Ronnie Hughes, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Shrine

Ronnie Hughes : Shrine

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

19 September - 13 October 2001

Ronnie Hughes’ recent paintings resonate with echoes of high modernist abstraction but their contemporary palette and wry humour pitch them firmly in the present day. Hughes is interested in a synthetic representation of Nature. Titles such as Wood edge, Nightsong and Noonblind point to the fact that these sparse yet well-worked paintings are a hybrid of romatic yearning and cool detachment. The artist lives and works between mountains and sea in Co Sligo.

The recent paintings resonate with echoes of high modernist abstraction but their contemporary palette and wry humour pitch them firmly in the present day. Ronnie Hughes is interested in a synthetic representation of Nature. Titles such as Wood edge, Nightsong and Noonblind point to the fact that these sparse yet well-worked paintings are a hybrid of romatic yearning and cool detachment. The artist lives and works between mountains and sea in Co Sligo.

Catalogue Available

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Visual Worlds, Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis - Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula

Visual Worlds
Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
September 28 – October 31, 2001

The Visual Worlds exhibition features the work of Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, and Allan Sekula, investigating shifting concepts of visuality in the age of globalization and digitization. The exhibition encompasses works in photography, slide projection, video/performance, web-sites, and other conceptually based image/text explorations. Utilizing strategies of viral infiltration, parody, sabotage, and documentation, the works included in Visual Worlds, question the increasingly convoluted relationships between media and society, as they seek to undermine the omnipresence and seamlessness of mainstream media news, television and Hollywood.

Included in the exhibition are selections from Mary Kelly's mea culpa series in which thousands of pounds of laundry have been washed and dried to create wave-like intaglio prints composed of fragile dryer lint. The ocean-like swaths of lint are imprinted with text and are presented in photographic linear configurations. The texts, though fictitiously composed by Kelly, are derived from fragments of politically motivated atrocities including recent investigations by the International War Crimes Tribunal. Conveyed through the voice of an anonymous female protagonist, the texts reference atrocities associated with Vietnam in the 1970’s and the apartheid-crimes of South Africa under investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Act.

The exhibition also includes Shirin Neshat’s powerful and poetic photographs, in which contemporary female Muslim identity is examined in relationship to the culture of the media photograph and the history of the photographic portrait. Also on view will be "Waiting for Tear Gas," a slide-installation project by Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, Allan Sekula, incorporating documentation of the recent World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. Sekula’s poster-like piece "Dear Bill Gates" incorporating an image of the artist swimming in front of Microsoft executive Bill Gates’ sprawling estate, along with a letter from the artist addressed to Bill Gates, will also be on view.

Visual Worlds is also feature a series of works created by the GALA Committee, a collaborative artist/activist/product design team who have created ironic insertions into the Prime Time television program Melrose Place over a period of years. The GALA committee, consisting of over 100 artist/participants succeeded at producing over 100 art objects that actually appeared in many filmed episodes of the Melrose Place program. The objects developed collaboratively using fax communication between participants, poignantly satirize the cultures of Hollywood, of professional sports, and of the advertising industry through a critique of gender, race, sexuality, and status stereotyping. GALA Committee projects include, for example, a series of heirloom-like photographic portraits titled "Prostitute Ancestors" and an ironic sports trophy, "Father-Son Trophy," that seeks to unravel the cycles of aggression transmitted through mainstream sports culture. Several simulacra of David Hockney-like paintings will also be on view, including one depicting the site of the Rodney King beating and one depicting the home of Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles.

Also included is Andrea Fraser’s performance and video piece, "Inaugural Speech," originally produced for the inSITE 97 San Diego/Tijuana art event. Unraveling the relationship between international arts events such as the inSITE 97 festival and other parallel counterparts such as the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, Documenta, and the Seoul Biennial, Fraser reveals the not-so-hidden relationships between business interest, art patronage, real-estate development, and these types of arts events as she examines the "pyramid of power for which artists and arts audiences form the base of support." The exhibition will also feature the video "Bringing IT to YOU! by the digital arts collective ®™Ark. Accompanied by their web-site and a large digital poster display, ®™Ark, challenges Late Capitalist, Multi-Nationalist corporate culture, through a strategy of corporate sabotage and digital infiltration.

