Richard Pettibone @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Endless Variation

Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

October 27, 2018 - January 19, 2019

“I wished I had stuck with the idea of just painting the same painting like the soup can and never painting another painting. When someone wanted one, you would just do another one. Does anyone do that now?”  -Andy Warhol, 1981 [1]

The FLAG Art Foundation presents RICHARD PETTIBONE: Endless Variation, on view on its 9th floor. A prominent figure in the Pop, Post Pop, and Appropriation Art movements, Richard Pettibone creates small-scale replicas of iconic masterpieces by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol. The intimately-sized works, some as small as two by two inches, speak to themes of reproduction, originality, and authorship—ideas as relevant in today’s art world as when he began painting in the early 1960s. Richard Pettibone’s work continues a line of questioning that began with Duchamp and ran through successive generations of artists: What does it mean to appropriate an image of an image of an image?

The exhibition features work that spans 1964 to 2018, focusing on self-portraiture, seriality, and photorealism—three major themes within Richard Pettibone’s oeuvre that the artist continually, and often humorously, critiques and reinterprets. The artist’s facility with representation is particularly evident in his photorealistic paintings and “combine” works, which feature multiple canvases collaged together. Presented en masse, this rarely seen part of the artist’s practice sheds light onto Richard Pettibone’s interest in the intersection of style, pastiche, and art history. Juxtaposed with fine art reproductions of the satin ballgowns from Jean-August Dominique Ingres’s Princess de Broglie, 1853, and the rigid geometry of Frank Stella’s Union Pacific, 1950, are testosterone-fueled images of dirt bikes, race cars, and playboy center-folds.

FLAG’s south gallery is dedicated to the artist’s recurring and career-spanning recreations of Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, with more than 150 canvases on view. Richard Pettibone he first encountered in the artist’s seminal 1962 Soup Cans exhibition at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. “I remember that show so clearly,” Pettibone recounts, “The 32 cans were shown in two rooms, and when you walked into this room, all the paintings were all the same. And then you walked into the second room, and it was more of the same; it was the craziest show I’ve ever seen! But slowly I realized, ‘oh my god, they’re all different flavors.’”

Richard Pettibone’s self-portraits place the artist as subject matter, revealing more about his life and influences, all laden with humor and poetic wit. Installed chronologically, these works take shape in various forms, ranging from the artist’s own fingerprints, to paintings based on and scaled to candid polaroids, to series inspired by Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward, 1923, posters and Coeurs Volants (Fluttering Hearts), 1936. The latter nods to Richard Pettibone’s recent heart attack, the date of which, “October 16, 2016,” is inscribed at the top of the painting. Like Marcel Duchamp, Richard Pettibone believed everything was a readymade and up for grabs, and his work is infused with a reverence for the artists that he was appropriating – often simultaneous with the artists creating their works—offering an inventive commentary on 20th-century art.

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works is concurrently on view at Castelli Gallery from September 12 - November 21, 2018.

RICHARD PETTIBONE (b. 1938, Alhambra, CA) is an artist living and working in Charlotteville, NY. A pioneer of appropriation art, Richard Pettibone has dedicated his career to creating miniature replicas of artworks by iconic contemporary artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Initially constructed to match the size of images of the original works he found in Artforum magazine, Richard Pettibone’s small-scale facsimiles address themes of reproduction, seriality, and authorship. In 1962, Richard Pettibone received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute, CA. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Richard Pettibone: Recent Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Richard Pettibone: 64 Paintings, 9 Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Richard Pettibone (1964-2009), Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, France (2014); Richard Pettibone-Paintings and Sculpture: 1964-2003, David Nolan Gallery, New York,  NY (2013); among others. Recent group exhibitions include Miniatures by Master Artists, Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd., New York, NY (2018); Very Appropriate, Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2017); Marcel Duchamp Fountain – An Homage, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY (2017); The Natural Order of Things, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); The Appropriationnist (Against and With), Villa du Parc, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2015); among others. Several institutions have honored him with significant retrospective exhibitions, including The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2005, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2005, and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, in 2006.

[1] Shaar, Elisa. “Richard Pettibone: Painting the Same Painting Then and Now,” Richard Pettibone, September 10-October 26, 2013, published in 2013 by Castelli Gallery.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered @ The Photographers’ Gallery & Jewish Museum London

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered

The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Jewish Museum London

26 October 2018 - 24 February 2019

Presented simultaneously at The Photographers’ Gallery and Jewish Museum London, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered is the first UK retrospective of Russian born American photographer, ROMAN VISHNIAC (1897–1990).

