28/11/98

Andy Warhol at Dia Center for the Arts, New York

Andy Warhol: Shadows
Dia Center for the Arts, New York
December 4, 1998 - June 13, 1999

Dia Center for the Arts presents an exhibition of Andy Warhol's Shadows (1978), a single work comprised of over 100 panels. The installation will be on view in Dia's 545 West 22nd Street exhibition gallery. 

Acquired directly from the artist in 1979, Shadows remains a centerpiece of Dia's collection. The scale and ambition of Shadows, while grand even for Warhol, is characteristic of the key works in Dia's collection. This presentation of Shadows will constitute the second exhibition in Dia's new facility at 545 West 22nd Street. The paintings will be hung contiguously around the 298 feet of the gallery's perimeter, sequenced according to the artist's original plan, and in conformity with his conception of the work, which he designated as "one painting with...parts."

Each panel, measuring 76 x 52 inches, is of acrylic paint, variously silkscreened and handpainted on canvas. The whole encompasses an extraordinary range of colors, from subtle and muted to brilliant neon, placing Shadows among Warhol's most remarkable and compelling works.

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to immigrant parents of Czechoslovakian descent. He studied design at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945 to 1949. After a successful and distinguished career as a commercial illustrator in New York in the 1950s, he began exhibiting his paintings with silkscreened Pop imagery in 1962. In 1963 he began making films. Thereafter, his work was shown widely. Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987.

Dia Center for the Arts
www.diacenter.org

16/11/98

Olympus D-400 Zoom Digital Camera

Olympus D-400 Zoom Digital Camera

Olympus Camedia D-400 Zoom Digital Camera
(c) Olympus America Inc.

Announced on November 2, 1998, the Olympus D-400 Zoom filmless digital camera continues the Olympus winning tradition, as it is two weeks old today yet has already received its first award. Designed as a camera first and foremost, the D-400 Zoom has an ergonomically designed point & shoot body and features popular in today’s film cameras. These include a 4 mode pop-up intelligent flash, through-the-lens auto focus and 3X optical zoom (35-105mm lens system), auto white balance with 5-step manual override, center weighted and spot metering systems for exposure metering with +/-2 step manual EV control in ½ step increments. This camera is also designed as a "digital" device with many high-tech features, including a 1.3 megapixel resolution (1280 x 960) CCD censor, 2X Digital Telephoto at any focal length, floppy disk compatibility to computer systems, and reusable SmartMedia cards. Finally, it is a consumer electronics device, with video connectivity to popular consumer products and direct printing to the Olympus Personal Photo Printer without the need of a computer.

Olympus America Inc., today unveiled the world’s largest 360° panorama photo created with a digital camera. Shot with the Olympus D-400 Zoom, the newly announced point & shoot digital camera, if placed on end, the photo would tower four stories high. It is 45 feet x 3 feet tall, but is mounted end to end so attendees can view it from within. The photo will be displayed during Comdex in Las Vegas at the Olympus Booth #1648 (LVCC).

The image was created on busy Fremont Street in Las Vegas. This street was chosen because it is an extremely challenging subject for any camera to handle (digital or film-based alike), with great variations in the type of lighting and thousands of bright incandescent and fluorescent lights. The photographer used the Olympus D-400 Zoom’s autofocus and adjusted the exposure, color temperature and white balance to create the perfect image. White balance and exposure are automatic, but may be overriden by the user.

18 photos were taken with a 30% overlap at 1280 x 960 resolution in uncompressed mode to allow for the greatest detail. The photos were then enlarged with raster image software from 3M and automatically stitched with professional panorama stitching technology from Enroute Imaging’s QuickStitch. The finished panorama photo was then printed on a large format HP3500 CP printer at 600 dpi on opaque vinyl media, again from 3M. The resulting image is both technically and artistically stunning.

"The results are spectacular!" said Walter Urie, Professional Photographer. "The Olympus D-400 Zoom performed unbelievably. I’ve used expensive and sophisticated cameras in my profession, but this filmless camera outperformed these cameras creating a breathtaking panorama."

"The Olympus camera is so powerful that it allowed us to stitch the world’s largest panorama with our QuickStitch software without retouching the images," said Paul Cha, Executive Vice President, Enroute Imaging. "This panorama photo surpasses any ever taken with a digital camera and is our most aggressive effort to date."