The Visual Worlds exhibition has been developed for the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis in conjunction with a major interdisciplinary conference organized by the Center for History, Society, and Culture (CHSC), UC Davis scheduled from October 26 – 28, 2001.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates Announcement

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates

The recipients of the 13th Praemium Imperiale are:

Painting: Lee Ufan

Sculpture: Marta Pan

Architecture: Jean Nouvel

Music: Ornette Coleman

Theatre/Film: Arthur Miller

The artists are recognized and awarded for their achievements, for the impact they have had internationally on the arts, and for their role in enriching the global community. The five recipients each receive 15 million yen (c. $125,000), and a diploma and medal presented by governor of the Japan Art Association Prince Hitachi in an awards ceremony in Tokyo. The awards ceremony will be held on October 25.

The Praemium Imperiale is an annual award given by the Japan Art Association for global achievement in the arts. Since its foundation in 1989, it has become a mark of the highest international distinction. The 2001 laureates join a roster of 61 artists, including David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Anthony Caro, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Leonard Bernstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ravi Shankar, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Brook.

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates

Painting: Lee Ufan

Japan-based Korean Lee Ufan has been a presence on the international art scene since the early 1970s. Profoundly rooted in philosophy of the East and West, his works offer his response to the basic problems of western art in the latter half of the 20th century. Lee's questioning of artistic methods and materials classes him among a large group of contemporaries; but his elementary forms and reduced processes and colors, his handling of time and space, connect him above all with Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. The genesis of his work is embedded in long meditative phases and profound concentration.

Sculpture: Marta Pan

Marta Pan has devoted her professional life to a pursuit of geometric simplicity, and to exploration of the themes of equilibrium and continuity. Her site-specific sculptures were pioneering in their attention to the overall landscape, to subtly changing light, and movements of water and wind. They were typically placed in natural environments and sculpture parks, but in recent years are found increasingly in urban settings as her interest shifts to urban scenery, and to the creation of public space environments. She has been very active outside of France, and her encounter with Japan, starting in 1969 with Floating Sculpture for the Hakone Open-Air Museum, was something like a mystical union. She now has about 25 major pieces in Japan that are appreciated for their abstract serenity and harmony with nature that perhaps recalls the essence of the traditional Japanese garden.

Architecture: Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel is recognized for the clarity, elegance that characterizes his work. Nouvel has created a stylistic language separate from that of modernism and post-modernism, and buildings that go beyond cultural constraints. He places great importance on harmonizing a building with its site and surroundings. Another theme unifying all of his projects is the beautiful interplay of transparency, opacity, shadow, and light. Perhaps the most well known example of this is his Institute du Monde Arab in Paris. Nouvel is considered one of the founders of the high-tech school of architecture. He uses materials such as aluminum, glass, stainless steel and concrete, but he adopts a softer, perhaps more poetic approach than his British colleagues. Nouvel's current projects include the new corporate headquarters for Dentsu Corporation at a site overlooking Tokyo Bay.

Music: Ornette Coleman

Most people think of Ornette Coleman as the revolutionary saxophonist who created "free jazz," but his explorations of the musical possibilities extend much beyond that and reveal a personal musical vocabulary free from prevailing conventions of harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic structures. Coleman's innovations, later to be known as "harmolodics," pointed out a new direction, and also established his place among a group of major 20th Century American composers such as Charlie Parker, Harry Partch, Charles Ives and John Cage. He describes Harmolodics as a system that allows every person to express their own emotions and ideas regardless of their languages, instruments, or role.

Theatre/Film: Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller has enriched the stage for over five decades. With his Death of a Salesman in 1949, Miller reached a universal audience and set a standard that marked him as a playwright for his time and for all time. The fate of the individual in society, the tragedy of the common man who loses his integrity due to social and economic pressures, the moral and political issues of our time, including the right to speak and think freely - these are the themes that have occupied Miller throughout his career. Arthur Miller continues to be a major force in world theater.

