Romare Bearden @ Cincinnati Art Museum - Something Over Something Else

Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series
Cincinnati Art Museum
February 28 – May 24, 2020

The Cincinnati Art Museum will present “Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, an exhibition that brings together more than 30 works from Romare Bearden’s trailblazing series for the first time since its debut nearly 40 years ago.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is one of only two museums to display the exhibition, which opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta on September 14, 2019 and will be on view until February 2, 2020.

The pieces in Something Over Something Else appear in a chronological sequence, each accompanied by a title and short text written by Romare Bearden for the original exhibitions of this series, which were presented in New York in 1978 and 1981. These poetic and poignant narratives, written in collaboration with his friend, the writer Albert Murray, and shown in tandem with the collages, help lead viewers through Romare Bearden’s story as he wished to share it.

The development of the exhibition was inspired by a key acquisition by the High Museum of Art: Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Artist with Painting & Model (1981), the culminating work in the series and one of Romare Bearden’s only known self-portraits. The Cincinnati Art Museum presents the exhibition as the owner of another collage from the series, Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Pittsburgh Memories, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (1978).

Romare Bearden began this series after the publication of a feature-length biography published about him in 1977 by Calvin Tomkins as part of The New Yorker magazine’s “Profiles” series. The piece brought national attention to Bearden, who had experienced growing acclaim in the art world since the late 1960s. To Romare Bearden, the experience was so profound that it gave rise to this autobiographical body of work exploring the intricacies of memory and the way a life unfolds in history.

“Something Over Something Else” is sequenced in two parts. “Part I, The Twenties” plumbs memories from the artist’s youth in rural North Carolina and in industrial Pittsburgh. “Part II, The Thirties” celebrates his early adult life and artistic growth in New York City, surrounded by the vibrancy and innovation of the Harlem Renaissance. It also tells the story of a life bridging disparate experiences: rural and urban, rustic and metropolitan, North and South. Romare Bearden interweaves his own biography with the experiences of African Americans of the time, when many were following the path of the Great Migration, enduring and driving tremendous cultural transition. The collages explore the nature of memory and the passage of time, moving beyond autobiography to explore American history, cultural identity and human experience.

“To see this stunning historic series brought together is an opportunity not to be missed,” says Julie Aronson, Cincinnati Art Museum’s Curator of American Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. “Bearden’s work defies easy categorization—he moved gracefully between abstraction and figuration with exceptional creativity and drew upon so many different traditions. Walking through this exhibition, with its combination of poetic images and words, is like having the artist whispering in your ear. It is an extraordinarily moving experience.”

The exhibition title, “Something Over Something Else,” is a phrase Romare Bearden used to describe his own creative process. “You put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way,” said Romare Bearden. This description of the nature of his work with collage, painting and mixed media also echoes the improvisational nature of jazz, the music that Bearden so greatly admired.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a variety of public programming starting with a lecture by exhibition curators Stephanie Heydt, the High Museum of Art’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art, and Robert G. O’Meally, Columbia University’s Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, on Thursday, February 27 at 7 p.m. The museum will host an Art After Dark celebration of the exhibition on February 28, 5–9 p.m. A Staged Reading of "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" by August Wilson in collaboration with Playhouse in the Park will take place on April 16 at 7 p.m. Additional programs will be posted on the museum’s website.

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Cincinnati’s presentation is sponsored by LPK and support was provided by Eric & Jan-Michele Kearney.

Cincinnati Art Museum
953 Eden Park Drive | Cincinnati, OH 45202
cincinnatiartmuseum.org

John Dowell @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC - Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten

John Dowell, Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
December 5, 2019 – January 25, 2020

Laurence Miller Gallery presents the New York City debut of John Dowell’s COTTON: Symbol of the Forgotten. John Dowell blends a unique mixture of spiritualism, historical awareness, racial angst and deft technique to create photographic works that inspire the viewer to recognize the injustices imposed upon the black community, especially in New York, over the past 400 years.

Throughout the exhibition, featuring more than two dozen photographic works made between 2016 and 2018, John Dowell weaves together – both literally and figuratively –complex historical threads addressing issues of slavery, community, and memory, all intertwined with cotton.  Several of the works are large panoramas, reinforcing the idea of the vastness of cotton across the southern American landscape, as well as the long-term cultural and financial impact that cotton had on the African-Americans who harvested it for their white masters.

In All Angels Church of Seneca, John Dowell utilizes diverse digital techniques to situate one of the early churches in New York City’s Seneca Village, a once thriving African-American community founded in 1825, within view of the modern apartment buildings that today form the western border of Central Park. Seneca Village was razed in 1857 by eminent domain to make way for that Park.

In his installation Lost in Cotton, the centerpiece of the exhibit, John Dowell has constructed a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling fabric panels, covered with photographic images of cotton plants, to echo his grandmother’s frightening childhood recollection of getting lost in the tall fields of cotton, a thorn-filled maze ripping into her skin and with no apparent way to escape.

Cotton was at the heart of the burgeoning New York garment industry and economy, and in Bursting Out and The Long Road, John Dowell overwhelms Wall Street, site of an historic slave market, with cotton. In Sending the Message, John Dowell shows the spiritual side of cotton, with cotton balls ascending from the church altar like rising angels in Renaissance paintings.

"Cotton is our symbol," John Dowell says. "That's black people in this country. You just mention cotton, you know what I mean, and for those of us who are a little aware, all the torture, all of that stuff — it's there. And it makes you stop and think. That's why I'm doing the cotton. I couldn't think of a better symbol."

In February 2018, the African American Museum in Philadelphia presented John Dowell’s Cotton: The Soft, Dangerous Beauty of the Past with extensive critical response. In HYPERALLERGIC, Megan Voeller wrote “Dowell’s images don’t recount stories as much as serve as vivid signposts of the stories’ hidden presence.”

John Dowell is a Philadelphia native and Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has worked as an artist for over four decades, and his prints, paintings and photographs have been featured in 50 one-person exhibitions. His artwork is represented in the permanent collections of 70 museum and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Fogg Museum of Harvard University; the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design; and the Lehigh University Museum.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY
521 West 26th Street 5th floor, New York City 10001
www.laurencemillergallery.com

Sarah Navasse @ Galerie Marie Vitoux, Paris - Sur le fil

Sarah Navasse : Sur le fil

Galerie Marie Vitoux, Paris

21 novembre 2019 - 11 janvier 2020

Dans cette nouvelle exposition de dessins à la Galerie Marie Vitoux, SARAH NAVASSE continue de questionner la place de l'être humain dans l’environnement ainsi que son rapport au monde.

“ L’équilibriste incarne tout du “jeu sérieux” [...] Tout se joue dans un instant éphémère de grande fragilité… Il est à la merci de la bourrasque de vent, comme une feuille en fin de vie rattachée à l’arbre par son dernier filament de sève. Confronté au vertige, il devient une trace infime du paysage questionnant ainsi l’échelle et la place de l’Homme. Dans ces expériences de basculement, ou de perte d’équilibre, l’espace mental transforme notre paysage, notre corps et notre place dans le monde. Cela se fait au quotidien où l’on projette nos frayeurs et nos désirs.

