Dorothea Tanning, Zabriskie Gallery, New York - Flower Paintings

Dorothea Tanning: Flower Paintings
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
November 23, 1999 - January 15, 2000

Zabriskie Gallery presents new oil paintings by DOROTHEA TANNING. The exhibition features works from the series Flowers, which are the subject of the recently published book, Another Language of Flowers.

In 1998, Dorothea Tanning painted twelve imaginary blooms on twelve canvases - one for each month. Zabriskie Gallery will highlight eight of these paintings. These large and brilliantly conceived canvases once again reveal the artist's life-long dedication to the romantic-erotic imagination. Art critic, Donald Kuspit wrote, "[Tanning] is heir to the surrealist magic, the keeper of its uncompromising flame. Still urgently in pursuit of the marvelous, she comes up with pictures that are so purely fantasy that they can be read as allegorical personifications of the unconscious itself."

The book, Another Language of Flowers, published in 1999 by George Braziller, Inc. Publishers, features the twelve paintings with poems by twelve contemporary poets who have each chosen a flower and given it its voice, creating a collaboration between artist and poets resulting in a new "language of flowers." The twelve poets are: James Merrill, Harry Mathews, Rosanna Warren, Debora Gregor, Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, J.D. McClatchy, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Stephen Yenser, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

DOROTHEA TANNING was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910. She has lived and worked in Chicago, Arizona, New York and for twenty-eight years in France. In addition to her work as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and designer of sets and costumes for ballet and theater in New York, London, and Paris, she has published essays, poems, and a memoir, Birthday. Since her return from France in 1979 she has lived in New York City where she continues to paint and write.

Dorothea Tanning's works are in numerous public collections including The Tate Gallery, London; The Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; the Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most recently, a number of Dorothea Tanning's works were seen in the exhibition, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, The Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com

Chris Ofili, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Chris Ofili
The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
28 November - 24 January 1999

An exhibition of the work of the Turner Prize-nominee Chris Ofili comes to the Whitworth Art Gallery. The show will open just days before the Turner Prize announcement on 1 December with Ofili returning to his home city, having shown his paintings in major exhibitions in Europe and the USA.

Chris Ofili's extraordinary paintings are inspired by a wide range of influences in art and popular culture, including jazz and hip hop, comic book heroes, glamour magazine models, 1970's afro hairdos and Blaxploitation movies. He has also studied the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston, George Condo, and William Blake, as well as an inspiring trip to Africa in the early 1990's. His own work featured most strongly in the recent Sensation exhibition of highlights from the Saatchi collection shown at the Royal Academy last year.

Despite the large-scale nature of the work, it is in the details that the artist finds real beauty, often in the most unexpected of materials. His dazzlingly innovative works often incorporate coloured resin, glitter, magazine cut-outs, phosphorescent paint, and, most famously, elephant dung with layer upon layer of surface and decoration.

The exhibition shows a selection of his work from the last five years and has been organised by Southampton City Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, London. The accompanying illustrated catalogue is the first publication dedicated to Chris Ofili's work and will be available at the exhibition.

THE WHITWORTH ART GALLERY
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER
www.whitworth.man.ac.uk

Yoko Ono Retrospective, Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Yoko Ono

Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000

Yoko Ono is one of the true pioneers of conceptual art and a prolific and influential innovator in forms ranging from installation to film. The full range of Ono’s originality and influence is apparent in “Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a major retrospective of Ono’s work at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Covering Ono’s career from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and installations as well as works in photography, video, and conceptual art. 

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono studied opera and classical music from an early age. As a girl, she moved with her family to the US, returning to Japan during World War II. She later studied music and philosophy in Japan and in the US. 

