Hong Kong FILMART 2005 Survey

 

Hong Kong's Film and Television Market (FILMART) is tagged as the leading market in Asia says FILMART survey

FILMART's position as the leading trade platform for the film and entertainment industry in Asia has once again been confirmed, according to an independent survey released today (24 March).

The survey was commissioned by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) and conducted by Citigate DVL Smith. A total of 336 were interviewed, comprising of 253 visitors and 83 exhibitors at FILMART this week (22 - 24 March 2005).

According to interviewees, Hong Kong's FILMART ranked first as the most important film and entertainment industry event, followed by the Tokyo Film Market (TIFCOM) and the Pusan Film Market.

Among industry players surveyed, over 65% agree that Hong Kong is the major content production centre in Asia, driven by creative talent, state-of-the art technology and freedom of expression. 75% of respondents also regard Hong Kong as a major content distribution centre in Asia because of its international profile and strong distribution network.

HKTDC's Director of Service Promotion, Mr. Raymond Yip said, " This year's success at FILMART, further strengthens Hong Kong's position as the major content and distribution hub of Asia. FILMART represents a golden opportunity for International companies to explore the emerging business opportunities with Hong Kong as a gateway into the Chinese mainland, especially with the implementation of CEPA. This year, we have seen a double-digit growth in the number of exhibitors and visitors from Europe and the US.

Key findings of the survey are as follows:

Sectors with best business growth prospects: digital entertainment, followed by TV and film.

Company expansion plans within the next three years: 74% and 71% of the surveyed companies plan to expand in respectively in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.

Desirable improvement areas in the Chinese mainland: Increased effort to combat piracy, simplification of censorship and the adoption of film classification.

FILMART 2005 attracted over 350 exhibitors from 23 countries and regions, a 15% increase from 2004. The number of international visitors rose dramatically by more than 40%. This year, FILMART celebrated its 9th birthday as part of the inaugural Entertainment Expo Hong Kong.

Herbert Ferber, Knoedler & Company, NYC - Grounded / Suspended, Sculpture From The 1970s

Grounded / Suspended: Herbert Ferber
Sculpture From The 1970s
Knoedler & Company, New York
March 24 – May 7, 2005

Knoedler & Company presents an exhibition focused on thirteen sculptures by Herbert Ferber (1906-1991) from the decade of the 1970s – including two large-scale outdoor works and five suspended wall reliefs.

A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Herbert Ferber was also highly regarded by his artist-colleagues as an intellect, and he was often a spokesperson for New York School ideas. He was one of Betty Parsons' artists, first showing with her in 1947. At her gallery, and later at Samuel Kootz's, he formed relationships with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Tony Smith, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and others. The Museum of Modern Art made its first purchase of a sculpture by Ferber in 1949.

Herbert Ferber's sculpture of the 1970s evolved from an earlier Abstract Expressionist idiom shared by his sculptor contemporaries Theodore J. Roszak, David Hare, David Smith, Ibram Lassaw, and Seymour Lipton (who showed with Herbert Ferber at Betty Parsons Gallery and whose career is currently the subject of an exhibition on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York). By the early 1960s, Herbert Ferber's work had become especially distinctive in its concern for and engagement with the spectator, manifested in the Whitney's 1961 exhibition of his installation piece, Sculpture as Environment, Interior.

Another focus of Herbert Ferber's work during the 1970s was his Cages – in which forms are suspended within slight, linear three-dimensional frameworks, as in Homage to Piranesi XI (Sens), 1978. Herbert Ferber's Homage to Piranesi series alludes to the baroque fantasies of the Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778), particularly his Imaginary Prisons etchings. Among Herbert Ferber's signature works, sculptures from the Piranesi series are in the collections of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

In 1979, Herbert Ferber also began a series of floating wall reliefs that Eugene Goossen has described "as spatially full as the best of modern openwork, free-standing sculpture... Close study of any of the wall pieces reveals an exercise of choice as deliberate and delicate as the metaphors in a Shakespearean sonnet."