L’espace du dessin est alors le lieu idéal pour explorer ces situations, l’illusion de plusieurs réalités qui se confrontent et nous parlent (Illusion tire son étymologie de “inlusio” signifiant entrée dans le jeu). “ - Sarah Navasse

SARAH NAVASSE expose à la galerie Marie Vitoux depuis 2014. L'artiste est titulaire d'un master en histoire de l'Art de l'Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne (2007), d'un MFA de l'American University de Washington DC (2011) et d'une licence de l'Ecole Professionelle Supérieure d'Art Graphiques de Paris (2012-2014). Sarah Navasse à été en résidence à la  Casa Velazquez- Académie de France- Madrid (2014-2015) et à la Fondation Goya à - Fuendetodos, Espagne (2015).

GALERIE MARIE VITOUX

3 rue d’Ormesson, 75004 Paris

www.galeriemarievitoux.com

____________

Barbara Hepworth @ Musée Rodin, Paris

Barbara Hepworth
Musée Rodin, Paris
5 novembre 2019 - 22 mars 2020

Le musée Rodin, en collaboration avec la Tate, présente l’oeuvre de BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903-1975), figure majeure de la sculpture britannique du XXe siècle. Encore aujourd’hui trop méconnue en France, Barbara Hepworth, qui côtoyait Henry Moore, Picasso ou Mondrian, a pourtant révolutionné la sculpture et fait émerger une nouvelle sensibilité esthétique. Ses oeuvres abstraites, aussi pures que poétiques aspirent à un monde idéal et pacifique. Le musée Rodin rend hommage à cette femme artiste et présente ses oeuvres saisissantes, entre vide et plein, qui s’emparent du visiteur et ne le quittent plus. 

Après Rodin (1840-1917), l’éclosion d’une nouvelle sculpture émerge. En 1905, Maillol redonne à la statuaire densité et autonomie. A partir de 1909, Brancusi porte ce retour aux caractères fondateurs de la sculpture à sa plus grande épure. Le deuxième acte se déroule durant les années 1920, avec en Angleterre, Henry Moore et Barbara Hepworth. Loin de l’expressionnisme puissant de Rodin, Barbara Hepworth est en quête d’une nouvelle esthétique, privilégiant le langage des volumes et des formes. La nature est la grande source d’inspiration de la poésie du volume développée par Barbara Hepworth.

La sculpture organique de Barbara Hepworth est aussi une vision du monde: après la Première Guerre mondiale, la société trouve dans cette nouvelle sensibilité une vision pacifiée loin des atrocités de la guerre. Le vocabulaire de Barbara Hepworth s’oppose aux mondes du pathos, de la construction ou de l’univers machiniste. En 1934, elle écrit que son objectif est de « projeter dans un médium plastique un peu de la vision abstraite et universelle de la beauté ». Son art réside tout entier dans le jeu entre formes convexes et concaves, dans une constante opposition entre vide et plein. Sous les dehors silencieux des formes pleines, l’univers de la sculpteure devient le lieu d’une nouvelle aspiration à un monde idéal, pour éviter, selon Barbara Hepworth, de « s’abandonner au désespoir ».

Cette exposition permet d’avoir une vue d’ensemble de sa carrière et de son oeuvre sculptée peinte et dessinée, ainsi qu’un aperçu de ses méthodes de travail grâce à l’évocation de son atelier. De nombreuses photographies provenant de la famille complètent le parcours de l’exposition. 

Le public français connaît mal Barbara Hepworth qui était pourtant loin d‘être une inconnue de son temps. En France, avec son mari, le peintre Ben Nicholson, elle fréquente les milieux artistiques, visite Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, Mondrian et rencontre Arp, Calder, Mirò. Barbara Hepworth travailla à partir de 1939 en Cornouailles dont les paysages influencèrent son oeuvre. Plus encore, elle a de son vivant une aura immense en Angleterre: en 1965 elle faite « Dame » de l’Empire britannique. Dès 1936, l’œuvre Discs in Echelon entre dans les collections du MoMA de New York. Les expositions se succèdent : à la Biennale de Venise, San Francisco, Sao Paulo ou Tokyo...

Le musée Rodin est l’un des très rares lieux français dans lesquels Barbara Hepworth présente ses oeuvres de son vivant. Il revenait donc au musée Rodin, qui l’avait accueillie lors de manifestations collectives il y a plus de 60 ans, de faire découvrir au public français la quintessence de son univers poétique et saisissant.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Catherine Chevillot, conservateur général, directrice du musée Rodin et Sara Matson, conservateur à la Tate St Ives.

MUSÉE RODIN 
77 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris
musee-rodin.fr

Hans Hartung @ Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris - La fabrique du geste - Rétrospective

Hans Hartung, La fabrique du geste
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
11 octobre 2019 – 1er mars 2020

A l’occasion de sa réouverture après une année de travaux de rénovation, le Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris présente Hans Hartung, La fabrique du geste.

La dernière rétrospective dans un musée français datant de 1969, il était important de redonner à HANS HARTUNG (1904-1989) toute la visibilité qu’il mérite. L’exposition porte un nouveau regard sur l’ensemble de l’oeuvre de cet artiste majeur du XXe siècle et sur son rôle essentiel dans l’histoire de l’art. Hans Hartung fut un précurseur de l’une des inventions artistiques les plus marquantes de son temps : l’abstraction.

Acteur d’un siècle de peinture, qu’il traverse avec une soif de liberté à la mesure des phénomènes qui viennent l’entraver – de la montée du fascisme dans son pays d’origine l’Allemagne à la précarité de l’après-guerre en France et à ses conséquences physiques et morales – jamais, il ne cessera de peindre.

Le parcours de la rétrospective comprend une sélection resserrée d’environ trois cent oeuvres, provenant de collections publiques et particulières françaises et internationales et pour une grande part de la Fondation Hartung-Bergman. Cet hommage fait suite à l’acquisition du musée en 2017 d’un ensemble de quatre oeuvres de l’artiste.

L’exposition donne à voir la grande diversité des supports, la richesse des innovations techniques et la panoplie d’outils utilisés durant six décennies de production. Hans Hartung, qui place l’expérimentation au coeur de son travail, incarne aussi une modernité sans compromis, à la dimension conceptuelle. Les essais sur la couleur et le format érigés en méthode rigoureuse d’atelier, le cadrage, la photographie, l’agrandissement, la répétition, et plus surprenant encore, la reproduction à l’identique de nombre de ses oeuvres, sont autant de recherches menées sur l’original et l’authentique, qui résonnent aujourd’hui dans toute leur contemporanéité. Hans Hartung a ouvert la voie à certains de ses congénères, à l’instar de Pierre Soulages qui a toujours admis cette filiation.

L’exposition est construite comme une succession de séquences chronologiques sous la forme de quatre sections principales. Composée non seulement de peintures, elle comprend également des photographies, témoignant de cette pratique qui a accompagné l’ensemble de sa recherche artistique. Des ensembles d’oeuvres graphiques, des éditions limitées illustrées, des expérimentations sur céramique, ainsi qu’une sélection de galets peints complètent la présentation et retracent son itinéraire singulier.

Afin de mettre en relief le parcours d’Hans Hartung, en même temps que son rapport à l’histoire de son temps, cette exposition propose des documents d’archives, livres, correspondances, carnets, esquisses, journal de jeunesse, catalogues, cartons d’invitations, affiches, photographies, films documentaires, etc.

