Kotscha Reist, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris

Kotscha Reist

Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris

27 mai - 26 juin 2004

KOTSCHA REIST vit à Berne. Ses oeuvres ont comme sujet la peinture elle même, avec ses soucis de surface, de concentration, de détail, de nuance. Kotscha Reist possède une manière toute personnelle d’assembler la couleur, on y devine sans peine la lumière du nord. Que son geste soit le prétexte à des camouflages, des motifs ou bien des figures, sa palette montre un choix plutôt restreint de couleurs qu’il mélange principalement jusqu’à l’obtention de teintes apparemment sales dont le vert, presque omniprésent est exalté dans toutes ses nuances. 

En recouvrant ses peintures d’un voile transparent, il confère à chaque tableau une représentation spatiale et imprime le motif particulier dans un arrière-fond indéfinissable. Cette façon fugitive de peindre, elle a sans aucun doute quelques illustres prédécesseurs comme références, conduit Kotscha Reist non à illustrer mais à évoquer. Ce qui l’intéresse est peut-être de baigner ses images dans un monde de rêverie et de solitude, il laisse malgré tout au spectateur le soin de se mouvoir dans le sens qui lui apparaît. 

Tentant d’ordonner en cercles thématiques l’isolation, la proximité l’éloignement, il peint aussi bien des images complexes, des paysages, des architectures que des images de cow-boy, de sportifs ou d’enfants. On découvre aussi dans cette exposition deux tableaux horizontaux représentant plusieurs jambes de femmes cadrées du dessus du genou jusqu’aux pieds. Inspiré par un foisonnement de chaussures à haut talons, l’artiste nous offre une variation sur ce thème. Ces quatre jambes gauches et cette jambe droite n’ont rien à voir ensemble, sinon qu’elles sont des jambes, elles sont là comme mise en scène : offertes ou à prendre, on ne sait. Elles sont une occasion de plus pour nous plonger dans l’univers mélancolique de l’artiste. 

GALERIE ERIC DUPONT

13 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris

www.eric-dupont.com

Nikon F70 DSLR Grand Prix 2004 Award

(c) Nikon Corporation. All Rights Reserved

Nikon announces that the D70 DSLR camera has been selected to receive the Camera Grand Prix 2004 award as the single most outstanding still camera.

The Camera Grand Prix is the most prestigious award presented to a camera in the Japanese photo industry. It is sponsored by the Camera Press Club, an organization founded in September 1963 and comprised of writers from thirteen of Japan's leading photography and camera publications.

This year's selection committee of 51 photographers, scholars, and magazine editors selected the D70 to receive the 21st annual Camera Grand Prix award as the single most outstanding still camera from 172 nominees released between April 2003 and March 2004. This is the 4th time Nikon has received the award, with previous wins in 1984 (the 1st Grand Prix) for the Nikon FA, in 1989 (the 6th Grand Prix) for the Nikon F4, and in 1997 (the 14th Grand Prix) for the Nikon F5.

The committee members issued the following statement of reasons for bestowing the honor of camera of the year on the D70: "The Nikon D70 delivers a superior balance of performance, price, and size. Despite being positioned as a new popular-priced digital SLR model, the camera is loaded with features that challenge even higher priced products. It overcomes the traditional weaknesses of digital cameras by realizing fast power-up and fast continuous shooting, and earns special notice for realizing response that is on par with 35mm film SLR cameras while improving practicality and comfort of use. Clearly labeled menu options make operation easier for novices and combine with the camera's other features to make it accessible to a wider range of users, thereby achieving a level where the D70 establishes an entirely new trend in digital SLR cameras.

In addition, the following features help welcome a new era of digital SLR cameras that are ready to perform and accessible to a wide audience: Quick response that allows shooting the instant the camera is turned on.

3 frame per second continuous shooting for bursts of up to 144 shots.

Fast 1/8000 second shutter speed and 1/500 flash sync shutter speed.

A fast and precise autofocus system.

Menu options that are easy to view and easy to understand.

Quality feel and design that is consistent with the Nikon lineup."

Chuck Close, Miami Art Museum - Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration
Miami Art Museum
May 14 – August 22, 2004

Miami Art Museum presents Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. Long celebrated as one of America’s foremost painter CHUCK CLOSE is also a master of the artistic language of printmaking. Direct from its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this exhibition chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done some of his most exciting work. In Miami, the exhibition has been coordinated by MAM Assistant Director for Programs and Senior Curator, Peter Boswell. Included in MAM’s presentation is a new woodcut self-portrait that has never been exhibited before.

