Hermes acquires part Leica Camera AG

Hermès acquires 31.5 % of the share capital of Leica Camera AG On 22nd of November 2000, Hermès International has launched a friendly tender offer for 30 % of the share capital of Leica Camera AG running until 20th of December 2000. The proposed price was 12.50 Euro per share, representing a 30 % premium on the average stock market price in the last three months preceding the offer. At the closing of the offer, Hermès International announces that it has acquired 31.5% (30 % on a fully diluted basis) of the share capital of Leica Camera AG for a total investment of 17.7 million Euro. The press release note "Hermès International and Leica Camera AG welcome the decision of the shareholders who have tendered their shares and allowed the success of this operation. "

Catherine Wagner: Selections, 1980-2000, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

Catherine Wagner

Selections: 1980 - 2000

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

February 28 - April 14, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY announces it is now representing the work of CATHERINE WAGNER. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.

This 20-year survey exhibition features a cross-section of photographs from Catherine Wagner's oeuvre, beginning with those taken of the George Moscone Convention Center Site in 1980, up to her present photographs taken with medical imaging devices. The underlying theme throughout Wagner's work is decoding the times in which we live by using models such as construction sites, classrooms, homes, and science. Making a comment on change, Catherine Wagner captured the vast construction site of Moscone Center, planted between high rises, with the steel skeleton of a colossal arch girded by wooden beams. She presented a kind of archaeology in reverse, a harbinger of eventual ruin. Catherine Wagner uses the photograph as a catalyst for the transformation of ideas and information.

Among the series on exhibit is American Classroom. The classroom is shown as a model and a repository of our collective conscience. Andy Grundberg wrote about Catherine Wagner's work in The New York Times, "…as a result the classrooms seem like archeological sites that, if studied long and hard enough, might yield the keys to understanding our civilization." These classroom studies prompted Wagner's interest in our human culture revealed through science. Also exhibited are selections from Catherine Wagner's series Art & Science: Investigating Matter in which she examines the construction of contemporary culture through science.

Catherine Wagner's work is characterized by firmly ensconced compositions, crisply defined forms, meticulous attention to detail and seemingly infinite tonal gradations. Her photographs are devoid of human presence although they are fraught with the traces of human acts and passages. Each of the series represented in this survey was an independent travelling museum exhibition.

CATHERINE WAGNER will have a solo exhibition, "Cross Sections", at The San Jose Museum of Art in November 2001. Her work is in several public collections including: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Theresa Hackett at Florence Lynch Gallery, New York

Theresa Hackett: Going Off
Florence Lynch Gallery, New York
February 23 - March 31, 2001

Florence Lynch Gallery presents Going Off, an exhibition of recent paintings by Theresa Hackett. 

Theresa Hackett’s new paintings are colorful, obsessive, animated, abstractions of ocean wave, and hybrid landscapes. These paintings are on paper mounted on linen, which is an interesting departure from her earlier works on wood. Working on paper has brought out the drawing and obsessive quality in her works and yet preserves a lightness of materials. Materials are Hackett’s strength; she lets the materials lead her into a painting/non-painting dialogue such as in her use of color. Some color is applied and other is found, materials such as felt, foil sand, and ballpoint pen replace the traditional brush stroke with that of concrete gesture.

This dialectic that Theresa Hackett creates for herself is full of mesmerizing and seductive qualities. She provides us with one part visual meditation and the other of a disconnected cartoon. This bipolar reading gives the viewer a choice of various levels from which to approach the painting and above all, the possibility to share in her visual pleasure.

This is Theresa Hackett’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery. Theresa Hackett’s work has been shown in galleries and museums in Europe and the U.S. Among the venues are Pinacoteca Comunale Villa Soranzo, Outdoor Installation, Varallo Pombia, Italy; kjubh, Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; ARCO 2000, Madrid, Spain; Salle D’Exposition Centre St. Charles, University de Paris I, Sorbonne, Paris, France; Linda Schwartz Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio; Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY; The Work Space, New York, among others.