The Japan Art Association, Tokyo

www.praemiumimperiale.org

Hommage au cineaste Jean Rouch

La Documentation française publie dans sa collection Afrique contemporaine, sous la direction scientifique de François Gaulme, un dossier spécial autour du thème Culture et société où elle rend hommage au cinéaste Jean Rouch. Le cinéma africain est un sujet insuffisamment traité. C'est ce manque que comble Afrique contemporaine en publiant deux articles sur Jean Rouch. L'un est une interview de Jean Rouch lui même dont les souvenirs permettent de mieux mesurer l'apport personnel du cinéaste à la culture africaine (L'ethnographe et le cinéaste : un «véloportrait» des origines) ; l'autre, un article de Brice Ahounou (Jean Rouch et la grande sécheresse du Sahel. Les dieux se fâchent à Gangel. Divinités en colère et anthropologie visuelle), fait un bilan sur l'évolution du cinéma ethnographique universitaire. Afin d'enrichir la réflexion, un article posthume de Pierre Haffner fait le point sur le cinéma africain contemporain, francophone comme anglophone. Le dynamisme des médias africains est pour sa part abordé sous l'angle de la Tanzanie, un des pays les plus pauvres du continent, mais aussi un de ceux où la liberté d'expression est une tradition nationale. Culture et société - Actualité africaine Dossier spécial La Documentation française Collection Afrique contemporaine n° 196 Octobre-décembre 2001 168 pages, 13,50 €

Laurie Reid, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Work

Laurie Reid: New Work

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

September 6 - October 20, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents the exhibition of new works on paper by LAURIE REID.

Laurie Reid's quietly powerful and elegant paintings are meditations on beauty and abstraction, metaphor and process.  Laurie Reid has a unique approach to making watercolors.  Unlike traditional watercolorists, Reid embraces the sculptural effects created by the buckling and puckering of barely pigmented water on white sheets of paper.  The results invite the viewer to be slowly swept up and taken by the lines and curves on the paper.

Those familiar with Laurie Reid's work may be surprised to learn that she used to paint traditional watercolors of still lifes.  Her interest shifted away from representation as subject matter towards line and the effects of water on paper.  Reid explores the ways in which water, atmosphere, gravity, paper and pigment intersect and how they interact with one another.

LAURIE REID (b. 1964, Minneapolis, MN) was included in the "2000 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.  She was a 1998 SECA Art Award recipient (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) and as a result was given an exhibition at SFMOMA.  She was one of ten artists selected for the "1999 Biennial" at the Orange County Museum of Art.  Laurie Reid's work made its first appearance in New York in 1996 at The Drawing Center.  She will be included in "Marked: Bay Area Drawings" at Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Galley at Hunter College in September 2001.  Laurie Reid's work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum among others.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Jeff Brouws, Robert Mann Gallery, New York - Inside The Live Reptile Tent

Jeff Brouws: Inside The Live Reptile Tent

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

September 7 - November 3 2001

Robert Mann Gallery presents 'Jeff Brouws : Inside The Live Reptile Tent', an exhibition of the artist's photographs of carnivals and amusement parks. These vivid photographs are the result of his fascination with American life. As a teenager in the 1960s, Jeff Brouws hitchhiked from his family home in Daly City, California, to the seaside amusement park, Whitney's Playland-at-the-Beach. Intrigued by the seedy allure and surrealism of this quintessential American destination, he continues to mine the visually rich terrain of carnivals and amusement parks : futurist architecture, pulsing neon signs, ghostly silhouettes, maddening games of chance, bizarre sideshows, and serpentine roller coasters.The photographs of Jeff Brouws portray both the tumultuous energy of carnivals and parks when in operation, and their tranquil sadness when deserted or dismantled, bereft of the crowds upon which they thrive.

JEFF BROUWS was born in San Francisco, California, in 1955. He photographs extensively throughout North America, discovering beauty in commonplace surroundings. Jeff Brouws is drawn most often to derelict buildings and landscapes faded with the patina of time, seeking in these weathered surfaces the varied history of America, its aspirations and its failures. The exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery coincides with the publication of a book by the same name, 'Inside The Live Reptile Tent'. His work has been published previously in 'Highway : America's Endless Dream' and 'Twenty-Six Abandoned Gasoline Stations'. The photographs of Jeff Brouws are included in numerous public and private collections, including The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and The Cleveland Museum of Art.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001

www.robertmanngallery.com

Legs de la collection Seligmann à la Ville de Paris

Legs de la collection de Madame Seligmann à la Ville de Paris

Le 6 septembre 2001, dans les salons de l’Hôtel de Ville, s'est tenue la cérémonie organisée à l’occasion du legs de la collection de Madame SELIGMANN à la Ville de Paris. Celle-ci bénéficie ainsi de l’un des gestes les plus généreux de son histoire avec 160 œuvres léguées au Musée Carnavalet.