Figure incontournable de l’abstraction au XXe siècle, Hans Hartung ne se laisse pas pour autant circonscrire dans ce rôle de précurseur historique, car sa vision d’un art tourné vers l’avenir, vers le progrès humain et technologique, vient nous questionner aujourd’hui encore. Le parcours met en tension et en dialogue ces deux aspects complémentaires qui constituent le fil rouge de cette exposition.

Un catalogue comprenant une quinzaine d’essais et une anthologie de textes est publié aux Éditions Paris Musées.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Odile Burluraux

Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson - 75116 Paris
www.mam.paris.fr

Jutta Koether @ Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach - Libertine

Jutta Koether: Libertine

Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach

October 13, 2019 – February 16, 2020

JUTTA KOETHER

Tour de Madame 15, 2018

Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

Courtesy Kunsthaus Zürich

Foto: Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

JUTTA KOETHER implemented an exhibition for Museum Abteiberg that penetrates the history of painting. The starting point for her concept is Tour de Madame, a complex of paintings she presented as her most recent work in major retrospectives in Munich and Luxembourg last year. Originally conceived as an answer to Cy Twombly’s Lepanto cycle at Museum Brandhorst, Jutta Koether reinstalls this series – once again mounting it on glass walls – and develop it into a moment of thought and deflection point for the Museum Abteiberg collection. Other completely new works by Koether will occupy spaces for the collection on the museum’s so-called slab level, the skylight rooms between Gerhard Richter’s Eight Grey paintings and Sigmar Polke’s Kunststoffsiegelbildern (Plastic Sealant Paintings) from his cycle for the 1986 Venice Biennale. 

This exhibition – the Cologne-born artist’s first museum exhibition in the Rhineland – is also a very site-specific project in which the artist draws on well-known Mönchengladbach exhibitions that dealt with both the medium of painting and its viewers and the location of the museum. An artist who began working in the largely male-dominated Cologne art scene of the early 1980s, Jutta Koether (b. 1958) established a kind of painting that has placed viewership in the image ever since. Jutta Koether’s conceptual device is the color red, as symbol and signal color. It still dominates most of her works today; it is a color filter, a kind of red pair of glasses that makes the tinged gaze, the presence of the viewer, eminently perceptible while simultaneously producing a kind of ongoing visual alarm. Koether’s current work shows more distinctly than ever the artist’s pronounced art-historical perspective and tireless grappling with the history of painting, art, and culture: Her mostly large-format paintings, forms of expressive gesture and sketch-like figuration evoke art-historical perception, pictorial compositions, and schemes, afterimages of paintings seen. They broach the force fields, signs and emblems, glances and communications, norms and freedoms that make painting what it is. 

Confirmation, a three-part work mounted on high, glass walls in a large, temporary exhibition space, is the beginning and quasi-prelude—a painterly and sculptural assemblage from the 2013 Seven Sacraments. Its acrylic surfaces incorporate various found objects and colored bits of painting, including the artist’s identity cards, along with picture frame angles, which become a shadow- and leitmotif in subsequent paintings.

Occupying the museum’s street level is the artist’s Tour de Madame cycle from 2018. Designed by Jutta Koether, the convex side of the glass walls displays a sequence of twelve Tour de Madame paintings, while the concave side features a second series with the three other paintings and nine works from the Museum Abteiberg collection, including those by Roy Lichtenstein, Allan Kaprow, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, Jacques de la Villeglé and Dieter Roth, along with two “shooting pictures” by Niki de Saint Phalle. The installation on glass walls creates transparent spaces and corridors that guide the viewer on a tour of themes Jutta Koether has explored in her paintings; her motifs range from the analytical pictorial theory of classicist painter Nicolas Poussin to pixel formations in today’s media. Koether’s consistently sketch-like way of painting through a red filter encounters works from the museum collection; Koether’s mode of seeing emanates throughout the entire installation and affects the museum itself. The glass wall, as laid out in Confirmation, serves to expand; reverse sides, stretcher frames, and material components of all these exhibits are made visible. This is likewise true of the corner angle, the shadow of which can be seen in the Tour de Madame paintings. 

In the center skylight room, Jutta Koether has created a space consisting of five new paintings exploring figuration and abstraction, body and text. Jutta Koether’s motifs charge this long-standing, key space of the museum collection with powerful references: the Venus of Lespugue, Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, Albrecht Dürer’s Four Naked Women, Joseph Beuys’s dedication to sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, apples, the color pink.

In another skylight room Jutta Koether shows her most recent large-format paintings, works she created over the past months in reference to the large “open paintings” (Jutta Koether) in adjacent rooms showing the museum collection: the space featuring Gerhard Richter’s 8 Grey Paintings (1975) and the one that houses Sigmar Polke’s Biennale cycle (1986), the grey paint and plastic sealer surfaces of which give full reign to the imagination, suggesting figurativity and representation. Jutta Koether’s own paintings are now stage-like spaces, hardly limited by the edges of stretcher frames and, as in early paintings from the 1980s and 90s, seem to zoom in on the viewer: Elements in them float and oscillate, joining golden, shimmering surfaces and portraits of people. Story, movement and action—important characteristics of Jutta Koether’s painterly biography which have also triggered new concepts in painting (cf. David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” 2009)—are transferred to the picture plane. There are new identifications as well. The Neue Frau (New Woman) can be identified as New York politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the female stage character with the large fold in a red robe is a possible self-portrait of Jutta Koether, with brushes in her outstretched hands.

A number of works in the collection rooms have been re-hung and grouped differently in response to the Jutta Koether’s works.

JUTTA KOETHER (b. 1958, Cologne) lives and works in Berlin and New York. Exhibitions running parallel to her show at Museum Abteiberg include “Maskulinitäten” at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and “Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods” at Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City.

STÄDTISCHES MUSEUM ABTEIBERG

Abteitr. 27

41061 Mönchengladbach

museum-abteiberg.de

Jean-Pierre Sudre @ Gitterman Gallery, NYC

Jean-Pierre Sudre

Gitterman Gallery, New York

September 11 - November 9, 2019

Gitterman Gallery presents vintage photographic work from the 1960s-1970s by Jean-Pierre Sudre (1921–1997). 

A masterful technician in the darkroom, Jean-Pierre Sudre was enamored by the wonders of nature and the possibilities of photography. In the late 1950s his began to employ and create innovative techniques to amplify the abstract and visualize the building blocks of nature. This exhibition features these abstractions which exemplify his wonderment as well as his spiritual and metaphysical concerns.

His investigation began in the early 1950s photographing the dense forest floor. These photographs emphasize the infinite textures and patterns of nature. In the late 1950s and early 1960s his explorations turned toward the micro, creating crystals on glass plates that he would use as "negatives." On many of these prints Sudre employed the Mordançage technique, which he invented based on a late nineteenth century process known as etch-bleach.

Mordançage solution includes hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid and copper chloride. Once a fully processed gelatin silver print is put into the Mordançage solution, the darkest areas of the image (the areas with the greatest silver content) swell and soften. Sudre would then wipe them away leaving a relief of the mid-tones and the highlights. Next, he would thoroughly wash the print and redevelop it. He used a variety of different developers in various solutions and often made his own photographic chemistry. He was able to achieve a range of colors from the various toners he used and by letting the developer oxidize. His dynamic and expressive use of color became an integral part of his work.

