Ashley Bickerton @ The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Ashley Bickerton
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
September 23 – December 16, 2017

The FLAG Art Foundation presents the first U.S. survey of Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton.

Ashley Bickerton’s vibrant and often dystopic vision of contemporary culture has been at the center of his four-decade-long practice, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, and every possible combination therein. The survey demonstrates the extraordinary visual range of Bickerton’s oeuvre, which oscillates between playfulness and brutality, extreme beauty and the grotesque. Works from the artist’s signature series from the 1980’s to present, including Susie, Logos, Blue Man, and new Water Vector and Wall-Wall works, highlight his subversive and self-aware critique of identity, consumerism, and cultural artifice.

Ashley Bickerton rose to prominence as part of the 1980’s New York East Village art scene, with works that layered the reductive formalist aesthetic of minimalism with signs, symbols, and logos, as a means to examine commodity and value. In 1982, Bickerton concocted Susie, a personal trademark, which would be stamped onto his work for much of the next decade. Subverting the authority of the signature, Susie reduced the artist to a brand, alongside his use of logos and symbols such as Nike, Samsung, TV Guide, dollar signs, and skulls. As Bickerton stated “maybe somewhere in this circumscribed liberty of obvious, eccentric, contradictory, and choiceless choices we can pinpoint an individual. ‘Yes, I am a macrobiotic birdseed-swallowing disciple of the Marlboro Man, I like my liquor ‘rot gut’ and my TV highbrow, I wear American yokel underwear in icy Bauhaus furniture and I drive a crappy French car. Who am I?’”

The artist’s preoccupation with the end of the world (perhaps foreshadowing the end of his time in New York), was evidenced in Ashley Bickerton’s work from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, which included flotation devices, portholes, ropes, carabiners, and biosphere escape hatches. These time capsules/idiosyncratic survival kits contain a variety of materials – cigarette butts, cheese puffs, alcohol, an Elvis costume, “Smoked Sturgeon, Salmon and Scallops With A Mild Horseradish Flavored Oil,” etc. – all preserved for an eventual apocalypse.

Ashley Bickerton decamped from New York in 1993, eventually settling in the surfer’s paradise of Bali, which resulted in a dramatic shift in his practice and style. Working in an increasingly figurative and self-reflective mode, the artist used himself, his family, fellow expats, and prostitutes as models for hyper-realistic paintings, which depicted an increasingly acerbic view of humanity. Bickerton parodied do-gooding society types, contrived and idealized self and family portraiture, western fantasies of island expat life, and the mythological role of the artist. This led to the creation of bizarre, composite alter egos, such as Blue Man and Snake-Headed Man, as well as a tongue-in-cheek version of himself in the likeness of Paul Gauguin. In seeking further freedom to create his maximalist compositions, Bickerton began staging elaborate sets, painting directly onto people and objects that he would photograph and digitally alter. Local, artisinally-crafted frames, inlaid with mother of pearl and hand-carved coconut shells, complete these complex satires.

Whereas Ashley Bickerton’s early works tackle form, function, and communication, with sometimes single words acting as the entire painting, his later figurative pieces are visually deafening, with bright color and cluttered objects mirroring the over-the-top excess featured as the work’s subject. Newly created Wall-Walls refer to an earlier series from the 1980’s, and attest to Bickerton’s continued interest to mine and recontextualize a cohesive cadre of themes over time. He states “in a long and often breathless career, I feel I’ve pursued every reckless tangent with utterly no fidelity to any stylistic cohesion, but nevertheless in this tangle I knew inherently there was a larger overarching language that was distinctly my own. The project of the last several years has been to try to come full circle and in the process unearth that language, to give it shape and cadence, and understand how it has run through the work, clear and unadulterated from the beginning. The Wall-Walls turned out to be the key that unlocked it all.”

Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959, Barbados, West Indies) is an artist living and working in Uluwatu, Bali. Bickerton graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA, in 1982, and continued his education in the Independent Studios Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, in 1985. Bickerton has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions, including The Newport Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2017); Almanach 16, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2016); among others. His work has been featured in major institutions, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012); Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2011); New Museum, New York, NY (2010), among others. Bickerton’s work has been included in prominent international biennales, including the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1992); the 44th Venice Biennale (1990); and the 1989 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; among others.

