built through trade.

Monet’s late work consists almost exclusively of paintings of his garden and the reflections in his waterlily ponds, of which the Beyeler Collection owns some outstanding examples. The exhibition’s last room contains a selection of paintings of Monet’s garden in Giverny.

Website : Fondation Beyeler

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10484 - 20170507 - Serralves Museum presents "Philippe Parreno: A Time Coloured Space" - Porto - 04.02.2017-07.05.2017

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Philippe Parreno, Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier. Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl, 2014. 56 neon, 20 transformers, 32 light bulbs, 8 sound transducers, sound amplifiers, microphones, computer, disklavier piano, set of fish balloons. Col. Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Acquisition in 2015. Photo: © Andrea Rossetti. Installation views in Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin.

 

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents A Time Coloured Space, a major exhibition by French artist Philippe Parreno, his first in Portugal. Curated by the Director of the museum, Suzanne Cotter, the exhibition spans thirteen rooms, across two floors, occupying the museum's entire building.

The exhibition is structured on the mathematical model of the fugue, and conceived around the idea of the counterpoint, or ritournelle, a principle, whereby a particular passage is repeated at regular interludes within a musical arrangement to create compositional meaning. Governed by a similar method, A Time Coloured Space is determined not by its ‘objects’, but by the regularity and rhythm of their appearance, featuring some of Parreno’s most emblematic work dating back to the 1990s.

Throughout his practice, Parreno has redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent ‘object’ and a medium in its own right, rather than as a collection of individual works. To this end, he conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space in which a series of events unfold. Placed within the philosophical framework of Giles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), each of the exhibition’s thirteen rooms is a recurrence of the last, differentiated only by variations in color and arrangement. By introducing these recurring variables, Parreno takes the Ritournelle principle beyond its musical understanding to what Deleuze described as ‘a repetition of the different’. As the past and the future are inscribed into the present, the exhibition becomes an automaton, a factory in which to engineer these variables, and a form of imitation becomes a new invention.

Among the works included are Parreno’s Speech Bubbles (1997 and ongoing), helium-filled balloons in the shape of cartoon speech bubbles. Empty of words, they congregate and hover on the ceiling of the space they inhabit. Also returning is Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and then December it’s Christmas (2008-2016), an ongoing series of aluminium sculptures cast as snow-covered Christmas trees.

More than 180 of Parreno’s ink drawings, created between 2012 and 2015, will also be on display. The drawings form the basis of the filmic animation: With a Rhythmic Instinction to be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life (2016), a perpetual Danse Macabre controlled by an organic cellular system that will be projected in the Serralves Auditorium as a Cinéma en Permanence.

A series of light objects: AC/DC snakes and Happy Ending Lamps will also punctuate the space.

A recent addition to the Serralves Museum’s permanent collection, Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl (2014), serves as the exhibition’s master of ceremonies.

 

 

Website : Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10483 - 20170402 - Kunstverein München presents exhibition of works by Karel Martens - München - 04.02.2017-02.04.2017

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Karel Martens, Untitled, 2016. Letterpress monoprint on found card, 8 x 5 inches. Courtesy the artist and P!

 

Karel Martens has ten hands for every finger. He’s an artist, a typographer, a graphic designer, a bookmaker, and an educator. He co-founded a school. He’s synonymous with overprinting. He’s a method.

That said, Motion is appropriately dexterous and tentacular – comprising an experiential exhibition of Martens’ work within a staircase and three rooms, extending outwards through a series of discursive events in Munich, Amsterdam, Paris, Vilnius, and New York, as well as a publication (copublished with Roma Publications, Amsterdam). Altogether, Motion affords a compound view on an expansive practice, and chart a road map. Yet while all of that spans over 50 years of Martens inter-disciplinary activity, Motion remains grounded firmly in the present (and future).

Of course, the exhibition includes some representative works – overprinted mono-prints, paper reliefs, videos, modular wallpapers, kinetic sculptures, a very early optical work. Consider all of that a contextual substrate that corroborates Marten’s responsive and systematic approach to color, format, type, and material. And his immense influence as an educator is also being centrally positioned within the exhibition, with a selection of publications by his former students displayed on tables Martens designed for the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, NL (the school he co-founded in 1998). Consider all of that a demonstrative charting of his influence. Yet the primary focus is on Martens’ most recent work, with several new commissions – woven textiles, interactive video projections, a massive abstract clock enabled with GPS. These are being produced for the exhibition, while existing works are being specially reconfigured. It is immersive – layered with color inversions over entire spaces, multiplied by real-time mirroring, and attuned with technique, systematic seriality, conceptual operations, and a multi-functional zone.

A tendency to reconfigure also extends to the ambitious new publication Martens is producing with Julie Peeters, which is available. Not for resale – a video comprising approximately 500 images – is being translated into a book form. The image sequences will follow the video’s pacing. Martens is also punctuating the images with new work and unrealized proposals. And all of it, thoroughly indexed.

