30/11/21

Jacqueline Carron @ Maison nationale des artistes, Nogent-sur-Marne - Psicolor, la passion de la couleur

Jacqueline Carron 
Psicolor, la passion de la couleur 
Maison nationale des artistes, 
Nogent-sur-Marne
Jusqu'au 22 février 2022

Jacqueline Carron
Jacqueline Carron
Comme à la marelle, 2020-2021
Huile sur toile, 150 x 140 cm
Courtesy de l’artiste

Psicolor, la passion de la couleur, exposition présentée à la Maison nationale des artistes, revient sur un parcours artistique entièrement dédié à la peinture et sur la place omniprésente de la couleur dans l’oeuvre de JACQUELINE CARRON. L’exposition dévoile deux moments du travail, l’un où intervient encore la notion de sujet et de motif, l’autre où la couleur devient le seul et unique sujet.

Ancienne élève de l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, diplômée des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble, passée par les Studios de la Victorine et un travail de dessin animé auprès de René Clément, puis par la publicité (notamment pour les Bas « DD »), Jacqueline Carron a également suivi les cours de Paul Colin pendant trois ans. Son parcours l’amène à réaliser des commandes monumentales dans divers établissements scolaires et à côtoyer le monde de l’industrie. Entre 1965 et 2002, elle expose dans des galeries parisiennes, au Palais des congrès de Monte-Carlo, à la Fondation Vasarely à Aix-en-Provence, à la Maison de l’Innovation à Clermont-Ferrand...

La rencontre, en 1976, à Beaubourg et au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, de scientifiques spécialistes de la couleur et notamment du physicien François Parra, ainsi que de Jacques Fillacier, Yves Charnay et Michel Albert-Vanel de l’Ensad, va être déterminante dans l’élaboration d’une nouvelle démarche picturale qui va entraîner Jacqueline Carron dans une recherche approfondie de la connaissance de la couleur. Dorénavant, la couleur sera pour elle la seule raison d’être du tableau.

Jacqueline Carron va ainsi créer les « Psicolors ». Ce sont des ensembles de carrés de 200 nuances de couleurs qui permettent, par leurs combinaisons, de vérifier l'interaction des couleurs, leur relativité, leur instabilité, pour démontrer qu'il n'y a pas une vérité de la couleur mais bien une sensation, une perception physiologique et psychologique liée à notre culture.

Jusqu’en 2019, elle travaille dans son « Atelier Recherche Couleur » dans la Drôme où elle reçoit scientifiques, architectes, médecins, artistes et entreprises. Elle poursuit désormais sa recherche depuis la Maison nationale des artistes, où elle réside.

Jacqueline Carron
Jacqueline Carron
Mouvement sable, 1993
Huile sur toile, 150 x 75 cm
Courtesy de l'artiste
« Ces couleurs du spectre s’installent partout, dans mon verre, sur le sol dans la tache de pétrole et les murs de ma maison, sur le paysage et sur les ailes de l’avion qui m’emporte. Puis il est présent dans ma tête, dans mes rêves et dans mon corps. Ainsi, je voyage en permanence emportée dans l’arc-en-ciel, couchée sur les ondes qui me bercent et m’emportent dans leur voyage lumineux, me noient en elles, me nourrissent. Je suis infinie particule installée au coeur de leur structure et promenée selon leur volonté ou leurs nécessités, voyage terrestre mais aussi peut-être menant vers un au-delà encore inconnu. Voilà donc cette aventure, où rien n’est acquis, où je dépends de ces phénomènes qui m’entourent. » Jacqueline Carron

La Maison nationale des artistes est un établissement de la Fondation des Artistes.

MAISON NATIONALE DES ARTISTES
14 rue Charles VII, 94130 Nogent-sur-Marne

Paulina Olowska @ Metro Pictures Gallery, NYC - Haus Proud

Paulina Olowska: Haus Proud 
Metro Pictures, New York
Through December 11, 2021

Paulina Olowska
PAULINA OLOWSKA
Ester Krumbachová in her office, 2021 
Oil on canvas
86 5/8 x 63 inches (220 x 160 cm)
© Paulina Olowska, courtesy of Metro Pictures

Paulina Olowska presents a new series of paintings and a video work in Haus Proud, the final exhibition at Metro Pictures before its permanent closure at the end of the year. Paulina Olowska considered the special context of the exhibition while producing the works. Informed by her research into women-run exhibition spaces and schools, such as the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture in the United States and the Zakopianska Szkoła Koronkarska (“Zakopane Bobbin Lace School”) in Poland, the paintings adapt imagery from her ever-increasing collection of vintage fashion advertisements and photographs to continue her longstanding interest in expanding the representation of women in art history.

The portrait Ester Krumbachová in her office is an homage to the eponymous stage and costume designer, screenwriter, and director. Paulina Olowska is drawn to Krumbachová not only for her many contributions to Czech New Wave cinema but also for her influential position behind the scenes, a position typical of women whose labor has often gone underappreciated and unrecognized throughout history. Paulina Olowska paints Krumbachová standing in the middle of an office surrounded by posters for the films she worked on in the 1960s. 
 
The School of Archery is one of two paintings based on images by American fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. Reminiscent of Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Paulina Olowska’s painting shows a group of elegantly dressed women in bowler hats lounging in a field, their bows and arrows resting on the grass beside them. The title painting Haus Proud celebrates the professional technical schools of the Soviet Union, which provided specialized, non-academic vocational training across the Soviet republics. The sgraffito depicted on the wall behind the women alludes to the instruction these schools provided in a wide range of artistic mediums, including mosaics and mural painting. 
 
Together, the paintings imagine a fantasy educational community starring fabulous renaissance women of all stripes—lecturers, students, custodial staff, and a principal with her pet. The video collage work foregrounds the historical basis of this narrative, featuring photographs and documentation from the women-run art schools and institutions that served as the artist’s inspiration. These parallels form the artist’s tribute to her longtime gallery Metro Pictures and the community it has established over its forty-year history. 
 
Paulina Olowska’s own practice includes sculpture, installation, and performance. It also extends to collaborative projects such as the Artist House Kadenówka, a grand 1930s mansion in a bucolic corner of rural Poland where Paulina Olowska hosts artist-led events and happenings. Since 2015 she has served as artistic director of Pavilionesque, a magazine dedicated to art and theater published by the Centre for Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor CRICOTEKA in Kraków, the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the University of Geneva, and for the upcoming fourth issue the University of Zurich. (Olowska has taught at the latter three institutions.) Earlier this year she presented a newly commissioned performance titled Grotesque Alphabet (After Roland Topor) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Kitchen in New York premiered her ballet Slavic Goddesses in 2017, and it was subsequently performed at Milan’s Museo del Novecento in 2018 and again at the 2020 Biennale Gherdëina in Italy. Her performance commission Naughty Nymphs in the Courtyard of the Favorites will debut at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022.
 