Additional support provided by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org

Masterpieces of Design and Photography @ Christie's London

Masterpieces of Design and Photography
Christie's London
3 October 2017

Christie’s Frieze Week season will launch on 3 October 2017, including, for the first time, an evening auction that showcases two complementary collecting categories: Masterpieces of Design and Photography. The auction will showcase masterworks of the 20th and 21st centuries and tell the story of the extraordinary expansion of creativity in both design and photography from 1865 to the present day. Featuring major names including Diane Arbus, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Allen Jones, Finn Juhl, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carlo Mollino, Marc Newson, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Gio Ponti, Jean Prouvé, Gerrit Rietveld and Thomas Struth, the auction will provide an opportunity for both established and younger collectors. On view at Christie’s, King Street from 26 September to 3 October. 

Francis Outred, Chairman & Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art EMERI: “I am delighted to present Masterpieces of Design and Photography: a new concept sale for Frieze Week 2017. Coinciding with our Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions, it is the sheer breadth and depth of materials on display in these 39 objects which underlines the extraordinary expansion of creativity from 1875 to the present day. The way that these ‘artists’ have responded to technological evolution by inventing new ways and approaches to deal with their vision of the world is truly breathtaking. Across 15 photographic works there are no less than six different process, but comparing the Platinum print in Robert Mapplethorpe’s masterpiece Self Portrait from 1988 with that of Baron Adolph de Meyer’s from 1906 creates two very different experiences. The touch and ‘texture' of photography is what I hope that this auction and exhibition encourages. Colour in the hands of Thomas Struth is very different to that of Andreas Gursky for example. These aspects are all heightened by the context of the surfaces, forms and textures of Design which surround them. Virtually each of the 24 pieces uses a unique set of materials from hand-blown glass to cutlery and porcelain, from steel mesh to stainless steel and painted steel and riveted aluminium. These pioneers of Design have tackled the human relationship with the world, making functional yet beautiful works, none more so than Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge. By placing these works within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century painting and sculpture – as celebrated in our Evening and Day Auctions, as well as our themed sales Thinking Italian and Up Close – we will bring new stories and artistic relationships to light. With prices ranging from £20,000 to £1,500,000, we are looking to encourage both established and younger collectors to come together and experience the special excitement and drama of an evening auction at Christie’s King Street.”

Highlights of the sale include Allen Jones’ Table, Chair and Hatstand (Hatstand estimate: £600,000 – £800,000; Chair estimate: £600,000 – £800,000 and Table estimate: £600,000 – £800,000), which are icons of British Pop Art and were created at the height of Jones’ career. Executed in 1969, the works were acquired that year by the pioneering collector, filmmaker and photographer Gunter Sachs, and remained in his possession for the next 43 years. Doubling as purposefully provocative pieces of household furniture, three exaggerated feminine figures are contorted into subservient postures. Illuminating the sexual undercurrents that ran through commercial advertising in the 1960s. Laced with seduction and critique in equal measure, they capture the Zeitgeist of this revolutionary period.

The pared back colour of Gilbert & George’s Red Morning (Hell) (1977, estimate: £800,000 – £1,200,000), from the landmark ‘Red Morning’ series of seventeen mural-sized works, with examples in various museums including Tate Modern. Red Morning (Hell) stands apart from others through its complete absence of red colour, resulting in a composition of austere monochrome impact. Red Morning (Hell) captures a pivotal moment in Gilbert & George’s career – the year was 1977, the Silver Jubilee of the Queen, but it was also a year rife with political and social unrest in Britain. The series’ title is a reference to the socialist movement which grew in the UK from 1976-77 and refers more broadly to tensions that coursed through many aspects of English culture at the time, from economic difficulties and police strikes to the anti-establishment punk movement, conveying deep social unrest.  

One of the leading design pieces in the auction, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’s 1919 ‘Elling’ sideboard (estimate: £60,000 – £90,000) is one of the most articulate examples of furniture as art and mirrored the evolution of minimalism and conceptualism in painting and sculpture such as that of Gilbert & George. The cabinet reveals the interior as exterior, the components identified, exploded and now held static in time, space and volume.  As a member of the Dutch De Stijl collective, founded in 1917, Rietveld embraced the group’s conceptual abstraction that adopted a streamlined, reductive personality that was now guided by bold use of line, plane, and colour. The ambient, deconstructed imagery of the painters Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and Piet Mondrian, amongst others, found synergy with Rietveld’s experimental abstractions of furniture.