FLORENCE LYNCH GALLERY
147 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.florencelynchgallery.com

August Sander Exhibit Getty Museum

August Sander: German Portraits (1918-1933)

Opens March 6, 2001 at the Getty Museum

Photographs by the Powerful German Master

This exhibition highlights more than 125 photographs that survey this German master's portraiture of the 1920s and early 1930s, and reveal the turbulent face of Germany during the Weimar period after WWI, just prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. The exhibition will be on view from March 6 through June 24, 2001, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It examines a significant period of Sander's prolific career through works that were selected from more than 1200 Sander photographs in the Getty's collection - the largest holding outside of Germany.

August Sander (1876- 1964) is revered in Germany as a father of modern photography. Since the 1920s, his work has had an enormous influence on generations of artists around the world. He is known primarily for his iconic photographs of farmers, artists, bricklayers, musicians, cab drivers, bureaucrats, dancers, industrialists, secretaries, the unemployed, and the disabled. Together these images form a collective "portrait" of pre-World War II German society, and reflect Sander's then-idealistic view of the existing social order. Many of these works will be on display at the Getty. Ironically, in the rise of the Third Reich, Sander himself became a focus of persecution. He eventually moved from Cologne to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving behind 30,000 glass negatives that were later destroyed by fire in 1946. Sander's photographs of his house and studio made before the Allied bombing of Cologne will also be on view in the exhibition.

Judith Keller, associate curator of the Getty's department of photographs, commented, "With each of our shows, the department of photographs tries to share with our audience more of the permanent collection. The Sander exhibition, drawn from our exceptional Sander holdings, takes another look at one of the masters of portraiture at a time when this genre is again popular with painters and photographers. In his own way, Sander employed his camera to put his country back together after World War I, one man, one picture at a time. His portraits take on added resonance in light of the devastating war that followed."

Sander reached artistic maturity during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), when many German artists were inspired by a refreshing political freedom. Berlin had become an international artistic center and a new Realism in painting reflected observations about contemporary government and society. The era's cultural icons and references included the Bauhaus school, Joseph von Sternberg's film Blue Angel, Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera, Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

Fueled by the Cologne Progressives, a group of radical young painters he met in the early 1920s, Sander embarked on a grand artistic enterprise. He began an ambitious project he called "Citizens of the Twentieth Century," and sought to portray the German social order through images of "types" or population groups. He began by revisiting his earliest portraits of peasants from his native Westerwald region and added an extensive series of portraits that blended his conservative views and nostalgia for the past with a progressive future vision. The photographs he created as part of this project are considered his most significant work.

With the rise of Hitler's political power and the advent of the Third Reich in 1933, Sander's career took a turn for the worse. His son Erich, a communist party member, was arrested, and Sander was scorned by the Nazi authorities. He moved to the small village of Kuchhausen and managed to bring with him and thus save 10,000 negatives. He was forced to abandon his politically sensitive work and concentrated instead on landscape photography. While he never completed his ambitious "Citizens" project, he left a compelling body of work reflecting the contradictory and complex nature of the era.

"Sander continuously walked the fine line between social satire and factual recording. Because of their multivalent character, Sander's photographs have been sources for artists working in a variety of materials from poetry to motion pictures," commented Weston Naef, curator of photographs.

For this exhibition, the Getty photographs galleries will be organized into sections related to Sander's own hierarchy of subjects. These include: First and Last (from the rural peasants to the urban unemployed), Women and the Metropolis, and Tradesmen and Professionals, with a final section portraying his house and studio.

Concurrent with the exhibition, the Getty is publishing a new book about Sander in its In Focus photography series. It will be on sale at the Getty bookstore and online for $17.50 (paperback).

The In Focus series makes available in an affordable format the Museum's significant holdings of works by major photographers. Each volume contains approximately 50 photographs with commentaries, an introduction, a chronology, and a transcription of a colloquium on the photographer's life and work. Among the contemporaries of Sander featured in this series are André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz, and Doris Ulmann.

Sharon Lockhart, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Sharon Lockhart

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago

March 3 - May 20, 2001

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents a major exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist SHARON LOCKHART's work. A survey of photographs and films from 1993 to the present, this exhibition is the largest and most significant solo presentation of the artist in an American museum to date. Sharon Lockhart features approximately 35 photographs and multi-photograph series, and includes screenings of her films Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence (1994), Goshogaoka (1997), Shirley (1999), (created with artist Daniel Marlos), and Teatro Amazonas (1999) in the MCA Theater.