In the 1960s in New York she helped found the avant-garde Fluxus movement, a loose group of artists, musicians and poets whose works were inspired by the Dada movement and by Marcel Duchamp as well as by John Cage’s radical musical experiments. Key avant-garde figures with whom Ono collaborated included John Cage himself, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas. Throughout the 1960s, Ono traveled between New York, Tokyo, and London, exerting a major influence on the avant-garde art scene and pioneering conceptual art with works involving the participation of the viewer through mental or physical interaction. At her first exhibition in London in 1966, Ono met John Lennon, who would remain her partner and collaborator until his death in 1980. In 1967, her controversial film Bottoms, showing a series of naked buttocks, was promptly banned after its London premiere. Although ignored and even scorned by the art establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, Yoko Ono continued to work steadily. 

Many of her works reflect the influence of Zen Buddhism, to which she was exposed from an early age, while more recent work focuses on the complex interactions between women and male centers of authority. “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?” displays a range of Yoko Ono’s conceptual works, including: Ceiling Painting, which frames the word "yes” on a piece of paper; and The Wishing Tree, on which viewers are invited to write their wishes, echoing a tradition from Japanese temples. Half a Room, one of the most striking installations from Ono’s London period, displays the interior of a room whose objects and furniture have been cut in half and painted white. Portrait of Nora, a more recent work, presents the blurred, pixelized face of Ono herself and underscores her connection with the struggle for liberation from male dominance as experienced by Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll House. 

The exhibition also includes screenings of Bottoms and other early Ono films, including Fly, Rape, and rarely seen short “FluxFilms.” “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a touring exhibition of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in England, arrives in Jerusalem from Helsinki. Ono’s outdoor installation Ex-It, on display at the Museum since May, remains on view. 

James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states: “At the turn of the millennium the Israel Museum is honored to host one of the great creative artists of our time, who is only now receiving the recognition she deserves. We are grateful to Ms. Ono for sharing her vision with the people of Israel, and we hope that her presence in Jerusalem will promote the causes of peace and understanding to which she has dedicated much of her career.”

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

Ruppin Boulevard 11, Jerusalem

www.imj.org.il

Shiseido Support NYU Grey Art Gallery

Shiseido Support NYU Grey Art Gallery

New York University President L. Jay Oliva yesterday announced a $500,000 gift from Shiseido to endow the cultural and artistic activities of New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. The gift is the largest ever to support the Gallery’s public exhibitions and education programs since the initial endowment from Abby Weed Grey that established the Gallery.

According to Dr. Oliva, “The Shiseido endowment will immeasurably enhance our ability to make art an integral part of the university experience for our students and our community.”

Founded in 1975, the Grey Art Gallery is New York University’s fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park. In its exhibitions and publications, the Grey distinguishes itself by serving as a museum-laboratory, dedicated to exploring the historical, cultural, and social context of the full range of the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, architecture, decorative arts, video, film, and performance. The Gallery is also guardian of the New York University Art Collection, which today includes approximately 6,000 objects, primarily from the late 19th and 20th centuries. The collection has particular strengths in American painting from the 1940s to the present; in 20th century European prints; and in contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern Art, represented in the Ben and Abby Weed Grey Collection.

An international cosmetics firm based in Tokyo, Shiseido has long-standing cultural ties to both New York City and New York University. Noboru Matsumoto, who became Shiseido’s Managing Director in 1917 (and became the company’s second President in 1940), was educated at NYU, where he studied marketing in the School of Business. It was also in New York City that he met his future business partner, Shinzo Fukuhara, who would become the first President of Shiseido.

“NYU is the outstanding educational institution in downtown New York, where much of the world’s artistic activity is concentrated,” stated Akira Gemma, President and CEO of Shiseido. “The Grey Art Gallery therefore plays a unique role. It exhibits and interprets the visual arts and stimulates an international dialogue in the very midst of New York’s cultural ferment. We at Shiseido are proud to offer our support to the Gallery, an institution that exemplifies the living involvement with art that is at the core of our company’s vision.”

Commenting on the receipt of the endowment, Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery, said, “The visual arts are indispensable to a university education, just as they are indispensable to the community of which NYU is a part. Through this generous gift, which will support the Grey’s programs in perpetuity, Shiseido is helping us open new paths of understanding in the visual arts, for our students and our general public alike.”