She has had major one-person exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She received the prestigious Aachen Art Prize in 2014, with an associated exhibition at the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany.

METRO PICTURES GALLERY
519 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

29/11/21

Fondation des Artistes, Résultats de la Commission mécénat d'automne 2021 - Les 25 projets de production soutenus

Fondation des Artistes 
Résultats de la Commission mécénat d'automne 2021 

Io Burgard
IO BURGARD 
Sphinx
Trame du jeu vidéo, image 3D
Modélisatrice Anaïs Goupy
Conception Io Burgard
© Io Burgard, Courtesy de l’artiste

Fortement investie dans le soutien à la production d’oeuvres, la Fondation des Artistes développe une politique volontariste de mécénat, notamment à travers l’important dispositif d’aide aux projets qu’elle a mis en place en décembre 2011 qui s’adresse aux artistes, sans critères d’âge, dans tous les champs des arts visuels, de la peinture à la vidéo, en passant par la sculpture, le dessin, la photographie, la performance...

En 2021, après 461 projets financés, le dispositif fête ses dix ans de soutien à la création artistique, retracés dans une publication à paraître aux Éditions Dilecta en janvier 2022.

Celui-ci, le plus important dispositif privé d’aide à la production en France puisque la Fondation des Artistes y consacre chaque année près de 500 K€, concerne les travaux d’artistes confirmés ou émergents, français ou étrangers qui développent un projet en France et vise à encourager la production d’oeuvres ambitieuses, innovantes, expérimentales, ou nécessitant un temps de recherche ou de gestation significatif. Parmi les dépenses susceptibles d’être comptabilisées, figure la rémunération de l’auteur. 

Les aides sont attribuées après avis d’une commission, composée de la directrice de la Fondation, de deux représentants du ministère de la Culture (Direction générale de la création artistique et Inspection générale de la création artistique) et de quatre personnalités qualifiées, désignées pour deux ans par le Conseil d’administration de la Fondation qui sont, pour la période 2020/2021 :

- Marie Gautier , commissaire et directrice artistique ;
- Jean-Pierre Greff, directeur de la HEAD à Genève ;
- Sophie Kaplan, directrice de La Criée à Rennes ;
- Ange Leccia, artiste.

Lors de la commission d’automne 2021, qui s’est tenue le 22 novembre, 25 nouveaux projets ont été retenus pour une enveloppe globale de 250 000 €.

Depuis la création de ce dispositif, ce sont donc désormais 461 projets d’artistes qui ont été aidés, pour un montant total de 5 329 524 €.

Les 25 projets de production soutenus :

Basma ALSHARIF, Béotienne
Fabienne AUDÉOUD, De-Learning To Play The Piano #3
Joan AYRTON, Breaches I & II
Noémie BABLET, Tenue de Promesse
Pauline BASTARD, La Vie Politique
Io BURGARD, Sphinx
Thierry COSTESÈQUE, Éloge des Mauvaises Herbes
Franck DAVID, Toyota Corona
Judith DESCHAMPS, La Mue
Mario D’SOUZA, Indigo an Identity – Home Away from Home
Mimosa ECHARD, Sporal
Nicolas GIRAUD, Le dialogue des machines
Marine HUGONNIER, Les États Généraux (Notes pour une Europe Heureuse)
Lamia JOREIGE, Uncertain Times
Pauline JULIER, Perseverance Valley
Kaori KINOSHITA, TI LU LU 2026
Irene KOPELMAN, Modèles Marins. Dessiner la régénération
LEK & SOWAT, J’aurais voulu
Marie LOSIER, Behind the Mask
Anita MOLINERO, Extrudia 3D
Marie OUAZZANI & Nicolas CARRIER, Milieu vague
Julien PEREZ, REX
Caroline REVEILLAUD, Sharp-eyed
Julia ROMETTI & Victor COSTALES, Welcome Time Travellers
Giuliana ZEFFERI, D’autres oiseaux marchent eux aussi comme ça

Pour présenter un projet lors de la commission du printemps 2022, les artistes peuvent se préinscrire sur la plateforme dédiée sur le site web de la Fondation des Artistes (ci-dessous) et envoyer un dossier, jusqu’au vendredi 4 février 2022 inclus. 

FONDATION DES ARTISTES
Commission Mécénat
Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild
11 rue Berryer, 75008 Paris

28/11/21

The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Discovery and Invention - Exhibition + Catalogue

Discovery and Invention
The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers
Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
10 December, 2021 - 22 January 2022
(closed 20 December - 3 January)

The first major survey of early graphic works by JOSEF ALBERS (1888 - 1976), tracing the artist’s early printmaking career, beginning with his first explorations of the medium in 1916, whilst teaching in an elementary school, and ending in his final year at Black Mountain College, USA, in 1950.

Almost 50 works on paper will be on show, all of which come directly from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and they feature scenes of domestic animals, local industry, rare self-portraits as well as portraits of his friends. The exhibition will culminate in the first appearance of geometric forms inspired by pre-Columbian architecture. This comprehensive review explores the complex themes and subject matter that shaped the evolution of Albers’s work in the first half of the twentieth century, prior to his experimentation with his renowned homages to the square.
Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Josef Albers was a naturally gifted printmaker, who possessed an innate ability to push techniques and materials to new limits. The progression from his first print to his final portfolios was the culmination of a lifetime of complex artistic investigation, an evolution most clearly revealed through the historical arc of his printmaking practice.”
Josef Albers first seriously took up printmaking in 1916, at the age of 28. After attending the Royal Art School, Berlin, from 1913 – 1915, he returned home to Bottrop to take up a teaching position. Simultaneously he resumed his studies at the School of Applied Arts in nearby Essen, where he began printmaking via bookplates and greetings cards. He focused on everyday subject matter to produce accomplished linocuts and lithographs depicting local landmarks, such as sand and coal-mines and animals. Using what was available to him during wartime, these graphic works were printed on a variety of papers and on sheets of different sizes. Albers first lithographs were based on dancers he had observed in a ballet entitled The Green Flute in 1916. His portraits from this period include studies of his own striking profile and those of his friends. The soft floating figures from The Green Flute series and his portraits reveal the playful and informal side of Albers’ character, as well as his developing fascination with the interplay of two and three-dimensional space.