Jean-Pierre Sudre was born in Paris in 1921. He studied at l’Ecole Nationale de Photographie et de Cinématographie and at l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. Due to the limited opportunities in cinema, Sudre decided to become a professional photographer. Growing up, his family owned a property surrounded by woods; it was there that he became entranced by nature. In addition to his commitment to his own work, Sudre was an influential teacher in both traditional and experimental photography. He created the photographic department at the School of Graphic Art in Paris. In 1974 Jean-Pierre Sudre and his wife Claudine, a fine photographer and printer in her own right, moved to Lacoste and opened a research center, later named the Association for Professional Training and Research in Photography, where photographers would spend nine months immersed in photography.

During his lifetime Jean-Pierre Sudre's work was exhibited throughout Europe, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels. He was featured in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition A European Experiment in 1967 along with Denis Brihat and Pierre Cordier, an exhibition emphasizing color and texture and the physicality of photo-based work. Jean-Pierre Sudre’s work is represented in international institutional collections, including the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Cincinnati Art Museum; The Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas, Austin; The Morgan Library & Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the Victoria

& Albert Museum, London.

GITTERMAN GALLERY

41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.gittermangallery.com

Mondrian figuratif @ Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Mondrian figuratif
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
12 septembre 2019 - 26 janvier 2020

PIET MONDRIAN

Dévotion, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

La peinture figurative de Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) est longtemps restée méconnue. Pourtant, celui qui se distingue aujourd’hui comme le plus important collectionneur de l’artiste, Salomon Slijper (1884-1971) s’est passionné pour cet aspect longtemps oublié de son oeuvre. Ayant rencontré le maître aux Pays-Bas où il se réfugie pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, ce fils de diamantaire d’origine amstellodamoise réunit un ensemble unique de peintures et de dessins de l’artiste avec lequel il se lie d’amitié. Piet Mondrian procède lui-même à la sélection d’une suite représentative de sa production exécutée entre 1891 et 1918, enrichissant l’ensemble de quelques pièces abstraites ultérieures ; les majorités des acquisitions ayant lieu entre 1916 et 1920. Le soutien que Slijper apporte au peintre est de taille. Plus encore, il change sa vie. A une époque où Piet Mondrian ne parvient pas à vivre de son travail et fait des copies au Rijksmuseum pour joindre les deux bouts, les achats en nombre de son récent mécène lui ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et lui permettent de financer son retour à Paris en juin 1919.

PIET MONDRIAN

Moulin dans la clarté du soleil, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

Le devenir de la collection de Salomon Slijper n’est pas sans rappeler l’héritage de Michel Monet qui est l’un des fleurons du musée Marmottan Monet. Comme le fils de l’impressionniste, Salomon Slijper est resté sans enfant. Comme ce dernier, Slijper a institué un musée – le Kunstmuseum de La Haye (anciennement Gemeentemuseum) – son légataire. Comme le fonds Monet présenté dans l’hôtel particulier de la rue Louis Boilly, la collection Slijper constitue le premier fonds mondial de l’oeuvre de l’artiste.

Musée de collectionneurs ayant vocation à apporter un éclairage sur le rôle des amateurs dans la vie des arts, le musée Marmottan Monet a noué un partenariat exceptionnel avec le Kunstmuseum de La Haye pour organiser une exposition totalement inédite rendant hommage à Salomon Slijper et au Mondrian figuratif à travers la présentation de peintures et de dessins majeurs provenant exclusivement de la collection de l’amateur. Dans cette exposition, ce sont près de soixante-dix Mondrian qui ornent les cimaises de l’institution parisienne. L’exposition se distingue par le nombre et la qualité des toiles estampillées chefs-d’oeuvre par le musée de La Haye. Des 67 Mondrian présentés, la moitié voyage pour la première fois à Paris. Les autres sont tout aussi rares : 12 % n’y ont pas séjourné depuis un demi-siècle, 20 % depuis près de 20 ans. Jamais vu à Paris depuis près d’une génération, l’accrochage crée en soi l’événement. Un événement unique à plus d’un titre puisque certaines pièces phares sont déplacées pour la dernière fois en raison de leur fragilité. C’est le cas de l’iconique Moulin dans la clarté du soleil (1908). L’exposition de Marmottan offre ainsi une ultime opportunité de le découvrir à Paris avant son interdiction définitive de prêt.

Composition N° IV (1914) est présenté en ouverture. Première oeuvre acquise par Salomon Slijper, elle est aussi l’une des exceptions jalonnant le parcours puisque purement abstraite. L’acquisition d’une peinture récente fut sans doute un pré requis pour mettre l’artiste en confiance. Piet Mondrian sera dès lors heureux de céder ses toiles « naturalistes » à Salomon Slijper qui s’impose sans délai comme son mécène le plus fidèle. Faisant pendant, un lièvre mort de 1891 souligne les liens qui unissent Piet Mondrian à la tradition hollandaise à travers le genre de la nature morte. Pièce la plus ancienne de l’exposition – le peintre n’a que 19 ans quand il la signe – elle ouvre le parcours qui suit : chronologique et à dominante figurative.

La première section regroupe des paysages peints entre 1898 et 1905. Ce sont des vues de la région du Gooi à l’est d’Amsterdam, où l’artiste et le mécène résident un temps et se fréquentent. Ces oeuvres qui décrivent des lieux connus des deux hommes illustrent les talents précoces de Piet Mondrian : dessinateur hors pair et maître du clair obscur. Les thèmes choisis tout autant que l’attention portée au rendu de l’atmosphère le rattache à l’école de La Haye. Il est encore un héritier des « classiques ». Pourtant, la rapidité de son évolution, son renouvellement ininterrompu frappent. Bien que le peintre se limite à quelques thèmes – le moulin, l’arbre, la ferme, la fleur et le portrait – aucune oeuvre ne se ressemble. Il se réinvente sans cesse. Ainsi, le parcours est-il placé sous le signe de la diversité, du contraste et de la surprise.

Considérant que « les couleurs de la nature ne peuvent être imitées sur la toile », Piet Mondrian aborde dès 1907 un tournant moderne privilégiant les aplats et les contrastes colorés poussés à l’extrême. Moulin dans le crépuscule (1907-1908) explore – à travers des registres aux tonalités franches : jaune, bleu, vert – une poétique de la peinture. Avec Bois près d’Oele (1908) l’artiste passe un nouveau cap. Lignes courbes, arabesques et couleurs irréelles confinent au mystique. Membre de l’association théosophique, Piet Mondrian se dépeint alors tel un illuminé. Trois autoportraits inédits le montrent à l’âge trente-six ans, cheveux longs, barbe noire et le regard pénétrant des êtres habités.

Dévotion (1908) témoigne par le biais du portrait d’enfant de la portée spirituelle de son oeuvre. Certaines des toiles les plus illustres du maître lui font face. Marquées par l’exemple des fauves et des divisionnistes Moulin dans le crépuscule, Dunes ou Arum (1908-1909) se font de plus en plus rayonnantes et vibrantes. Deux critères propres à définir la beauté d’une toile selon Piet Mondrian.

La spectaculaire église rose de Domburg (Clocher en Zélande, 1911) et le monumental Moulin rouge (1911) éclatant sur un fond bleu profond exaltent les couleurs pures vers 1911. La géométrisation des formes des deux monuments annonce l’abstraction. Au même moment, Piet Mondrian réinterprète d’ailleurs le cubisme de Braque et Picasso dont il adopte la palette ocre – gris comme le montrent Arbre gris (1911) et Paysage (1912).