Eminent marchand d’art, François-Gérard SELIGMANN décédé en 1999, avait réuni dans son hôtel particulier parisien, une magnifique collection consacrée à la Belle Epoque qu’il plaça sous le titre de Marcel Proust, son auteur de prédilection. Citons « La soirée au Pré-Catelan » de Gervex, « Le Portrait de la Marquise de Vaucouleur » de Carolus-Duran, les portraits de personnalités artistiques comme Sarah Bernhardt par Louise Abbéma…

François-Gérard SELIGMANN fut également sensible aux petits tableaux de genre de la Belle Epoque tels que les scènes de café de Jean Béraud. A signaler deux artistes à découvrir, le dessinateur Henri Somm et Abel Truchet dont les tableaux évoquent Toulouse-Lautrec.

Une exposition se tiendra au Musée Carnavalet du 31 octobre 2001 au 20 janvier 2002 « Au Temps de Marcel Proust, la collection de F. G. Seligmann » et permettra d’apprécier l’ensemble du legs Seligmann.

Mairie de Paris

www.paris.fr

SportCult Curated by Euridice Arratia at Apex Art

 

Apex Art Curatorial Program

 

SportCult

Curated by:

Euridice Arratia

 

Artists:

Carlos Amorales - Gustavo Artigas - Elisabetta Benassi - Ana Busto and Sandra Seymour - Mónica de la Torre and Bruce Pearson - Godfried Donkor - Satch Hoyt - Michaela Schweiger - Grazia Toderi

 

© Satch Hoyt, The Don KingDom, 2001
Courtesy the artist and Apex Art, New York

 

It’s no wonder that sports function with such power in society. Often it is a nation’s identity itself that is sports’ principal narrative. Sports recount compelling stories of individual exploits and collective yearnings, but they also act as a meeting ground where far-ranging issues commingle, sometimes in contradiction. Side by side in the complex field of sports, one finds notions of leisure and entertainment and of bodily regimens and discipline, notions of athletes as symbols of local pride and idealism and as commodities and corporate entities. Coming from diverse backgrounds and using a variety of media, the artists included in SportCult point to the pervasiveness of the sports culture and its richness for metaphorical play.

The work of video artists Grazia Toderi and Elisabetta Benassi (Italy) dwells in the charged intersection between the sport arena and private and collective dreams.

Carlos Amorales explores in his performances the world of lucha libre (wrestling), a wildly popular entertainment in his native Mexico.

 

© Carlos Amorales, Carlos Amorales vs. Carlos Amorales, 2000
Courtesy the artist and Apex Art, New York

 

Gustavo Artigas (Mexico) stages and documents “sport events,” hiring semi-professional players to play soccer, basketball, or, in the case of his installation for SportCult, mudwrestling. 

In her interactive work Carrera, the German artist Michaela Schweiger revels in the childhood fascination with mimetic play.

Godfried Donkor (Ghana-UK) and Satch Hoyt (Jamaica) both investigate how race and corporate power mix it up in the world of boxing. Godfried Donkor has created wallpaper specifically for the exhibition,depicting eighteenth-century boxers superimposed on the pages of the London Financial Times.

  © Gustavo Artigas, From the VS series: #4, 2001
   Courtesy the artist and Apex Art, New York

 

Satch Hoyt, in his figural work, takes as a point of departure the famous impresario Don King in creating his sculpture made entirely of boxing gloves.

The soundscape Night Fights, created by Ana Busto (Spain) and Sandra Seymour (USA) is an aural excerpt of the intense life of the boxer.

And keeping with the interdisciplinary spirit of this exhibition, the Mexican poet Mónica de la Torre, has teamed up with the American artist Bruce Pearson to create a piece conjoining text and image that looks at the culture of recreation sports.

A color brochure containing an essay by Euridice Arratia will be available free of charge.