The publication also fuels an array of satellite events, which will begin in Munich and culminate in New York. Each event is being specifically tailored to the conditions of each venue, and to different aspects of Martens’ practice – from Martens’ influence as an educator (4 February, Kunstverein München, Munich) to the reference material Martens collects and generates around his work (9 February, San Serriffe, the Rietveld Library, Amsterdam), from the unrealized proposals Martens injected into his new publication (17 February, Section 7, Paris) to Martens’ accounting of past and most recent work (24 March, CAC Reading Room, Vilnius). All of this will culminate, openly, in a final event through which the entire Motion project may be discussed and extended, simultaneously (7 April, P!, New York).

In other words, Motion is not intended to display Martens’ practice, but instead to demonstrate his method.

Karel Martens (b. 1939, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is an artist, educator, and graphic designer. He finished as a student at the Arnhem School of Art in 1961. Since then he has worked as an artist and as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Today he is recognized as one of the most influential practitioners in graphic design. Alongside this, he has always made free (non-commissioned) graphic and three-dimensional artwork. He has exhibited his work internationally, published widely, regularly receives major commissions, and has won numerous awards.

 

 

Website : Kunstverein München

 

Source : Artdaily

 

 

10482 - 20170226 - Artworks made by women's groups go on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art - Edinburgh - 04.02.2017-26.02.2017

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Catherine Yarrow, Head with Insect, 1935. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © Catherine Yarrow Estate.

 

A selection of artworks and texts created by members of four women’s groups based in Edinburgh and Glasgow will be unveiled in a new display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this week. Call & Response: Women in Surrealism, which has been organised in partnership with the Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), will present responses to the work of women artists - such as the famous American photographer Lee Miller and the British artist Eileen Agar - who were at the heart of the Surrealist art movement in the twentieth century, and whose own works from the SNGMA Archive will be displayed alongside that of the women’s groups and of contemporary artist Stephanie Mann.

In a series of workshops held between August and December 2016, members of the groups Sikh Sanjog, Shakti Women’s Aid, Seeing Things and Bonnie Fechters looked at works in the SNGMA’s world-renowned archive of Surrealist and Dada material before going on to write and create artworks of their own, using a range of techniques favoured by the Surrealists.

Surrealism was one of the most radical movements of the twentieth century, which challenged conventions through the exploration of the subconscious mind, the world of dreams and the laws of chance. Emerging from the chaotic creativity of Dada (itself a powerful rejection of traditional values triggered by the horrors of the First World War) its influence on our wider culture remains potent almost a century after it first appeared in Paris in the 1920s.

Although male Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte are well known today, many hugely influential women artists, who were a vital part of the movement’s activities, are frequently overlooked. The Surreal Encounters exhibition held at the SNGMA in summer 2016 provided the opportunity to look at these artists and the project proceeded from discussions around works in the show.

Facilitated by Edinburgh-based artist Stephanie Mann, the Call and Response workshops examined the lives of Lee Miller (1907-1977), Eileen Agar (1899-1991), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Grace Pailthorpe (1883-1971), Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Valentine Penrose (1898-1978) through their letters, photographs, books and other objects relating to them which are held in the archive.

Surrealism drew upon theories of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud - specifically the idea that our memories and most basic instincts are stored in a layer of the human mind he called the unconscious - and sought to explore these through writing and art. Participants in the Call and Response workshops were encouraged to create artworks using a range of Surrealist techniques, among them ‘decalcomania’. This involves pouring ink or paint onto the surface of a piece of paper, pressing onto another sheet, and then using the resulting patterns to suggest unexpected objects, figures or landscapes.

Responses were also encouraged through automatic writing and word games, which are designed to capture the voice ‘unedited’ by conscious thought. The Surrealists relied on these techniques as ways of tapping into our intuitive feelings about the world around us, our hidden emotions and life experiences.

Working with GWL allowed the Gallery to open up the collection and archive to women who were not already familiar with the Gallery’s collection and archive. All works made during the workshops as well as related documentation will enter the Gallery’s archive when the display closes.

The project is part of the Gallery’s Public Engagement Programme and follows on from a collaboration with GWL in 2015-16 on a project around then then current exhibition: Modern Scottish Women: Painter and Sculptors 1885-1965.

Sikh Sanjog seeks to inspire and empower Sikh and other Minority Ethnic women to advance their own life opportunities, through the building of skills, confidence and social inclusion. Shakti Women’s Aid provides support to black minority ethnic (BME) women, children and young people who are experiencing, or who have experienced, domestic abuse. Seeing Things is designed to give women the opportunity to explore cultural events across Glasgow, such as (but not limited to) art, music, theatre or comedy, together with friendly and like-minded women. Bonnie Fechters is an informal group focussed on women’s issues, which organises events to raise funds for women’s causes worldwide, visits to Book Festival and Fringe events and the annual event 'Harpies, Fechters and Quines' event, run in conjunction with City of Edinburgh Library and supported by Glasgow Women’s Library.

Morag Smith, National Lifelong Learning Co-ordinator at Glasgow Women’s Library commented: “One of the Women’s Library’s most important aims is to enable women from different backgrounds to access art and cultural activities. Archives and museums can be intimidating places for many people, but through this collaborative project, the team at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art have opened up the treasures of the Gallery’s archive to a new audience and empowered the women involved to take on a new journey of discovery. We are delighted to have been involved.”

