Louise Bourgeois at Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown - Sleepwalking

Louise Bourgeois: Sleepwalking

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown

November 24, 2001 - August 25, 2002

“I’m in a state of sleepwalking which has something to do with the impression I have of not being able to focus my attention on anything for long. At the same time my brain is tremendously active. I have all sorts of ideas and plans in my head and I’m all set to write, or to draw--anything...”

- Louise Bourgeois, Diary entry, November 19, 1944

Louise Bourgeois has always had an abundance of ideas and plans in her head, and has realized hundreds of them over the course of seven decades. With the recent commission of Eyes, 2001, a monumental, permanent, outdoor sculpture by this influential artist, the museum has brought into its galleries a select sampling of her artwork to compliment and provide a context for the sculpture outside. This selection includes, twenty drawings, six sculptures, a photograph of the artist from 1982 by Robert Mapplethorpe, and an audio track titled, Otte from 1995 in which Bourgeois sings a song she wrote in her native French.

Sleepwalking touches on a range of motifs and themes within Louise Bourgeois’ prolific body of work, including that of the “insomnia drawings,” intimate works, primarily in ink on paper, that have aided the artist through an ongoing battle with sleeplessness. Drawings of this nature, such as the 1998 Untitled (I Can or Will Fall Asleep), together with the sculptures in the exhibition, provide a glimpse into her working method. As indicated in her diary entry from 1944 above, Louise Bourgeois is in a constant flux of production, moving effortlessly between materials and motifs, between small works and large public installations. For example, Spider II, 1995, included in the exhibition, is a smaller, yet no less powerful, prototype for Louise Bourgeois’ massive public installation, Maman and two smaller Spiders, recently on view at Rockefeller Center in NYC. While her work has undergone dramatic formal changes over the years she has remained loyal to a handful of visual and psychological subjects: family groups, personal spaces and the fragmented human form.

Louise Bourgeois began her career as a painter and print-maker but sculpture has been her dominant medium since the late 1940s. Though her work shared some stylistic attributes with popular art movements such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, because of her gender and her intentionally idiosyncratic style, she remained on the fringes of these groups. Her modest public persona was exploded by the critically acclaimed 1982 MoMA retrospective, Louise Bourgeois, the first of its kind for a woman artist. She has since received many prestigious awards and honors including the first Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Sculpture Center, Washington DC in 1991; distinction as the United States representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale; and the National Medal of the Arts at the White House in 1997. In recent years, she has completed a number of large-scale installations and commissioned public works, including the museum’s 75th anniversary sculpture, Eyes, 2001 located on the front lawn and entrance courtyard.

Louise Bourgeois: Sleepwalking was organized by Abigail Guay, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art ‘02 with Lisa Dorin Curatorial and Programs Assistant.

WILLIAMS COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART - WCMA

15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Ste 2, Williamstown, MA 01267

www.wcma.org

Eileen Neff, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Moving Still

Eileen Neff: Moving Still

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

November 16 - December 22, 2001

Locks Gallery presents a new series of photograph-based work by the Philadelphia artist and writer EILEEN NEFF. These fifteen images begin from the artist's photographs and combine several images that evoke both mysterious and playful landscapes.

Eileen Neff, well known for photographic installations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Contemporary Philadelphia Artists, 1990) and ICA, Philadelphia (The Mountain, A Bed and A Chair, 1992) and as a critic and teacher, has most recently photographed interiors and the landscape as seen from the commuter train from Philadelphia to New York. This is her first exhibition at Locks Gallery and her largest solo exhibition since 1997.

Previously, Eileen Neff's photographs turned into actual objects, combining furniture or picture frames with landscapes or interiors. In these new works, the complex structures of the installation are embodied in the individual photographs. Working from a conceptual impulse to trigger memory or reflection, Neff's landscapes pose questions about presence and perception.

The seemingly natural landscapes are in fact constructions that allow Eileen Neff to question what is seen versus what is imagined. In this group of works, generated from her train photographs, movement and time seem to exist in different states within the same landscape.

EILEEN NEFF received a B.A. from Temple University, a B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York; Artists Space, New York; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. She has received numerous awards and grants, including an NEA Photography Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Leeway Foundation Grant. Eileen Neff has been a regular contributor to Artforum since 1989 and has taught at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981 she has been an instructor at the University of the Arts.