Figuration et abstraction se font également face dans la section suivante. Trois exceptionnels grands formats représentant à l’huile et au fusain le moulin de Blaricum (1917) où réside Salomon Slijper et Ferme près de Duivendrecht (1916) reprenant un motif de jeunesse visible dans la première section tranchent avec trois toiles purement abstraites de 1914.

Terminant le parcours et en guise de conclusion, un autoportrait de Piet Mondrian posant devant une toile abstraite en damier (1918) fait face à une oeuvre du même genre : Composition avec grille 8 : composition en damier aux couleurs foncées (1919) que Salomon Slijper acquiert l’année de sa création. Les oeuvres se font écho autant qu’elles font contraste : les couleurs vives – rouges et bleus – étant réservées exclusivement à la peinture en damier tandis qu’un camaïeu de bruns suffit à la représentation « naturaliste » du peintre dans son atelier.

En épilogue, Composition, toile néoplasticiste de 1921 voisine avec six tableaux de fleurs exécutés entre 1918 et 1921 : chrysanthèmes, roses et arums. La juxtaposition de ces oeuvres achève de démontrer que l’évolution de Mondrian est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. Elle ne peut se définir comme un strict passage de la figuration à l’abstraction ou du noir à la couleur. Au contraire, le naturalisme reste et demeure une constante de l’oeuvre de Piet Mondrian, l’érigeant au rang – méconnu et pourtant essentiel – de grand maître de la peinture figurative du XXe siècle.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Marianne Mathieu, Directeur scientifique du musée Marmottan Monet.

MUSEE MARMOTTAN MONET
2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016 Paris
www.marmottan.fr

Gladys Nilsson @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - New Work

Gladys Nilsson: New Work

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

September 13 - November 2, 2019

“I’m not interested in classical beauty—or, I am interested in classical beauty, it’s just that my idea of classical beauty might  be completely different from someone else’s.”

—Gladys Nilsson

Rhona Hoffman Gallery presents its first exhibition with GLADYS NILSSON, one of the foremost Chicago artists of her generation and a member of the Hairy Who, the venerable group that came to prominence through a series of radical exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960s. Featuring paintings and works on paper made in the last five years, the exhibition highlights Gladys Nilsson’s continued experiments with form, color, and figuration.

The works on view range from large paintings on canvas to intimately scaled watercolors and collages. In sprawling canvases like Repose (2017) and Painting Nature (2018), Gladys Nilsson offers her signature spin on the central tenets of the Chicago Imagist style: distorted figuration, densely layered compositions, and an electric color palette. Meanwhile, smaller works on paper like those from the “Head on a Plate” series highlight Gladys Nilsson’s sense of humor and whimsy, incorporating a playful mix of figurative drawing, abstract washes, and collaged elements. Gladys Nilsson’s newest featured works, Out After Dark and Still Scape (both 2019), depict abstracted and obscured landscapes replete with references to the body.

In light of renewed awareness of the Imagists—thanks in part to the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2018 exhibition “Hairy Who? 1966–1969”—this exhibition offers a look at an artist who remains connected with her historical lineage but has never stopped developing her unique visual language.

GLADYS NILSSON BIOGRAPHY

Born in Chicago in 1940, Gladys Nilsson studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1973, she became one of the first women to have a solo-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1990, she accepted a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now a professor.

Gladys Nilsson is known for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages. Like many of the Hairy Who artists, Nilsson employed a type of horror vacui; many of her works feel filled to the brim with winding, playful imagery. Her work often focuses on aspects of human sexuality and its inherent contradictions.

Since 1966, Gladys Nilsson’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions, including sixteen at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), and two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as: Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence).

Gladys Nilsson’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

Sarah Sze @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC

Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
September 5 — October 19, 2019

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents a solo exhibition with artist Sarah Sze at the gallery’s New York location. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2015.

“In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.”
Sarah Sze (2019) 

“After the rupture, after the apocalypse, amid the ruin of cables and wires, someone might ask: what was the purpose of all of those images within and through which we lived?”
Zadie Smith “The Tattered Ruins of the Map” Sarah Sze: Centrifuge (2018)

For more than two decades, Sarah Sze’s work has defied the limitations of artistic media, employing with equal facility sculpture, installation, video, photography, printmaking and painting. Sze has been credited with dismantling and re-envisioning the very potential of objects, simultaneously celebrating the particular relevance of sculpture in contemporary visual culture, while also expanding its definition. However, her focus has been equally tuned to images, considering their materiality, transmutability, and ease of circulation in our increasingly digital existence. Originally trained as a painter, she has consistently looked through the lens of two-dimensionality, including color, line, form and image-making, to consider aspects of sculpture and installation.

Sarah Sze’s latest body of work frays “the seam between the real and the image” (Smith). Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sze expands upon the never- ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. The works evoke the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

In this new exhibition, Sarah Sze expands her work by embedding her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm through the interplay of cloth, ink, wood, paper, metal, paint, found objects, light, sound and structural supports—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. This body of work fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us. Both objects and images, Sze says, are “ultimately reminders of our own ephemerality”.

The exhibition is immediately visible on the gallery’s exterior storefront windows and fills both floors with an installation that utilizes all media and approaches to art making. On the lower level, the main space is filled with a Plato’s Cave of imagery, entitled Crescent (Timekeeper), which scatters out to the entryway, across the walls and onto floors. An immersive installation of light, sound, film, paintings and objects transforms our sense of materiality and the imaginary. Moving pictures, scenes, and flickering light surround viewers in loops of personal, researched and found scenes. The installation unfolds in fragments: a fire burns, a building collapses, a child sleeps, static image signals or “snow” overtakes a film clip mid-play. Sarah Sze splices together disparate content that viewers, upon moving through the space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to create their own narrative content in the work.

This interplay of images and content is juxtaposed on the first floor with a “studio space” filled with paintings and other visual elements, utilized by the artist in the making of the work itself. Here Sarah Sze debuts a layered painting process in which the medium functions as a portal into two- dimensional experimentation in time, space and memory. Traces of image-making techniques fuse and fade: silkscreen prints, collage, photographs and other elements mark the walls, suggesting the generative process of making in innumerable forms and the ways in which an image is burned into memory and unreliably persists, decaying over time.

In two galleries upstairs, painting, video, photography, sculpture likewise morph, with each assuming and absorbing the characteristics of other media and taking on new forms. Painting fills not only walls, but also the floor; paint is converted into a physical route laid on the floor plane and assumes the role of sculptural entity around which viewers maneuver physically. Sarah Sze further generates images of painting, and paintings of images that, in turn, are photographed, printed, recorded, and projected. Her sculpture generates images that are not only used in the paintings, but also fuel the video and installation in an endless feedback loop. Input and output feed the work in ways that confirm that the hierarchies of the originality no longer exist. Taken together, the intermingling of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and architecture become fertile ground for the process of seeing images in time and space—not unlike the way we experience them in the ever shifting, complex, material yet ephemeral world in which we exist.

SARAH SZE’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide, and in 2003 she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur fellowship. In 2013, she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with a presentation entitled Triple Point. Her work has also been presented in major solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2017); Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2017); Rose Art Museum, Brandies University, Boston (2016); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2014); Asia Society, New York (2011- 12); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2009); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2002); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); Fondation Cartier, Paris (1999); and the Institute of Contemporary, London (1998).