Gounded / Suspended: Herbert Ferber – Sculpture from the 1970s is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essay by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Suand and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum, New York. 

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.knoedlergallery.com

Monica Mariniello à la Galerie Marie Demange

Exposition d’art contemporain

Monica Mariniello

Galerie Marie Demange, Paris

26 mars - 6 mai 2005

 

La galerie Marie Demange présente une série de sculptures récentes de Monica Mariniello. Le travail de cette artiste toscane nourri de splendeurs florentines et de références à l’Antiquité offre des œuvres d’une sensibilité très contemporaine et d’une grande originalité.

Toute l’oeuvre de Monica Mariniello semble l’expression d’une rêverie fascinée par la puissance et la fragilité de la terre, de la pierre, du fer, de l’air, de l’eau et du feu.

De cette fascination pour les éléments, quand le ciel et la terre se rencontrent par la magie du paysage et du temps, naissent ces œuvres où la photographie, moment volé, moment fixé, se laisse inclure, comme avalée par la pierre, matière pérenne contre la fluidité du temps qui passe.

L’univers de cette artiste ouvre à une poésie du fugace, de l’éphémère et de la métamorphose. Elle attrape au vol l’immatérialité du temps, en saisit les traces, ombres changeantes, reflets dans l’eau, nuages, pour en faire la matière même de son travail.

La dimension « artisanale » de son oeuvre la rend d’autant plus précieuse qu’il est devenu rare aujourd’hui qu’un artiste contemporain manie avec ce raffinement et ce sens de l’harmonie la pierre et le métal. Ce remarquable travail sur les matières livre une œuvre sensible et sensuelle, aux contrastes subtils.

A l’apparente dureté, pesanteur, permanence de la pierre et du fer répondent la légèreté, la fragilité, l’évanescence de l’eau, des nuages et du ciel évoquant dans une harmonie inattendue d’une grande beauté. De manière étonnante, il se dégage de ces matériaux bruts une impression de douceur, de calme et d’apaisement. Ses compositions sérielles, propices à la contemplation, invitent à la méditation et conduisent tout doucement à retrouver en son monde intérieur les souvenirs oniriques de paysages passés ou imaginaires.

Hymne à la vie, en sa beauté, en ce qu’elle doit à la nature, forte et fragile, libre et soumise, c’est surtout un travail d’une grande humanité, dans ce que nous pouvons en espérer de meilleur : sa sensibilité au monde.

BIOGRAPHIE de MONICA MARINIELLO

Née à Sienne en 1954, Monica Mariniello a étudié le dessin à l’Académie de Florence, puis la sculpture aux Beaux-Arts de Paris entre 1980 et 1986. Elle a été lauréate du prix Renoir en 1995.

A la fin des années 80, elle expérimente un premier langage formel, dans un travail subtil  sur le métal récupéré et refaçonné. Les « Portes du temps », « Le jardin aux mille oeufs » en sont les plus émouvants exemples. A partir de 1995 apparaissent les terres cuites puis, vers 2000, les inclusions travaillées de photographies, qui font sa spécificité aujourd’hui. Elle enchaîne les expositions personnelles et collectives depuis 1988, de Paris à San-Francisco, de Collioure à Toluca, au Mexique, mais aussi en Italie. Elle y a réalisé en 1996 des oeuvres sculpturales monumentales, notamment à Guyancourt (Yvelines) en 2001 dans le cadre d’une commande publique. Elle vit en France et travaille dans son atelier de Montreuil, dans la banlieue parisienne.

Galerie Marie Demange

Exposition MONICA MARINIELLO

26 mars - 6 mai 2005

Galerie Marie Demange
12, rue Beautreillis
75004 Paris  

Robin Sellick, Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill - Facing Robin Sellick

Facing Robin Sellick

Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill

24 March — 29 May 2005

Facing Robin Sellick showcases a collection of world-class portraiture by one of Australia’s premier celebrity photographers, Robin Sellick. 