A full color catalogue with an essay by Dominique Nahas accompanies the exhibition.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Nathalie Du Pasquier, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - New Paintings

Nathalie Du Pasquier : New Paintings

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

27 November - 22 December 2001 

Nathalie du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux in 1957. She travelled extensively before settling in Milan permanantly in 1979. It was in Milan that she became a founding member of the acclaimed Design movement - Memphis and latterly focussing on her own painting. ‘Memphis’ marked a revolutionary moment in contemporary design, the group addressed architecture, interior design, furniture and eclectic ‘objects’. They sought to create a more up-to-date lifestyle atmosphere and were distinguished by their “games of aesthetic mockery” and an anti-idealogical energy which gave the movement its richness, complexity and ambiguity. Led by architect Ettore Sotsasse, the group comprised several nationalities, styles, disciplines and sensibilities.

Around 1987 Nathalie du Pasquier began to focus more exclusively on her studio practise, working within the genre of Still Life. The artist believes “the studio is a place to work but also a place to live” , the objects are those that surround her in her daily working life; handtools, baskets and shoes with nothing more exotic than a patterned vase or an unusual stone. In his essay about her work in 2000 the Irish painter stephen McKenna said “This is not a celebration of banality but a means of concentrating the attention on how things are seen and painted......an attempt is made to release the visual marvels hidden beneath the surface of things”. Nathalies’ work is anchored in the representation of an object or a collection of objects but the work has no anecdotal narrative present in them. If the paintings have names, they are merely descriptive and if the objects are recogniseable that is merely incidental. Stephen McKenna noted that “A pepper becomes primarilly a colour variation of certain yellows joined to a precise green curve. It is not a giant pepper. A pair of scissors is a series of arabesques, joints and reflections where the colours and and positions of the shadows compete in importance with the objects” Scale is a key element of the work, the objects are frequently represented many times greater than life-size, in subdued, muted colours and the treatment of shadows is altogether significant.

In her new work Nathalie Du Pasquier studies her subject matter at a much closer range and exaggerates the role of shadows and reflections by looking through transparent glasses and bottles. All the objects in the paintings sit on a flat plane and contain a horizon. “Through the glass, with or without water, the shapes of things change, this horizon is broken”. In her past exhibitons, items in the painting were gathered and strategically placed to create a composition. Lately the way in which Nathalie looks at her subject matter creates the composition, sometimes forcing her to crop items out of view. In this new suite of paintings she is more assertively exploring the formal aspects of light colour and composition using still life as a conduit for these experiments.

Nathalie Du Pasquier has exhibited internationally since the late 80’s, in galleries such as ‘Le Cadre Gallery’ Hong Kong, Antonio Colombo Arte Milan and Galerie Christa Burger Munich, this is her second solo-project with the Rubicon Gallery Dublin.

Catalogue Available.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Leo Rubinfien, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC

Leo Rubinfien
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
November 8 - December 22, 2001

Leo Rubinfien is one of photography's great travelers, and his pictures are rich with the beauty of life on the road. These images are less about exotic, faraway places and more about the common landscape of an in-between place : the railway compartment, the aircraft cabin, the waiting room in the airport, tourists at a celebrated monument, or the luminous mixture of sun, water and air that a passenger glimpses through an airplane window.

Included in the exhibition are a selection of Leo Rubinfien's most recent series of photographs, some of which are published in Blind Spot 19 (November, 2001). In these images of billboards and signs we sense his fascination with their combination of ugliness and beauty and the dreams of youth, wealth and love that they convey. Leo Rubinfien's first book, entitled 'A Map of the East', was praised by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books as "superb." In 'The New York Times', Charles Hagen explains that the strength of Leo Rubinfien's photographs "lies in their ability to evoke the sense of discovery and surprise, alienation and introspection, that for many people characterizes the experience of travel. For many people this uneasy blend of emotions includes homesickness and melancholy, a yearning to be no longer the outsider. This feeling comes through strongly in Mr. Rubinfien's lonely, elegant pictures." Maria Morris Hambourg, Curator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art calls 'A Map of the East' "as vivid and aching as brands on the heart." In 1994 the Robert Mann Gallery published Leo Rubinfien's second book, entitled '10 Takeoffs 5 Landings'.