 

Apex Art, New York
September 7 - October 6, 2001

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Johan van der Keuken - Wexner Center, Colombus - From The Body and the City

 Johan van der Keuken

From The Body and the City

Wexner Center, Colombus

September 18 – December 30, 2001

“Film is not life, but it has to touch your life. It’s a second life.”—Johan van der Keuken

An exhibition of multimedia works documenting street life in New York, Amsterdam, and Sarajevo by Dutch artist Johan van der Keuken opens at the Wexner Center this fall. Known for his exquisitely shot images of urban settings around the globe, van der Keuken had an astonishing career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world. His gallery works, which combine film, photography, and sound, have never been shown in the United States. “The idea,” wrote the artist about these works, “is to use image, projection, sound, and visual instruments to create individual and distinct worlds and atmospheres.”

The three installations at the Wexner Center are part of the series The Body and the City, created in collaboration with designer Jeroen de Vries, who comes to the Wexner Center to help install the exhibition.

Reflecting Johan van der Keuken’s international perspective, the three installations on view here are New York/Colours on 42nd Street, Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, and Amsterdam/Two Streets. These works, all produced in 1998, consist of multiple photographs and moving images on film and video, focusing on the individual set against documentary backdrops of urban scenes. Wrote Artforum, these environments “draw visitors into and out of the exhibition space, to transform spectators into active participants, and, ultimately, to recall the violence and chaos of ‘what’s happening on the street.’”

In Johan van der Keuken’s own words, following are descriptions of the three installations:

• New York/Colours on 42nd Street, featuring a wall of 32 large-scale color photographs, plus film: “On 42nd Street between Times Square and Eight Avenue, I came across a long row of shops, their roll-down shutters all closed and painted in bright colors. I spent hours on the sidewalk across from the roll-down shutters, photographing passers-by walking past the fields of color. With their own bright colors, they seemed to represent an entire society. In the exhibition, the photographs are arranged adjacent to each other to form a huge mosaic of colour fields with people in them, one big human chessboard. A flat surface with the feeling: The Old New World: America!”

• Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, incorporating black-and-white photographs and film: “In November, 1993, my friend and colleague Frank Vellenga and I went to Sarajevo to show several films at the festival held there amidst Serbian gunfire and sniper ambushes. We also shot a 14-minute film showing moments in the day-to-day life of a city under siege with the underlying question: What purpose does it serve to make a film in wartime? Our main character was Marijela Margeta, an architecture student who risked her life to attend all the films at the festival.”

• Amsterdam/Two Streets, featuring two series of black-and-white photographs: “Two ‘lanes’ of photographs that are technically and aesthetically very different are confronted with each other. They run parallel or cross each other, much as streets do. On one lane, pictures of Dam Street can be seen through ‘holes’ in the black surface of the photographs like keyholes, so the view is largely restricted. Dam Street in the old center of Amsterdam is populated by an odd mixture of old timers, tourists, dropouts, junkies, and dealers. The opposite lane consists of pictures of Haarlemmerdijk. An old-fashioned shopping street now characterized by enormous mobility: stores, snack bars and coffee shops come and go, premises are constructed and demolished. I have photographed images of this street in layers one over the other, as multiple exposures with control and coincidence each playing an equal role.”

The Body and the City, a series of eight installations, has been exhibited in various combinations in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has hosted a retrospective of van der Keuken’s films this year, but his gallery installations have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Johan van der Keuken: From The Body and the City was curated by Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s curator of media arts.

Johan van der Keuken (1938–2001) emerged as an artist in 1955 with the publication of his first photography collection, We Are 17. After studying film in Paris, he embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world with retrospectives in Montreal, Paris (at the Centre Georges Pompidou), and Holland. The artist became known for his evocative images and films that revealed an interest in the global circulation of capital, the erosion of traditional ways of life, the divide between rich and poor, racial and religious conflicts, and the place of chance and control in photography and film.

Jeroen de Vries has been compiling and designing innovative photo and media exhibitions for more than two decades, most recently in the cities of Belgrade and Porto. He designed the recent catalogue of Johan van der Keuken’s photographs, The Lucid Eye. He divides his time between Amsterdam and Belgrade.