This special exhibition spans 10 years of Robin Sellick’s career and features over 80 celebrities from Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett, Magda Szubanski, Hugo Weaving, John Polson, Portia de Rossi, Anthony La Paglia, Emma George, Dee Smart, Kylie Minogue, Cathy Freeman, Pat Rafter, Grant Hackett and Rove McManus to Henry Rollins, Radiohead, Placebo, The Darkness, kd lang, Andrew Denton, Barry Humphries, Spike Milligan, Hugo Weaving, The Tea Party, Travis, Slim Dusty, Spike Milligan, Pat Rafter, Lleyton Hewitt, Cathy Freeman, Grant Hackett, Sir Donald Bradman, Clive James, Michael Parkinson, Rove McManus, Molly Meldrum, Rose Porteous, Bananas in Pyjamas, The Wiggles, Pro Hart, Lindsay Fox, Eddie Maguire, Amanda Vanstone, John Howard, Steve Bracks, Natasha Stott Despoja and The Wiggles.

A trademark feature of Robin Sellick’s work is his use of light. Most of his subjects seem literally illuminated in arresting and unusual ways. These elements, combined with an unmistakable wit and playfulness, create what many people would see as an unconventional approach, but one that is in fact the essence of an Australian point of view.

Applying this approach to portraiture has seen Robin Sellick’s work published in dozens of major magazines around the world over the past decade. Although his portraits bear all the hallmarks of a photographer whose work is truly international, the goal throughout his career has been to define a style of photography that is intrinsically Australian.

Jane Scott, Director of the MGA said, “Facing Robin Sellick is not only a prime example of contemporary Australian portrait photography but it also provides a unique window into popular culture in this country throughout the past decade.”

Monash Gallery of Art is the sole Victorian venue for this special touring exhibition.

MONASH GALLERY OF ART - MGA

860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill, Victoria 3150, Australia

www.mga.org.au

Basquiat Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum + Other Venues

Basquiat
Brooklyn Museum
March 11 - June 5, 2005

Following the Brooklyn Museum presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from July 17 to October 10, 2005, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from November 18, 2005 to February 12, 2006.

Over 100 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose meteoric career coincided with the emergence of the hip-hop movement and who contributed to the revival of painting in the United States before his untimely death, are on view in the major exhibition Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum. A number of works in the exhibition have never been seen in the United States.

The most comprehensive re-evaluation of the prolific artist’s career since a 1992 retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum, the exhibition includes more than seventy paintings and fifty works on paper presented on two floors. This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary achievement embodied in Basquiat’s work—his skillful use of color, his aptitude at drawing, his unique and complex iconography, his integration of text into his canvases and his development of themes from the African Diaspora. Born to a middle-class Brooklyn family of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, Jean-Michel Basquiat was active for just one decade, yet he is one of the best-known artists of his generation and enjoyed unprecedented international recognition. Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. His works continue to break auction records for art made during the 1980s.

When still in his teens, Jean-Michel Basquiat first gained recognition among New Yorkers for the cryptic graffiti poetry he sprayed on the walls of Lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO. In 1981, however, when he was twenty years old, Basquiat burst upon the art scene under his own name with an original body of work that quickly developed toward a complex and highly diverse, mature style, marked by innovation, sophistication, skill, and a stirring emotional depth. By the age of 21, he had already enjoyed five important one-person exhibitions and been included in the prestigious Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany.

A talented, self-taught artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skill set him apart from many of the artists of his generation. He drew constantly, producing hundreds of works, which he sometimes photocopied to incorporate into his paintings as collage elements. He admired other draftsmen, including Leonardo da Vinci, whose anatomical studies he quotes, and Cy Twombly, whose influence is seen in many of Basquiat’s earliest works. Among the finest examples of this aspect of Basquiat’s work is a series of 32 drawings currently referred to as the Daros Suite, and once belonging to the legendary collector and dealer Thomas Ammann. The portfolio will be seen in its entirety for the first time in the United States.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings are frequently inhabited by primitive-looking figures with large, mask-like heads and consequently have been considered Neo-Expressionist in style. Nevertheless, although he exhibited many of the qualities of such modernists as Picasso, Matisse, Kirchner, Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, and, his friend Andy Warhol, he had a unique style, one that synthesized many of the main tendencies of the 20th century art.