Stretching over five metres in width and two in height, Andreas Gursky’s May Day IV (2000, estimate: £500,000 – £700,000) offers a vast, panoramic spectacle of humanity. Viewed from a staggering aerial vantage point, a sea of semi-clad revellers pulses to an unheard beat. Executed in 2000, it is the second from an edition of six photographs, examples of which are housed in the Kunstmuseum NRW, Düsseldorf, the Kistefos Museet, Oslo and the Castello di Rivoli, Turin. The work was included in the artist’s 2001 touring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York – Gursky’s first American retrospective – where it featured on the front cover of the catalogue. Capturing a split-second of frenzied activity in intoxicating detail, it is a consummate example of Gursky’s ability to distil the chaos of contemporary human experience into a single, crystalline image. Merging and manipulating multiple different shots, his works play with radically intensified colour, overlapping perspectives and dramatically enlarged scale. Andreas Gursky’s Rheine II (1999) holds the record for a single photographic print, selling for $4,338,500 at Christie’s New York in 2011.  Gursky leads a field of major photographers of the German school including Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth and Wolfgang Tillmans, also featured in the auction. 

At the other end of the 20th century, Marc Newson’s pioneering A Lockheed Lounge (designed 1985-1988, this piece executed before 1993, estimate: £1,000,000– £1,500,000) inaugurated a new aesthetic language for the twenty-first century, and confirmed Newson’s status as a universal creator whose sensitivity, diversity and sense of innovation remains unparalleled. A Lockheed Lounge holds the highest price achieved for a contemporary design by a living maker, selling for £2,434,500 in 2015. This chaise longue was designed to investigate mobility and movement and was was inspired by a classical furniture form – a daybed – however, through the use of a biomorphic form and the rich texture of the riveted aluminium surface, it was updated to now become the leading icon of contemporary design.  In 1993 the Lockheed was brought to a wider audience when featured as the centrepiece in Madonna’s video for her single, ‘Rain’. Two years later Vitra Design Museum included the Lockheed in their exhibition of ‘100 Masterpieces’, and in 2000 the chaise was the focus of the Carnegie Art Museum’s aluminium retrospective, occupying both front and back covers of the exhibition catalogue. The innovative status of this landmark design was now assured, and swiftly the few remaining examples that had not already been secured by museums became the focus of pioneering collectors, many drawn from the fields of contemporary art, transcending the traditional boundaries that were perceived to exist within the fields of the fine and the decorative arts.

Another stand-out work, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait (photographed and printed in 1988, £300,000 – £500,000) is an edition of three platinum prints, with two of them in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. An icon of twentieth century portraiture, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait signifies one of the very last self-representations he would make before his life – and profound contribution to the history of art – was tragically cut short in 1989 at the tender age of 42. Seen clad in a black turtle-neck that intentionally blends with the background and disembodies his brilliant, sharp mind from the decaying, ailing body it underlines the artist’s understanding of his impending death. Clutched in his right hand is a walking cane, an open confession of physical frailty, adorned with a shiny metal skull, turning the entire composition into a vanitas and aligning Mapplethorpe with other greats who foretold their own death.

Carlo Mollino’s dining suite (1954-55, estimate: £300,000 – £500,000) is another highlight, and this is the first complete suite featuring a rectangular dining table with six chairs to be offered at auction in nearly two decades. The present suite is consciously rugged – its construction designed to withstand regular use and stylistically informed by Carlo Mollino’s studies into Alpine, vernacular furniture and architecture. Carlo Mollino is today celebrated as one of the most strikingly original creators of mid-century Italian architecture and design. He was a passionate skier and as such was naturally attracted to design in the context of winter sports. This suite was designed for just such a commission, the Casa del Sole ten-story apartment complex, in the Italian Alpine resort of Cervinia in Italy.

CHRISTIE'S LONDON
8 King Street, St. James's
www.christies.com

Artist Franklin Williams: 1963–1973 @ Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, California

Franklin Williams: 1963–1973 

Parker Gallery, Los Angeles 

September 17 – November 4, 2017 

Parker Gallery presents a solo exhibition of early works by FRANKLIN WILLIAMS, made between 1963 and 1973: Franklin Williams: 1963-1973.