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

www.wexarts.org

Yasumasa Morimura’s Homage to Frida Kahlo

 

Yasumasa Morimura

An Inner Dialogue With Frida Kahlo

at Luhring Augustine in New York

 

Luhring Augustine presents a new series of self-portraits by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura. This body of work pays homage to the extraordinary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Morimura recreates, relives and indulges in the painters artistic process, vividly depicting the glamorous yet agonizing life of this remarkable woman

An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo is the crystallization of a project that has taken ten years to complete. Inspired by her remarkable life and career, Morimura becomes Frida Kahlo in this exhibition to reveal her world of joy, suffering, and mental and physical pain, and to seek a process by which healing may occur. Yasumasa Morimura describes Kahlo’s art as a “fierce and intense manifestation of human sentiments and universal themes, such as joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, beauty, life, and love.” It’s these themes that have provided inspiration for Morimura in this new body of work.

Widely known as the artist who transforms himself into the Mona Lisa and movie actresses, Yasumasa Morimura has won international acclaim for his unique and avant-garde expression of “beauty.” Since 1985, his focus has been his “self-portrait” series, consisting of unique reconstructions of art masterpieces in which the subject’s face is substituted with that of Morimura himself. Through careful study and analysis of the themes, artists, and historical background of these works, Morimura searches out their raison d’etre and transforms them according to his own interpretations. His ability to deconstruct, subvert and simultaneously create an homage is what enables his work to continually defy categorization.

This exhibition is on view simultaneously at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tokyo and a selection of works travels to the Steirischerbst Museum in Graz.

Yasumasa Morimura has shown extensively in international solo exhibitions, and his work is in the following selected collections: The Yokohama Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 

Yasumasa Morimura
An Inner Dialogue With Frida Kahlo
September 8 – October 6, 2001

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th St
New York 10011

La Photographie Hongroise des avant-gardes aux années 80 dans les collections du Musée Hongrois de Kecskemet au Musée du Montpanasse, Paris

La Photographie Hongroise des avant-gardes aux années 80 dans les collections du Musée Hongrois de Kecskemet

Musée du Montpanasse, Paris

12 septembre - 28 octobre 2001

Dans le cadre de la Saison Hongroise MAGYart et en partenariat avec l'Association Française d'Action Artistique (AFAA), le Musée du Montparnasse présente « La Photographie Hongroise des avant-gardes aux années 80 dans les collections du Musée Hongrois de Kecskemet », du 12 septembre au 28 octobre 2001. Les commissaires de l'exposition sont, pour la Hongrie, Karoly Kincses, Magdolna Kolta et, pour la France, Monique Plon.

La Photographie Hongroise est surtout connue par des artistes tels que : André Kertész, Brassaï, Martin Munkacsi, Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucien Hervé, Paul Almasy et bien d'autres... Tous ces artistes nés en Hongrie ont souvent eu un parcours commun. Après des études à Budapest dans les années vingt, ils partent pour Vienne puis Berlin qui est alors le centre artistique de l'Europe, mais la montée du nazisme en 1933 les obligent à se réfugier à Paris ou New York. A côté de ces grands noms, d'autres photographes, restés en Hongrie, ont su, malgré les vicissitudes rencontrées dans leur pays et l'isolement, imposer un style, un culte du beau ou un même souci du réalisme que leurs compatriotes émigrés. Dans cette exposition, on peut voir côte à côte, les oeuvres des artistes restés au pays et celles de ces photographes qui, à travers l'oeil, ont gardé une même sensibilité originelle et développé une ouverture et une réflexion théorique que leurs compatriotes moins connus ont partagées. Cette exposition s'efforce de faire découvrir, en apportant un nouveau regard sur les maîtres de la Photographie Hongroise, célèbres ou moins célèbres, mais tout aussi talentueux tels que Angelo, Josef Pecsi ou Nandor Barany. Tous ces " vintages " et photographies originales des collections du Musée de Kecskemet, près de Budapest, ont été rassemblés et conservés par Karoly Kincses et sa collaboratrice Magda Kolta. Leur érudition, leur grande connaissance de la photographie, les dons des artistes et des collectionneurs ont fait du petit Musée de Kecskemet, un lieu incontournable pour les amoureux de la photographie.