The exhibition is curated by MCA Associate Curator Dominic Molon.

"Sharon Lockhart's work presents the fragile moments and overlooked details of the everyday through the removed lens of conceptual photography and structuralist film," said Dominic Molon. "Her photographs and films are the result of meticulous organization and elaborate production, yet are profoundly intimate and immediately affecting. Lockhart's work encourages the viewer toward a more vigilant observation of the photographic and cinematic image, provoking a heightened consideration of perspective or of seemingly insignificant objects, gestures, and details."

Sharon Lockhart's photographs complicate the various visual codes that determine our ways of seeing. Since 1994, she has created numerous multi-photographic works that investigate concepts of time, narrative, and sequence.

These works create a tension between the intimacy and familiarity of a single image and the detached, categorical form of the overall whole. Much of Sharon Lockhart's early work-such as the five-photograph series Auditions (1994), or her Untitled photographs from 1996-employed the staging of scenes characteristic of filmmaking, requiring rigorous research and set-up to produce quiet scenes of the everyday.

The work that she has created in Japan, Mexico, and Brazil from 1997 to 1999, begins with a predetermined photographic situation, and allows subtle variations to emerge from image to image through collaboration with the subject or by simply recording the unseen changes that naturally occur over time.

Sharon Lockhart's films emphasize the photographic basis of the moving image, often using a fixed perspective to capture fragile and unexpected movements and human reactions in a given situation. Teatro Amazonas for example, records the occasional gestures and ambient sounds of a Brazilian audience listening to a 24-minute choral work by California composer Becky Allen which gradually fades to reveal the indistinct murmuring of the people at the conclusion of the performance.

Creating the illusion of an audience watching the audience viewing the film, Sharon Lockhart's film joins much of her recent work in presenting images of other cultures-such as Mexico and Japan-in a manner that addresses the complexities of cross-cultural representation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 112-page full-color catalogue-the first major English language publication on the artist to date-featuring essays by art historian Norman Bryson and exhibition curator Dominic Molon. This is the first publication to present a full range of Sharon Lockhart's color and black-and-white photographs from throughout her career. 

Sharon Lockhart is scheduled to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, from June 9 through September 2, 2001.

This exhibition and its national tour are sponsored by the Sara Lee Foundation.

SHARON LOCKHART was born in 1964 in Norwood, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Sharon Lockhart's work was recently presented in a major solo exhibition organized by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 1999, which traveled to the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2000. Her work has been included in numerous important group exhibitions such as the 2000 and 1997 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; "Cinéma Cinéma" at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, (1999); and "Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions" at SITE Santa Fe (1997).

Her film Goshogaoka has been screened internationally at such prestigious venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (as part of its New Directors/New Films series), the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. Teatro Amazonas has been screened at the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films, film festival in Berlin (2000), the Pitti Imagine, Florence, (1999), and the New York Film Festival (2000).

MCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago 60611.2604

www.mcachicago.org

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche at San Diego Museum of Art

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche

San Diego Museum of Art

February 24 - May 27, 2001

As part of the San Diego Museum of Art's 75th anniversary celebration, a special exhibition of lithographs by turn-of-the-century French printmaker Albert Belleroche (1864-1944) will showcase some never before exhibited works from the Museum's extensive holdings of this master printmaker's art. Heralded by both his contemporary critics and modern art historians, Albert Belleroche's experimental work was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, which began to emerge as an independent art form during the artist's lifetime.

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, has selected forty examples from the 129 Belleroche lithographs owned by the Museum for The Rival of Painting. "The variety of works chosen for the exhibition reveal the entire scope of Albert Belleroche's experimental approach to the medium of lithography. These prints document the process of lithography's transformation from a predominantly commercial medium, to one of self expression in the hands of one of its most innovative practitioners" explains Don Bacigalupi, the Museum's executive director.