An extraordinarily versatile and innovative photographer, Roman Vishniac is best known for having created one of the most widely recognised and reproduced photographic records of Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.Featuring many of his most iconic works, this comprehensive exhibition further introduces recently discovered and lesser-known chapters of his photographic career from the early 1920s to the late 1970s. The cross-venue exhibition presents radically diverse bodies of work and positions Roman Vishniac as one of the most important social documentary photographers of the 20th century whose work also sits within a broader tradition of 1930s modernist photography.  

Born in Pavlovsk, Russia in 1897 to a Jewish family Roman Vishniac was raised in Moscow. On his seventh birthday, he was given a camera and a microscope which began a lifelong fascination with photography and science.  He began to conduct early scientific experiments attaching the camera to the microscope and as a teenager became an avid amateur photographer and student of biology, chemistry and zoology.  In 1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, he immigrated to Berlin where he joined some of the city’s many flourishing camera clubs.  Inspired by the cosmopolitanism and rich cultural experimentation in Berlin at this time, Roman Vishniac used his camera to document his surroundings. This early body of work reflects the influence of European modernism with his framing and compositions favouring sharp angles and dramatic use of light and shade to inform his subject matter.

Roman Vishniac’s development as a photographer coincided with the enormous political changes occurring in Germany, which he steadfastly captured in his images. They represent an unsettling visual foreboding of the growing signs of oppression, the loss of rights for Jews, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the insidious propaganda - swastika flags and military parades, which were taking over both the streets and daily life. German Jews routinely had their businesses boycotted, were banned from many public places and expelled from Aryanised schools. They were also prevented from pursuing professions in law, medicine, teaching, and photography, among many other indignities and curtailments of civil liberties. Roman Vishniac recorded this painful new reality through uncompromising images showing Jewish soup kitchens, schools and hospitals, immigration offices and Zionist agrarian training camps, his photos tracking the speed with which the city changed from an open, intellectual society to one where militarism and fascism were closing in.

Social and political documentation quickly became a focal point of his work and drew the attention of organisations wanting to raise awareness and gain support for the Jewish population. In 1935, Roman Vishniac was commissioned by the world’s largest Jewish relief organisation, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. These images were intended to support relief efforts and were used in fundraising campaigns for an American donor audience. When the war broke out only a few years later, his photos served increasingly urgent refugee efforts, before finally, at the end of the war and the genocide enacted by Nazi Germany, Roman Vishniac’s images became the most comprehensive photographic record by a single photographer of a vanished world.

Roman Vishniac left Europe in 1940 and arrived in New York with his family on New Year’s Day, 1941. He continued to record the impact of World War II throughout the 1940s and 50s in particular focusing on the arrival of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors in the US, but also looking at other immigrant communities including Chinese Americans. In 1947, he returned to Europe to document refugees and relief efforts in Jewish Displaced Persons camps and also to witness the ruins of his former hometown, Berlin. He also continued his biological studies and supplemented his income by teaching and writing.

In New York, Roman Vishniac established himself as a freelance photographer and built a successful portrait studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  At the same time he dedicated himself to scientific research, resuming his interest in Photomicroscopy. This particular application of photography became the primary focus of his work during the last 45 years of his life. By the mid-1950s, he was regarded as a pioneer in the field, developing increasingly sophisticated techniques for photographing and filming microscopic life forms. Romn Vishniac was appointed Professor of Biology and Art at several universities and his groundbreaking images and scientific research were published in hundreds of magazines and books.

Although he was mainly embedded in the scientific community, Roman Vishniac was a keen observer and scholar of art, culture, and history and would have been aware of developments in photography going on around him and the work of his contemporaries. In 1955, famed photographer and museum curator Edward Steichen featured several of Roman Vishniac’s photographs in the influential book and travelling exhibition The Family of Man shown at the Museum of Modern Art.  Steichen later describes the importance of Vishniac’s work. ''[He]…gives a last-minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of Nazi brutality exterminated them. The resulting photographs are among photography's finest documents of a time and place.”

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered offers a timely reappraisal of Roman Vishniac’s vast photographic output and legacy and brings together – for the first time – his complete works including recently discovered vintage prints, rare and ‘lost’ film footage from his pre-war period, contact sheets, personal correspondence, original magazine publications, newly created exhibition prints as well as his acclaimed photomicroscopy.  

Drawn from the Roman Vishniac Archive at the International Center of Photography, New York and curated by Maya Benton in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery curator, Anna Dannemann and Jewish Museum London curator, Morgan Wadsworth-Boyle, each venue provides additional contextual material to illuminate the works on display and bring the artist, his works and significance to the attention of UK audiences.