Josef Albers second period of focused printmaking begins after the Bauhaus closed in 1933, when he arrived at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina, USA. Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation discusses his prints from this era; “They mark a point of transition from the hard-edged forms and linear geometries associated with his major Bauhaus works in sandblasted glass, which investigated the interplay and exchangeability of figure and ground, to an engagement with evocative line and organic patterns.” Now also working in woodcut, Josef Albers delighted in the irregularities of wood grain and cork and the possibilities they lent to printmaking.

Prints made whilst teaching at Black Mountain Collage were also inspired by Albers frequent visits to Mexico which began in 1935/36. He travelled to archaeological sites throughout the country studying the constructions, the influence of which emerges in his work during the preceding years. As Albers style and themes developed, his prints made in the mid to late 1940s demonstrate his pursuit of linear geometry in a more refined format than ever before. He began using a limited amount of simple ruled lines to create forms that appear to rotate and shift. These later prints share fundamental traits with, and pave the wave for, his Homage to the Square works, which Albers explored in the final decades of his life.

Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Discovery and Invention
The Early Graphic Works 
© 2021 Cristea Roberts Gallery - ART/BOOKS
On the jacket: Josef Albers, Self-portrait, 1916, 
Linoleum cut, paper 46 × 29.5 cm, image 21.6 × 16.5 cm (detail). 
Copyright © 2021 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
Discovery and Invention: The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardback catalogue (160 pages with 158 illustrations) with an introduction by David Cleaton-Roberts and essays by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, and Jeannette Redensek, Research Curator and Josef Albers Catalogue Raisonné Director, both of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. If you are interested, please visit Criste Roberts Gallery's website.
A major exhibition featuring over 350 objects, entitled Anni et Josef Albers - L'art et la vie (Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life), is currently on show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris until 9 January 2022.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY
43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

Beate Wassermann @ Moderna Museet, Malmö - Balancing Acts - Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann

Beate Wassermann: Balancing Acts
Moderna Museet, Malmö
Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann
Through February 20, 2022

Beate Wassermann
BEATE WASSERMANN
From the cycle "Balance", 1997 
© Beate Wassermann/Wassermann Estate

Balancing Acts is the first exhibition in Scandinavia of BEATE WASSERMANN (1947 – 2018). With works spanning five decades, the exhibition explores the many facets of Wassermann’s unique painting.

Beate Wassermann grew up in post-war Germany which had a strong impact on her. Her powerful, mainly abstract paintings were inspired by everyday life and the profane as well as the sacred – two spheres that she never considered contradictory. Wassermann developed a profoundly singular style of painting. In her works, often in large formats, she condensed what she saw around her into signs or symbol-like shapes.
- Beate Wassermann perceived colours and shapes as animated energies, says curator of the exhibition, Museum Director Iris Müller-Westermann. The image was her mental and directly physical field of dialogue. Her painterly practice explores the role of artist, human being, woman and mother – as in the early self-portrait “Madonna von Altona” from 1979, where the highly pregnant artist is standing in a beam of light, with paint brushes in her hair like a crown of thorns, wearing pointed, elegant shoes. Her paintings are highly physical, always with proportions that relate to her own body. Balancing different aspects of life, shapes and colours, light and darkness, the near and the distant, is central to Wassermann’s oeuvre.
Beate Wassermann saw herself as a collector, finding forms and structures in everyday life that felt familiar on a deeper level. Painting was an ongoing contemplation to her. She perceived her images as likenesses of experiences and the paintings became answers to her own questions. From the mid-1990s, when she began creating glass windows for churches and other public, monumental buildings, her paintings reached new levels of freedom and gradually lightened from within.

Beate Wassermann studied at the Art Academy, first in Berlin, then in Hamburg. She lived and worked in Hamburg-Altona and periodically in Italy. Wassermann’s work has been shown in Germany and other countries in Europe. Balancing Acts is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, offering an insight into how her images sprang from earlier pictures, and how themes were modified and resumed throughout her career.

With this exhibition Moderna Museet Malmö contributes yet again to highlighting exciting and important women artists who have been overlooked in a male-dominated art world. In connection with the exhibition, Moderna Museet publishes a catalogue presenting Beate Wassermann's oeuvre.

MODERNA MUSEET MALMO
Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö

Hanna Hyy, Lasse Juuti, Tuuli Kerätär, Linda Roschier @ Helsinki Contemporary - Modern Love

Hanna Hyy, Lasse Juuti, Tuuli Kerätär, Linda Roschier
Modern Love
Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki
26 November - 19 December, 2021

In place of a common theme the exhibition Modern Love at Helsinki Contemporary highlights the uniqueness of four different painters, providing a sample of the state of current contemporary painting right now.

Hanna Hyy
HANNA HYY
Tämänhetkinen tilanteesi / Your Current Situation, 2021
Watercolour and oil on sandwich board, 120 x 100 cm
© Hanna Hyy, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

The starting points for Hanna Hyy’s paintings are various models: toys, ornaments, and biological specimens. She begins her process by looking for objects, often finding them in flea markets, but occasionally also in rubbish skips, as with the biological specimens that have now been given space in her new works. After choosing an object or objects, Hyy constructs a still life, which she paints ‘from life’. The inanimate model for the painting is humanized into being a ‘substitute experiencer’, a figure with whom we can identify, and who appears as the painting’s actor or on whose viewpoint the work is based. Hyy’s paintings seek to raise issues and experiences that elude everyday language, and also coincident contradictions.

HANNA HYY (b. 1990 Helsinki), graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions, for instance, at Galleria Huuto and Kosminen in Helsinki, and appeared in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition. Hyy’s paintings are in several private collections and the Hämäläis-Osakunta (Tavastia Nation) collection. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the artist's work.

Lasse-juuti
LASSE JUUTI
Exhibition view: Modern Love
© Lasse Juuti, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

One of the starting points for Lasse Juuti’s works that combine painting, collage and object assemblages has been games and nest building. In the Modern Love exhibition we see two painting/sculpture hybrids on the floor, in the form language of one we find a car and in the other a trailer, transformed into a ping-pong court and a sarcophagus. Typical of Juuti’s works is, on the one hand, the key role played by the materials, but also the construction of disparate visual narratives. On this occasion, a series of paintings made on large plywood boards is linked via its materials to the floor-standing works, which converse with one another to tell a story. In the plywood boards leaning against the wall Juuti constructs a work using both painting and collage.

LASSE JUUTI (b. 1990 Tampere) has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and Tampere School of Art and Communication. He has had solo exhibitions at Monitoimitila O. in Helsinki, Titanik in Turku, and HAM Gallery in Helsinki. Most recently Juuti’s works were shown in the summer 2021 Porvoo Triennial. His works are represented in HAM’s and Kiasma’s collections. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Uusimaa Regional Fund), for supporting the artist's work.