Albert Belleroche lithographs: The Collection

With the exception of only two works, all of the Belleroche lithographs in the Museum's holdings were acquired through the generous donations of museum trustee George C. Kenney II, his wife Olga Kitsakos-Kenney, and their daughter Elizabeth. The Kenneys are among a generation of younger collectors and supporters of the Museum and, at twelve years of age, Elizabeth is the youngest donor of a work of art to the collection on record. All nine lithographs recently donated by Elizabeth will form part of the exhibition.

According to Bacigalupi, "The Kenneys are to be commended for making such a remarkable portion of their personal art collection accessible to the community through their generous and continuing donations to our institution. The Museum is now the largest repository of Belleroche's art in North America, rivaling such esteemed collections as those of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the British Museum in London."

San Diego residents, the Kenneys are active art collectors, with a special interest in European art. They have donated works of art to museums and art galleries throughout the country. In addition to the Belleroche lithographs, the Kenneys have also given the Museum two paintings by Belleroche, nine etchings by Rembrandt's student Ferdinand Bol as well as many other works on paper by old master and 20th century artists.

Albert Belleroche and the Parisian Art World

Albert Belleroche was born in Swansea, Wales in 1864 to a family of French aristocrats who had fled the persecution of Hugeunot Protestants by the French crown in the late 17th century. Wealthy and international, having spent most of his childhood in Paris, Belleroche was able to focus on his own artistic exploration throughout his lifetime, particularly in lithography, without the hindrance of commercial interest or the desire or need for critical acclaim.

Beginning his artistic career in Paris in 1882, Albert Belleroche was well acquainted with the leading figures and trends in the fin-de-siècle art world. He first studied briefly with that city's premier portrait painter, Carolus-Duran, and subsequently grew friendly with Duran's former star pupil, American expatriate John Singer Sargent (who is featured in the concurrently running exhibition, American Impressionists Abroad and at Home). The two of them traveled together and shared studios.

During that same period, Albert Belleroche encountered fellow aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was born the same year as Belleroche. The two of them shared a passion for drawing as well as for the models that inspired them. Lili, for example, was made famous by Lautrec, though she posed more frequently with Belleroche, and she and Belleroche eventually became lovers.

Albert Belleroche and his Critics

Although he first trained and worked as a painter, it was as a lithographer that Belleroche excelled. His work in lithography was recognized by both his fellow artists and by critics, this in spite of Belleroche's lack of pursuit of critical acclaim. "Belleroche holds a premiere position in the current renaissance of lithography," wrote Claude Roger-Marx in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1908. Roger-Marx, the great turn-of-the-century French critic who had previously championed the Impressionists, continued in his article, "No one... has equaled Belleroche's technique or his understanding of lithography."

Frank Brangwyn, fellow artist and friend of Belleroche, wrote in 1935, "As a lithographic artist, [Belleroche] stands alone. No modern can touch him either in his knowledge or in the quality to be got out of the stone. No one else has succeeded in making lithography the rival of painting."

And finally, a year before Albert Belleroche's death in 1944, noted art historian and print expert at the British Museum, Arthur Hind, provided this assessment of the printmaker's career: "In sensitive draughtsmanship, in variety of handling and in understanding of the possibilities of the medium, his work in lithography is among the greatest achievements [of the medium] since its discovery."

Albert Belleroche and Lithography

Lithography was in fact "discovered" or rather invented in 1796. The technique is based on the principle that oil and water repel one another and consists of printing an image drawn on the surface of a specially prepared stone surface with a greasy material. Because of its durability as a print medium-unlike in etching or engraving where the metal plates wear causing the image quality to degrade-huge editions of prints were possible, making lithography well suited to the world of commerce and industry. Consequently, its artistic application focused at first on the reproduction of paintings and drawings as illustrations for journals and other publications, with the actual printing carried out by trained technicians in commercial studios.

Albert Belleroche was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, when artists began to stretch the medium beyond the limits of creativity and technical production as defined by commerce. He drew and brushed directly on the stone, making full use of its grain and finish, varying strokes and touches to maximize effects of tone and modeling. He pulled his own impressions from his own press, sometimes a unique image, other times in editions as small as only two or three. He experimented with different inks and colors, sometimes grinding his own pigments. An avid collector of antique paper stock, he varied effect with sheets of different tones and weights.