Franklin Williams was born in Ogden, Utah in 1940. The value of handicraft was paramount in the Williams household, where his grandmother and mother made everything from quilts to hand-painted wallpaper, while his Uncle George carved figures out of vegetables, among other creative pursuits. He learned to sew and crochet at an early age; skills that he would continue to use throughout his artistic practice. When dyslexia prevented Franklin Williams from learning to read and write until adulthood, his mother encouraged his artistic pursuits by transforming their basement apartment into an art studio.

Franklin Williams attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he received a BFA in 1964 and an MFA in 1966. Franklin Williams was implored by Fred Martin to begin teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, assuring the reluctant young artist wary of his competence, “Your gift is what counts.” At the Art Institute, Franklin Williams taught alongside Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo and Bruce Nauman. Franklin Williams was included in the landmark 1967 Funk exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, and Whitney Museum Sculpture and Painting Annuals in 1967 & 1968.

Franklin Williams: 1963-73 focuses on the early part of the artist’s  career, from his formative student years through the development of his mature style. Most of the works in the exhibition have never been seen outside of the studio. They include sewn canvas sculptures stuffed with cotton batting and surfaces covered in painted dots and knotted yarn; small, contorted canvases on the brink of bursting; bulging box-like constructions sprouting appendages; and a suite of elegant organic abstractions composed of cut, folded and collaged paper. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition fully-illustrated catalogue, including reproductions of early exhibition announcements and an essay by writer and curator Eli Diner.

FRANKLIN WILLIAMS (b. 1940 in Ogden, UT, lives and works in Petaluma, CA). Select solo exhibitions include Eye Fruit: The Art of Franklin Williams, Sonoma County Art Museum, Santa Rosa, CA (2017), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT (1997), Braunstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1971-89), Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT (1984), Franklin Williams Paintings & Constructions, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (1983), Galerie B, Paris, France (1975), Gallery Marc, Washington, D.C. (1972), Phyllis B. Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL (1969), Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (1968), Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1967), Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA (1966), and New Mission Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1964). 

PARKER GALLERY

2441 Glendower Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027

www.parkergallery.com

Amy Sillman @ Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Amy Sillman, ein Paar 
Capitain Petzel, Berlin 
September 15 - November 11, 2017 

Capitain Petzel presents the second solo exhibition of New York artist AMY SILLMAN at the gallery’s Berlin space. Entitled »ein Paar«, the exhibition takes place on the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week.

Drawing is the starting point and method for this exhibition, an expanded material investigation that moves from painting to animation. Compelled by the implications of the German phrase »ein Paar«, (a couple or a few), the artist has realized pairs and groups of works, including a large di- ptych on canvas, a series of works on paper utilizing both printmaking and gestural drawing, and a video animation combining digital and hand-made layers. Keenly attuned to language itself, Sill- man is interested in generating mismatches, disjunctions, and parapraxis from the materiality of the calligraphic impulse. Her work seems to constantly generate beginnings and transformations: ultimately she registers the process of change itself.

In recent works, Amy Sillman has explored seriality and machine formats, using inkjet-printed canvasses generated from her drawings. In this show, she continues the exploration using silkscreen prin- ting with drawing. In her video »After Metamorphoses«, an endlessly-morphing digital line, which loosely following the narrative of Ovid’s work, »The Metamorphoses«, plays atop a backdrop of process-based inks-on-paper. The video also features a soundtrack by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks.

Amy Sillman’s new book, »the All-Over«, co-published by Dancing Foxes Press, Portikus, and Mousse Publishing, makes its debut at this exhibition, and is available throughout the show. This fully-illustrated monograph explores Amy Sillman’s work in painting, drawing, and animation, and con- tains essays by curator Manuela Ammer (MuMOK, Vienna) and art historian Yve-Alain Bois.

AMY SILLMAN (born 1955 in Detroit) lives and works in New York City. Since 2015 she has held the position of Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. Her works have been recently exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2017), Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2016) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015). Her exhibition »one lump or two« originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2014, toured the Aspen Art Museum and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her works have been presented, among others, in group shows at Brandhorst Museum, Munich (2015), Tate Modern, London (2015) and MoMA, New York (2014).