In Chuck Close’s work the human face becomes a series of gridded abstractions that create a whole image when assembled in the eye of the viewer. Curated by Terrie Sultan, director of Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, Chuck Close Prints features 118 works dating from 1972 to 2002, illustrating the artist’s range of invention in etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut, and reduction linocut.

Chuck Close has said that his experiments in printmaking have been enormously influential on his paintings. “Prints have moved me in my unique work more than anything else has. Prints change the way I think about things.”

In the course of his career, Chuck Close has overcome a series of difficulties; his father died when he was still a boy, his mother became seriously ill and the artist himself was dyslexic – a condition which for lack of an accurate diagnosis, led him to be labeled “slow” in school. Nonetheless, Chuck Close graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington and earned an MFA with highest honors from Yale University.

In 1988, at the age of 49, Chuck Close was at the height of his career as a painter, when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a partial quadriplegic. The art world was stunned. Chuck Close was forced to come to grips with living the rest of his life in a motorized wheelchair with only limited use of his hands and legs. Chuck Close not only found a way to return to painting, he also developed new techniques that catapulted him to an even more prominent place among artists worldwide.

This exhibition puts the spotlight on the decidedly interactive approach Chuck Close takes with his prints. While the production of a painting can occupy Chuck Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take more than two years from conception to final edition. The relationship between Chuck Close and the master printers has become key to the creation of his work. Chuck Close Prints constitutes a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision and intellect of one of America’s most important living artists.

”Chuck Close has triumphed over immense difficulties to carve out a singular place for himself among artists,” said MAM Director Suzanne Delehanty. “This is a monumental exhibition and we’re pleased to present it in South Florida as part of our commitment to bringing the very best in art to our community.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 160-page catalogue published by Princeton University Press. 

About the Curator Peter Boswell

Peter Boswell has been assistant director for programs and senior curator at MAM since 1999. He is responsible for the growth of MAM’s permanent collection as well as the museum’s exhibitions, educational programs and publications. Mr. Boswell holds a BA in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Art History from Stanford University. At MAM, Peter Boswell led the curatorial effort behind the exhibition Miami Currents: Linking Community and Collection (2002) and has organized exhibitions for the museum’s New Work series of the work of Donald Lipski (2002); Teresita Fernández (2002); and Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt (2003).

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org

Updated 14.07.2020

Ricoh GX Appareil photo compact numérique

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Photos (c) Ricoh - 2004 - Tous droits réservés

Ed Ruscha and Photography at the Whitney

Organized to celebrate the Whitney’s acquisition of a treasure trove of photographs by Ed Ruscha, the museum presents Ed Ruscha and Photography, an exhibition of more than seventy original prints, many of which have never been published or exhibited before. The collection of 456 objects acquired by the Museum makes the Whitney the principal repository of Ruscha’s photographic works. Because of what the photographs reveal about his vision and his career, the collection will be an essential resource for the study and appreciation of Ruscha’s art in all media. The show runs June 24 to September 26, 2004. “Since the beginning of Ed Ruscha’s career in the late 1950s, photography has been both an inspiration and a source of discovery,” notes Sylvia Wolf, the Whitney’s Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, who organized the show. “This exhibition presents Ruscha’s signature photographic books and dozens of previously unseen original prints. Among these are unique photographs taken in Europe in 1961 that contain motifs and stylistic treatments that would emerge in Ruscha's paintings in later years. The exhibition suggests the depth of Ruscha’s engagement with photography and sheds light on his career as a whole.” Ruscha’s photographic books of the 1960s and 1970s have come to embody the Conceptualists’ embrace of serial imaging. The books have had a profound impact on the art and careers of many American artists, including Lewis Baltz, Dan Graham, and Robert Venturi. German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher presented Ruscha’s work to their students, including Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, whose own work incorporates a similar dry documentary aesthetic. And Canadian artist Jeff Wall has called Ruscha the “American Everyman.” Ruscha’s involvement with photography extends far beyond his books, however, as is revealed in the publication accompanying this exhibition. The artist identifies photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank as influential to his art. He also acknowledges the impact of photography on his work in other media. Last month, the Whitney announced that it had acquired a major body of original photographic works from Ruscha through the generosity of The Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation, with additional support from Tom and Diane Tuft, and through a significant gift of unique early works from the artist. Included are original prints from his photographic books Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963); Various Small Fires and Milk (1964); Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965); Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967); Royal Road Test (1967); Babycakes with Weights (1970) and Real Estate Opportunities (1970). Also in this acquisition are several photographs Ruscha never published, in particular 16 images from Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) that were not included in the book. In addition, the acquisition contains more than 300 vintage photographs from a seven-month tour that Ruscha took of Europe in 1961. Photographs from Austria, England, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia feature many motifs and stylistic elements that have marked Ruscha’s work over the past 40 years, in particular his interest in typography and signage, and his strong graphic sensibility. They also show him experimenting with the camera. Ms. Wolf observes, “The lack of self-consciousness and intense curiosity reflected in these early photographs makes them both refreshing and revelatory of a fertile time in a young artist’s career. Ruscha’s use of photography would later develop into a systematic inquiry with clarity of purpose, but during his months in Europe, his pictures suggest spontaneity, playfulness, and a pure delight in seeing.”