Leo Rubinfien was born in Chicago in 1953. He has photographed in more than 40 countries across the world. Among other prestigious awards, he has received the Guggenheim Fellowship. His photographs have been exhibited widely at major museums in the United States, Europe and Japan, and are represented in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Cleveland and Seattle Art Museums.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.robertmann.com

Timothy Hutchings, I-20 Gallery, New York - The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views

Timothy Hutchings

The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views

I-20 Gallery, New York

November 3 – December 23, 2001

I-20 presents “The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views” by New York artist Timothy Hutchings. This video on DVD - which the artist began in early 2001 - depicts what at first glance appears to be a tourist film of 1930s Eastern Europe, with an unremarkable figure who walks among buildings and occasionally waves to the camera. In fact, the buildings are all landmarks that were destroyed in the world wars, and the animated sequences are based on period photographs. The man in period dress is the artist, who has inserted himself into these scenes like a time traveler. Combining video and digital animation, Timothy Hutchings has reanimated these buildings while allowing small errors of motion to remain - a clue for viewers that the apparent charm of these lost buildings is not exactly what it seems.

The second gallery holds 'Smialy' Forward Artillary Car, the artist's wood and cardboard sculpture of an armored train that traveled under several flags in both world wars. The train has been stripped of all its utilitarian signifiers - doors, rivets, ladders and guns - and has been reduced to an abstract model indicating nothing more than form and volume. Opposite to the video, which shows how landmarks are destroyed by war, the sculpture illustrates how warfare is transformed into a purist esthetic landmark.

Timothy Hutchings group exhibitions include “Greater New York” and “Some Young New Yorkers, Part 2,” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; “Parking” produced by MayDayProductions; “Keep Fit, Be Happy” at DeChiara Stewart; and “Dissin' the Real” at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna. Hutchings was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received a Skowhegan Fellowship. He received his MFA at the Yale University School of the Arts. “The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views” is his first solo show in New York.

I-20 GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.i-20.com

Ed Ruscha, Museum of Modern Art Oxford

Ed Ruscha

Museum of Modern Art Oxford

3 November 2001 - 13 January 2002

“When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were gutturalutterances like Smash, Boss, Eat. Those words were like flowers in a vase; I just happened to paint words likesomeone else paints flowers." Ed Ruscha

“Ed Ruscha has the coolest gaze in American art.” J G Ballard

The Museum of Modern Art Oxford presents the UK’s first major retrospective of American artist Ed Ruscha, in an exhibition organised with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The exhibition comprises a wide range of Ed Ruscha’s paintings from early ‘pop’ works such as Annie and Boss through to recent highly acclaimed ‘mountain’ paintings and metro plots, and also offers visitors a rare opportunity to see a selection of drawings and all of his books, including Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963).

Considered both a pop and a conceptual artist, Los Angeles based Ed Ruscha has resisted such convenient labels for his work, but has always been a pioneer in the use of language and imagery drawn from the popular media. From his early, powerful word paintings, to his influential artist books of the 1960s and 70s, through to his recent, colourful views of generic mountains, Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and journeys, image and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and the contemporary landscape.

“I am more firmly rooted in issues of abstract art than I am with things figurative, yet I use figurative objects. This is a contradiction that is never resolved but does not confuse me.” explains Ed Ruscha of his work.

Ed Ruscha was born in December 1937 in Omaha, and grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, (aged 18) he left home driving along Route 66 to California. The highways and landscapes he passed on his journey were to influence his work in a profound and lasting way. In Los Angeles, Ruscha attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1960 where, under the influence of teachers such as Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben and Emerson Woelffer, he gave up his original intention of becoming a cartoonist and began to focus instead on fine art.

In the early sixties, Ed Ruscha worked for an advertising agency, after which he made his first paintings using words, a prime focus for him throughout the years since. At first, words were rendered in great brushstrokes in the style of Abstract Expressionism, which later became words that floated against a variety of backgrounds. His early work featured mostly single words such as “Ace” and “Jelly”.

Ed Ruscha’s work is included in numerous international museum collections, and previous retrospectives have been mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The MOMA exhibition brings together, for the first time in the UK, works from private and public collections from all over the world, that survey Ruscha’s entire career to date.