Tuuli Keratar
TUULI KERÄTÄR
Soft rubble, 2021
Oil on canvas, 154 x 150 cm
© Tuuli Kerätär, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Tuuli Kerätär’s abstract paintings move forwards without prior planning, in a dialogue between forms and colours. The sketching and the partially erased layers become part of the works, creating the feeling of dense, layered space characteristic of Kerätär’s works. In her paintings she returns to memories of places where she has felt she could see behind the physical surroundings. Other paintings also act as stimuli for further works, and she has recently been particularly interested in Frans Marc. The motifs of Kerätär’s latest works are grids and squares, which allude to a space viewed through a digital screen. The glow seen through the grids becomes the central element in the works. At times, it illuminates the space like the warm California morning sun that ripens fruit. While, at other times, the glow is pale and cold, like looking into a stranger’s apartment from the outside, into an empty room filled with the light from a television.

TUULI KERÄTÄR (b. 1985 Turku) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions, e.g., at the Exhibition Laboratory Project Room in Helsinki, and at Gumbostrand Konst & Form in Sipoo, and appeared in group exhibitions in Helsinki, Rovaniemi and Antwerp. Kerätär’s works are in the collections of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Oulu University Hospital.

Linda Roschier
LINDA ROSCHIER
Double barred green cross remedy, 2021
Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm
© Linda Roschier, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Linda Roschier’s painting process begins organically. The elements are built up one step at a time, with the painting carrying it forwards. Sometimes, a work has its starting point in another work, and the motif is repeated, but resolved in a slightly different way. Sometimes, Roschier’s small paintings serve as laboratories for large works, in which she can try out compositions and motifs. Looking and seeing are recurrent themes in her working process, as are various natural phenomena. The paintings in Modern Love contain numerous elements, such as sea shells, pearls, the plant world, and emojis, which evoke various mental associations in the viewer. These works are powerfully rooted in our time, but Roschier also feels an affinity with esoteric pictorial traditions, and occasionally makes references to modernism and earlier practices.

LINDA ROSCHIER (b. 1979 Vantaa) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at Galleria Huuto and the Exhibition Laboratory Project Room in Helsinki, and at Gallery Vanha Kappalaisentalo in Porvoo. Roschier has also taken part in group exhibitions and her works have been acquired by the Finnish Art Society and private collectors. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Uusimaa Regional Fund), for supporting the artist's work.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

Mika Taanila @ Galerie Anhava, Helsinki - Film without Film

Mika Taanila: Film without Film 
Galerie Anhava, Helsinki 
25 November - 19 December 2021 

Film without Film is Mika Taanila’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Anhava. Using the moving image in versatile ways, Taanila’s work often focuses on the complex relationship between technology and the human mind. It asks: What is cinema?

Mika Taanila’s art is characterised by the kind of thought experiments typical of conceptual art, subtle humour, and a longing for aesthetics that eschews rigid proceduralism.

The conceptual premises and manner of production of the works in the exhibition create a kind of narrative in which the object of humour is hard to define unambiguously. A case in point are the videos “Failed Emptiness. Time” and “Failed Emptiness. Place”. Co-created with author Harry Salmenniemi, the works arise from speculations about how to depict as little as possible on film or, preferably, nothing. Dispensing with camera footage altogether, the first video consists exclusively of elements such as “scene transition effects” produced with video editing software, although the film dispenses with scenes as well. The other work does contain film footage, but it is recorded with a heat camera that, instead of light, distinguishes the temperatures of objects in the shot. Reality takes on a new cast, becoming an eerie surface on which objects shine and glow in unexpected ways.

In “Interiors” and “Exteriors”, Mika Taanila abandons camera and computer technology entirely. The “Interior” series consists of black and white photograms created in a darkroom by moving various filmmaking equipment (film camera, projector parts, DVD player, digital set-top box, film cutter) over photographic paper. The shadow images can be seen as portraits of impossibilities in which the subjects – moving image equipment – appear to move within their frozen portraits, which were created without any such equipment at all. The “Exterior” series consist of lumen prints made by placing movie camera lenses on photographic paper which was then left outdoors for hours to be exposed. During the exposure, the image appears slowly on the paper in colour, without any need of development. Earth’s rotation and changes in weather leave their mark on the images.

The exhibition also includes prepared film books from the “Film Reader” collage series, as well as a new kinetic installation based on found film stills, “A Reflection of Fear.”

Mika Taanila (b. 1965) works with documentary film, experimental film and visual art. He has held solo exhibitions at Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau in Bologna (2020), STUK House for Dance, Image and Sound in Leuven (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2013–14), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2013) and TENT Rotterdam (2013). Taanila’s works have been presented at numerous international film festivals and major exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (Nordic Pavilion, 2017), Aichi Triennale (2013), documenta (2012), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Berlin Biennale (2004), Manifesta (2002) and Istanbul Biennale (2001). He has received numerous awards, both in Finland and internationally. Mika Taanila was awarded the prestigious Ars Fennica prize in 2015.

GALERIE ANHAVA
Fredrikinkatu 43, 00120 Helsinki
_______________



27/11/21

Ping Zheng @ McClain Gallery, Houston - The Voice of Water

Ping Zheng: The Voice of Water
McClain Gallery, Houston
Through January 8, 2022

McClain Gallery presents an exhibition of new oil-stick-on-paper paintings by Ping Zheng (b. 1989 in Zhejiang, China). Zheng’s imagery is rooted in nature but operates in a richly symbolic realm where the vibrational energy of the natural world merges with biomorphic abstraction. In depicting landscapes both real and imagined, Zheng embodies a space where she has long found freedom and solace. The Voice of Water is the artist’s second solo exhibition, following the gallery inaugural presentation of her work online in 2020.

In these recent works, Ping Zheng captures the potential and sense of magic she feels through uninhibited self-expression. Each painting is essentially a meditation, granting access to a place pulsing with symbolic potency. With reverence for art movements from spiritual abstraction to surrealism, Ping Zheng’s depiction of nature is integrally tethered to bodily forms: sensual curves, undulating peaks, orbs, and fuzzy textures often reappear. In “Shimmering Sea Mountain,” a sun shines through a valley, and the resulting reflection off the water has an animistic quality: a painterly, yet cartoon-like chorus of neon-citrus ripples toward us, until it finally resolves into the calm of a mottled blue and green sea. As Barbara Pollock commented in her recent essay about the artist’s work: “Zheng views light as a kind of life force, necessary to propel a painting into a relationship with the viewer."

Forgoing a paintbrush, Ping Zheng favors a bright palette rendered in oil sticks. Her process is physically demanding despite the intimate scale of the works. She is interested in the energy transference between her hands and the plasticity of her medium. She will often manipulate the dense layers with her fingers, and sometimes the pressure from her hands and fingerprints is made visible. Ping Zheng’s handling reveals a versatile range of colors and textures: at times her vivid palette reads velvety soft, while other portions are scraped, ribbed, or speckled.