Basquiat’s art was also part of the cultural movement that began sweeping the country at the time: hip-hop. As a musician and performer, he was friendly with many figures on the downtown New York music scene and even performed in a feature film loosely based on his life entitled Downtown 81, directed by Edo Bertoglio. Indeed, a second film on his life, the posthumous Basquiat, directed by artist Julian Schnabel, achieved some critical success.

The co-curators for Basquiat include Marc Mayer, Basquiat Project Director, former Deputy Director for Art, Brooklyn Museum, and now Director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Fred Hoffman, Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kellie Jones, Assistant Professor of the History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University; and Franklin Sirmans, an independent writer, editor, and curator based in New York.

A full-color catalogue with essays by the co-curators has been published by the Brooklyn Museum in association with Merrell.

Basquiat is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. The national tour of Basquiat is sponsored by JPMorgan Chase. Additional generous support has been provided by Fernwood Art Foundation. The exhibition was also supported in part by the Brooklyn Museum’s Richard and Barbara Debs Exhibition Fund and the Museum’s Contemporary Art Council. The Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities has granted an indemnity for this exhibition. The Village Voice and WBGO are media sponsors. Promotional support provided by MTA New York City Transit.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052

Zulma Parker Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow, Spanierman Gallery, New York

Zulma Parker Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow

Spanierman Gallery, New York

March 17 - April 23, 2005

Spanierman Gallery presents Zulma Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow, an exhibition and sale featuring over fifty works that introduces the paintings and monotypes of Zulma Steele (1881-1979), while also presenting a complementary group of paintings and woodcuts by her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). The show is accompanied by a brochure with a scholarly essay by Dr. Carol Lowrey.

Building on the extensive exhibition held at Spanierman Gallery in 1999-2000 that considered Dow’s art and influence, this show also augments the exhibition organized by Cornell University and currently traveling, entitled Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony that features the art colony in Woodstock, New York, of which Steele was a member.

Steele is probably best known for her pottery, and this exhibition is the first to concentrate on her brightly colored landscapes and her lyrical monotypes, revealing how her stylistic approach was informed both by modernism and by its impact on the arts and crafts movement.

Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Steele was raised in Vermont and in the Catskill region of upstate New York. In 1899, after periods of study in Chicago and Boston, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she came into contact with Dow, an avid proponent of the arts and crafts, who suggested that she join Byrdcliffe, the utopian arts and crafts colony established a year earlier on the outskirts of Woodstock by the Englishman Ralph Whitehead and the American painter-lithographer Bolton Brown.

Arriving at Byrdcliffe in 1903, Steele spent the next two years drawing decorative designs for mission furniture and other objects, incorporating indigenous flora in her work. Although Byrdcliffe’s furniture concern closed in 1905, she stayed on in Woodstock, going on to make monotypes, pottery, and picture frames. She also studied painting with the Tonalist painter Birge Harrison, who urged his students to explore the pictorial potential of local scenery. By about 1910 Steele had evolved a lively Post-Impressionist style that she applied to depictions of the regional landscape, in particular a series of stunning views portraying the Ashokan Reservoir in all phases of its construction--several of these works are included in this exhibition.

Steele’s involvement with advanced strategies of form and color did not go unnoticed: in 1914 several of her paintings were included in The Exhibition of Contemporary Art, a controversial show of cutting-edge art held at the National Arts Club that had been organized by the New York Times critic J. Nilson Laurvik, known for his sympathetic outlook to progressive modes of painting. There, Steele’s oils hung side-by-side with those of Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley.

Painting and printmaking also occupied the attention of Dow, an artist, teacher and theoretician whose interest in the design principles of Eastern art helped pave the way for the development of Modernism in the United States. A native of Ipswich, Dow studied in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Paris, before returning to his native town in 1889. There while painting of the low-lying salt marshes near his home, he developed the views on mass, line, and color that became the basis for his influential book of 1899 entitled Composition.