Kirstie Meehan, Archivist at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, added: “We’re delighted to open up the Archive in this way, and encourage creative responses to the letters, photographs and publications in the Gallery’s collection. ‘Call and Response’ shows how engaged the workshop participants were with the project, creating artworks and writings in a truly Surrealist vein. This innovative collaboration with Glasgow Women’s Library demonstrated the power of the archive as a living resource, and the enduring appeal of Surrealism for a contemporary generation.”

 

 

Website : Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

  

Source : Artdaily

 

10481 - 20170514 - KW Institute for Contemporary Art reopens with a series of exhibitions reflecting on the work of Ian Wilson - Berlin - 20.01.2017-14.05.2017

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Hanne Lippard, Flesh, 2016, Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina.

 

After the first period of renovation, KW Institute for Contemporary Art announced the inauguration of its new artistic program under the directorship of Krist Gruijthuijsen and the celebration of its 25th anniversary.

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KW reopens with a series of exhibitions reflecting on the work of South African artist Ian Wilson. Through three corresponding solo presentations by Hanne Lippard, Adam Pendleton, and Paul Elliman, Ian Wilson’s influential practice is revisited as a framework for exploring the roles of language and communication and the broader significance of interpersonal interaction.

Dialogue lies at the core of Ian Wilson’s practice. Focusing on spoken language as an art form, he initially described his work as “oral communication” and later as “discussion”. Language replaces traditional representation as the quintessential vehicle for communication and knowledge. Wilson’s interest in the concentrated moment in which ideas emerge and are formulated in language is a guiding framework for the season. KW views the artist’s oeuvre as a reflection of its own mission: to explore relationships between the viewer and the viewed—or discussed—and the topical urgency of this interaction. To highlight the importance of Wilson’s practice, artists have been invited to concentrate on different aspects of his body of work and either incorporate them in their exhibitions or take them as inspiration for the production of new work.

Norwegian artist Hanne Lippard kicks off the new program with a visually pared down yet spectacular new work entitled Flesh that takes its inspiration from Wilson’s Statements and Circle Works. The immersive installation takes up the entire hall on the ground floor of the KW building and confronts the visitor with a singular element—a spiral staircase leading to a platform. From here the artist’s voice resounds, completely encompassing the audience and opening up a world in which our experience of language as pure voice is explored, shaped, and broadened. Over the past few years, Lippard has focused on the production of language solely through the use of the voice. In her text-based works she employs daily speech and transforms the meaning of words through structural and syntactical repetition.

American artist Adam Pendleton’s exhibition titled shot him in the face occupies the entire floor of KW with one large-scale gesture—a wall that diagonally cuts across the exhibition space. The shape of the wall resembles that of a billboard. The first sentence from the poem Albany by poet Ron Silliman functions as the exhibition’s point of departure. Pendleton appropriates the opening words of the text—“If the function of writing is to ‘express the world’”— and transforms it into monumental work spanning the entirety of the constructed wall. Layers upon layers of Pendleton’s works are also “pasted” onto the wall. These various arrangements, including posters, framed collages, and sculptural objects based on Pendleton’s extensive archival material, incorporate images from various sources such as art history, African independence movements, display systems, poetry, and French cinema—all kept within a consistently black-and-white aesthetic. As a counterpoint to Pendleton’s work, the exhibition includes one of Ian Wilson’s monochromatic paintings, which were created with the conceptual aim of producing distilled, non-referential objects without metaphoric content.

British artist Paul Elliman has consistently engaged with the production and performance of language as a material component of the socially constructed environment. In a world where objects and people are equally subject to the force fields of mass production, Elliman explores the range of human expression as kind of typography. His exhibition As you said includes various works, both existing and new, that test the boundaries of our communication through letter-like objects, language-like vocal sounds, actions, and movements of the body. Whether concealed by clothing or techniques of mimicry, our gestures and the desire for language are always within easy reach of the violently communicative raw material of the city itself. As you said is structured around a set of vitrines devised by Ian Wilson, which Elliman considers as sculptures, objects of display, and sites for discourse. Alongside these vitrines Elliman presents two new bodies of work, one produced in collaboration with the dancer Elena Giannotti.

The constellation of exhibitions presented at KW is consecutively staggered across the different floors of the building. The format allows the exhibitions to be seen in unison but also as separate entities that expand upon each other, framing and interacting with each other through the work of Ian Wilson and through commonly shared sensibilities and concerns. Punctuating the program will be the series Pause, envisioned as a platform for bridging relationships between the past, present, and future. Individual artworks will be presented for a short period of time, up to three times a year. Anthony McCall’s iconic light work Line Describing A Cone (1971) is the first in the series, which is presented in immediate dialogue with Wilson’s circle and disc works from the late 1960s.

In the spirit of Wilson’s practice, an ambitious program of commissioned performances, concerts, lectures, and screenings titled The Weekends will take place in and around KW and throughout the city, with contributions by Nils Bech, CAConrad, Guy de Cointet, Paul Elliman, Coco Fusco, Will Holder, Germaine Kruip, Hanne Lippard, Adam Pendleton, Michael Portnoy, Trisha Brown Dance Company, and Miet Warlop.