Like most of us, Ping Zheng struggled with isolation throughout the pandemic’s lockdowns as her access to nature and the outdoors became severely limited. As a substitute for natural light, Ping Zheng had to rely on artificial city lights, paying close attention to how they manipulate the sky as night gives way to day. The escape from reality her work had always provided was suddenly more necessary than ever. Nature both grounds and scales, and Ping Zheng’s practice takes root in the humbling effect of being present. She acknowledges “human beings are a part of the universe” and whether “you are male or female, eventually our bodies become soil or dust into the air or on the ground.” 

PING ZHENG (b. 1989 in Zhejiang, China, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a BFA in painting from the University College of London, Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Her works have been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY, the Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456, New York, NY, and Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, among other venues. She has completed artist residencies at the Rancho Linda Vista Arts Community, in Oracle, Arizona, and the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson, Vermont among others. Recently, Ping Zheng has been reviewed in ArtForum, the New Yorker, and featured on Glasstire. She is co-represented by Kristen Lorello, New York.

McCLAIN GALLERY
2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston, TX 77098
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Yoshitomo Nara @ Pace Gallery, London - Pinacoteca

Yoshitomo Nara: Pinacoteca
Pace Gallery, London
26 November 2021 – 15 January 2022

Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara 
STOP THE BOMBS, 2019
Acrylic on wood 
58-7/8" × 46-1/4" × 3-1/16" 
(149.5 cm × 117.5 cm × 7.8 cm) 
© Yoshitomo Nara

Marking the first show to utilize the full expanse of Pace's new space in London, Yoshitomo Nara’s exhibition is presented across two levels with a major new installation, Pinacoteca 2021, at its center and a diverse range of recent paintings, sculpture, and works on cardboard throughout our three galleries. Yoshitomo Nara’s practice expertly balances the aesthetics of material with thoughtful reflections on the human experience – pain, war, spirit, politics, loneliness, music, and nature. Yoshitomo Nara: Pinacoteca coincides with the artist’s major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has been extended through January 2022, and the exhibition, i forgot their names and often can’t remember their faces but remember their voices well at Dallas Contemporary, Texas, March 20–August 22, 2021.

At the cornerstone of the exhibition Yoshitomo Nara presents Pinacoteca 2021, a new multi-room installation that is reworked from an earlier project titled London Mayfair House which Nara built from abandoned materials found in a London suburb in 2006. One of only 15 in existence, seven of which are in public collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in South Korea and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, this installation offers a rare insight into the artist’s radically multidisciplinary, experiential practice.

Borrowing its title from the Ancient Greco-Roman term for a public art salon, Pinacoteca 2021, is a specially crafted multi-room structure that imitates an exhibition space. Since 1985, Yoshitomo Nara’s practice has explored the relationship between space and artwork. In 2001 he created an installation that resembled his student room, in which he exhibited unframed drawings by pinning them directly on the walls as if just completed, bringing the viewer into his inner world. Between 2003 and 2010, Nara made several spatial installations, often using found materials and personal affects alongside artworks to build and compose his structures.
‘In these fantastical, childlike rooms, Nara disrupt[s] the institutional spaces of museums and galleries by challenging the traditional classifications of what is and is not considered art. ... With each exhibition, a viewer’s experience as voyeur, consumer, or passerby becomes a part of the dislocating effect of this concentrated layering of things.’ – Dr. Yeewan Koon
Visitors are invited to enter Pinacoteca 2021 and experience the work from within as a gallery of paintings. Nara has meticulously designed every facet of the space to evoke a strong sense of place and emotion and create connections between viewer and environment. On the internal walls, newly created paintings on wood and canvas as well as drawings on paper, used envelopes, and cardboard boxes, are hung by the artist himself. Adorning the outside walls – which have been directly painted onto – Nara hangs new paintings on wood which are stylistically simpler and more graphic than the works inside the installation. Sightlines from outside the structure have been carefully constructed through wooden slats and windows, deftly shifting the viewer’s position from participant to onlooker as they enter and exit the space.

For more than three decades, Yoshitomo Nara’s idiosyncratic visual language has centred on innocent, genderless figures often rendered in bright colours with large heads and oval eyes. Drawing on a multitude of sources, including politics, punk rock and folk music, and the counterculture of the 1960s, Nara’s iconic figures function as a kind of self-portrait. Working alone, Nara channels his inner world through these unusual and brazen figures, whose expressions range from indignant and rebellious (Banging the Drum, 2020) to despondent (Okhotsk Girl Island, Cape Shiretoko, 2020) and inquisitive (... So, 2020). Particular attention is paid to the materiality of his work. Nara’s paintings on cardboard such as Girl with Drum Sticks (2019) and Remember BTB (2020), retain the exposed raw edges, leaving old barcodes and shipping text visible as part of the painting’s composition.

Peace Head (2020) and Ennui Head (2020), two new bronze sculptures covered in a white urethane coating, began as small palm sized works in clay before being enlarged and cast. Melding the physical, natural world with portraiture, these sculptures have a shared sensibility with his graphite drawings in their use of shadow and line.

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan) is a pioneering figure in contemporary art whose signature style—which expresses figures in a range of emotional complexities from resistance and rebellion to quietude and contemplation—celebrates the introspective freedom of the imagination and the individual. Yoshitomo Nara’s work spans painting, drawing, photography, large-scale installations, and sculpture in ceramic, bronze, and fibre-reinforced plastic. Influenced by popular music, memories of childhood, and current events, he filters these references through an exploratory realm of feelings, loneliness and rebelliousness especially, which span autobiographical as well as broader cultural sensibilities. In 2021, Nara opened two major exhibitions: a survey at Dallas Contemporary, Texas and a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which continues through to January 2022.

PACE GALLERY
5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ

On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale @ Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Through January 9, 2022

Irene Weir
Irene Weir
(B.F.A. 1906) 
The Blacksmith, Chinon, France, ca. 1923
Watercolor on paper
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Irene Weir, B.F.A. 1906 

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
(M.F.A. 2011)
The Rest of Her Remains, 2010 
Charcoal, acrylic, ink, collage, and Xerox transfers on paper 
Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift
from the Arthur and Constance Zeckendorf Foundation
Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

Yale University Art Gallery celebrates the work of Yale-educated women artists in a new exhibition.