With involvement in every stage of the creation of his art, Albert Belleroche challenged the traditional definition of a lithograph and its relation to the other arts. Belleroche, with his lithographs, did indeed rival painting and the selection of forty of his works in this exhibition represent the breadth of Belleroche's technique.

EXHIBITION CURATOR

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, is the exhibition's curator. Since joining the San Diego Museum of Art in 1997, Kern has overseen new thematic reinstallations of the Museum's permanent collection of old master paintings and of late 19th century European art. He has also coordinated the local presentations of major touring exhibitions including Monet: The Late Paintings of Giverny (1998) and Palace of Gold and Light: Treasures from the Topkapi, Istanbul (2000).

Prior to his arrival at SDMA, Kern was curator of paintings for nearly nine years at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Prior to that position, he was curator of European art and exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts and George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, MA. Kern holds a Master's degree in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and bachelors degrees in French Language and Literature and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

PUBLICATION

A full color, fully illustrated catalogue, published by the San Diego Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an introductory essay by exhibition curator Steven Kern, which discusses Albert Belleroche's experimental work within the context of the fin-de-siècle art world and the history of lithography. 64 pages, 40 color plates, 6 color illustrations, 9 x 12 inches. Softcover $25.00.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org

Spencer Finch: Here and There, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Spencer Finch: Here and There
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
February 16 - March 23, 2001

New York artist SPENCER FINCH explores the borders of representation in his exhibition Here and There at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Utilizing a wide range of materials and techniques – from sculpture and installation to painting and drawing – Spencer Finch creates work that addresses the ways in which subjectivity, memory and language inform the act of seeing. 

Many of the works included in this exhibit study the effects that light and memory have on perception. The enchanting and poetic work titled Blue (sky over Los Alamos, New Mexico, 5/5/00, morning effect), an installation of light bulb molecules precisely matching the cobalt, titanium oxide, and ultramarine sky over Los Alamos, is on view in the small gallery. Mounted to the ceiling in complex arrangements the piece probes some of the great mysteries of the universe: color, light, gravity, time, and space as Spencer Finch explores the gaps between objectivity and subjectivity as well as his fascination with science and its limits.

SPENCER FINCH currently lives and works in NYC. He has had several recent solo exhibitions including Up, Postmasters Gallery, New York (2000); Bildhuset, Stockholm (1999); Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice, Postmasters Gallery, New York (1998); Galerie Andreas Brandstrom, Stockholm (1998); Periscope, Artnode, Stockholm (1997).

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
www.rhoffmangallery.com

Nikon receives two DIMA Awards

Nikon D1x Professional Digital SLR Camera and Super Coolscan 8000 ED High-Speed Multi-Format Film Scanner Recognized for Technology and Innovation by the Digital Imaging Marketing Association (DIMA)

Nikon has received two DIMA innovative Digital Product Awards for the Nikon D1x pro digital SLR camera and the Super Coolscan 8000 ED desktop film scanner. Nikon was honored with two of the 17 awards that recognize unique technologies and/or applications that will influence the future of digital imaging. Digital imaging editors and writers judged the annual award sponsored by DIMA, the Digital Imaging Marketing Association, which is a section of PMA.

Nikon D1x digital SLR camera is optimized for superior image quality with a 5.47 megapixel CCD and a number of advanced capabilities for color reproduction, white balance and precision exposure control. It is designed for professionals requiring high image quality and the more demanding image resolution requirements for high-tech, publishing, scientific, pre-press, advertising, graphic arts and other photography that involves extremely high detail. The D1x combines with the Nikon Total Pro Imaging System to advanceany pro photographer's ability to most effectively incorporate digital photography into their workflow.

Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED is a multi-format film scanner that offers the highest dynamic range and resolution of any desktop film scanner available today. The scanner is capable of scanning a variety of film formats, including 35mm, 120/220, 16mm, electron microscope and prepared microscope slides, at true 4,000 dpi optical resolution with image quality equal to drum scanners. Designed for professionals looking to increase productivity and profitability in graphics applications, the Super Coolscan 8000 ED is the first film scanner to include Applied Science Fiction's groundbreaking Digital ICE3 technology, a suite of sophisticated digital enhancement tools for color correcting and enhancing images.

http://www.nikonusa.com/

Nikon Press Release - 21.02.2001

Cameron Hayes, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Cameron Hayes

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

February 23 – March 31, 2001

The Feldman Gallery will exhibit paintings by Cameron Hayes, a young Australian artist whose work presents bizarre, allegorical fictions. His sumptuously chaotic compositions display a multitude of hyper-realistic details that cover a vast field. The ribald subject matter -- perversions, grotesqueries, and cartoonish characters -- evokes the diverse phantasmagoric worlds of Bosch, Bruegel, and Daumier. Referencing Pop culture, he addresses historical and current issues with a visual satire that is laced with black humor and infused with a "Down Under" brashness.