CAPITAIN PETZEL 

Kark-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin

www.capitainpetzel.de

You can also read on Wanafoto the post about the first exhibition of Amy Sillman at Capitain Petzel in 2011: Amy Sillman: Thumb Cinema  

Ross Hansen @ Stephane Simoens Contemporary Fine Art, Knokke, Belgium

Ross Hansen: Representing Abstraction
Stephane Simoens Contemporary Fine Art, Knokke, Belgium
16 September - 23 October 2017

Populated by replica brushstrokes and simulated gestures, Ross Hansen’s paintings are about painting. They are also about time. Extrapolated from a momentary gesture, these reproductions of marks are created via a painstaking and circuitous process of masking and re-enactment. Ross Hansen goes the long way around, repeating and slowing down the action until the medium itself becomes the message.

Many of the current series of paintings are generated from ideas and imagery developed during a much earlier cycle of work. Others ‘re-make’ the provisional or formative stages of their own production. The artist consistently trips himself up and doubles back on his own output, both recent and historic.

The sanding process employed throughout this body of work itself represents a kind of retrospection; a physical excavation of paint layers built up over time. The resulting paper-smooth surface also creates an association with the flatness of reproductions. The works have the appearance of printed copies, an effect exacerbated by the contrast between the smooth crosssections of painted matter and the coarser texture of the linen backgrounds on which they sit.

The linen acts like a ground zero signifier of ‘painting’. It effectively establishes the context for the dance between gesture and reproduction that takes place on its surface. These painted brushstrokes may be stripped of their spontaneous bravura, yet there is heroism too in these patiently constructed anti-gestures. The hand-made copy reinforces the value of manual facture, gaining its power and resonance from the exact same sensory appeal as the painterly mark.

Ross Hansen’s critique of painted gestures can therefore be seen as a love hate affair; the transposing of the gesture into hyper-reality a means of finding an alternate way of engaging with the same age old concerns. For Hansen it creates a kind of a-temporal space in which to reinvent the wheel.

ROSS HANSEN (b.1973, UK) studied at Newcastle University and The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Recent exhibitions include: After Images, stephane simoens contemporary fine art, Knokke, Belgium; Se souvenir des Belles Choses, Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain, Sérignan, France; Contemporary Drawings from Britain, Museum of Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, Shaan Xi Province, P R China; Dessins au Cube, l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture, Montpellier, France. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon and UBS Warburg. He now lives and works in rural France.

Stephane Simoens Contemporary Fine Art
Golvenstraat 7, 8300 Knokke-Zoute - Belgium
www.stephanesimoens.com

Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris @ Bortolami Gallery, New York

Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris
Bortolami Gallery, New York
8 September - 21 October, 2017

Bortolami presents PARTI PRIS, BARBARA KASTEN’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Endlessly experimental and now in her eighth decade, Barbara Kasten presents three recent bodies of work: an extension of her colorful, large scale photographs, Collisions, and new sculptural, photographic hybrids entitled Progressions. She also presents Parallels—her first freestanding sculpture since the early 1970s. In architectural terminology, the parti pris is the chief organizing principle of a project. Barbara Kasten utilizes the structural principles of architecture and process in her new works, which can be read within the realm of architectural diagrams.

Barbara Kasten’s inventive Progressions, composed of face-mounted photographs with geometric acrylic shapes affixed to the surface, emphasize the duality of the photograph and of the relief’s sculptural forms. Transitioning from photographic representation as in the Collisions to address spatial ambiguities, Barbara Kasten incorporates concrete materiality while maintaining each element’s mysterious and elusive qualities. The image in the photograph depicts space and even recedes into the depths of implied space, while the three-dimensional components extend outward. Both features—the image and the acrylic fragments—act as a bridge between dimensions.

As photographic hybrids, the Progressions are abstract objects, and the relationship between the two components ceaselessly oscillates back and forth. With both elements of sculpture and photography, the new works become something else entirely, depending on and informing one another. The shapes and shadows that they cast are crucial; creating what Barbara Kasten deems a “temporary photogram.”

These new works conceptually relate to her AMALGAMS of the late 1970s; gelatin silver prints that fused photogram, photograph, and drawing. As photograms of transparent objects on light-sensitive prints, the AMALGAMS are three-dimensional arrangements translated into two-dimensional form. Nearly 50 years later, Kasten is now inverting this translation, turning the two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional forms.

Finally, Parallels, the large sculpture central to the exhibition, brings the transparency of form that exists in Kasten’s images fully into the viewers’ space and experience. In Parallels, she pushes the modernist, formal geometric order of these cubic constructions askew, utilizing a point of balance for its form. The fluorescent, acrylic components of Parallels are cantilevered on top of one another, each depending on the other, relying on the tension between each element and reaffirming an intuitive process.