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered is organised by the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S GALLERY

16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW

thephotographersgallery.org.uk

JEWISH MUSEUM LONDON

Raymond Burton House, 129 – 131 Albert Street, London NW1 7NB

www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

Atul Dodiya @ Galerie Templon, Paris

Atul Dodiya, The Fragrance of a Paper Rose
Galerie Templon, Paris
27 octobre - 22 décembre 2018

La Galerie Templon présente pour la première fois depuis 5 ans à Paris le pionnier de l’art contemporain indien Atul Dodiya. L’artiste a conçu une exposition inédite autour du peintre Morandi, célébration de la beauté d’un monde hanté par la peur de la perte, réunissant de nouvelles oeuvres hybrides - peintures, installation et cabinets de curiosité.

Un dialogue du film de Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita est le point de départ de l’exposition : lors d’une réception, face à un tableau de Morandi, le héros exprime sa fascination pour le calme et la beauté de la composition du peintre, avant de révéler son angoisse devant cette sérénité apparente : ‘la paix me fait peur, peut-être plus que tout. J’ai l’impression qu’il ne s’agit que d’une façade qui cache le visage de l’enfer’. L’exposition d’Atul Dodiya s’articule ainsi autour de cette tension entre émerveillement et menace de destruction.

Vingt peintures directement puisées du film inaugurent le parcours. Ensuite une série de peintures inspirées par les fresques italiennes de la Renaissance convoque, au milieu de paysages d’Arcadie, des figures de saints autant que du Dieu Shiva, comme sauveurs d’un environnement menacé par l’effondrement. La colonne de Brancusi y devient un motif abstrait récurrent. Atul Dodiya mêle les références autant qu’il marie les techniques (peinture à l’huile, mastic, stratifié) pour offrir à sa peinture une matérialité inédite. Trois grandes vitrines réunissent des objets trouvés et photographies d’Atul Dodiya, agissant comme des rappels de l’oeuvre de Morandi. On y trouve la fleur en papier que le peintre italien utilisait comme modèle et qui donne son titre à l’exposition. Bien que rigide et sans vie, elle manifeste la beauté de la création dont on peut, malgré tout, imaginer profiter du parfum.

Atul Dodiya a été le premier à jeter des ponts entre art indien et occidental. L’expérience d’une année de formation à l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts à Paris au début des années 1990 a été fondatrice. De la même génération que Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher ou Sudarshan Shetty, il a emergé sur la scène internationale en même temps qu’eux dans les années 2010. Son oeuvre fait voisiner culture populaire et références au cinéma ou à la littérature. Derrière l’humour et la poésie, la politique reste un de ses sujets de prédilection.

ATUL DODIYA, né en 1959, vit et travaille à Mumbai. Il est représenté dans les collections de nombreuses institutions internationales, dont celle du Mnam-Centre Pompidou. Il a pris part à la plupart des grandes expositions sur l’art indien organisées aux Etats-Unis, en Europe et en Asie ces dernières années : After Midnight : Indian Modernism to Contemporary India au Queens Museum de New York (2015), India: Art Now au musée d’ARKEN au Danemark (2012), La Route de la soie au Tri Postal à Lille et Paris Delhi Bombay au Centre Pompidou (2011), Inside India au Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana Turin et The Empire Strikes Back à la Saatchi Gallery de Londres (2010), Indian Summer à l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris (2000). Il a également a participé à la Documenta de Kassel en 2007, à la Biennale de Gwangju (commissaire Okwui Enwezor) en 2008, à la Biennale de Moscou (commissaire Jean-Hubert Martin) en 2009, à la Biennale de Kochi en 2012. En 2014 le Bhau Daji Lad de Mumbai lui a consacré une grande exposition : 7000 Museums.

GALERIE TEMPLON
30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
www.galerietemplon.com

Michael Krebber @ Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Michael Krebber
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
October 26 – December 15, 2018

"All languages being cousins beneath the skin, in other words?”

—Ian Watson, The Embedding

Greene Naftali presents Michael Krebber’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, and his first since the artist relocated to New York City. The exhibition features new paintings based on iterations of coded painterly gestures, executed in only two colors.

These gestures, which repeat and accrue across the exhibition, transform into an assembly of signifiers that read like a novel.