Maintaining that art should excite the imagination, since "only imagination can free you from being pushed around by the nature inside you," Cameron Hayes renounces emotional painting. "People who paint about their emotional inner self paint boring paintings. They are usually thickly painted and are brown and red. They look like burnt lasagna. A good work of art is less about the ideas of the artist than the ideas it can create in the people who look at it."

Each painting is accompanied by a short text, written by the artist in a faux simplistic style. Some of the paintings included in the exhibition are:

"Blind and deaf school the day talkie films" were invented presupposes the integration of the deaf population into mainstream culture during the silent film era, and their replacement by the blind with the advent of the talkies. On that day, the two groups exchange possessions, symbolic of their changing status.

"Bonnie and Clyde during a petrol strike" celebrates "people who know they are unique but can't do anything about it," and depicts bank robbers using public transportation, the digging up of graves, and a parrot plague.

"From the air we all felt sorry for the sick and starving" contrasts feelings of empathy from afar with antipathy in proximity, an insight inspired by a plane flying over Africa and its subsequent crash.

"In 1977 Cameron Hooker picked up a hitchhiker", 19 year-old Colleen Stan tells a story of female enslavement and unspeakable acts, in order to understand the victimizer.

"Today hardly anyone could forget yesterday" refers to the Australian national character – Whites who bring testimonials from England stating that they have been charming, funny, and desirable company in the past, sparing them the energy of actually trying to be so in the present.

Cameron Hayes' work was included in the group exhibition, Sampling, at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1999. A recipient of numerous prizes, Cameron Hayes has exhibited in Australia, including the prestigious Moët and Chandon Touring Exhibition. He was born in Sydney in 1969 and received his Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) from the R.M.I.T., Melbourne, in 1992. He currently lives and works in Melbourne.

RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS

31 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10013

www.feldmangallery.com

Maria Maier and Felix Weinold at Monique Goldstrom Gallery, NYC

'Ambivalent' The work of Maria Maier and Felix Weinold
Monique Goldstrom Gallery, New York
February 17 - March 14, 2001

Monique Goldstrom Gallery presents "Ambivalent", a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Felix Weinold and Maria Maier.

Both from Germany, Maier and Weinold have joined artistic forces previous to the current exhibition, in "Taking Pictures" last year, in which they, similarly to their new show, elegantly combined painting, collage, and photography in a very unique and visually interesting way.

Maria Maier's work is primarily photographic, although the basis for each piece is a collage technique in which she combines painting as well. The special appeal of her artwork is the result of this combination of media and materials. The collages featured in this exhibition are from two of Maier's most recent series, "E-mission" and "Time-Symbioses" which although alike in technique have very different meanings. Some of the work that is part of the "E-mission"series features bits of painting and clippings of x-ray pictures. Other work is made up of photographs of electric cable and squarely cut radiograph contrastingly placed with pictures of old power-stations, focusing on their decay in an historical statement. Such a statement has become Maier's interest as is shown also in her "Time-Symbioses" series where she combines photos of disintegrating pipes, cables, and sockets, with discarded pieces of theatre scenery from the Velodrorn-Theatre in Regensburg, Germany. Her work has an original concept that is not only visually obvious, but allows the viewer to get a firm grasp on the statement she makes.