"The D-400 Zoom is the perfect camera for taking panorama photos since it has a special panorama mode built in," said Dave Veilleux, Director of Marketing Communications, Olympus America, Digital & Imaging Systems Group. "The exposure is automatically locked with the first image in a panoramic set so subsequent photos are consistently exposed – even in widely illuminated subjects. This results in a smooth, even panoramic photograph."

01/11/98

Fernando Botero at Marlborough Gallery, NYC - Drawings and Watercolors on Canvas

FERNANDO BOTERO
Drawings and Watercolors on Canvas
Marlborough Gallery, New York
November 4 - December 5, 1998

Marlborough Gallery presents an exhibition by the world renowned Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. Botero was born in Medellin, Colombia in 1932. He moved to Bogota in 1951 where he had his first one-man show at the age of nineteen. He presently lives and works in Paris, France and Pietrasanta, Italy.

The exhibition is comprised of approximately thirty large-scale drawings on canvas and includes portraits, still lifes, and scenes of family and city life. The drawings are executed in the mediums of charcoal, sanguine and watercolor and range in size from an average of about 50 by 40 inches to a monumental triptych measuring 7 by 14 feet entitled The Street. In this “tour de force” sanguine drawing, certainly one of the largest ever done by an artist, there are three arenas of action bound together and unified structurally by a giant slabbed sidewalk and an extended row of houses that form a contiguous frieze-like background in each panel. In the left panel a man wearing a suit and tie and bowler hat is having his shoes shined by a tiny figure in tattered striped pants and a baseball cap, while a beautiful woman passes by nonchalantly holding a parasol and each character seeming to be oblivious to one another. In the center panel, another woman whose voluptuous curves are shown off in her white polka dot dress and elegant necklace walks her little dog and is greeted by a gallant gentleman tipping his hat to her. In the right panel, a grand, aproned nanny is taking an enormous child out for a daily stroll in a baby carriage while in the lower corner a plump dog squats facing forward, alone in his awareness of the viewer, and in the upper corner a man’s small head appears looking out a window intrigued by all the goings on in The Street. In another drawing of striking fascination, Portrait of Velasquez, Fernando Botero carries on his long established tradition of creating in his inimitable style portraits of artists he admires. In this full length portrait Velasquez is seen as a courtly gentleman holding a brush in his right hand and a palette in his left. The drawing rendered in rich, deep charcoal conveys the elegance of the artist’s clothes and with touches of sanguine in the sashes of the artist’s pantaloons and in the cross emblazoned on the front of his waist coat, charm and delicacy are added to Fernando Botero’s monumental interpretation. All the drawings in this exhibition bear witness to an inventive imagination and a phenomenal draftsmanship both in the artist’s facility to draw any subject he chooses and in the wide range and variations of effects that his drawing skills can achieve. Fernando Botero’s drawings can be dramatic and monumental as in the case of many of the works in this show and also as in other drawings, graceful and expressive of the most refined lyricism. There is no question that, generally speaking, behind every great artist lies a great draftsman. This drawing exhibition demonstrates beyond any doubt the accomplished mastery of a great artist.

Fernando Botero’s work is distinctly his own and highly original. His art strikes a universal human chord that goes beyond regional tastes and temporal values and reaches a fundamental feeling in people all over the world. There is, perhaps, no other living artist who has so many admirers and collectors. His work is sought-after as much in the United States, South America, and Europe as it is in South Africa, Asia, and Australia. Asia Pacific Sculpture News attributed this phenomenon to “a vision of humanity that transcends the boundaries of cultural specificity, a vision of humanity that pulsates to the ancient universal rhythms of life.”

Fernando Botero has had innumerable one-man exhibitions. In the last five years alone he has had over thirty exhibitions worldwide devoted solely to his work. Among the most prominent museum exhibitions are the following: Forte de Belvedere, Florence, Italy (1991); Kunst Haus, Vienna, Austria (1992); Grand Palais, Paris, France (1992); Palais des Papes, Avignon, France; Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (1992-93); Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland (1994); The Chicago Cultural Center, Illinois (1994); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1994); Shinjuku Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (1995); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1996). He has had highly successful outdoor exhibitions of his monumental sculptures in Monaco, Paris, New York, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Fernando Botero’s work can be found in forty-six museums. Among the most prominent are: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany; Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; and The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Many books have been published on Botero’s work in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese.

A fully illustrated catalog of the Fernando Botero show is available.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.marlboroughgallery.com