On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale celebrates the vital contributions of generations of Yale-trained women artists to the national and international art scene. Through an exploration of their work, the exhibition charts the history of women at the Yale School of Art (formerly Yale School of the Fine Arts) and traces the ways in which they challenged boundaries of time and circumstance and forged avenues of opportunity— attaining gallery and museum representation, developing relationships with dedicated collectors, and securing professorships and teaching posts in a male-dominated art world. On view at the Yale University Art Gallery from September 10, 2021, through January 9, 2022, the exhibition commemorates two recent milestones: the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of Yale University’s admittance of its first female students who, flaunting historical precedent, were welcomed to study at the School of the Fine Arts upon its opening in 1869.

On the Basis of Art showcases more than 75 artists working in a broad range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, print, photography, textile, and video. Objects are drawn exclusively from the Gallery’s collection and span more than 15 decades as well as a wide range of stylistic approaches—from realism to abstraction to figuration—revealing how these modern and contemporary women artists have brought their life experiences and individual styles to their careers.

“We are thrilled to join the University in celebrating and commemorating the contributions and accomplishments of women at Yale,” says Stephanie Wiles, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Gallery. “It’s an honor to present this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, which together offer deep insight about women artist-graduates of Yale. These women brought an unwavering determination, bold experimentation, and a spirit of risk-taking to their practice, qualities that were critical to their success in the international art world.”

Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu
(M.F.A. 2000) 
Sentinel I, 2018 
Paper pulp, wood glue, concrete, wood, glass beads, stone, 
rose quartz, gourd, and jewelry 
Yale University Art Gallery, Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
© Wangechi Mutu

Sylvia Plimack Mangold
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
(B.F.A. 1961)
Opposite Corners, 1973 
Acrylic on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery, Susan Morse Hilles Fund 
© Sylvia Plimack Mangold, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

On the Basis of Art is curated by Elisabeth Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Curator of Prints and Drawings, with the assistance of Judy Ditner, the Richard Benson Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media; John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts; Keely Orgeman, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Sydney Skelton Simon, the Bradley Assistant Curator of Academic Affairs; and Molleen Theodore, Associate Curator of Programs.
“It is inspiring to highlight the extraordinary and varied work of these talented female-identifying artists,” shares Elisabeth Hodermarsky. “Although this diverse group of artists spans multiple generations, there are cross-connections in their work that engage history, feminist movements, and legacies of influence. The exhibition is the first of its kind, telling the history of the visual arts at Yale from a female perspective.” Accordingly, the exhibition is organized into six thematic sections that mix time periods and media, allowing visitors to observe these dialogues across generations.
The first section, Carving a Presence, demonstrates the persistence of the genre of portraiture and includes works by Irene Weir (B.A. 1906), Audrey Flack (B.F.A. 1952), and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (M.F.A. 2011). Sculpting Space and Place features two- and three-dimensional objects by Eva Hesse (B.F.A. 1959), Sylvia Plimack Mangold (B.F.A. 1961), Howardena Pindell (M.F.A. 1967), and others whose oeuvres consider space, perception, surface, and depth. Threading Myth, Legend, and Ritual highlights artists such as Rina Banerjee (M.F.A. 1995) and Natalie Frank (B.A. 2002), who engage tradition and storytelling in their practice. With works by artists like Lois Conner (M.F.A. 1981)and Victoria Sambunaris (M.F.A. 1999), Modeling Nature, Tracing the Human Footprint presents the different ways in which artists have depicted the natural world and have examined humankind’s relationship with nature—as both nurturer/steward and user/abuser. Drawing Identity reveals how artists, such as Wangechi Mutu (M.F.A. 2000), Mickalene Thomas (M.F.A. 2002), and Angela Strassheim (M.F.A. 2003), have challenged societal labels and offered thoughtful and powerful critiques of cultural systems. Finally, Casting History, Etching Memory explores how Maya Lin (B.A. 1981, M.ARCH. 1986), An-My Lê (M.F.A. 1993), Mary Reid Kelley (M.F.A. 2009), and others have memorialized or reflected on our past.

On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale
308 pages/10 x 10 3/4 inches/187 color and 52 black-and-white illustrations
Distributed by Yale University Press/Paper over board/ISBN 978-0-300-25424-2
A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features an introduction by Elisabeth Hodermarsky and essays by Helen A. Cooper (PH.D. 1986), the Holcombe T. Green Curator Emeritus of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Gallery; Linda Konheim Kramer (B.F.A. 1963),former curator at the Brooklyn Museum and former Executive Director of the Nancy Graves Foundation; and Marta Kuzma, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, the first woman to hold that role. It also includes catalogue entries on every artist in the exhibition and timelines that detail important milestones for women—at Yale, in the arts, and in the country.
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 

26/11/21

Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude, London

Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude
National Gallery, London
10 December 2021 – 18 April 2022

Kehinde Wiley by Abdoulaye Ndao
Kehinde Wiley 
Photographer: Abdoulaye Ndao 

KEHINDE WILEY (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is an American artist best known for his portraits that feature people of colour in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings. Most famously, in 2017 he was commissioned to paint Barack Obama, becoming the first Black artist to paint an official portrait of a President of the United States. His work references European portraiture by positioning contemporary Black sitters, from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds, often wearing casual or hip-hop clothing, in the poses of the original historical, religious or mythological figures, conferring – in the process – his sitters with a similar fame and status.

His images – as part quotation, part intervention – raise questions about power, privilege, identity, and above all highlight the absence or marginalisation of Black figures within European art.

Kehinde Wiley’s first film installation, 'Narrenschiff' (2017), was a contemporary response to the ‘Ship of Fools’ allegory, popular in European culture from the late 15th century. Wiley’s work featured a group of young Black men at sea, struggling to reach the land – a metaphor for both historical and contemporary issues of migration, isolation and social dislocation.

Building on these themes at the National Gallery, with five paintings and one six-channel digital film, Wiley will explore European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, humankind’s relationship with nature and in the process touches upon current concerns such as climate change and migration.

One section of the film included in this project will feature Black Londoners that Kehinde Wiley met and cast for the film on the streets around the National Gallery, and whom he took on a trip to Norway to explore its fjords and glacial landscapes. Mountains can be perceived as something to be conquered. They can also be seen as impenetrable places, the highest places on earth and consequently the closest to the heavens, associated with virtue, rationality, purity and godliness. In this film 'In Search of the Miraculous' the Black female and male characters are, in turns, overwhelmed by the snow, subsumed by whiteness and almost disappear in the landscape, or take centre stage and contemplate nature in a respectful and dignified way. His paintings reference the Romantic wanderer figure in search of spirituality or self-discovery.

Marine painting has long been linked to European maritime power and traditionally featured imperial endeavours, voyages of exploration, and typically emphasized the prowess of experienced seafarers or the bravery and leadership qualities of (white) naval officers. In Kehinde Wiley’s work, oceans are seen as changing, irrational and unreliable forces which also can be used as trade routes, passages and escapes to a better life, and also represent the site of a defunct empire.