In October 2019, Sarah Sze’s work will be featured in Surrounds: 11 Installations, a major group exhibition for the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In December 2019, Sarah Sze will have a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, France.

Sarah Sze has completed major public commissions for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 2nd Avenue subway line, 96th street station (2017), New York City’s High Line Park (2011-12), the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City, organized by the Public Art Fund (2006), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (2004), and most recently for Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (2019).

Her work is well represented in private and public collections worldwide, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Walker Art Center Minneapolis; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Gallery of Canada; Tate Collection, London; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
521 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011
tanyabonakdargallery.com

Berthe Morisot @ Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Jusqu'au 22 septembre 2019

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

Affiche de l'exposition

Pour la première fois depuis son ouverture en 1986, le musée d’Orsay consacre une exposition à l’une des figures majeures de l’impressionnisme, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). C'est aussi la première manifestation monographique consacrée à l’artiste par un musée national depuis la rétrospective de 1941 à l’Orangerie.

Née en 1841 dans ce que son ami Renoir qualifiait de « milieu le plus austèrement bourgeois », mais ouvert aux arts, Berthe Morisot affiche très tôt un goût de l’indépendance. Elle s’affranchit d’une pratique amateure, où la peinture est considérée comme un talent d’agrément, et affirme, à rebours des usages de son milieu, l’ambition de travailler en professionnelle. Ainsi, elle expose au Salon, manifestation officielle essentielle pour qui veut faire carrière, place des oeuvres sur le marché et, surtout décide de participer à la première exposition dite impressionniste de 1874. Elle est alors la seule femme à prendre part à cette manifestation et, l’une des rares avec Pissarro, qui restera fidèle à la stratégie de l’indépendance, c’est-à-dire au développement d’une carrière en marge des circuits officiels. Figure centrale du mouvement, elle participe à toutes les expositions du groupe, sauf celle de 1879, affaiblie par la naissance de sa fille Julie. Mariée à l’un des frères d’Edouard Manet, Eugène, Berthe Morisot travaille jusqu’à sa mort prématurée en 1895, laissant un ensemble d’un peu plus de 400 tableaux. Toute sa vie, elle a été au coeur des avant-garde artistiques et littéraires, engageant des échanges artistiques féconds avec Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet ou Mallarmé pour ne citer que quelques noms.

Cette exposition veut marquer une nouvelle étape dans la diffusion et la connaissance de Berthe Morisot en proposant et suscitant de nouvelles approches, tout en déjouant les clichés d’une peinture « féminine » encore attachés à son oeuvre. Ainsi, le choix a été fait d’explorer une facette essentielle de sa création, les tableaux de figures et les portraits.

Dans l’édition de 1919 de son histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Théodore Duret distinguait les paysagistes et les peintres de figures. Berthe Morisot se range assurément dans cette dernière catégorie, aux côtés de Renoir, Degas ou Cassatt. Sur les 423 peintures répertoriées par le plus récent catalogue raisonné, 69,5 % sont donc consacrées à la figure, qu’il s’agisse de portraits, de scènes d’intérieur ou de plein air avec des personnages. C’est également la part de son oeuvre que l’artiste a choisi de montrer en priorité : de son vivant, on peut estimer qu’elle a exposé quatre-vingt-dix-huit tableaux de figures et portraits, contre trente-six paysages et trois natures mortes.

Pour Berthe Morisot, portraits et tableaux de figures sont autant de scènes de la vie moderne. Peindre d’après modèle lui permet en effet d’explorer plusieurs thématiques de la vie de son temps, telles que l’intimité de la vie bourgeoise de l’époque, le goût de la villégiature et des jardins, l’importance de la mode, le travail domestique féminin, tout en brouillant les frontières entre intérieur/extérieur, privé/public ou fini/non fini. Pour Morisot en effet, la peinture doit s’efforcer de « fixer quelque chose de ce qui passe ». Sujets modernes et rapidité d’exécution ont donc à voir avec la temporalité de la représentation, et l’artiste se confronte inlassablement à l’éphémère et au passage du temps. Ainsi, les dernières oeuvres de Berthe Morisot, aux accents symbolistes, caractérisées par une expressivité et une musicalité nouvelles, invitent à une méditation souvent mélancolique sur ces relations entre l’art et la vie. Souvent réduite à des scènes de la vie quotidienne, ces tableaux de figures et portraits se caractérisent au contraire par ce que la grande historienne de l’art américaine, récemment disparue, Linda Nochlin, appelait de « stimulantes ambiguïtés ». Ces « ambiguïtés », ce mystère, s’expriment tant du point de vue des modèles que des espaces mis en jeu et en scène et d’une technique audacieuse et énergique, qui vise à suggérer plutôt qu’à décrire. C’est à cette exploration qu’invitent l’exposition et le catalogue, à la fois en renouvelant le corpus et en croisant les approches.

Près de la moitié des tableaux réunis sont issus de collections particulières et certains n’ont pas été vus en France depuis plus de cent ans. Le parcours, chronologique et thématique, invite à s’interroger sur les sujets représentés (la mode, la toilette, le travail), qui traduisent en effet le statut de la femme au XIXe siècle, mais aussi sur la technique unique de Berthe Morisot (le plein air, l’intérieur, l’importance des espaces intermédiaires tels fenêtres, le fini). Ses tableaux sont une exploration de l’identité moderne que Berthe Morisot a délibérément voulu ambiguë, en équilibre fragile, à la fois paisible et intranquille, limpide et mystérieuse, mais toujours exigeante et profondément novatrice. L’exposition met ainsi en valeur les choix, la détermination sans faille d’une artiste qui affirmait dès l’âge de vingt-ans ne pouvoir obtenir son indépendance « qu’à force de persévérance et en manifestant très ouvertement l’intention de [s]’émanciper ».

Cette exposition est organisée par les musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, le Musée des beaux-arts, Québec, la Fondation Barnes, Philadelphie, et le Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas.

Commissaires de l'exposition : Sylvie Patry, conservatrice générale, directrice de la conservation et des collections du musée d'Orsay. 

Nicole R. Myers, The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art au Dallas Museum of Art.

Assistante pour la présentation au musée d’Orsay, Lucile Pierret, chargée d’études documentaires.

Berthe Morisot

Catalogue de l’exposition

Sous la direction de Sylvie Patry

Coédition Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie / Flammarion

304 pages – 22,5 x 30 cm – 200 ill.

ISBN : 978-2-35433-288-4

Sommaire du catalogue de l'exposition

Berthe Morisot aujourd’hui : « ambiguïtés stimulantes »

Sylvie Patry, Conservatrice générale et directrice de la conservation et des collections du musée d’Orsay

La modernité vue de l’intérieur

Anne Higonnet, Ann Witney Olin Professor, Barnard, Columbia University

Peindre la vie moderne

« Mettre une figure en plein air »

Femmes à leur toilette

La « beauté de l’être en toilette »

Fini / non-fini : « Fixer quelque chose de ce qui passe »

Femmes au travail

Fenêtres et seuils

Un atelier à soi

Sylvie Patry, Conservatrice générale et directrice de la conservation et des collections du musée d’Orsay

Une artiste en devenir

Marianne Mathieu, Directrice scientifique du musée Marmottan Monet

Morisot et la femme moderne

Nicole R. Myers, The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art

Morisot sur le seuil

Cindy Kang, Conservatrice adjointe à la Fondation Barnes, Philadelphie

Peintre pour peintres

Bill Scott, Peintre et graveur abstrait

Annexes

Chronologie, Amalia Wojciechowski, Doctorante au Bryn Mawr College

Les carnets de Berthe Morisot, Samuel Rodary, Chercheur indépendant en histoire de l’art

Expositions tenues de son vivant et posthume, Liste des oeuvres exposées, Liste des images de comparaison, Bibliographie

MUSEE D'ORSAY
1 rue de la Légion d'Honneur, 75007 Paris
www.musee-orsay.fr

Mr. et Pharrell Williams @ Musée Guimet, Paris - A Call To Action

Carte blanche à Mr. et Pharrell Williams: A Call To Action
Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris
Jusqu'au 23 septembre 2019

Mr.