ED RUSCHA - Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Oklahoma City, Ed Ruscha moved to Los Angeles when he was 18. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1960, before working briefly in commercial advertising. In 1961, Ruscha embarked on a career as an artist and produced enigmatic paintings, drawings, and photographic books of gasoline stations, apartment buildings, palm trees, vacant lots, and Los Angeles’s famous “Hollywood” sign. The irony and objective stance of his works from this period placed him in the context of Pop art and Conceptualism, but Ruscha consistently defies categorization. Now, Ed Ruscha is recognized as one of our most important and influential contemporary American artists.

WHITNEY HOLDINGS AND EXHIBITIONS - The Whitney first exhibited Ed Ruscha’s work in the 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting. It has since collected his art and exhibited it in several group exhibitions. In 1982, the Whitney was the New York venue for an SFMoMA retrospective. Among the Whitney’s holdings are two master paintings, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) and Hollywood to Pico (1998), two portfolios of prints, six individual prints, and three drawings. This initiative extends a vigorous program of acquisitions in contemporary photography that began with the formation of the Photography Collection Committee in 1991.

About the Whitney Museum of American Art [click the link for more information]

The museum is located at 945 Madison Avenue, New York City. Museum hours are: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday.

Red Grooms at Marlborough Gallery, New York - New Works in Wood

Red Grooms, New Works in Wood 
Marlborough Gallery, New York
May 6 – June 5, 2004

Since 1976 when Red Grooms had his first exhibition at Marlborough of Ruckus Manhattan he has staked his claim as one of America’s most original, inventive, and popular artists. His work combines the sophistication of high art with the naiveté of folk art and the caricature of the cartoonist. The current exhibition includes one large oil on canvas and approximately twenty-five of the artist’s hallmark dimensional constructions which meld painting and sculpture. The painting entitled Manet at the Met (78 1/4 x 120 1/2”) is bound to be one of the show’s highlights. It portrays a large room at The Metropolitan Museum where Red Grooms has painted the various Manet works on view. The gallery is “ruckused” with a veritable comédie humaine of art goers while Red Grooms shows off his anecdotal ability to make characters believable. 

The medium for all the dimensional works in this show is acrylic on wood and among the several stand out pieces the largest is based on a gangster funeral. Measuring approximately seven by ten feet the scene of Death in the Family is set in the 1930s and we see FBI agents in the process of surveillance, peering through Venetian blinds as the gangsters load the coffin into a hearse. Another eye-catching work entitled Joseph’s Bridge has for its genesis the famous painting by Joseph Stella of the Brooklyn Bridge set against the New York skyline. In Red Grooms’ adaptation we see the bridge from the same vantage point as in Joseph Stella’s painting but the bridge is now projected into space and the footbridge is peopled by joggers, bicyclists and tourists while their general bustle is echoed by the repeating forms of the suspension cables and in the movement of car traffic on the ramps below and by the motoring of boats in the East River. The bright colors of the painting enhance the scene’s boisterous activity and overall radiant joyfulness.

It could be said that Red Grooms’ work is theatrical in nature, that it conveys through his special, resonant colors the buoyant feeling of a circus atmosphere, and that it is entertaining. “He is living proof that art can be fun,” and as another critic has pointed out, “the vibrant hues and dynamic motion of his work capture the energy of the circus in a way which immediately calls to mind the renderings of the very same subject in late 19th century art of Seurat and Signac.” Grooms himself once stated, “As a kid I was mad about the theater, absolutely mad about it. Circuses, carnivals, movies, it didn’t matter what they were. All of them are theater to me.” While the spirit of the theater indeed informs much of his work, one must remember, however, as Clare Henry rightly pointed out in Sculpture Magazine that Red Grooms’ large scale figurative tableaux are more than mere entertainment: “A superb draftsman with a keen, unforgiving eye yet easy going, light touch, he translates a lifetime’s acute observation (laced with strong satire) into bright Pop Americana with universal appeal. Caricature is often vicious and Grooms can offer a no-holds-barred message with bite. But he stops short of the malicious in favor of the benign commentary on human frailties with which we can all identify. Such humanity and honesty imbues his stereotypes with conviction.”