Les photographes Hongrois émigrés

Lucien AIGNIER Paul ALMASY Ferenc ASZMANN Ferenc BERKO Eva BESNYO Irène BLÜHOVA BRASSAÏ Cornell CAPA Robert CAPA Emeric FEHER Francis HAAR Lucien HERVE Ata KANDO György KEPES Lajos KERESZTES André KERTESZ Ergy LANDAU György LORINCZY Mari MAHR Laszlo MOHOLY-NAGY Miklos MÜLLER Martin MUNKACSI Sylvia PLACHY Gustave SEIDEN

Ceux qui sont restés en Hongrie

ANGELO Rudolf BALOGH Nandor BARANY Zoltan BEREKMERI Ferenc CSIK Karoly ESCHER FG HALLER Judit KARASZ Lajos LENGYEL Jozsef PECSI Marian REISMANN Denes RONAÏ Kata SUGAR Kalman SZÖLLÖSY Ernö VADAS Istvan VECSENYI

La Hongrie constitue à bien des égards, un paradoxe sur la scène artistique mondiale du XX° siècle. En effet, la puissance de création et de diffusion artistique d'un pays s'est toujours mesurée très largement à sa capacité politique et économique d'imposer ses vues aux autres Etats, à l'image de la France au début du siècle et, plus largement, des Etats-Unis depuis la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Or, la Hongrie a connu une période d'intense créativité au moment même de son affaiblissement politique suite à la défaite de la Triple Alliance, à l'issue de la Première Guerre Mondiale. A l'inverse, Vienne, qui était le centre névralgique de l'Empire Austro-hongrois et incarnait un des pôles essentiels de l'avant-garde artistique européenne avec la Sécession, connaît une année 1918 qui marque, selon l'écrivain Karl Krauss, " la fin du monde ". En une seule année disparaissent successivement les principaux animateurs de l'école de Vienne que furent Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner et Egon Schiele. Budapest, au même moment, voir surgir toute une génération de jeunes créateurs qui, par leurs personnalités et leurs modes d'expressions vont incarner une nouvelle modernité et élargir les frontières de l'art. La Hongrie incarne dans le panorama de l'art mondial un autre paradoxe, parfaitement souligné par Karoly Kincses : entre la fin de la première guerre mondiale et l'intervention militaire soviétique à Budapest (1956), plus de dix photographes marquants du XX° siècle ont quitté leur pays d'origine, ce qui fait de la Hongrie " le plus grand exportateur de photographes mondialement connus " : Brassaï, Martin Munkàcsi, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Robert Capa et son frère Cornell Capa, Gyorgi Kepes, Nicholas Murray, Paul Almasy, Lucien Hervé ou Ata Kando. Comme si pour s'épanouir les artistes hongrois devaient répondre aux appels de Berlin ou de Vienne dans un premier temps, puis de Paris et New York. La situation économique et politique difficile de la Hongrie au cours de cette période ne se répercute donc pas sur la capacité de la Hongrie à faire naître des talents mais se traduit plutôt par son incapacité à les conserver dans ses frontières. Cette fuite des cerveaux, comme nous l'appellerions aujourd'hui, fut donc non seulement liée aux soubresauts politiques mais également à l'incapacité de ce pays d'offrir les conditions nécessaires à l'émergence d'une scène artistique viable économiquement, hors de la soumission aux forces politiques dominantes. Pourtant, l'entre-deux-guerres a été une ère d'épanouissement pour la photographie hongroise grâce aux progrès techniques et à l'intérêt du grand public. Ainsi, la photographie hongroise commence à être reconnue sur la scène internationale, à tel point que l'on parle de style hongrois pour caractériser ce culte du beau, de la forme plutôt que du contenu, ce souci de l'esthétique plutôt que de l'engagement. Mais, parallèlement à ce courant " esthétisant " va se développer une photographie plus soucieuse du contenu, plus ouverte aux problèmes de son époque et plus proche des réalités. Elle sera représentée par deux courants : le photo-journalisme et la socio-photo, le premier se concevant comme un regard objectif sur le mode d'un Munkàcsi peut apparaître comme une excellente synthèse du réalisme photographique et du style hongrois, comme une rencontre heureuse entre la forme toujours très élaborée et le contenu au plus proche des réalités. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, quant à lui, porte le style hongrois aux limites de l'esthétique, avec son avant-gardisme triomphal où les lois propres du support devaient annihiler toute subjectivité. De la même manière, les photographies de Paris réalisées par Brassaï croisent habilement la flânerie romantique à la façon de Walter Benjamin (Paris, capitale du XIX° siècle) et le quasi relevé topographique de l'architecture de la ville, entre subjectivité et objectivité, entre forme et sens. Robert Capa, figure mythique du photo-journalisme de guerre, qui a su retranscrire pour nous la guerre d'Espagne ou le débarquement de Normandie, était également tout aussi soucieux du contexte que de son aspect formel. Autre point commun de cette génération prodigue, la capacité de faire entrer de nouveaux modes d'expression dans le domaine artistique. Que la photographie de mode ou le photo-journalisme constituent des courants transversaux de l'expression artistique n'étonnera aujourd'hui personne, mais c'est sans doute grâce à des hommes tels que Munkàcsi et Capa (et bien d'autres photographes hongrois) qu'une telle ouverture d'esprit est désormais possible. Cette capacité de porter un mode d'expression au niveau de l'excellence artistique, de le détourner de ses fins purement marchandes ou informatives est peut-être le principal héritage de la photographie hongroise. Belle réussite en réalité que cette diaspora de photographes qui n'aura pas eu besoin de se fédérer en courant, en " isme ", pour rayonner jusqu'à nous.