In 1895 Dow moved to New York, where he taught at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and Columbia University’s Teacher College. His influence was far-reaching, encompassing both the fine and decorative arts; his notion that artists should work in an “imaginative manner” set an especially important example to painters such as Max Weber, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Steele.

Dow was engaged in printmaking until 1907, when he turned increasingly to oil. After his first visit to the Grand Canyon during the winter of 1911-12, he began exploring the expressive potential of color, creating vivid, light-filled views of the canyon with a lush Fauvist palette that reflect his belief that “the Canyon is not like any other subject in color, lighting or scale of distance. It forces the artist to seek new ways of painting.”

Dow is represented in this exhibition by intimate, Barbizon-inspired canvases from the late 1880s and 1890s and by a selection of his views of the Grand Canyon. A group of color woodcuts and cyanotypes are also included, underscoring the artist’s interest in a wide range of media.

SPANIERMAN GALLERY

45 East 58 Street, New York, NY 10022

www.spanierman.com

Martin Smith, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Martin Smith 
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
11 March - 23 April 2005

Martin Smith shows a new series of ceramic works investigating properties of space through varying accents of colour, shadow and reflected light. This is a development of his ‘Oscillate’ series and continues a line of artistic inquiry that began with ‘Wavelength’, a site specific installation made for Tate St Ives in 2001. Each work is composed of two elliptical or circular units, derived from sections of cones and cylinders and fabricated from an open textured red brick clay. They sit on discs of coloured glass whose hue is amplified or deeply muted in reflective inner surfaces of platinum leaf. Dependent on the spacing of the clay units, sometimes open, sometimes tight, one area can seem brightly lit and another in deep shadow. As a result of alternative colour and light responses the viewer gains very different perceptions of the inner spaces of the pieces. Due to their apparent stability and weightiness, the clay forms bring a sense of materiality and inertia. But in his deft use of colour to articulate light and space Martin Smith also conjures up a curiously contrasting sense of the ephemeral.

MARTIN SMITH is widely regarded as one of the UK’s most innovative ceramic artists. He has exhibited internationally and was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum, Rotterdam in 1996. His work is represented in numerous public collections including: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was awarded a Chair as Professor of Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art, London in 1999.

BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY
17-18 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DN
www.bmgallery.co.uk

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue - Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
March 5 - April 9, 2005

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents its first solo exhibition with the American artist SPENCER FINCH. For a viewer acquainted to Spencer Finch's work this exhibition reveal well-known and recurrent themes. We have references to philosophical phenomenology and psychology of perception: What does it actually mean to experience a colour? What is seeing? How do we communicate experiences? How can a sensual stimulus trig an existential reconstruction of a cultural context - as in the case of the famous Madeleine in Marcel Proust's Recherche? And how can such a context be shared? Spencer Finch has worked consistently with these questions during his career as an artist. "Prussian Blue" is yet another step in the development of a deeply personal "Cultural Colour Doctrine" that involves such disparate phenomena as the pink colour of Jacqueline Kennedy's hat the day her husband, the President, was shot, or the tone of the ceiling above the sofa in Sigmund Freud's examination room, and the shade of blue in the sky over the place where the first atomic bomb was developed in the desert of Los Alamos in 1945.

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Spencer Finch delves into Prussian blue, the pigment that was the first artificial pigment, and invented in this very city by Heinrich Diesbach some 300 years ago. Suddenly blue was for the first time available as an affordable colour, both commercially and artistically. Its use quickly spread to textiles and it was notably used to dye the uniforms of the Prussian army. In the 19th century it showed itself useful for the early photographical pioneers and was used for cyanotypes or blueprints.

Prussian Blue, 2005 is a three-dimensional model of the molecular structure of said pigment, executed using standard light bulbs in different sizes. As all Spencer Finch's works, the chandelier is representational. This is in fact what the pigment looks like on the molecular level.