Michael Krebber’s practice has consistently been characterized by strategies that offer a distinct commentary on painting and art exhibitions, functioning by establishing and obliterating its own constitutive elements in order to tell a joke that continues again and again. With this new body of work the artist moves towards a blur of painterly and textual structures that establish a visual grammar through an abstract compositional method. The interlacing goes back and forth, interweaving the blank ground of the canvas into the painting, resurfacing fore- and background. The paintings in this exhibition play a dual role, as an essence in and of themselves. Yet with their contingency upon a highly coded system, these works do not offer to complete or resolve.

Born 1954, Cologne, Germany, Michael Krebber lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Living Wedge (Part II), Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2017); The Living Wedge, Serralves Museum, Porto, (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015; Les escargots ridiculisés, CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, (2012); and Greene Naftali, New York (2011). His work is in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York; CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich. He was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2015.

GREENE NAFTALI
508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.greenenaftaligallery.com

Tacita Dean @ Kunsthaus Bregenz

Tacita Dean
Kunsthaus Bregenz
20 October 2018 - 6 January 2019

The work of the renowned British European artist Tacita Dean has already been seen at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2003/2004 as part of the group exhibition Remind... with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Anri Sala, and Jane and Louise Wilson. She is regarded as one of today’s most outstanding artists. Her subject matter is often historical, touching on memory and empathy, the forces of nature and the traces left behind by humanity. Her works, from her early chalk on blackboard drawings to her four or more leaf clover collection, round stones, and found postcard interventions become ardent witnesses to a lost past, and the desire to capture, in imagery, the incomprehensible. Tacita Dean’s works in film also demonstrate her insistence on a medium’s materiality reinforcing her stance against a work’s arbitrary and careless exhibition. When the last laboratory printing 16mm film was suddenly closed in London in 2011, she began her campaign to preserve the medium of photochemical film by writing an article published in The Guardian newspaper.

Tacita Dean’s graphic work interrelates the medium of film, photography, drawing, and books. Her works on blackboards appear like excerpts from a film storyboard. Her photogravures of fictional landscapes display a richness of forms and diversity of line. Small-scale notation is embedded within large-scale imagery; they are miniscule and personal, her handwriting almost indecipherable. And yet it becomes clear that every scene, every vista, each image is permeated by a directing, scripting, and planning hand.

The extensive exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz includes three of her most significant film works – FILM, 2011 made for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, her six film installation Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS… (2008), as well as her most recent and most elaborate film project Antigone (2018). It premiered in the spring of 2018 in the new Burlington Garden spaces at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the third in an unprecedented collaboration of simultaneous exhibitions across three venerable London institutions that also included The National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Antigone is an hour-long dual synchronized 35 mm film projection. Based on the mythical figure Antigone, which is also the name of the artist’s sister, the film addresses time, transience and the mythological, as well as the materiality of film itself.

One of her most important works at Kunsthaus Bregenz is the large-format chalkboard drawing The Montafon Letter (2017) which depicts a mountain landscape, drawn with white chalk on a blackboard surface. The story that gave the work its title is as sublime and impressive as the drawing itself: In the 17th century, an avalanche fell in the mountain valley of Montafon, south of Vorarlberg. Legend has it that a priest, while blessing the dead was himself then buried by a second avalanche only to be miraculously uncovered by a third. Tacita Dean has just completed a second, similarly monumental drawing called Chalk Fall, 2018, which depicts the collapse of a chalk cliff, deliberately matching her subject matter with the medium she has used to make it, while at the same time mirroring the fall of white on white in The Montafon Letter.

TACITA DEAN was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Tacita Dean has been awarded numerous prizes including the Hugo Boss Prize (2006), the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Visual Art (2009). Tacita Dean has had solo exhibitions in internationally established museums such as Tate Britain, London (2001), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2001), Schaulager, Münchenstein/Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2009), MUMOK, Vienna (2011), Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Fundación Botín, Santander (2013), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2013), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2014), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016), National Portrait Gallery, The National Gallery & Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018). Her works were also included in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), 55th Venice Biennale (2013), as well as the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014).

KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ
Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz
kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Ange Leccia @ Galleria Six, Milan - Girls, Ghosts and war - Curated by Elio Grazioli

Ange Leccia 

Girls, Ghosts and war 

Galleria Six, Milan 

20 October 2018  - 26 January 2019 

​Galleria Six presents a solo show by Corsican artist Ange Leccia curated by Elio Grazioli

​In the '80s Ange Leccia became famous for one of the simplest yet most fascinating artistic operations, a sort of double readymade. In fact, he took two copies of an object, of various sizes, even very large, such as the caterpillars at Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1987) or two airplanes or two oil tankers (of which a photographic version is on display), arranged one in front of the other (or next to it) . It was a radical and significant operation as never before, if one thinks that doubling is the basis of a certain idea of postmodernism. One of the most important exhibitions of American art of the period was titled Art and his double (1986). Ange Leccia's version was more limpid than the American ones and at the same time unequivocally poetic, suspended and not demonstrative . Two identical objects, that were simply juxtaposed, "arranged" as the French say (and it was the title of the works: Arrangement), as if they were a reflection of one the other, or as if they were kissing, as an encounter, but also as a confrontation . Because a relationship between two parties is the simplest but also the most paradigmatic one: what happens between the two? What unites them and / or separates them? how are they together? But the fact that they are identical gives these questions sort of an enigmatic allure, as in the case of twins: something flows between the two, unity is the whole, no longer the single, or other.

​In the '90s Ange Leccia went on to make more and more videos - he had already shot them before, but never shown before, and they are back now. Sometimes he put two projections of the same video next to each other, but gradually Ange Leccia goes from identical subjects to other forms of relationship . Therefore the video can now either be alone or inserted into complex video installations. It is as if instead of looking at the two objects now Ange Leccia looks rather at the space between them, the one in which they touch, while remaining separate: something happens there, something special. Videos are a particular medium: the shooting first, with its face to face with the subject that is shot, and the projection then, with that peculiar device that is the screen, seem to contain the two from the beginning , the doubling and the relationship. But Ange Leccia also goes in search of subjects that make this new and different doubling clearer: the explosion, the wake of the ship, the shore, the lightning, the intermittent light. There, in threshold spaces, all sorts of mixing or tensions take place, of turbulences or contacts. All ever-changing visual forms.

​Elio Grazioli

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5 - 20131 Milan

www.galleriasix.it

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel @ Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel 

Musée d’Orsay, Paris 

10 octobre 2018 – 13 janvier 2019 

Pour sa première invitation à une grande figure de la création contemporaine, le musée d’Orsay a invité le peintre américain Julien Schnabel à proposer sa lecture des collections en sélectionnant des oeuvres et en les présentant dans deux salles historiques, en conversation avec celles de l’artiste, de 1978 à aujourd’hui.

Pour cette exposition au musée d’Orsay, la première de Julian Schnabel dans une institution parisienne depuis le Centre Pompidou il y a plus de trente ans, l’artiste a choisi dans la collection des oeuvres qui n’ont jamais été présentées ensemble – de Van Gogh, Cézanne, Manet et Toulouse-Lautrec, à d’autres artistes moins connus de la même époque, mais de grande influence. Ces rapprochements nourrissent des dialogues par-delà le temps et l’espace, entre ces oeuvres d’art qui coexistent pour la durée de l’exposition, et mettent ainsi en évidence les propriétés de la peinture, en contredisant la notion commune au XXe siècle d’une « fin de la peinture », illustrant qu’elle est bien vivante, et que sa signification est tout aussi grande dans le présent que par le passé.

L’artiste a non seulement choisi les tableaux, mais, avec Louise Kugelberg, a conçu la scénographie et l’installation de l’exposition. Julian Schnabel nous invite à voir dans les oeuvres du XIXe siècle et d’aujourd’hui davantage que des images, des expériences existentielles où le corps humain, l’échelle, les émotions de l’art sont données à vivre à nouveau. Il propose des lectures de chaque oeuvre et offre une expérience complète, à la fois historique et contemporaine.

Depuis quarante ans, Julian Schnabel a proposé des manières neuves et audacieuses de regarder la peinture. Son oeuvre a pris des aspects très différents, et a contribué à changer la façon dont nous comprenons la peinture aujourd’hui, en ouvrant aux nouvelles générations des possibilités qui étaient considérées inenvisageables au moment où elles furent dévoilées. Il s’est opposé à la tendance à avoir un « style-signature » en peinture, en répétant un modèle de peinture et en proposant une image irréductible emblématique de l’artiste, caractéristique de l’expressionisme abstrait d’après-Guerre. En ayant recours à des matériaux et des images très divers, Julian Schnabel a créé des oeuvres qui semblent contredire la trajectoire du modernisme au XXe siècle, et réaffirmer que des manières différentes de peindre étaient possibles, au-delà de la polarité entre Duchamp et Picasso.

Ses oeuvres ont été exposées dans de nombreux musées, et sont présentes dans les collections majeures, telles le Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate, Londres, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

À l’occasion de l’exposition, le portrait d’Azzedine Alaïa par Julian Schnabel sera emprunté au studio et présenté dans les salles du pavillon Amont, comme un hommage particulier à Monsieur Alaïa, ami proche de l’artiste, et ami du musée d’Orsay. Ce sera la première fois que l’oeuvre d’un artiste contemporain sera présentée dans les collections.