© Mr. / Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. 

All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin

Le musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet accueille une exposition in situ créée par l’artiste japonais Mr., dont le commissariat est assuré par Pharrell Williams, artiste américain aux multiples talents. Pharrell Williams est à l’origine de ce projet avec Mr., l’un de ses artistes contemporains préférés. L’installation et les dispositifs qui y sont associés ont demandé plusieurs séances de travail à distance et à l’atelier durant cinq années de collaboration intense. Selon Pharrell Williams, « les enfants font tourner le monde et ce projet se veut un défi aux dirigeants, sommés d’agir immédiatement, pour un avenir meilleur, un avenir radieux ».

L’exposition présente des installations, des tableaux et des sculptures décalés qui invitent à la réflexion, dans le style qui a fait la renommée de Mr. Elle dépeint des enfants, certains affublés de façon symbolique d’armes, émergeant dans un monde devenu chaotique par la faute des adultes d’aujourd’hui ; des enfants prêts à faire face à l’avenir. Le travail de Mr. prône une approche positive face aux problèmes de notre époque : « Au milieu des tensions et des crises d’incertitude que nous connaissons aujourd’hui, nous devons avoir foi en l’espoir qui anime les enfants. Nous devons nous inspirer de leur optimisme. Les enfants ont le pouvoir. Avec l’art, nous amorçons un dialogue », explique Mr.

Prenant pour point de départ les problèmes sociaux, politiques, environnementaux et technologiques actuels, l’exposition est traversée par l’optimisme et le potentiel de la jeunesse. Point d’orgue de l’installation, une grande fresque réalisée par Mr. présente une armée de personnages, des enfants, clin d’oeil à la tradition du portrait classique européen. L’exposition invite les visiteurs à pénétrer dans le monde fantastique de Mr., un monde où le quotidien rencontre le surnaturel. Dans un environnement immersif composé de scènes qui pourraient être tirées de la vie quotidienne, ses tableaux et ses sculptures aux dimensions et textures variées sont autant de confrontations poétiques du statu quo, mais reflètent également l’énergie du possible.

Commissaires de l'exposition :
Sophie Makariou, Présidente du MNAAG
Pharrell Williams, Artiste

Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet (MNAAG)
6, place d’Iéna, 75116 Paris
www.guimet.fr

The "Moon lens" ZEISS Biogon 5.6/60: A camera lens custom-made for the Moon

The "Moon lens" ZEISS Biogon 5.6/60: A camera lens custom-made for the Moon

The "Moon lens" ZEISS Biogon 5.6/60

Photo © and courtesy of ZEISS

Even though 50 years have passed since the first Moon landing on 20 July 1969, the images have lost none of their fascination. The main reason this event become so firmly entrenched in our collective memory is that it gave us the iconic images captured during the Apollo missions. These were not only the first photographs ever taken of the Moon’s surface – the image of the Earth as seen from the Moon also continues to inspire people of all generations to this day. And all these missions used cameras with lenses developed by ZEISS.

The first Moon landing was also the first global media event. According to media reports, audience ratings amounted to 50 per cent throughout the world, which means that more than 500 million people followed the event live on television. Many of them still know exactly where they were when the Moon landing took place. Newspapers and magazines published special issues that often featured the first color images these publications ever printed. Together with the first stills of the footage shot on the Moon, these photographs are highly coveted collectibles today, among connoisseurs and ordinary people alike.

The history of photography in space took off with the Mercury (1962) and Gemini (1964) program that preceded the Apollo missions. Increasingly, camera lenses were used in the Earth’s orbit. During these years, the ZEISS laboratories further refined their technology and designed camera lenses ready to meet the challenges posed by space.

In October 1968, ZEISS received the order for a camera lens to be used during the Moon landing, which was scheduled to take place a mere nine months later as part of the Apollo 11 mission. “The time for development was extremely brief,” says Dr. Vladan Blahnik who works in research and development at ZEISS. The optical data for the preceding model the ZEISS Biogon 4.5/38 still had to be calculated manually, an extremely time-consuming process. However, a mainframe computer helped to determine the mathematical parameters for the ZEISS Biogon 5.6/60, the camera lens designed for the Moon landing, in a mere couple of weeks. Dr. Erhard Glatzel (1925-2002), a leading mathematician from the optical design department at ZEISS, received the Apollo Achievement Award for this and the development of other special camera lenses for space photography.

The customized ZEISS Biogon 5.6/60 “Moon lens” had to meet a number of requirements. While it was supposed to work within an easy-to-use camera, it also had to precisely map the lunar surface around the landing site. “They decided on a camera fitted with a Reseau plate, which created a grid of cross-marks on the images. These made it possible to calculate the distances between individual objects on the Moon,” explains Blahnik. “The special symmetric design of the camera lens provided an excellent correction for distortions and all other image errors.” A straight line remains a straight line. The images have great definition and edge-to-edge contrast.

Apart from the ZEISS Biogon used on the surface of the Moon, ZEISS designed a number of other special camera lenses for space photography in the 1960s, among them lenses that could transmit UV-waves or extremely fast lenses such as the ZEISS Planar 0.7/50. The engineers at ZEISS continue to benefit from this research until the present day. Some examples are the development of fast lenses for professional movie cameras, lenses for aerial photography used in surveying the Earth’s surface and lithographic lenses employed in the production of microchips.

The camera lens was a small but significant contribution to the Apollo 11 lunar mission. And, incidentally, the cameras with the ZEISS lenses are still up there on the Moon, because on the return journey the astronauts wanted to save every gram in order to take back as many samples of Moon rocks as possible. Only the valuable exposed film made it back to Earth.

ZEISS

www.zeiss.com

Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape @ Flowers Gallery, London - Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Flensberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor

Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape - Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Flensberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor
Flowers Gallery, London
Through 31 August, 2019

LISA BARNARD 

Santa Filomena, Andes, Peru, 2016

Orotone made with Fairtrade Gold leaf from SOTRAMI

with Kozo Washi Gampi paper

© Lisa Barnard, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents a group exhibition of work by female photographers. Her Ground uses landscape as a thematic focus to consider relationships between genre and gender. The term landscape, a principle category in Western art, is used in relation to the visible features of an area of land, often depicting human relationships to place and the environment. This exhibition looks at the specificity of viewpoint, addressing the visibility of women’s narratives and perspectives in photographic images of the landscape.

Her Ground includes nine international contemporary artists, each approaching ideas of landscape in different ways. Their varied perspectives invite questions around how we define our landscape today and the connections to be found between landscape and cultural identity. Many works on view explore notions of power, agency and sexual politics, concerning the control, access and definition of land. Often the landscape is presented in fragmented or constructed forms, incorporating a revised visualisation of landscape through mythology, memory and the imagination.