In Self Portrait as Crazy Horse, 1995-2005, a large site specific cyanotype photograph made directly on the wall, Spencer Finch again connects to the use of Prussian blue but also to the German fascination with Indians as manifested in the huge success of Karl May's stories. Using the whole gallery space and its large windows as a camera and a gesso-primed, and photosensitised wall as the "film", he spends a day in front of the wall, using the time from sunrise to sunset as exposure time. The final result is a cyanotype made directly on the wall that shows himself as the famous Indian chief. The cyanotype process uses the same components as the ones found in Prussian blue and gives an image traced in white on a blue background. In the work, which hovers between, painting, photography and performance, the artist seems to appear as a white shadow on the wall. Or is it only your imagination? Crazy Horse was a Lakota warrior and mystic who successfully lead an uprising that culminated in the battle of Little Big Horn, also known as Custer's Last Stand. However, even if occupying a place in our collective memory, and even if coming from an era when photography already played a significant role in defining historical key figures and places, Crazy Horse never allowed anyone to take his picture, "Why would you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?"

The main work that Spencer Finch has made especially for the exhibition is an installation called Two Examples of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue) 2005. Blue light is seen coming from two large door openings leading in to large light-filled rooms. Both appear blue, but the colour is achieved by different means. Again the artist questions what we see but also shows faith in representing the unattainable - be it the colour of Jackie's pillbox hat or the elusive position of electrons in a molecule. Similar ideas come back in a series of water-colours, Study for a Transparent Language, Index of Prussian Blue (35 watercolour drawings), 2005, that catalogues alphabetically 35 different names for the pigment, ranging from American Blue to Williamson's Blue. But again, does anyone know what blue is?

This is Spencer Finch's first solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake. In 2003 he participated in the gallery's exhibition on painting, "Pale Fire", with the light installation New York Boogie Woogie, 2003, (the light at Times Square on the night of April 27, 2003).

NORDENHAKE Berlin
www.nordenhake.com

Bacon Picasso, Musée Picasso, Paris - La vie des images

Bacon Picasso

La vie des images

Musée Picasso, Paris

2 mars – 30 mai 2005

Avec une centaine d’œuvres de Pablo Picasso et de Francis Bacon, cette exposition veut rassembler les œuvres-clefs qui, depuis le début des années 30, témoignent de la fascination exercée sur Francis Bacon par l'art de Picasso. La dimension plastique, thématique et philosophique de ce dialogue virtuel se manifeste tout particulièrement dans cette « brutality of fact » qui, selon ses propres termes, liait l’œuvre de Bacon à celle de Picasso.

Pour comprendre l’œuvre de Bacon, et notamment ses origines, l’étude des rapports qu’elle entretient avec celle de Picasso est essentielle. Si l’artiste lui-même a toujours indiqué de la manière la plus explicite le rôle tenu par sa découverte de l’œuvre de Picasso dans sa décision de devenir peintre, comme dans ses options thématiques ou stylistiques plus tardives, cette filiation n’avait encore jamais fait l’objet d’un travail d’analyse systématique.

L’exposition traite de la période qui s’ouvre en 1927-1928 avec le voyage de Bacon à Paris ; découvrant l’œuvre du maître espagnol lors de l’exposition "Cents Dessins par Picasso" à la galerie Paul Rosenberg (juin-juillet 1927), Bacon, que rien ne prédisposait à un tel choix, décide alors de s'engager à son tour dans la peinture. Entre 1933 et 1944, se situe une période cruciale d'expériences artistiques qui vont le conduire à peindre le triptyque Trois études de figures à la base d’une Crucifixion (1944) prenant comme source la Crucifixion de Picasso, 1930, et la série des dessins que ce dernier fit à Boisgeloup deux ans plus tard.

C'est autour des grands thèmes communs aux deux artistes qu'a été conçu le parcours de l'exposition qui bénéficie de très importants prêts de prestigieuses collections publiques et privées internationales. Ce parcours commence par une salle d'introduction qui confronte quelques témoins majeurs (collections particulières, Marlborough International Gallery) de l'œuvre initiale de Bacon (l'artiste a en effet détruit la quasi-totalité de son œuvre de jeunesse), aux dessins et peintures surréalistes (1927-30) de Picasso qui en furent les sources directes. Viennent ensuite des sections thématiques :

- Clefs / Ombre : Les Baigneuses à la cabine, 1927-28, et L’Atelier, 1928, de Picasso sont présentés, en vis-à-vis du Triptyque à la mémoire de Georges Dyer (Fondation Beyeler) de Bacon.