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel coïncide avec la sortie du film de Julian Schnabel At Eternity’s Gate, avec Willem Dafoe en Vincent Van Gogh, qui connaît sa première à la Mostra de Venise, et sa première américaine en nuit de clôture du New York Film Festival.

En 1996 Julian Schnabel a écrit et réalisé le film Basquiat, à propos de l’artiste new-yorkais, dont il était proche. Le film fut présenté en sélection officielle à la Mostra de Venise. Son deuxième film, Avant la nuit, basé sur la vie du défunt romancier cubain Reinaldo Arenas, fut récompensé à la fois par le Grand Prix du Jury et par la Coppa Volpi pour le meilleur acteur, Javier Bardem, à la Mostra de Venise. En 2007 Julian Schnabel réalisa son troisième film, Le Scaphandre et le papillon. Il fut récompensé par la caméra d’or au Festival de Cannes, et le Golden Globe du meilleur réalisateur. Le Scaphandre et le papillon fut nommé pour quatre Oscars.

Un projet conçu par Julian Schnabel, en collaboration avec Louise Kugelberg et Donatien Grau.

Catalogue de l'exposition, coédition musée d’Orsay / Flammarion, 96 pages, 240 x 310 cm.

Musée d'Orsay

1 rue de la Légion d'Honneur, 75007 Paris

www.musee-orsay.fr

Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Mark di Suvero: Hugs
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
October 6, 2018 - February 28, 2019

Paula Cooper Gallery presents the installation of Mark di Suvero’s monumental steel sculpture Hugs at 220 11th Avenue, New York. Organized on the occasion of the gallery’s fiftieth anniversary, the installation is located down the street from its new primary space at 524 W 26th Street. The presentation honors Mark di Suvero’s long history with the gallery, having first collaborated with Cooper at Park Place Gallery (1965-67) and later at the Paula Cooper Gallery—including the second exhibition in 1968, and most recently in a one-person show in 2018. The sculpture is presented in collaboration with the Moinian Group and Alex Brotmann Art Advisory.

Throughout his sixty-year career, Mark di Suvero has created vibrant and dynamic works, which fuse vitality and improvisation with complex construction. Standing over fifty feet high, the pyramidal structure Hugs, is composed of steel I-beams whose three legs intersect in a central, curved form. Its expansive scale allows viewers to engage physically with the work, inducing a kinesthetic response as one walks under and around to perceive it from shifting vantages. Democratic accessibility and viewer participation have long been driving principles in Mark di Suvero’s artistic practice:

“When one is an artist, one wants to do art that is meaningful to a lot of people. Most art is shown in museums and galleries, which eliminates a whole population. By putting it out on the streets, you open it up to the world … there’s a great thing that happens when you have outdoor works where people are interacting and searching … I like to do interactive work. I really believe that the piece needs to be all the way around you. We see in about 210 degrees, but you feel what there is at the very edge of vision. With sculpture, you can get inside of it. It gives you a different kind of a feeling.” (Mark di Suvero, interviewed by Brienne Walsh: “Orgasmic Space: Q+A With Mark di Suvero,” Art in America, July 1, 2011)

Born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, Mark di Suvero first came to public prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris—the first for any living artist—and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This exhibition featured his large-scale sculpture in public sites throughout all five boroughs of the city. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, on the occasion of the 46th Venice Biennale) and Paris (1997), among others. In 2011, eleven monumental works were installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Organized by Storm King Art Center, this marked the largest outdoor exhibition of work in New York City since the 1970s. That same yearMark  di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor given to artists. In May 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented eight monumental sculptures in the city’s historic Crissy Field for a yearlong outdoor exhibition. In September 2016, two monumental works were installed on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive through a partnership between the Chicago Park District and EXPO CHICAGO; they will remain on view through September 2019. One can also see a number of permanently installed Mark di Suvero sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. The artist currently lives and works in Petaluma, CA.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
524 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Stéphane Couturier / Fernand Léger, Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot

Stéphane Couturier / Fernand Léger
Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot
6 octobre 2018 - 4 mars 2019

Les musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes invitent des artistes contemporains à exposer ou créer des œuvres dans le cadre d’expositions conçues en résonance avec les collections et le site du musée.