Felix Weinold also uses the combination of media and materials, once again specifically photography and painting, as a way of creating the multi-level meaning that is portrayed in his work. Dr. Thomas Elsen, Director of the Neue Galerie in Augsburg, Germany, explains Weinold's technique as: "a totally new, independent medium, which uses painterly means to put a new perspective on photography, and which 'undermines' painting with photographic methods. His pictures do not spell out explicit pictorial statements or messages, but at the same time they can raise all the more resonant questions in the viewerís mind, by far transcending the actual work and sparking off controversy, to which the work itself rigorously refuses to supply any answers; it just provides the initial and decisive stimulus." In this way Weinold's work and the work created by Maria Maier become a perfect compliment to each other and fall fittingly and fascinatingly into this exhibition called "Ambivalent".

Monique Goldstrom Gallery
560 Broadway (at Prince St.), Suite 303, NYC 10012
www.moniquegoldstrom.com

The price of history – What is the Bauhaus worth (today)? at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The price of history – What is the Bauhaus worth (today)?

Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

February 2 - May 20, 2001

The price of history – What is the Bauhaus worth (today)? is the title of the new exhibition in which the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation tells the apparently familiar story of the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1933 and its worldwide reception from a new angle. Almost all the items on display are taken from the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and open up a hitherto unknown perspective on the "modern classics” created at the Bauhaus. The exhibition asks about the system of values which has made Bauhaus "originals”, including early series products, almost unaffordable collectors’ items today and sustains a lively trade in "genuine” and "fake” copies. It also asks why some designs by Bauhaus members have – deservedly or undeservedly? –faded into oblivion while others have stolen the limelight. 

The exhibition title is deliberately ambiguous and provocative since it seeks to put up for discussion the criteria for economic evaluations and the ways in which museums present items from the past. The dividing line is becoming ever thinner between the noble mandate of preserving and passing on cultural values und mundane money-making in which art is just another commodity. This is certainly true of the Bauhaus which has – wrongly – become synonymous with the Neues Bauen movement of the 1920s and whose name, having become a mark of design quality today, is often used for dubious purposes.  

As soon as works of art or artists’ names are admitted to the "sacred precincts” of a leading museum or a public collection, their higher value makes them objects of investment among private collectors who are not afraid to take risks in the quest for profit. The budget available for new purchases by public institutions – if they have one at all – leaves museum staff powerless in the face of the laws governing the art investment market. 

Museums which focus on education are increasingly losing ground to exhibitions which promise adventure. This trend, too, has changed the criteria for evaluating art and cultural assets. Perfectly staged, this new type of exhibition entertainment merges all exhibits into a holistic work of art and turns them into cult objects. Even works which art historians consider insignificant come to share in the glamour and can be sold for correspondingly high prices. 

Straddling as it does the frontier where art meets everyday life, the Bauhaus is the right place and addresses the right issues to analyse the phenomena described above. More then three hundred items from the Bauhaus Dessau collections will be selected for the exhibition and presented in alphabetical order with brief comments. Visitors to the Bauhaus exhibition will have a chance to experience door handles, cantilevered chairs and woven fabrics as well as works of art from Wassily Kandinsky to Reinhold Rossig in a new context.

BAUHAUS DESSAU FOUNDATION

Gropiusalle 38, 06846 Dessau

www.bauhaus-dessau.de

Alan McKernan, University of Liverpool, Senate House Exhibition Hall - Contrasting Light

Alan McKernan: Contrasting Light

Senate House Exhibition Hall, 

University of Liverpool

1 February - 16 March 2001

Enter a new and unfamiliar landscape in this exhibition of photographs of Formby and the Dock Road area by local artist, Alan McKernan. There will be a selection of 36 black and white photos from two recent series called 'Last Light' made at Formby and 'Continuum of Change' taken around the Dock Road.

Laying aside the high-tech digital equipment now available to photographers Alan McKernan decided to show what could be done with the simpler medium of camera, black and white film and daylight. He wanted to demonstrate to himself, and his students at Liverpool's Community College, the continuing potential of traditional camera technology to surprise and please the eye.

Visiting the woods and dunes at Formby, Alan McKernan made a series of photographs often taken in the last light of day. 'The familiar landscape emerged re-drawn in the ever-changing light. The pinewoods and marram grass became reminiscent of equatorial forests, savannah grasslands and dry deserts.' The resulting images in the 'Last Light' series are of unusual and haunting beauty; creating connections with a distant past and echoes of a fairy-tale world.