Shiseido was originally a Western-style pharmacy, the first in Japan, established in 1872 in the Ginza District, the most modern and fashionable location in Tokyo. The company was incorporated in 1927 by Shinzo Fukuhara, the son of the founder. After earning a degree in pharmacology in New York (where he formed his friendship with Noboro Matsumoto), Shinzo Fukuhara participated in the Parisian art scene during the Cubist years and became an accomplished photographer. Upon taking charge of Shiseido in 1915, Shinzo Fukuhara personally designed the company’s camellia trademark, put himself in charge of the design department (while delegating business operations to Matsumoto), and in 1919 established the Shiseido Gallery.

Now the oldest existing art gallery in Japan, open to the public free of charge, the Shiseido Gallery has presented more than three thousand exhibitions. Among the gallery’s most important activities is an annual exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier, Paris, of the work of young Japanese artists living abroad. Shiseido also maintains an exhibition space within its Ginza fashion boutique, focusing on design, photography, and fashion; and the Shiseido Art House, showcasing product designs, posters, print advertisements, and commercials produced by the company, as well as a corporate collection of 1,700 paintings, sculptures, and craft objects.

Shiseido is today the world’s fourth-largest cosmetics company, with an active sales presence in some sixty countries and annual net sales of more than $5 billion. The company has done business in the United States since 1965. Shiseido’s endowment gift to the Grey Art Gallery celebrates the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Shiseido America, Incorporated, which was formed in January 1990 as a subsidiary of Shiseido Co., Ltd., as a manufacturer of prestige cosmetics, skin care products, and fine fragrances. In addition to its involvement in the contemporary arts (including poetry and dance), Shiseido focuses its philanthropy on research and scholarship in dermatology and the treatment of burns, support for forums and publications on aging and well-being, and community based social programs with an emphasis on employee volunteerism.

Major expansion of Tate Gallery in London

New Millennium sees major expansion of Tate Gallery in London

In spring 2000 the Tate Gallery will create two new galleries in London. Tate Britain, at the original Millbank site, will open to the public on 24 March 2000, and Tate Modern, in the transformed Bankside Power Station in Southwark, will open on 12 May 2000. These join Tate Liverpool which opened in 1988, and Tate St Ives which opened in 1993, to form a network of galleries across the country.

The new galleries have been made possible with funding from the National Lottery. In February 1997 the Tate Gallery Centenary Development at Millbank was awarded £18.75 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Work will continue until 2001 on this development, transforming the north west quarter of the building to provide new galleries, a new entrance and many new facilities for visitors to Tate Britain. Tate Modern has received £50 million from the Millennium Commission and £6.2 million from the Art Council’s Lottery Fund.

Since 1950, the number of works in the Tate Collection has more than doubled, and the Tate’s audience has grown to over 2 million visitors each year. By the early 1990s it had become clear that the Gallery’s responsibilities to display both the British and Modern Collections in London could no longer be adequately fulfilled on the current Millbank site. In 1992 the Tate announced its decision to divide displays of the Collection between two sites in London, enabling it to show more effectively its Modern and British collections.

Tate Britain will present the world’s greatest collection of British art in a dynamic series of new displays and exhibitions. The gallery will show British art from the sixteenth century to the present day, highlighting masterpieces of the collection, while also introducing lively thematic approaches to British Art.

Tate Modern will be one of the foremost modern art museums in the world. It will house the Tate’s collection of international modern art from 1900 to the present, and it will be a gallery for the twenty-first century, exhibiting new art as it is created. The new museum will match those already established elsewhere in Europe and America and its opening will be equivalent to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1920s or the Pompidou Centre in Paris in the 1970s.

In spring 2000 the two London galleries will be linked by a new transport strategy which will include a new shuttle bus and boat service, as well as bicycle and pedestrian routes.

Tate Britain, London, UK
www.tate.org.uk