The aim of the inaugural exhibition season is to create a multifaceted program that understands dialogue and conversation as profoundly political acts that are the necessary basis for all creative activities and therefore an inherent part of exhibition making. The open-endedness and collaborative nature of dialogue renders an intrinsically inclusionary strategy, allowing for a plurality of voices and narratives to unfold. The notion of language will be continuously explored throughout the artistic program in order to emphasize the institution’s goal of experimenting with communication and exchange—no longer as the stable common grounds of a traditional value system but rather as the articulation of many possible parallel narratives. Wilson’s emphasis on dialogue, experimental uses of language, and the collective experience of art through spoken exchange between artists and audiences, in Berlin and beyond, is a significant aspect of the future program of KW, even beyond this season.

In parallel with its exhibition program, KW is continuing to push beyond the confines of its physical building through commissions, events, and its education program. Commissions take various forms: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Chemo) (1991), a curtain made of beads at the entrance into the exhibition spaces, invokes a generic form of hospitality that corresponds with Philippe Van Snick’s recent intervention Dag/Nacht (1984–ongoing) at the entrance gate but also a new sound commission by Paul Elliman and the reinstatement of the KW Garden by atelier le balto. In addition, the legendary Pogo Bar is being re-established at KW with a new design by American artist and designer Robert Wilhite. It presents weekly, one-night-only events conducted by artists and creative individuals. Bob’s Pogo Bar will open to the public on January 19, 2017 with a performance by the Netherlands-based artist Nora Turato. Bob’s Pogo Bar follows the format of Bob’s Your Uncle, a bar that was hosted by the Kunstverein Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016.

The new series titled A year with offers time for detailed investigations into design and publishing practices in the arts, developed over the course of a year. For 2017, British typographer Will Holder investigates his practice by inviting guests to collaborate and use his archive of publications from the past two decades as a starting point. Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder follows the exhibition Sorry! NO We Don’t Do REQUESTS, which was presented at Kunstverein Amsterdam in the fall of 2016. Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder will commence on Saturday, January 21, 2017 with the launch of a new issue of Holder’s serial publication F.R.DAVID coedited with Riet Wijnen and with KW as its new copublisher.

 

 

Website : KW Institute for Contemporary Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10480 - 20170501 - The Museum Tinguely presents first major monographic exhibition of British artist Stephen Cripps - Basel - 27.01.2017-01.05.2017

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Stephen Cripps, untitled, (Photo Copier), 1978. Collage with ink, pencil, charcoal, glue and black particles on paper, 30 x 42 cm © The family of Stephen Cripps/Leeds Museums and Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive.

 

The Museum Tinguely is to show the first major monographic exhibition of British artist Stephen Cripps (1952–1982).

Stephen Cripps. Performing Machines assembles over 200 works by this exceptional artist, including several films, sound works, drawings and collages that together afford a fascinating insight into his unusual, lavishly appointed conceptual world. Cripps’ interest in kinetic sculpture and machines, in fireworks and the poetic potential of destruction as well as in new forms of music resulted in a highly experimental artistic praxis, especially in performative realms. His performances were radical transgressions that owing to the risks they posed for both audiences and the environment would be unthinkable today. Indeed, many of his ideas have survived only as drawings. Until his untimely death in 1982, Cripps’ main focus was on experiments with sound. The Museum Tinguely’s presentation of his cross-media output in an exhibition that is to run from 27 January to 1 May 2017 is a real rediscovery.

Life and Works
Cripps’ artistic praxis eludes categorization, just as he himself intended. He was not the kind of artist to be pinned down to any one medium. In the course of his all too brief career, starting with his training at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham from 1970 to 1974 right up to his premature death in 1982, he built machines and interactive installations as well as staging pyrotechnic performances. He devised kinetic, mechanical sculptures; he performed; he created sound works; he experimented with film; and last, but definitely not least, he produced both collages and drawings. In many of his works he combined these practices. The fleeting, the provisional, and the experimental are all key components of his art. He was thus very much a part of the 1960s project to liberate the arts.

Alone the scope of his artistic ventures is extraordinary, as evidenced by his contemporary rendering of the garden as a place of rest and relaxation in environments punctuated by the din of lawnmowers and barking dogs. With the aid of a helicopter rotor he built a machine that attacked the gallery housing it even as the machine itself broke apart. Cripps also realized installations that called on visitors to be proactive, as in his Shooting Gallery, where they were invited to shoot a cymbal, a xylophone and other sound producing objects with a prepared pistol. To judge by eyewitness accounts, his pyrotechnic performances were multisensory experiences that without a doubt overstepped boundaries, posing a genuine risk not just for the gallery premises but also for the spectators’ life and limb. Cripps worked in places like Butler’s Wharf and the Acme Gallery, which provided space for radical interventions of this kind and generated a climate of artistic collaboration and intense cross-fertilization. Cripps’ close association with Acme meant that following his death, his drawings, notebooks, photographs and letters were passed to them for safekeeping. In 1990, Acme published a monograph ‘Stephen Cripps: Pyrotechnic Sculptor’ and in 2012 passed on Stephen’s work to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Cripps and Tinguely
Jean Tinguely’s mechanical sculptures and his performances with self-destructing works of art, such as his Homage to New York (1960), were an important source of inspiration for Cripps. Jean Tinguely was even the subject of his degree thesis at art college. There are indeed a number of parallels between Cripps’ works and those of the Swiss artist he so admired. The integration of chance and destruction and the influence of the elements as an aesthetic concept are among the fundamental themes they both pursued.