Situated in the Sunley Room, at the centre of the Gallery’s collection, this exhibition draws out the dynamic relationship between Kehinde Wiley’s work and the National Gallery’s historical landscapes and seascapes by artists such as Claude, Friedrich, Turner and Vernet.
Christine Riding, Jacob Rothschild Head of the Curatorial Department, says: ‘I met Kehinde Wiley in 2017, as a curator at the Royal Museums Greenwich, when we acquired his allegorical painting, 'Ship of Fools', the first work by this internationally renowned artist to enter a UK public collection. I am so thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with him at the National Gallery, building on his recent exploration of the pictorial conventions associated in Western art with the sublime, landscape and marine art.’

National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, says: ‘The National Gallery’s paintings and the themes they explore have archetypal status and seem to demand constant reconsideration and reinterpretation. Kehinde Wiley’s response has been to define a new kind of sublime, one that is strong and distinctive, that reflects on artistic and poetic tradition, but confronts urgent contemporary questions of identity, migration and marginality.’
Publication
'Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude'
Authors: Christine Riding with contributions by Sarah Thomas, Zoé Whitley and Kehinde Wiley
112 pages, over 70 illustrations, 280 x 240 mm, portrait
Published by National Gallery Company Ltd

THE NATIONAL GALLERY
Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN

Viljami Heinonen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Arboretum

Viljami Heinonen: Arboretum
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
26 November 2021 – 9 January 2022 

Viljami Heinonen’s (b.1986) recent works fall into a thematic category of jungle-themed paintings. The series is highly painterly and can be appreciated solely for its abstract qualities. Viljami Heinonen’s raw, unpolished swirls of paint carry reminders of his emphatically physical approach and his total emotional immersion in the creative act. In his recent work, Heinonen has abandoned dystopian fantasy in favor of lighter aesthetic content. On closer analysis, however, his paintings can be interpreted as making a compelling environmentalist statement about biodiversity and its vanishing beauty.

Viljami Heinonen constructs his paintings layer upon layer, building synergy between the structural elements. Dynamic tension is born through juxtapositions of conflict and harmony. Rather than seeking tranquil composure, Heinonen consciously invites friction and imperfection. His paintings are intriguing not for their pleasing harmonies but for their flaws and emotional extremity. His abstract style of expression occasionally slips into the figurative, opening windows for free association. With his expressive brushwork, Heinonen infuses his paintings with a powerful emotional poignancy. His brushwork pays tribute to art history, yet his style inhabits its own realm dissociated from history.

Viljami Heinonen graduated from Kankaanpää Art School in 2012. He has held solo exhibitions at galleries including Helsinki’s Forum Box and Makasiini Contemporary in Turku. He has taken part in group exhibitions at venues including Pori Art Museum and Rovaniemi Art Museum. His work is represented in collections including Helsinki Art Museum HAM, the Saastamoinen Foundation, Pori Art Museum, Wihuri Art Foundation, and the State Art Deposit Collection. The artist is based in Tampere. 

GALERIE FORSBLOM
Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki
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Pierre Bonnard @ Musée de Grenoble - Les couleurs de la lumière

Bonnard. Les couleurs de la lumière
Musée de Grenoble
30 octobre 2021 - 30 janvier 2022

Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard 
La Place Clichy, 1912
Huile sur toile. Paris, Centre Pompidou, musée national d’Art moderne.
Dépôt au Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon
© Besançon, musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie – Photographie C. Choffet

Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Paysage normand, 1920 
Huile sur toile
Musée Unterlinden, Colmar
© Christian Kempf

Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard 
Intérieur blanc, 1932
Huile sur toile. Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble
© Photo Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble - J.-L. Lacroix

Sous le titre Bonnard. Les couleurs de la lumière, le musée de Grenoble en partenariat avec le musée d’Orsay présente une grande exposition consacrée à l’artiste. Rassemblant plus de 75 peintures, une trentaine d’œuvres sur papier (dessins, affiches) et une vingtaine de photographies, elle propose un parcours inédit embrassant la totalité de son œuvre avec, comme fil rouge, le thème de la lumière et les différentes couleurs et nuances qu’elle revêt au cours de sa vie et selon les lieux où il séjourne.

Très tôt présent dans les collections du musée de Grenoble, notamment avec l’un de ses chefs-d’œuvre Intérieur blanc de 1932, Bonnard passa durant sa jeunesse toutes ses vacances dans un petit village en Isère, Le Grand-Lemps, d’où était originaire sa famille paternelle. Néanmoins, jusqu’à présent le musée n’avait encore jamais organisé une exposition dédiée à cette figure majeure de l’art du XXe siècle. Cette manifestation, qui bénéficie en outre d’un prêt exceptionnel du Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou et de plusieurs autres prêts de musées français, permet ainsi de combler cette lacune.

Le parcours s’organise en six sections illustrant chacune un thème représentatif des différentes périodes de sa création. Deux salles viennent s’intercaler dans ce cheminement : une première dédiée à la photographie, que l’artiste pratiqua surtout dans le cercle familial des années 1890 aux années 1910, et une seconde aux arts graphiques, avec notamment un très bel ensemble de dessins témoignant de la vitalité et de la précision de son trait. L’exposition s’achève par un contre-point contemporain avec une série inédite de photographies de Bernard Plossu réalisées récemment dans la maison du peintre au Cannet.

Le Grand-Lemps
La première section s’attache à l’ancrage dauphinois de Pierre Bonnard et aux nombreux étés qu’il passa dans la propriété du Grand-Lemps, où il retrouvait sa sœur Andrée, son beau-frère le compositeur Claude Terrasse et leurs cinq enfants. L’artiste y réalise ses premiers paysages et se souviendra longtemps des sensations premières vécues dans ce « vert paradis ». Quelques grandes compositions aux lumières vaporeuses illustrent cette vie de famille, dont l’artiste se plaisait à fixer avec tendresse les détails, et témoignent au plan stylistique de son engagement auprès des Nabis. S’inspirant encore de l’éden isérois, Pierre Bonnard plonge les scènes idylliques de ses grands décors parisiens dans une douce lumière dorée.

Paris « ville Lumière »
Le parcours se poursuit avec une section consacrée à Paris « ville lumière ». En véritable « peintre de la vie moderne », Bonnard arpente les rues de son quartier, des Batignolles à Montmartre, pour en croquer les scènes du quotidien. Il les retranscrit ensuite de manière sophistiquée dans ses tableaux aux constructions complexes et aux perspectives influencées par l’art du Japon. Les scènes diurnes inspirées des harmonies grises et bleutées de la capitale alternent avec des scènes nocturnes rehaussées parfois de couleurs stridentes pour dire l’effervescence et le dynamisme de la ville.