En 2018, le musée national Fernand Léger a souhaité mettre en lumière les riches correspondances thématiques et plastiques qui existent entre la peinture de Fernand Léger (1881-1955), pionnier de l’avant-garde de la première moitié du XXe siècle, et l’œuvre photographique de Stéphane Couturier, artiste français né en 1957. 

La rencontre de Stéphane Couturier avec l’œuvre du peintre a donné lieu à la création de photographies inédites,inspirées par la collection du musée : Stéphane Couturier a choisi le tableau intitulé Le Grand remorqueur, paysage industriel des bords de Seine peint par Fernand Léger en 1923, point de départ pour le photographe de nouvelles prises de vue, réalisées dans la ville de Sète à l’automne 2017.

L’exposition présente également des œuvres plus anciennes de Stéphane Couturier, qui établissent un dialogue in situ avec les tableaux de Fernand Léger. Les deux artistes partagent une même fascination pour les profondes mutations de la ville, un intérêt commun pour le monde du travail, l’esthétique industrielle ou l’architecture moderne, notamment celle de Le Corbusier. Mais, tandis que Fernand Léger exprime, après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, sa foi dans le progrès, la modernité et la reconstruction, Stéphane Couturier documente, à partir des années 1990, la disparition progressive de la société industrielle et la transformation de l’espace urbain qui en découle, dans les métropoles mondiales (Paris, Berlin, Séoul, Brasilia, Salvador da Bahia, Alger).

Dans sa série inédite, conçue en écho à l’œuvre de Fernand Léger, Stéphane Couturier utilise la superposition de plusieurs photographies numériques, technique initiée en 2004 dans ses premières séries intitulées Melting Point. L’artiste fait naître une réalité hybride, à partir de la fusion de deux ou trois images. Cette synthèse entre deux réalités produit une multitude de détails, où l’œil du spectateur se perd et provoque une impression de mouvement et de dissolution du sujet, au sein d’une composition monumentale.

Aujourd’hui, l’œuvre photographique de Stéphane Couturier, jouant des potentialités infinies de l’outil numérique, allie une approche documentaire à un traitement complexe de la composition. A la manière d’un tableau cubiste, elle puise dans le réel, le fragmente et, grâce au rythme et aux contrastes entre lignes, formes et plans colorés, le dépasse pour en offrir une nouvelle perception.

Stéphane Couturier interroge ainsi la nature prétendument objective du medium photographique : s’affranchissant de la réalité la plus immédiate, ses photographies nous font voyager dans un paysage imaginaire où tout devient possible.

MUSEE NATIONAL FERNAND LEGER
Chemin du Val de Pôme - 06410 Biot
musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr

Carlo Carrà @ Palazzo Reale, Milan

Carlo Carrà

Palazzo Reale, Milan

4 October 2018 – 3 February 2019

Palazzo Reale presents a major exhibition dedicated to Carlo Carrà (1881 - 1966), one of the greatest 20th century masters, and one of the most prominent artists of Italian art and modern European painting. His indelible mark and vital style can be recognised throughout his artistic production. This is the most comprehensive and important anthological exhibition ever made of the works by Carlo Carrà, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity bringing together about 130 works, loaned from the most important Italian and international public and private collections.

Promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan, Palazzo Reale, and Civita Mostre, the exhibition is curated by Maria Cristina Bandera, an expert of Carlo Carrà and the scientific director of the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, with the collaboration of Luca Carrà, nephew of the master, photographer and in charge of Carlo Carrà’s archive. This exhibition is part of the programme “Novecento Italiano” promoted by the Department for Culture of the Municipality of Milan for the entire 2018 and dedicated to Italy’s artistic and cultural expressions in the 20th century.

“The exploration of the Italian Novecento, to which the Municipality of Milan has dedicated our cultural programme in 2018, continues in autumn with this important retrospective exhibition that pays tribute to an Italian master of the first half of the century, and a leading representative of European modern painting, who chose our city as the seat of his lively creative and professional activity”, stated Filippo Del Corno Councillor for Culture. “It is an important exhibition, with over 130 works on display, through which Palazzo Reale retraces the history of Carra’s artistic and life journey, characterised by his constant ability to open up to new artistic horizons while maintaining a continuous dialogue with contemporary artistic styles and expression trends”.

This exhibition takes place thirty years after the one dedicated to Carlo Carrà by the City of Milan (1987) and fifty-six years since the one also organized at Palazzo Reale, back in 1962, under the presidency of Roberto Longhi, when Carlo Carrà was still alive. The one in 1962 paid generous tribute to the Master who in 1954 had been awarded with the Good Citizen Gold Medal and who, when still very young, had decided to move to live and work in Milan.  This proper recognition – in full Milanese tradition - followed the 1942 tribute to Carlo Carrà with the exhibition held at Pinacoteca di Brera during one of World War II most dramatic times.