Exhibition
Cripps’ works were extremely ephemeral and for the most part they no longer exist. Made of fire and light, noise and smoke, they often volatilized at the instant of their realization. Not even the machines ever had the character of an immutable object; they were instead adapted to the prevailing circumstances, and sometimes even rebuilt.

Through its combination of works on paper, audio material, film and documentary media, the exhibition sets out to showcase the hybrid quality of Cripps’ transmedia, multisensory, performative praxis. Drawings and sound recordings, the visual and the acoustic, thus complement each other in a feast for both eyes and ears.

While avoiding strict categorization, the show groups the works thematically, leaving plenty of scope for correlations and associations. The exhibition STEPHEN CRIPPS. PERFORMING MACHINES turns the spotlight on the transmedia character and multisensory quality of Cripps’ oeuvre, even through its focus on the drawings.

The Museum Tinguely will also present some hitherto unknown sound works by Cripps – an artist with a predilection for ‘collecting’ noises ranging from jet engines to lawnmowers. For him, it was all raw material which, inserted in the right place at the right time, supplies a backdrop of sound for his conceptual machine worlds. The cacophonous overlapping generated in this way is fully congruent with the underlying character of Cripps’ works – and with the noisy, at times unbearable, din of the modern, industrial world that we inhabit and that was frequently the starting point for his art.

 

 

Website : Museum Tinguely 

 

Source : Artdaily

 

 

10479 - 20170417 - Jonas Burgert's first solo show in Italy at MAMbo - Bologna - 26.01.2017-17.04.2017

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Jonas Burgert, Stückfrass, 2013. Oil on canvas, 240 x 300 cm. Courtesy: the Artist. Photo: Lepkowski Studios.

 

Jonas Burgert’s first solo show in Italy, Lotsucht / Scandagliodipendenza, opened at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna on 26 January. Curated by Laura Carlini Fanfogna, the exhibition fills the vast space of the Sala delle Ciminiere with around 40 mostly large-format paintings created by the German artist over the last decade.

A master of imaginative figurative painting, with each brush stroke Burgert creates carefully constructed scenes filled with complexity. His works depict his vision of the theatre that is human existence, examining the instinctive need for humans to give sense, direction and purpose to their lives. This exploration encompasses realms of reason, imagination and desire, generating monumental landscapes crowded with fantastic figures of different proportions: monkeys and zebras, skeletons and harlequins, Amazons and children.

These dynamic pictorial dramas generate a strong sense of unease in the viewer: the subjects depicted wear masks and costumes, walls and floors split open to reveal piles of bodies or liquids, while an inexplicable darkness looms everywhere.

Referenced in the exhibition’s title, the plumb line is a symbol of inner balance and a motif that appears frequently in Burgert’s paintings. Compulsively plumbing our reality is something of an obsession for the artist. He chooses to examine existential questions with his paintings and does not shy from venturing into dark corners to explore our emotions, obsessions and demons. The viewer is confronted with a chaotic world that echoes the confusion and anxiety of current events and leaves them without any grounding. His aim is to push at the limits of personal knowledge in order to strengthen our reasons for being in the here and now and restore one’s centre of gravity.

The works that are on display at MAMbo consist of both monumental canvases which provide space for sprawling narratives of compositional complexity and smaller paintings which focus on the study of individual subjects, portraits that push the figures portrayed into the foreground, as if under a microscope.

The exhibition is part of the fifth edition of ART CITY Bologna, an institutional program of exhibitions, events and cultural initiatives developed jointly by the City of Bologna and BolognaFiere. During Arte Fiera, it offers new opportunities to discover and learn about artistic heritage through a dialogue with contemporary art.

Lotsucht / Scandagliodipendenza is accompanied by a detailed catalogue published by Edizioni MAMbo featuring critical texts and images of all the works in the exhibition, as well as a selection of other works by the artist.

Jonas Burgert was born in 1969 in Berlin, where he lives and works. His principal solo exhibitions include: Jonas Burgert, STÜCK HIRN BLIND at Blain|Southern in London (2014); Schutt und Futter at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover (2013), Gift gegen Zeit / Poison Against Time, at Blain|Southern in Berlin (2012); Jonas Burgert Lebendversuch, at the Kunsthalle in Krems and at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen (2011 and 2010); Zweiter Tag Nichts at the MCA in Denver, Promenade Space (2008)

 

 

Website : MAMbo

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10478 - 20170430 - Musée de l’Elysée presents first exhibition to focus on mountain photography - Lausanne - 25.01.2017-30.04.2017

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John Jullien, Crossing the Sea of Ice, circa 1880 © Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne.