British artist LISA BARNARD’s most recent project The Canary and the Hammer traces the history of gold, and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Created in response to the financial crisis of 2008, Lisa Barnard uses gold as a prism through which globalism can be refracted, embarking on a personal journey across the world to reflect on how this ubiquitous material substance acts as a barometer of our changing times. Working across various thematic strands or chapters, connecting stories from the mania of the gold rush to the high tech industry, Lisa Barnard’s project incorporates images of the Peruvian mining landscape to explore the sexual politics of the supply chain. Lisa Barnard’s photographs show the practice of women known as pallaqueras, driven to the edges of Peruvian mines by pervading superstitions, to extract minerals from stones discarded by male peers. Lisa Barnard’s ambitious project is the subject of a new book published by MACK in September 2019.

Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer

MACK, September 2019

Silkscreened hardcover 

200 pages, 20 x 29 cm 

ISBN 978-1-912339-33-4

MAJA DANIELS is a Swedish photographic artist whose work can be described as a multi-layered academic and artistic practice that includes photography, sociological methodology, sound, moving image and archive materials.Her most recent project Elf Dalia is a book and film project in Älvdalen, Sweden, a rural community in the far North of the country, which has one of the oldest surviving languages. The series explores the landscape and its mythologies through Daniels’ own photographs and an appropriated local archive of images amassed by a local inventor and photographer Tenn Lars Persson (1878 –1938) who was interested in astrology, alchemy and the occult. In her uncanny photographs of life in this isolated region surrounded by woods, mountains and lakes, Maja Daniels’ images evoke the mysticism and dark spirits of the past, shrouded by its history as the origin of the notorious witch trials in 1668. The book was published by MACK.

MAJA DANIELS 

Self-Portrait/Totem Study nr 02, 2018

Giclee print

© Maja Daniels, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Maja Daniels, Elf Dalia

MACK, April 2019

OTA bound paperback with flaps 

136 pages, 22 x 29 cm

ISBN: 978-1-912339-37-2

Danish photographer RIKKE FLENSBERG’s latest series O presents a fluid world of bodies and landscapes, in which a playful approach to scale generates new relationships and interactions between humans and the environment. Fragmented body parts resemble topographical surfaces, while images of the landscape rupture to create biomorphic forms. The title of the series refers to the zero point, from which new readings and meanings can develop, combining both natural and cultural features. 

RIKKE FLENSBERG

Darkness is Empty Space, 2015,

Fine art print

© Rikke Flensberg, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Dutch artist SCARLETT HOOFT GRAAFLAND has described using landscape as a stage for a performance or installation. Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s carefully choreographed, site-specific sculptural interventions and performances take place in some of the most remote corners of the earth and are made in collaboration with isolated communities in those regions. Over the past decade she has explored the salt desert of Bolivia, the desolate Canadian Arctic, the remote shores of Madagascar and Vanuatu, and recently the United Arab Emirates, generating playful interactions that reflect and critique the exchange between nature and culture. The exhibition coincides with a major solo exhibition Vanishing Traces at Fotografiska, Stockholm.

SCARLETT HOOFT GRAAFLAND 

Discovery, 2006

C-type print

© Scarlett Hooft Graafland, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

LA-based artist MONA KUHN uses landscape to portray the complexities of human nature. Her series She Disappeared into Complete Silence was photographed at a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, where nature, architecture, light and a single figure merge to create a surrealist mirage in the Californian desert wilderness. Using mirroring and refraction of light, Kuhn’s experimental abstraction of the landscape reflects the atmospheric mysticism and hallucinatory visions of the desert environment’s endless horizons. Works from this series have recently been shown in an expanded context as part of fully immersive site-specific installations involving a hybrid layering of sound, image projections and shimmering mirrored surfaces. She Disappeared into Complete Silence is published by Steidl.

MONA KUHN

AD6883, 2014

Chromogenic dye coupler print

© Mona Kuhn, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Mona Khun, She Disappeared into Complete Silence
Steidl, November 2018
104 pages, 53 images
Open-spine softcover with a gilded top edge
23.7 x 31 cm
ISBN 978-3-95829-180-5

KRISTIN MAN was born in Hong Kong, and now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Her Fragments of Grey Matter series was photographed over a period of two years, creating images that oscillate between concrete figuration and emotive abstraction. The publication of the series won an award of Excellence at the Tokyo Type Director’s Club Awards in 2014, and was presented at the National Museum of Singapore. A selection of work from the series was exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Singapore, Palm Springs and New York art fairs and at the J.P. Morgan building, New York.

KRISTIN MAN

Bridge Under The Water, 2013

Photographic Print on Hahnemule paper 

© Kristin Man, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA is a Moscow-born, USA-based artist, moving between observational photography, studio practice and installation. Her series FloodZone extends a longstanding interest in the differences between natural and constructed landscapes, and the role of images in the making of collective memory and imagined geography. These photographs were made in the southern United States, in areas at risk from rising sea levels. Anastasia Samoylova evokes the precarious psychological condition of a way of life that teeters between paradise and catastrophe. FloodZone is published by Steidl in September 2019.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

Façade in South Beach (Fountain), 2017 

Dye sublimation print on aluminium

© Anastasia Samoylova, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Anastasia Samoylova, FloodZone

Steidl, September 2019

136 pages, 86 images

Hardback / Clothbound 

23.1 x 27.4 cm

ISBN 978-3-95829-633-6

CORINNE SILVA is a London-based artist using photography, video works and collaboration to disrupt prevalent modes of representing the landscape. Corinne Silva understands landscape to be a complex interrelation of culture, geography, politics and botany, living beings and inanimate matter. While Silva’s work is informed by historic precedents in landscape photography, she seeks a visual language that privileges fragmentation and interrelationships rather than an all-encompassing overview, responding to place in an embodied and subjective manner to create new narrative possibilities. In Garden State, Corinne Silva considers how gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory. Over three years Corinne Silva travelled across Israel/Palestine, making photographs of public and private gardens in twenty-two Israeli settlements, which she presents as contributing to the reshaping and renaming of these contested lands. Garden State was published by the Mosaic Rooms and Ffotogallery in 2016.

CORINNE SILVA

Untitled from the series Garden State, 2014

C-type print

© Corinne Silva , courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Corinne Silva, Garden State

Ffotogallery / The Mosaic Rooms, October 2016

156 pages, 53 images

Hardback, 21 x 22.5 cm

ISBN 978-1-87277-158-8

DAFNA TALMOR is a London-based artist whose practice encompasses photography, video, curation and collaborations. Her Constructed Landscapes transform colour negatives of landscapes initially taken as mere keepsakes through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs allude to an imaginary place, idealised spaces or virtual spaces that exist beyond their fractured surfaces. The act of physically merging landscapes from different parts of the world acts as a metaphor for the transitional nature of belonging in today’s globalised societies. The Constructed Landscapes blur notions of space, memory and time to create a space that defies specificity and reflects the transience of our contemporary world.

DAFNA TALMOR

Untitled (NE-04040404-1) from the Constructed Landscapes series, 2015 

C-type handprint made from four collaged negatives

© Dafna Talmor, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

FLOWERS GALLERY
82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP
www.flowersgallery.com