Maximilien Queyranne

Parle-t-on de la photographie hongroise, on pense aussitôt à des artistes aussi célèbres qu’André Kertész, Brassaï, Martin Munkacsi, Robert et Cornell Capa, Lucien Hervé, György Kepes, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Eva Besnyö, Sylvia Plachy et bien d’autres... Avec leur renommée mondiale, ces artistes partagent, sans exception, d’être hongrois et d’avoir, à l’âge adulte, émigré de Hongrie. Leur connaissance de la photographie, leur approche, leur relation au monde se sont forgés pendant leurs années passées en Hongrie, mais c’est à l’étranger qu’ils sont devenus célèbres, au point de s’inscrire dans l’histoire de la photographie du vingtième siècle. Cependant, nombre de leurs contemporains restés en Hongrie, qui avaient les mêmes origines et les mêmes ambitions, sont allés aux mêmes écoles, ont eu la même formation. Pour n’avoir pas quitté leur pays, ils n’avaient pas moins de valeur ni de talent, mais la place de la Hongrie dans l’histoire de l’Europe centrale les a condamnés à l’isolement. Qui connait le monde d’un Angelo, d’un Jozsef Pecsi, probablement le photographe le plus novateur des années vingt et trente, d’un Nandor Barany, d’un Zoltan Zajky qui, dans le nouveau style positiviste, ont laissé des oeuvres à jamais restés uniques ? Les meilleurs des reporters photographes hongrois, Rudolf Balogh, Karoly Escher ou Denes Ronaï, ont su montrer qu’ils savaient, tout autant qu’Erich Salomon ou Werner Bischof, aller au coeur de l’événement. Et que dire encore des meilleurs étudiants du Bauhaus, Judit Karasz, Iren Blüh et les photographes sociaux hongrois, rassemblés autour de Lajos Kassak ? Nous avons pensé que cet ensemble considérable mais mal connu avait une place aussi légitime que brillante dans une exposition sur l’histoire de la photographie hongroise entre 1920 et 1945. Parmi les collections du musée hongrois, nous avons choisi des photographies d’auteurs d’origine hongroise de renommée mondiale, et, parallèlement, des images d’artistes qui sont restés en Hongrie, en veillant à la cohérence des différentes tendances rencontrées. Il nous a semblé juste de rajouter à la liste des " restés sur place " les oeuvres d’artistes tels que Ferenc Csik, Lajos Lengyel, Denes Ronaï, Kalman Szöllösy, Ernö Vadas.

Karoly Kincses, Conservateur du Musée de Kecskemet

Informations pratiques : Horaires d'ouverture : mercredi au dimanche inclus (fermé lundi et mardi) de 13h à 19h - Tarifs : Plein : 25 frs - Réduit : 20 frs (étudiants, + de 60 ans, chômeurs, carte Amis du Louvre et ICOM) - Groupe : 20 frs/ personne - Accès : Métro : lignes 4, 6, 12, 13, station Montparnasse ou Falguière - Bus : 28, 48, 58, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96

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