 

The exhibition Vertical No Limit. Mountain Photography, the first of its kind, is based on the premise that photography invented the mountain landscape by revealing it to the eyes of the world. Photography is heir to a certain idea of the mountains and of the sublime, closely linked to romanticism. Until the 19th century, the mountain was considered to be “God’s Country”, a cursed and surreal place, inaccessible to man. The pioneers of mountain photography made it possible to discover summits that had not yet been conquered and to transform the mountain into landscapes.

Spotlight on the museum’s collections
With almost 300 prints on view, three quarters of which are from the Musée de l’Elysée’s collections, the museum gives pride of place to images from every period, including many contemporary works. Among the works exhibited here, there are works by Gabriel Lippmann, Francis Frith, Adolphe Braun, Jules Beck, William Donkin, Emile Gos and René Burri, as well as by contemporary photograpers such as Peter Knapp, Balthasar Burkhard, Matthieu Gafsou, Pierre Vallet, Jacques Pugin, Maurice Schobinger and Iris Hutegger.

Photographic explorations
The exhibition is organized around four approaches on the theme of mountain photography:

• Scientific photography with its many prints of glaciers and that made the study of rocks and the visual documentation of geology possible;

• Travel photography, which facilitated the sale of hundreds of prints to tourists as of the 1860s;

• Mountaineering photography, revealing inaccessible mountain landscapes, and finally;

• Fine-art photography. These four approaches come together as the visitor moves through the exhibition: “The farther we are removed from the circumstances in which a photograph was taken, the more differently we interpret it”, explains Daniel Girardin.

Formal strategies and techniques used
The exhibition illustrates the formal strategies used by photographers to present the mountain: frontality, verticality, horizontality, aerial views and distance. It shows the forms imposed by the mountain such as the cone, as well as the details of the matter of which it is composed. It also highlights the technical processes used by photographers: the large formats of the 19th century, panoramas and the very big digital formats used today.

Curator: Daniel Girardin, with the assistance of Emilie Delcambre Hirsch and Maéva Besse

 

 

Website : Musée de l’Elysée

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10477 - 20170326 - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome hosts a solo show by Rafael Y. Herman - Rome - 25.01.2017-26.03.2017

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Rafael Y. Herman, felix taeda II. 180 x 270cm / 71 x 106 inches.

 

From 25 January to 26 March 2017 MACRO – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome – hosts a solo show by Rafael Y. Herman entitled The Night Illuminates the Night, curated by Giorgia Calò and Stefano Rabolli Pansera.

The exhibition at MACRO Testaccio takes the form of a large environmental installation in which the works emerge from the darkness of the space like revelations. The poetics of Rafael Y. Herman develops in this dialectic between darkness and light. The artist’s gaze reveals a new approach to reality born and structured in darkness.

The Night Illuminates the Night features photographic work that began in 2010 and was completed in 2015. During this period Herman established a dialogue with the great masters of the western tradition who have depicted the Holy Land across the centuries without ever having been there, relying on biblical and literary sources. Herman traces back through this tradition using his own method: nocturnal photography, without electronic aids or digital manipulation, showing only what is visible to the naked eye. Like the great masters of the past, operating in the darkness of the night Herman puts himself in the condition of not being able to see the landscape, even in these places where he was born and raised. The intentional blindness enables the artist to gain access to reality in a new way, through nocturnal photographs and the developing of the film in the darkroom.

Rafael Y. Herman thus produces a “recreated” reality, purged of any subjective preconceptions, offering the viewer landscapes that exist only in the works themselves. He develops his nocturnal research through the discovery of three different environments: the Forest of Galilee, the fields of the Judaean Mountains, and the Mediterranean Sea. His images encourage us to reflect on the invisible or – as the artist calls it – the “unseen”; on the difference that unfolds between what is real and what is only perceived. The resulting unnatural hues and evanescent forms are extraordinary, seeming to emerge from a place and time where colors are not real, time is stretched and images become obscure or – perhaps dazzling.

Rafael Y. Herman was born in 1974 in Be’er Sheva, an ancient city in the Negev Desert in Israel. The winner of the Prague Photosphere Award in 2015, Herman began studying classical music at the age of six, becoming a percussionist in Philharmonic orchestras, ensembles and rock bands. Following a long stay in New York City, he studied at the School of Economics and Management at the University of Tel Aviv. Throughout his studies, he supported himself financially by providing consulting services to assess collections and jewelry, travelling to Kenya and Tanzania. Graduating in 2000, he moved to Latin America, taking a long research trip in seven countries: photographing Cuban musicians, the Carnival of Bahia and the Zapatistas in Mexico, working with Amnesty International in Paraguay, then studying painting in Mexico City and Chile and becoming part of an artists’ commune. This visual apprenticeship combines vision, metropolitan experience and encounters with uncontaminated nature. In 2003, Herman moved to Milan, showing the project “Bereshit-Genesis” at Palazzo Reale, a project created with a method of his own devising: nocturnal photography without electronic aids or digital manipulation, revealing what cannot normally be seen by the naked eye. This exhibition launched Herman into the international art scene. In 2012, Herman’s portrait of John Chamberlain was chosen by the Guggenheim Museum of N.Y. for the inside cover of Chamberlain’s book, “Choices.” In 2013, he was invited by TED to speak on his artistic language, a talk he titled “Alternative Reality.” His recent works address two main themes: metaphysical curiosity and the tale of what lies beyond, and the investigation of light as a physical element and protagonist of space-time. Significant public and private collections have acquired numerous works by Herman, including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Salsali Private Museum of Dubai. Currently living and working in Paris, he is a resident artist of La Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris for the second time.