“There’s been a kind of renaissance of interest in his work in the last three or four years” says Neal Benezra, who co-curated the exhibition. “He’s continually reinventing his paintings and reinventing not just the look of art but the way it’s made.”

Ed Ruscha opened in June 2000 at the Hirshhorn, and has toured to MoCA, Chicago, Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition has been organised by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. The exhibition is co-curated by Neal Benezra, Deputy Director, Art Institute of Chicago and Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn.

A fully illustrated, 196 page catalogue has been produced in association with Scalo Ltd, including essays by Neal Benezra, Kerry Brougher and Phyllis Rosenzweig. 

MOMA - MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, OX1 1BP

www.moma.org.uk

Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum

Milton Avery: The Late Paintings

Milwaukee Art Museum

November 30, 2001 - January 27, 2002

The first survey to explore the late paintings of one of the most influential American modernists, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings premieres at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Along with Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibits Wisconsin Collects Avery. This exhibition contains MAM’s Avery artworks, as well as works from Wisconsin institutions and private collections.

Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, organized by the American Federations of Arts and supported by the National Patrons of the AFA, comprises more than 50 exemplary paintings produced in the last two decades of Milton Avery’s life (1885–1965). The works feature nudes, interiors, seascapes, landscapes and Avery’s eloquent Self-Portrait (1947), depicting the artist with brush in hand surrounded by his own paintings. The paintings were executed between 1947, when Milton Avery had his first gallery retrospective, My Daughter, March (a survey of his own art and a celebration of his daughter’s life), and 1963, when he was forced to stop painting due to poor health.

During his lifetime, Milton Avery combined aspects of Impressionist subject matter with Abstract Expressionism, American interest in the everyday and Abstract Expressionist color and handling, effectively uniting American traditions and modernism. He is celebrated for his bold experiments with color and his spare, graceful style. In the 1950s and early 60s, Milton Avery intensified the contradictions between representation and abstraction in increasingly larger canvases, some measuring as much as five by six feet, and explored extreme simplification of forms.

“Avery’s common subjects and simple forms invite viewers to take the images at face value, but upon careful examination, his paintings reflect a powerful play between realism and abstraction,” said Russell Bowman, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum and curator of the exhibition at the Museum. “They also have a wit and vitality that make them wonderfully accessible.”

Frequently considered the last of the American painterly figurative artists, Milton Avery is reassessed in this survey as a pioneer and forerunner of a new generation of artists. He had an enduring influence on mid-century American art and was an inspiration to younger Abstract Expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, both life-long friends of Avery. In Avery’s eulogy, Mark Rothko acknowledged the debt that he and others owed, “For Avery was a great poet inventor who invented sonorities never seen nor heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.”

Wisconsin Collects Avery

The exhibition Milton Avery: The Late Paintings allows the Milwaukee Art Museum to highlight its own Avery collection and the acquisition of Milton Avery works among Wisconsin collectors. The Museum owns seven Avery paintings, which are displayed as part of its Bradley Collection. Collecting of Avery’s work in Milwaukee was led by art patron Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley’s special interest in the artist combined with the David Barnett Gallery’s numerous exhibitions of works from the Avery estate in the 1980s and 90s. Comprised of more than 30 works, Wisconsin Collects Avery includes paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints; and reflects the full range of works produced during the artist’s career.

After the presentation in Milwaukee, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings travels to the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, where it is on view from February 16 through April 14, 2002.

PUBLICATION: A fully illustrated catalogue published by the American Federation of Arts and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., accompanies the exhibition. Milton Avery: The Late Paintings features an extensive essay by Robert Hobbs, examining the philosophical underpinnings of Avery’s style and the ways in which modernist themes culminate in his late work. It also appraises the role that Avery played in the formation of the Color Field painters of Abstract Expressionism. A seminal essay on Milton Avery by Clement Greenberg that originally appeared in the December 1957 issue of Arts Magazine, and was later revised by the author, is reprinted. The renowned critic placed Avery in the vanguard of a tradition that united abstraction and representation, applying American ingenuity and an international sensibility. More than 110 pages containing approximately 52 colorplates and 35 black-and-white illustrations. 10 x 10 inches. Paperbound; $25.

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM - MAM 

700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202

www.mam.org