BARBARA KASTEN was born in 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Most recently, Barbara Kasten was the subject of a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that travelled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Centre Pompidou, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. among many others.

BORTOLAMI GALLERY
39 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
www.bortolamigallery.com

Opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE

Opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi 

11 November 2017

Louvre Abu Dhabi announced it will open its doors to the public on 11 November 2017. It is the first museum of its kind in the Arab world: a universal museum that focuses on shared human stories across civilisations and cultures.

The opening celebrations will include a wide range of public programmes, including symposiums, performances, concerts, dance, and visual arts by renowned contemporary and classical artists.

Located in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pritzker Prize winning French architect Jean Nouvel has designed a museum city (Arab medina) under a vast silvery dome. Visitors can walk through the promenades overlooking the sea beneath the museum’s 180-metre dome, comprised of almost 8,000 unique metal stars set in a complex geometric pattern. When sunlight filters through, it creates a moving ‘rain of light’ beneath the dome, reminiscent of the overlapping palm trees in the UAE’s oases.

On display will be the museum’s important collection of artworks, artefacts and loans from France’s top museums. These span the entirety of human existence: from prehistorical objects to commissioned contemporary artworks, highlighting universal themes and ideas and marking a departure from traditional museography that often separates according to origin. In addition to the galleries, the museum will include exhibitions, a Children’s Museum, a restaurant, a boutique and a café.

Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority (TCA Abu Dhabi) and Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), said: "Louvre Abu Dhabi embodies our belief that nations thrive on diversity and acceptance, with a curatorial narrative that emphasises how interconnected the world has always been. The museum represents the latest innovation in a long-standing tradition of cultural preservation nurtured by the founding leaders of the UAE.

Louvre Abu Dhabi forms one element of Abu Dhabi’s cultural strategy, which safeguards our rich heritage and catalyses creativity. Investment in a vibrant cultural ecosystem supports the UAE’s economic diversification and development as a modern, dynamic society. Louvre Abu Dhabi will inspire a new generation of cultural leaders and creative thinkers to contribute to our rapidly-changing and tolerant nation."

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s story will begin in the "Great Vestibule", where visitors are introduced to important themes such as maternity and funerary rituals. The dialogue between works from different geographical territories, sometimes far apart, highlights similarities between the canons despite each having its own mode of expression. The galleries will be both chronological and thematic, and subdivided into 12 chapters. Displays include works from the earliest empires, including the first figurative representations, such as the Bactrian Princess created in Central Asia at the end of the 3rd Millennium BCE, funerary practices of ancient Egypt illustrated by a set sarcophagi of Princess Henuttawy, and the creation of new economies with a Decadrachm coin of Syracuse signed by the artist Euainetos.

A gallery dedicated to universal religions will feature sacred texts: a Leaf from the "Blue Quran", a Gothic Bible, a Pentateuch and texts from Buddhism and Taoism. The artistic exchanges on the trading routes during the Medieval and Modern periods are brought to the fore through a important number of ceramic works. Between Asia and the Mediterranean and then between Europe and America, guests will appreciate how the world’s horizon gradually expanded. A set of screens from the Japanese Namban demonstrate the dialogue between the Far East and Europe. From the image of the Prince throughout the world, illustrated by an important Ottoman Turban Helmet to a more intimate vision of a new art of living, the museum presents an exceptional chest of drawers made in Red Chinese lacquer by Bernard II Van Risenburgh (BVRB, 1696–1766), created in France. In a section about Modernity are Edouard Manet’s (1832–1883) the Gypsy, Paul Gauguin’s (1848–1903) Children Wrestling, Piet Mondrian’s (1872–1944) Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black. On show will be a monumental work by the artist Ai Weiwei (1957) and his questioning of globalisation.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first site-specific works installed in the outdoor areas by renowned contemporary artists, interact with the spirit of the museum and the fabric of the architecture. American artist Jenny Holzer (1950) has created three engraved stone walls named For Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017). These cite important historical texts from Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, the Mesopotamian bilingual (Akkadian / Sumerian) Creation Myth tablet, and the 1588 annotated edition of Michel de Montaigne's Les Essais.

Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (1947) has produced several works specifically for Louvre Abu Dhabi. Leaves of Light (2017) is a vast bronze tree with mirrors placed in its branches to reflect the ‘rain of light’. Propagation (2017) is a wall of porcelain tiles that depict hand-drawn concentric circles originating from the fingerprint of Sheikh Zayed, the UAE’s founding father. It was produced in collaboration with the workshops of Sèvres – Cité de la céramique in France.

Françoise Nyssen, the French Minister of Culture said : "The opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi on 11 November 2017 will be a milestone in the development of the cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and France, ten years after the signature of the intergovernmental agreement. This museum is one of the most ambitious cultural projects in the world, brought to light by Jean Nouvel’s exceptional architectural masterpiece. With the expertise of its cultural institutions and loans from its national collections, France is particularly proud to play a significant role in the completion and the life of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and so for several decades to come.

Endowed with an innovative scientific and cultural project combining the expertise of 13 French museums and institutions steered by the Agence France-Muséums, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will indeed offer visitors a unique experience: a brand new journey through major works of art from different civilisations, mirrored to reveal our common humanity. The Louvre Abu Dhabi therefore carries a message of tolerance and peace and stresses the unwavering commitment of our two countries to promote culture and education as a shield against extremism.

The inauguration week will also feature two prestigious events coproduced under the French-Emirati Cultural Programme, that was initiated over a year ago by our two countries and supported by the creative momentum generated by the Louvre Abu Dhabi. I have the hope that the Louvre Abu Dhabi will always bring this energy further, inspire new callings, promote mutual understanding, and always reinforce the strong bonds uniting the United Arab Emirates and France."

Manuel Rabaté, Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, said: "With a unique global narrative and a vision to explore the history of art in a fresh context, Louvre Abu Dhabi is a place where visitors can come to understand their own and others’ cultures. Its ground-breaking architecture complements a presentation of exceptional treasures that represent a snapshot of humanity’s creativity, and paves the way for new discussions."

Jean-Luc Martinez, President-director of the Louvre museum and Chairman of the scientific Board of Agence France-Muséums, who was also in Abu Dhabi for the announcement said: "This joint announcement honours the completion of a magnificent project with which the Louvre is proud to have associated its name and to claim the spirit of it: the creation of the first universal museum in the Arab World. I am delighted to see that we are entering the final phase of a project with a spirit of openness perfectly aligned with the true nature of the Louvre: I wish that, out of the Saadiyat Island, it will be carrying out this inspiring world awareness mission to the future generations. 

Jean Nouvel, the architect of the Louvre Abu Dhabi: "Louvre Abu Dhabi will open in two months. After several years of studies and construction, guests will be able to enter this place of light, this revelatory meeting place of a number of planetary cultures beyond the seas and centuries. It is an architecture that is protective of its treasures, it is a homage to the Arab city, to its poetry in geometry and light, and, under the large cupola, it is an evocation of the temporalities which inexorably punctuate the hours, days, and the passing of our lives."

In the galleries, important artworks on loan from 13 leading museums in France will be presented. Highlights include Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) La Belle Ferronnière (on loan from musée du Louvre); Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) self-portrait (musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie); a rare ivory saltcellar from the Benin Empire (musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac); a Globe by Vincenzo Coronelli (1650–1718) of Bibliothèque nationale de France; a pair of gui vessels (Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet); Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Château de Versailles); Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) Jean d’Aire from the group the Burghers of Calais (Musée Rodin); a 13th century reliquary chest (Musée de Cluny - Musée national du Moyen Âge); a Chinese ewer of Persian shape (Musée des Arts Décoratifs); a Breastplate of Marmesse (Musée d'archéologie nationale - Saint Germain en Laye); the Apollo Belvedere statue by Primatice (1504–1570) from Château de Fontainebleau; and Standing Woman II by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) from Centre Pompidou.

The inaugural special exhibition, From One Louvre to Another: opening a museum for everyone, opens on 21 December 2017, and traces the history of Musée du Louvre in Paris. Divided into three sections, the exhibition will look at the royal collections at Versailles under King Louis XIV, followed by the residency of the Academy and Salons in this palace for artists, and conclude with the creation of the modern Musée du Louvre. It will feature aproximately 145 significant paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and other pieces from the collections of Musée du Louvre and Château de Versailles. The exhibition is curated by Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director, Musée du Louvre, and Juliette Trey, Curator, Prints and Drawings Department, Musée du Louvre.

The intergovernmental agreement includes the loan of the Musée du Louvre’s name for 30 years and 6 months, temporary exhibitions for 15 years, and loans of artworks for 10 years.