 

 

Website : MACRO

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10476 - 20170507 - Hallen Haarlem opens new solo exhibitions: Kasper Bosmans, Richard Tuttle and Evelyn Taocheng Wang - 21.01.2017-07.05.2017

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Kasper Bosmans, Installation view of the exhibition Motif (Oil and Silver), 2016, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles Courtesy the artist; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

 

From 21 January 2017, De Hallen Haarlem presents three solo exhibitions, by Kasper Bosmans, Richard Tuttle and Evelyn Taocheng Wang. Poetry, beauty and elegance seem to play an important role in their work – that is simultaneously drenched in history and permanent oscillations between ‘then’ and ‘now’, tradition and the present. Moreover, all three artists have a special interest in the expressive possibilities of specific materials, which endows their work with a great tactile sensitivity. 

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Tuttle focuses on the unforeseen expressiveness of small gestures and simple materials, in a formal idiom that could be termed poetic-minimalist. In the work of Wang and Bosmans, both a penchant for the decadent as well as the more crafty expression of folk art is discernible. They intuitively combine information from diverse historical, literary and scientific sources and cultural traditions into idiosyncratic narratives.

With the exhibitions of Bosmans and Wang, our departing curator Xander Karskens concludes his curatorship at the museum. In the past decade he has given the contemporary art programming of the museum a razor-sharp profile and international élan.

Solo exhibition Richard Tuttle
Location: De Hallen Haarlem and the Frans Hals Museum
The minimal, sensitive and sometimes sensual gesture: that is the trademark of American artist Richard Tuttle (Rahway, New Jersey, 1941). With a small number of ‘poor’ materials – from paper and cardboard to thread and textile – he creates sculptures and paintings that speak a thousand wordless languages. Those who know no better would call Tuttle a formalist. His oeuvre, however, is permeated with the fact that art can be ‘nourishment’ for one’s inner life. For the historical Vleeshal on the Grote Markt, Tuttle is developing a new, monumental ceiling sculpture that indirectly seems to respond to the history of seventeenthcentury Haarlem, the Dutch city where damask and silk of the highest quality were produced.

Solo exhibition Evelyn Taocheng Wang – Allegory of Transience
Location: De Hallen Haarlem and the Frans Hals Museum
The first solo museum exhibition of Chinese artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang (Chengdu, 1981) is based upon her fascination for Dutch painting from the Golden Age. During her childhood in China, this Dutch art functioned as a pars pro toto for the entire history of Western art. Wang connects personal memories and fantasies to larger themes, such as cultural and sexual identity and exoticism, and develops these in performances, paintings and videos. In this exhibition the artist reflects on the history of Haarlem as a place for innovation in seventeenth-century painting. She does this on the basis of the representation of the human body and clichés concerning the ‘male view’. A new video piece will situate this theme in several locations in and around Haarlem that are historically associated with gender categories – such as the courtyards for single women, the so-called Hofjes of which Haarlem still has twenty functioning.

Wang extends her domain into the Frans Hals Museum, where she casts an exoticizing glance at the Wadden Islands with the video series A Home Made Travel MV Series, as part of the ongoing series ‘New & Old’. On view from 25 March to 20 August 2017.

Solo exhibition Kasper Bosmans
Location: De Hallen Haarlem
The young Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (Lommel, 1990) creates mysteriously elegant objects and paintings in which he intuitively combines his interest in local folklore and sociohistorical anecdotes with the symbolic potential of materials. Like an artistic anthropologist, Bosmans combines stories and legends from different cultural and historical contexts in an associative manner. He blends these into speculative new mythologies for our demystified world. In this exhibition Bosmans responds to hidden histories in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem.

Website : De Hallen Haarlem

 

Source : Artdaily

 

10475 - 20170507 - EYE Filmmuseum presents the first ever exhibition by the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr - Amsterdam - 21.01.2017-07.05.2017

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Béla Tarr, Till the End of the World. EYE Filmmuseum. Photo: Studio Hans Wilschut.

 

EYE is presenting the first ever exhibition by the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (Pécs, Hungary, 1955). Béla Tarr is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential film authors of the past three decades. He is the master of the long take, the master of wonderfully shot, languid, melancholic films about the human condition. After making his international breakthrough with Damnation (1988), he enhanced his reputation and standing with the more than seven-hour Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Turin Horse (2011).

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Tarr considers The Turin Horse to be his very last film, the one in which he has said all he wanted to say as a filmmaker. For Tarr views filmmaking, not as a profession, but as an urgency. If there is no need to say something, better to remain silent. In recent years, however, Europe has been confronted by huge influxes of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and other countries in Africa. Tarr was moved by the way Europe – after an initially positive response – reacted by closing its borders. Europe simply stood by and watched as a humanitarian tragedy unfolded before its eyes. One of the first countries to close its borders was Béla Tarr’s native Hungary.