This new exhibition aims to reconstruct the master’s entire artistic trajectory through his most significant works, including but not limited to the early Divisionist attempts, his great masterpieces making him a leading representative and pacesetter of Futurism and Metaphysics; paintings attributable to his so-called 'plastic values', then, from the 1920s, landscapes and still lives attesting to his return to reality, with a thematic approach he would actively pursue throughout his life. The exhibition will also highlight his great figure compositions, especially those painted in the 1930s, the decade when he also painted the frescoes for the Court of Milan, documented in the exhibition by some large size preparatory cartoons. 

“With this exhibition on Carrà commissioned by the Municipality of Milan at Palazzo Reale, visitors will be able to retrace his long, articulated and courageous artistic journey; to widen their view in order to better understand this painter within the international scenario of those times, while looking at his work with the eyes of today; to understand his artistic temperament and great passion for painting and culture he cherished through the last days of his long life; to understand his role as a pacesetter and real promoter of avant-garde movements in different European capitals, his ability to turn the page and take up new paths, to turn to the past with a modern spirit and with a forward looking attitude, his constant will to rethink, review and strip reality of the appearances and get to its essence, and, finally, its artistic performance so closely linked to the traditional values ​​of the great Italian painting tradition, namely a calibrated sense of space and absolute mastery in the use of colours, or rather, quoting Roberto Longhi, his "chromatic dominants", explained Maria Cristina Bandera.

The exhibition presents over 130 works loaned from some of the world's largest collections such as the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Yale University Art Gallery, the Národní galerie in Prague, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Vatican Museums, as well as from numerous Italian museums, including Pinacoteca di Brera, MART in Rovereto, Museo del Novecento in Milan, Gallerie degli Uffizi of Florence, as well as from many private collections. The exhibition is thus reconstructing the dense network of intellectual affinities and privileged relations that linked Carlo Carrà to his collectors and friends. He was indeed a restless artist, and a great traveller who, when still very young, went to Paris and then to London. In his life he would meet and become friends with other important artists, such as Apollinaire and Picasso; always open to new cultural trends he was a verified bookworm, which landed him reviewer jobs with some of the most important and trendy magazines of his time, like La Voce, Lacerba and above all L'Ambrosiano".

Finally, in addition to his works of art, the exhibition also highlights the most significant features and moments of what Carlo Carrà himself defined as a ‘passionate life’. Documents, photographs, letters and numerous videos will be displayed, testifying to Carlo Carrà’s intense life, personally reported in his autobiographic book La mia vita that he published in 1942. Further, for the first time ever, a 1952 video directed by Piero Portaluppi documenting the life of Carrà with the words of Roberto Longhi is shown at the exhibition. This video was rediscovered thanks to a research project by Andrea Scapolan, who also followed its restoration carried out by CSC - Cineteca Nazionale.

The exhibition features 7 sections, each of them illustrating a specific period in the life and style of the great master: Between Divisionism and Futurism; Primitivism; Metaphysics; Back to nature; Central Role of the Human Figure; His last years; Portraits. In this way, the exhibition path seamlessly and consistently marks the various stages of a life entirely dedicated to painting: 

“My painting is made of some variable and some constant elements. The variable elements include theoretical principles and aesthetic ideas, while the constant ones refer to the construction of the painting itself. Actually, I believe that it is not possible to express pictorial feelings without, above all, taking into account these architectural elements on which all other figurative values of form and colour depend. On top of this, the principle of spatiality must be added, not to be confused with perspectivism; since the value of spatiality has never, so to speak, visual origins. In my painting, this concept is a fundamental expression.” - Carlo Carrà, 1962

CARLO CARRA

Exhibition catalogue

Marsilio Editori, 2017

The exhibition catalogue is a prestigious book published by Marsilio Editori which comes with a music CD "In Casella’s living room: Chamber music by Alfredo Casella, Collector of Carlo Carrà" produced by Concerto Classics. The milieu in which Carlo Carrà’s artistic talent developed and flourished is investigated and thoroughly illustrated with a musical narration of Carlo Carrà’s relationship with his time and with Alfredo Casella, who was his greatest collector – out of esteem and pure friendship and not out of personal wealth.

PALAZZO REALE

Piazza del Duomo, 12 - 20122 Milano

www.palazzorealemilano.it