LOUVRE ABU DHABI

Saadiyat Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi

LOUVRE, PARIS

www.louvre.fr

Stanley Whitney @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Stanley Whitney: Drawings
Lisson Gallery, New York
8 September – 21 October 2017

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York is the first major presentation of his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Stanley Whitney’s works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Stanley Whitney’s signature format revolves around his use of a loose grid and it is within his sketchbooks and drawings that Whitney works through the abstract structure of colored blocks and lines, testing combinations, arrangements, density and transparency of colors to evoke a sense of rhythm and cadence. Whitney has noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.” (*)

In Stanley Whitney’s work, color functions as both the design, creating shape and arrangement, and also as the energy, simultaneously attracting and distracting from the color laid beside it. The colors are meant to be seen next to and in relation to the others, rather than as individual blocks. While the drawings and paintings share the importance of space and sequencing of hue — and the gesture of the paintings maintain a sketching quality with the deliberate presence of the artist’s hand — the works on paper do not adhere to a square format as the paintings do. Instead, they tend to fill the rectangular page. Thus, by their format alone the drawings allow for an entirely fresh approach to the grid and pose a different challenge to creating the desired ‘call and response’ between colors. They incorporate a wider variety of color and texture — Whitney uses mediums including colored pencil, graphite, acrylic marker and crayon on surfaces as varied as Indian paper, Japanese rice papers and cardboard.

In his early drawings Whitney experiments with space in a freer format, with marks that are gestural and loose and the areas of color or space between horizontals are sparse and circular. Following a visit to Italy and Egypt in the early 1990s, he begins to experiment with the density of the color within the structure, as inspired by the classical and ancient architecture of the regions. Building these blocks of color, stacked on top of one another across the horizontal lines, the structure becomes more organized and the grids more precise and angular over the following decades.

To accompany the exhibition, the gallery has published a facsimile of one of Whitney’s sketchbooks, illustrating his working process and the way in which he orchestrates shape and color.   

(*) Stanley Whitney, “Stanley Whitney in conversation with Lowery Stokes Sims,” Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2015), 60.

STANLEY WHITNEY

Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Having developed his unique grid format in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Whitney’s work evokes a constant rhythm and profound lyricism deeply inspired by music, and drawing influences from sources as vast as Egyptian architecture and Italian cityscapes to textiles and the Gee’s Bend Quilts. Whitney's works featured in a major solo exhibition ‘Dance the Orange’, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA (2015), and he has been included in many prominent group shows such as Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017), ‘Nero su Bianco’ at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); ‘Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract’, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, USA (2014); ‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’, Cheim & Read, New York (2013) and ‘Utopia Station’ at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. Whitney was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in May 2017. Whitney’s work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. This marks his third exhibition at Lisson Gallery, and his first in the New York location. 

LISSON GALLERY, NEW YORK
138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
www.lissongallery.com

Peter Saul: Fake News @ Mary Boone Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Fake News
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
9 September - 4 November 2017

Mary Boone Gallery presents, at its Chelsea location, Fake News, an exhibition of new paintings by PETER SAUL.

Peter Saul has maintained his over sixty-year career as an affront to good taste, political correctness, and Academic standards. His unmistakable paintings mash elements of Pop, Surrealism, comics, editorial cartoons, and adolescent doodles – they break down preconceptions of serious art and are impossible to forget. Peter Saul’s high esteem among both his peers and much younger artists comes from this enduring conviction to define on his own terms what constitutes the appropriate subject matter and style for painting.

In the current exhibition, Peter Saul tackles art history and its celebrities, as well as a present-day aspirant and his conundrums. Rembrandt’s 1642 masterpiece is re-imagined as an unthreatening militia of costumed ducks in Nightwatch II (2016), Gainsborough’s beloved portrait subject cools off in Blue Boy with Ice Cream Cone (2017), and the Texas Revolution takes a gruesome turn in Return to the Alamo (2017). Donald Trump in Florida (2017) and Quack-Quack, Trump (2017) depict US presiding President in a variety of ignoble situations, oblivious to the imminent catastrophe presented in Global Warming, the Last Beer (2017).

Peter Saul’s send-up of politics and former United States presidents is a highlight of the first comprehensive survey exhibition in Europe of his work that is being held at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, from 2 June through 3 September 2017.

MARY BOONE GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151
www.maryboonegallery.com