- Crucifixion : Ici sont réunis, autour de la Crucifixion de Picasso de 1930 et des dessins de Boisgeloup, 1932, une petite Crucifixion de 1933 (collection particulière) et la seconde version des Trois études de figures à la base d'une crucifixion datant de 1988, peints par Bacon (Tate Gallery).

- Cris : Cette section confronte les Têtes dominées par le motif des « bouches dentées » peintes par Picasso entre 1925 et 1935 et le tout premier de Papes de Bacon, Head VI, 1949 (Hayward Gallery-Festival-Hall).

- Portraits : Cette section associe des Têtes peintes par Picasso durant la période cubiste (1907- 1914) ou dans les années 1930-40, aux Portraits d’Isabel Rawsthorne et de Michel Leiris et à un groupe d'Autoportraits de Bacon (musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, et collections particulières).

- Nus : Autour de La Flûte de Pan, œuvre de Picasso datant de 1923, sont rassemblés le Triptyque, 1972 (Tate Gallery), et Study from the human body, 1987 (collection Claude Berri), de Bacon. De même que le Grand Nu au fauteuil rouge, 1929, les dessins pour les Femmes d’Alger d’après Delacroix, 1954, ou les dernières Odalisques de Picasso sont présentés en vis-à-vis du Nu couché, 1969 (Fondation Beyeler), de Bacon.

Grâce à la présentation de cet ensemble d'œuvres majeures, l'exposition permet de mesurer la place tenue par Pablo Picasso, moderne anti-modèle du grand maître, dans le puzzle d'images du « musée imaginaire » de Francis Bacon. 

Musée national Picasso

Hôtel Salé - 5, rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris

www.musee-picasso.fr

Betsabeé Romero, Galeria Ramis Barquet, NYC - Vulnerable Windows

Betsabeé Romero: Vulnerable Windows 

Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York 

March 4 - April 2, 2005 

Galeria Ramis Barquet is pleased to announce Vulnerable Windows, an exhibition of the most recent work of Mexican artist, Betsabeé Romero.

Throughout her career Betsabeé Romero has dwelt on traditional genres and handcrafting techniques to comment on aspects of contemporary Western culture, from the standpoint of her Mexican identity. For almost a decade, the automobile has been a recurrent theme in her paintings, sculpture, photography and site-specific installations. From toy cars transfigured into quasi Dadaist objects, “ex-voto” paintings on car parts like hoods and doors, to actual reconfiguration of automobiles as public sculptures, With poetic wit and ingenuity, Betsabeé Romero has transformed these artifacts into commentaries on the conjunction of technology and craft and the recycling of form and function.

For Vulnerable Windows, utilizing pre-Columbian geometric patterns and motifs, the artist pierced a series of eight used tires taken from the public buses of Mexico City. The tires are covered in gold leaf that also suggests a strong Baroque influence. Two other tires are carved with patterns of Indian iconography inspired by a recent visit to the Taj Mahal. Here, instead of recurring to the use of semiprecious stones, the artist uses chewing gum, an emblematic element of American culture, to fill the carved motifs on the tires.

Some other works from the exhibition, which are also a common example of Betsabeé Romero’s oeuvre, are comprised by found car windows, which she regards as lenses that protect us from urban violence. The windows are carved and grinded with different depictions alluding to this symbolism as protectors from the outside world.

Betsabeé Romero was born in Mexico City in 1963. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Latin America. Romero recently participated at a group exhibition of Mexican artists titled ECO: Mexican Contemporary Art at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain (2005). Recently, she has also participated in biennials such as the Havana Biennial and the Sao Paulo Biennial. She currently lives and works in Mexico City.

GALERIA RAMIS BARQUET

532 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.ramisbarquet.com