Lumières normandes
Grand admirateur de Monet qu’il rencontra à plusieurs reprises à Giverny, Bonnard achète en 1912 une propriété dans les environs, à Vernonnet. La troisième section de l’exposition évoque précisément la douceur de la lumière normande et les séjours répétés qu’il fit jusqu’en 1938 dans sa maison appelée « Ma Roulotte », qui dominait un jardin pentu descendant vers la Seine. Il peignit là de nombreux paysages panoramiques qui s’embrasent parfois sous les feux du soleil et, grâce au dispositif de la porte-fenêtre, ses premières compositions faisant cohabiter espace intérieur et vue extérieure.

Entre ombre et lumière
La quatrième section, contrepoint aux vues de plein air, traite des scènes d’intérieur et du goût de l’artiste pour les espaces intimes et confinés. Objets, figures féminines, animaux déploient en de savants agencements une narration exprimant tour à tour la douceur de la vie domestique, la solitude voire l’incommunicabilité entre les êtres. Dans ses intérieurs en huis clos du tournant du siècle, Pierre Bonnard impose sa « manière noire ». La lumière vient ici trouer l’ombre, créant de subtiles tensions entre les couleurs et les formes, tout en faisant écho semble-t-il aux sentiments des occupants silencieux de ces intérieurs. A partir des années 1910, les sujets quotidiens se muent en scènes enchanteresses baignées d’une lumière irréelle. 

Reflets
Cette cinquième section est dédiée à un thème central dans l’œuvre de Pierre Bonnard : le nu féminin. Marthe sa compagne en est le modèle privilégié, et si d’autres femmes posent pour lui comme Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle ou Renée Montchaty, sa maîtresse durant quelques années, elles se confondent toutes pour former « La Femme », dont Marthe est l’expression générique. Dans la lignée de Degas, Bonnard aime à les dépeindre dans l’intimité du rituel de leur toilette. Adoptant des cadrages inédits, démultipliant les points de vue et fragmentant l’espace grâce à des jeux de miroirs, il traduit de manière stupéfiante le vertige de ses visions intérieures. La lumière nimbe les corps et leur écrin d’un halo scintillant et miroitant et exalte les couleurs jusqu’à créer un véritable éblouissement des sens d’une suave splendeur.

Sous le soleil du midi
C’est à l’impact de la lumière du Midi sur l’artiste qu’est consacrée l’ultime section, et plus particulièrement à celle de la Côte d’Azur que Pierre Bonnard découvre en 1904 en compagnie de Vuillard et de Roussel. Il rencontre alors Signac et Valtat à Saint-Tropez, dont les toiles vivement colorées et composées de touches juxtaposées influencent profondément son approche de l’art. Il retourne ensuite régulièrement dans ce sud enchanteur, louant des villas à Grasse, Saint-Tropez, Antibes et Cannes, et finit par acheter en 1926 une petite maison sur les hauteurs du Cannet, avec une belle vue sur la Méditerranée. C’est là qu’il crée des œuvres apparaissant comme autant d’éloges de la lumière intense du Midi qui diffracte les tons et les formes pour constituer un tout vibrant de couleurs et d’émotions mêlées. 

Pierre Bonnard
Bonnard. Les couleurs de la lumière
Catalogue de l'exposition
Coédition Musée de Grenoble / In Fine éditions d’art
Reliure cartonnée contrecollée, 320 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Sous la direction de Guy Tosatto, directeur du musée de Grenoble, Sophie Bernard, conservatrice en chef chargée des collections d’art moderne et contemporain au musée de Grenoble, Isabelle Cahn, conservatrice générale honoraire des peintures du musée d'Orsay

MUSEE DE GRENOBLE
5 Place de Lavalette, 38000 Grenoble

Alyssa Monks @ Forum Gallery, NYC - It’s All Under Control

Alyssa Monks
It’s All Under Control
Forum Gallery, New York
November 11, 2021 – January 8, 2022

Alyssa Monks
ALYSSA MONKS
This Is Not What You Wanted, 2021
Oil on linen, 62 x 90 inches
© Alyssa Monks, courtesy Forum Gallery
 
Forum Gallery presents It’s All Under Control, an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, ALYSSA MONKS. The Artist, whose psychologically-charged, figurative paintings have been exhibited in New York since 2006, is known for her bold, expressionistic portrayals of women as they experience the natural, contemporary world. Alyssa Monks’ TED talk has been viewed more than a million times, her paintings have been presented throughout the United States and in Europe, and her work was featured in the television series, The Americans (FX) throughout its sixth and final season.

In the sixteen paintings on view, Alyssa Monks draws the viewer into the shifting, powerful emotions experienced during the past eighteen months when the wider world has suffered physical, emotional, and political disturbances unlike at any time in history.  Compounding the complexity of the new works in the exhibition, from the smallest (12 x 18 inches) to the largest (62 x 90 inches), have been the acutely emotional, personal circumstances the Artist has faced during this time, events that have combined to propel Monks to turn to herself as the subject of a body of work that endeavors to make sense of troubled times.

The Artist writes:
At times, the recent global and national devastation, division, and so many disappointments felt like a surreal projection of my own mental states in the isolation of the last 18 months. I began to explore the human reliance on control and predictability, and how our deepest suffering comes from our attachment to security, virtue, identity, and the logic of cause and effect.  The glass barrier in these paintings between subject and viewer is clouded with vapor that obscures and abstracts the subject.  This barrier underlines the personal and community-wide preoccupation with virus-laden respiratory droplets and the isolation it creates.  Some works are more ambiguous than others, amplifying the state of disorientation in the face of terrifying unfamiliarity.  Each piece has its own, often-layered, strategy, voice and urgent plea.

One of the most painful truths in life is that there are difficult events and circumstances that we cannot control or influence. Perhaps in accepting our limitations, and the often life-altering grief that goes along with them, we can find a greater authenticity of being, a sense of empathy, and an understanding that we are not quite so isolated after all. The paintings in this series paradoxically reveal our shared human experience as they describe private moments of distress.   
—Alyssa Monks
Since receiving her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2001, Alyssa Monks' paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group presentations including exhibitions at the Kunst Museum in Ahlen, Germany, The Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, GA, and the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts, New York. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, The Center for Contemporary Art, and the collections of Howard Tullman, Danielle Steele and Eric Fischl. Monks has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting three times.  It’s All Under Control is Alyssa Monks’ third one-person exhibition at Forum Gallery.

FORUM GALLERY
475 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022