Anybody who is at all familiar with the work of Béla Tarr will not be surprised that these events provoked him into making a statement in this exhibition at EYE. Not so much a political statement, but more an appeal to humanity, to the people and politicians of Europe, to respect universal human values.

The work of Tarr reveals a sombre view of the world, in which people have little control of their own existence. The characters in his films feel abandoned by life. The films are chiefly set in dreary surroundings dominated by decay, disintegration and disinterest. An outsider sometimes appears, upsetting the established patterns within a small community. But Tarr also makes it clear that there can be no escape. Life remains as it is.

As one of the great masters of contemporary cinema, Tarr has carved out this bleak view of the world a body of work that is hypnotic in its sheer visual force. More than anyone else, he has the courage to trust the image. After Damnation (1988) he filmed in black and white only, or rather in shades of grey, using extreme long shots in which he lets the camera ‘explore’ spaces or landscapes very slowly. In combination with the almost total lack of a traditional story line, his style of filming reinforces the state of mind of his characters and the futility of existence. Even though Tarr has an unmistakeably sombre view of society, he shows great compassion for his characters by infusing the rain, the mud, the wind, the disintegration and the despair with a poetry that testi fies to his empathy.

For EYE, Tarr has made a filmic installation that is a cross between a film, a theatre decor and an installation. Tarr shares with us his anger with the help of ‘found footage’, images of war, fragments from his own films and props. The exhibition starts with a space that confronts visitors with the inhuman conditions from which migrants try to escape, and in which they find themselves after a long journey. War, bombings, poverty, hunger, oppression, fear and finally closed borders and local henchmen who strike fear into the migrants, rob them, and try to force them back. Visitors then enter the world of Tarr, populated by similar characters on the margins of society.

Tarr picked up his camera one more time specially for this exhibition and filmed an 11­minute shot as the ultimate epilogue to his work in film. In it, a small boy plays the accordion in an anonymous shopping centre. A look of dismay falls across the face of the boy, unsure as he is whether he can trust the world before him — a world that we viewers cannot see. With this, Tarr asks us: can we create a world we can believe in?

 

 

Website : EYE

 

Source : Artdaily

 

 

10474 - 20170423 - Exhibition turns back time to show how Western art became infused by Japanese aesthetics - Copenhagen 18.01.2017-23.04.2017

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Vilhelm Hammershøi, Tree Trunks. Arresødal near Frederiksværk, North Zealand, 1904. Oil on canva, 58,8 x 80,7 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst © SMK Photo.

 

Mount Fuji covered in snow, cherry trees in blossom and “The Great Wave”: in the second half of the nineteenth century a wave of enthusiasm for all things Japanese crashed across the Western world – a Japanomania. From January a major exhibition at The National Gallery of Denmark shows how Nordic art changed when Japan hit Europe.

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One of the best-known and best-loved paintings in the SMK collections is Laurits Andersen Ring’s The Artist’s Wife. L.A. Ring painted this declaration of love to Sigrid Kähler in 1897, and in addition to portraying the artist’s wife in a moment of bliss the work also exemplifies how Japanese influences left their mark on Nordic art: the garden may be Danish, but shown full of decorative blossoming trees with gnarled branches as in Japanese art, and the woman herself is captured in a Zen-like moment of calm.

With the exhibition Japanomania in the North 1875–1918 SMK turns back time to show how Western art became infused by Japanese aesthetics: asymmetrical compositions, decorative subject matter, meditative imagery and close observation of birds, fish, insects, branches and flowers. This is the first exhibition ever in Denmark to demonstrate the impact of Japonisme on Nordic art.

The influence from Japan was particularly strong on artists such as Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, van Gogh, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Anna Ancher, Albert Edelfelt and L.A. Ring, all of whom are featured in the exhibition.

Many of the artists who were swept up by the craze for all things Japanese also staged themselves and their families in silk kimonos, fans, parasols and paper lamps, using photographs to immortalise themselves as Japonistes – either at their studios or in their own homes, decorated in the Japanese style.

How Japan reached Europe
Japan had been largely isolated and inaccessible to the Western world from the 1630s until around 1853, when the country opened its borders to allow international trade. This gave Europe access to Japanese goods and art. The “new” objects were featured at a range of world’s fairs, and the term “Japonisme” was coined to describe the wave of art and applied art inspired by Japanese aesthetics.

With Denmark as the main conduit, Japonisme arrived slightly later in the Nordic countries than in e.g. France and England. Japanese woodcuts in particular became a major source of inspiration, offering artists a different way of looking at the nature that surrounded them.

The artist and art critic Karl Madsen (1855-1938) was a key figure in the introduction of Japanese art in the Nordic countries. In 1885 he published the book Japansk Malerkunst (Japanese Painting). Being the first book on the subject in a Nordic language, it became very influential among artists and collectors.

The exhibition is a collaborative effort created by the national galleries in Helsinki, Oslo and Copenhagen.

 

 

Website : National Gallery of Denmark

 

Source : Artdaily