A stark contrast appears in Alan McKernan's second series of photos, which are of the Dock Road area, actually Regent Road. The grid-like pattern of brick and stone are deeply etched in these strongly urban images. Yet what attracted Alan McKernan to the subject was the 'Continuum of Change' between the man-made structures and the working of natural forces. As the disused warehouses of the Dock Road area age and decay, plants have begun to reclaim the buildings. 'This flourishing of nature symbolises man's transient impact; the apparently random distribution of the plant forms is in contrast to man's attempts to bring order and structure to the landscape'.

The 'Contrasting Light' of the two series are linked by this exploration of the forces of nature and by a common theme of light: 'its ephemeral effects sculpt and re-present the landscape'.

Ann Compton, Curator, University of Liverpool Art Collections

Senate House Exhibition Hall 

University of Liverpool

Oxford Street, Liverpool L69 7WY

www.liv.ac.uk

Alice Neel Retrospective at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Alice Neel
Philadelphia Museum of Art
February 18 - April 15, 2001

Alice Neel's daring portraits of people and places are among the most insightful images in 20th-century American art. To celebrate the centennial of her birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has organized Alice Neel, the first full-scale examination of her inspiring and provocative life and work. Organized with the full cooperation of the artist's family, this exhibition features 75 paintings and watercolors, many of which have never been previously exhibited. 

Born in 1900 in suburban Philadelphia, Alice Neel led a rich and complicated life, filled with friends, lovers, family, fellow artists, and a strong sense of community and social activism. A 1925 graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), Alice Neel spent a year in Havana, then moved with her husband to New York City, where she remained the rest of her life. In the 1930s, her subjects included the colorful Greenwich Village poets and writers, as well as friends and family. Neel's revolutionary nude portraits of figures such as her young daughter Isabetta and the bohemian icon Joe Gould are still audacious images. Employed by the W.P.A. during the Great Depression, Neel painted scenes of the city street that reflect her trenchant concern for the dispossessed: striking workers, impoverished families, and the homeless. Among the highlights of Alice Neel are works from the Depression era that have never been exhibited previously in a museum.

During the postwar era, when the tide of the art world had turned toward abstraction, Alice Neel remained committed to the representation of the human figure. She was steadfast in depicting the world around her with compassion, acuity and freedom. Alice Neel always displayed her empathy for her subjects--from her young sons or her dying mother to left-wing activists. Portraits of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem employ humor and insight to great effect--both tender and unforgiving at once.

In the early 1960s Alice Neel received her first recognition outside a small circle of admirers. Her astounding emergence, late in life, corresponded with the dawning of the women's movement and with the art world's reawakened interest in the human figure. Alice Neel's work of the next two decades reflects her increasing celebrity. Her portraits of fellow artists--including Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara, Robert Smithson, and Faith Ringgold--document a professional world in which Alice Neel was suddenly a seemingly improbable star. It was during these years that Alice Neel perfected the style for which she is now best remembered: large-scale portraits in the realist tradition of Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri, but newly inventive and unforgettably direct.

A centennial salute from the artist's native city of Philadelphia, whose culture and Museum she treasured, Alice Neel marks an opportune moment for a first full appraisal. With the new century comes a reevaluation of the modernist canon, which emphasized abstraction at the expense of adventurous figurative artists. The present-day resurgence of portraiture as a vibrant field for both veteran and emerging artists confirms Alice Neel's ongoing legacy.

Alice Neel is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays and entries by Ann Temkin, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Assistant Curator Susan Rosenberg, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center. Temkin discusses Alice Neel's interconnection of life and art; Rosenberg explores Neel's artistic roots in the 1930s; and Flood focuses on the art-world portraits of the 1960s and '70s. The catalogue also includes reminiscences by Alice Neel's subjects, and the first detailed chronology of Alice Neel's life, richly illustrated with many never-before-published photographs.

Alice Neel debuts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, from June 29 through September 17, 2000, and continue its national tour at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, October 7 through December 31, 2000; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 through April 15, 2001; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, June 10 through September 2, 2001.

Alice Neel was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the support of The William Penn Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, The Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Alice's List, a consortium of individual donors. Corporate sponsorship was provided by AT&T.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
www.philamuseum.org