RED GROOMS was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School for Social Research in New York City and at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, MA. Along with developing the painted relief as both a painting and sculpture, Grooms invented the three dimensional form called sculpto-pictorama that allows the viewer to walk through and interact with an environment created by the artist’s vision. He has had three retrospective shows: in 1985 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in 1987 at the Whitney Museum, and in 2001 at the National Academy of Design of his graphic work. This last exhibition traveled to eight other venues through 2004. He has also been honored with several important survey exhibitions, of which two recent ones were at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ in 2000 and at the Katonah Museum, NY in 2003. The Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, will present an exhibition of Red Grooms’ work from May 7 - October 10, 2004.

He has received numerous awards and commissions throughout his career. His most recent award is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Academy of Design in 2003. His most recent major commissions are a large (132 x 188 x 88”) painted aluminum and plastic sculpture entitled Piragüas de Frambuesa (Raspberry Shaved Ice Cone) for Coamo, Puerto Rico to be completed in 2004; a monumental cyclerama and accompanying canvases for Shelly’s Restaurant, in New York in 2000; the permanent outdoor installation entitled Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel in Nashville in 1998; and a permanent outdoor sculpture commissioned by the City of Nagoya, Japan in 1996. Grooms’ additional artistic activities include happenings, filmmaking and theater designs. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Red Grooms’ work can be found in thirty-nine museums throughout the world. Among them are the following: American Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; Des Moines Art Center, IA; The Denver Art Museum, CO; Fort Worth Art Museum, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

In June 2004 Rizzoli will publish a new monograph on Red Grooms entitled Red Grooms with essays by Arthur Danto and Marco Livingstone and an interview with the artist by Timothy Hyman.

In collaboration with Marlborough’s exhibition will be a show of the artist’s watercolors and prints at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Entitled The Private World of Red Grooms the exhibition will run from April 29 to May 28, 2004.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY 
www.marlboroughgallery.com

Galia Amsel, Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland

Galia Amsel: Alternative Views
Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland
May 1 - 29, 2004

The Bullseye Connection Gallery presents Alternative Views, an exhibition of Galia Amsel’s contemporary sculptures in kilnformed glass. Alternative Views is a collection from the artist’s recent solo museum exhibition at the Museo de Arte en Vidrio de Alcorcon, Madrid.

Galia Amsel is recognized as one of the best British glass artists of her generation. Her sculptural cast glass works exhibited in solo shows in Britain, France, the USA and now Spain emphasize what the contemporary studio glass authority Dan Klein has called a "geometry of mystery".

Dan Klein’s writing about Galia Amsel’s work describes her ability to contain a world of movement and color in a minimal form: “It is impressive how much varied movement and rhythm [Amsel] manages to achieve from piece to piece within the simple variations of her contained forms and restrained colours. Texture, whether smooth and shiny or with the pitting of lunar landscape is also used to great effect. The different surface textures add sensuality. There is, particularly in her more recent work, a great variety of carefully controlled light and shade, or to describe it in another way, a great variety of moods. The darkness of night and the brightness of day are juxtaposed to create contrast and atmosphere...Her work refers to landscape, to movement, to atmospherics or to a combination of all of these and it manages to convey its message with the utmost simplicity.”

The kilnformed glass medium Galia Amsel uses to achieve her unique depth and colors holds particular challenges. The technical expertise required for working with kiln-cast glass is not that of the glass blower (an athletic exercise), but of the engineer and sometimes the seer: a knowledge of how glass will move within a mold, under high heat, untouched by the artist. Her finished works are generally of tabletop size in basic forms - circles, rectangles, squares that are broken or cut in a way that emphasizes frozen movement, whether it be of man or machine.

“In a sense [Galia Amsel] choreographs movement, capturing a moment of balance that has almost bodily tension,” says Dan Klein. “The rhythm, movements, balance and tension referred to are those of moving parts, whether they be related to the world of humans or the world of machines. ‘I like things that work – machinery, bridges, things that fit together and move, work together,’ she says...Her visual imagery relates to the mechanics of movement. Her work, like the work of skilled photographers, freezes a gestural or operational split second, making one aware of the structural detail of things in motion.” Galia Amsel’s work echoes with both stillness and force, like pieces from a machine whose function is left to the viewer to discern.

THE BULLSEYE CONNECTION GALLERY
300 NW Thirteenth Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
www.bullseyeconnectiongallery.com