Wu Jian’an: 500 Brushstrokes @ Chambers Fine Art, ArtFarm, New York

Wu Jian’an: 500 Brushstrokes

Chambers Fine Art, New York

Through August 31, 2022

“These 500 Brushstrokes were completed in 2021. They spent over a year in transit at sea before landing in New York. Today, when I see them again in 2022, I have a sense of familiarity and strangeness. There is some sweetness hidden underneath, and feelings of hope and optimism. I feel that the time I created them was not long ago at a time when a force of gathering and wishing to generate something consequential was moving between the strokes, eager and calling out.”  – Wu Jian’an, Beijing, May 2022

This summer the main gallery of ArtFarm is devoted to ten recent examples of Wu Jian’an’s ongoing series 500 Brushstrokes on which work commenced in 2016. The abstract formal language characteristic of these works came as a considerable surprise to Wu’s admirers as until then there had been a strong element of figuration in all his major series of paper cuts from 2003 onwards with the series known as Daydreams.

Born in Beijing in 1980, Wu Jian’an graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) Beijing in 2005 and currently lives and works there. While studying at the Academy under Lu Shengzhong whose early studies of Chinese folk-art led to a life-long involvement with the traditional craft of paper cut, Wu conceived of ways in which this technique might be used in ways that would have been unimaginable to its original practitioners.  A small group of earlier works by Wu hanging in the corridor leading from the gallery shows how his technique evolved from the silhouetting of complicated paper cut-outs against monochromatic sheets of paper to the use of multiple layers of paper of different colors resulting in low-relief effects.

There does not seem to have been a transition period between the wild paper cuts for which he was best known at the time and the equally wild but abstract compositions characteristic of 500 Brushstrokes. Wu Jian’an gave a simple explanation early on in the development of the series. “Visitors of all kinds are invited to the studio to play a brushstroke “game”. They can freely pick the size and type of the brush, as well as choose the density of ink and colors in order to write a single brushstroke on a sheet of Xuan paper in whatever style they choose, without creating a recognizable image or character… In traditional Chinese painting, brushstroke are highly regulated. As in a hierarchical society, only a limited number of accepted brushstrokes can be used. 500 Brushstrokes offers equal opportunity to all manner of brushstrokes, orthodox or not, all can go into an artwork. This creates a variety of previously unimaginable relations. Combinations consisting of “bad” strokes often compose incredible images.”

Consequently Wu’s combinations of individual brushstrokes are as far as could possibly be both from traditional Chinese calligraphy which evidences the continuous movements of the calligrapher’s hand and from Western artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey or Brice Marden who have responded to Asian calligraphy in highly individual ways.

The skill with which the individual strokes have been collaged to the surface on which they coexist also adds another dimension to the viewing experience. In a description of 500 Brushstrokes #10, 2016, that has recently entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, reference is made to the way in which the individual strokes are “collaged into the larger whole using traditional Chinese conservation techniques which allow for nearly seamless layering of paper on paper.” On multiple levels, then, these festive works are not what they seem – not calligraphic, not expressive of a meaning, not painted directly on a flat surface but rather organized by a masterly hand in a manner that fools the eye and delights the mind.

CHAMBERS FINE ART - ARTFARM

Salt Point, NY

www.chambersfineart.com

B. Wurth @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Monuments

B. Wurtz: Monuments

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

June 23 – July 29, 2022

B. WURTZ

Untitled, 2018

Ceramic, red plastic object, blue plastic tacks, wire, 

metal and wood, 13 1/4 x 6 x 3 1/2 inches

© B. Wurtz, courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents B. Wurtz: Monuments. The exhibition includes a number of the artist’s playful sculptures and mixed media works deconstructing elements of scale and monumentality. The show is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

B. Wurtz is perhaps best known for his repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful sculptural objects. The works in the presentation—spanning the past four decades of B. Wurtz’s career—amount to transubstantiations of the commonplace, exposing the enigmatic relationships between grandiosity and scale, modesty and pomp, humor and seriousness.

At times, B. Wurtz’s themes become explicit, as in Untitled (East Village) (1987). A simple found object is presented on a crude wooden pedestal. Behind the diminutive object is a print of it, scaled up and set against a gray sky. The viewer is positioned between two versions of the same thing, peering down at one and up at the other. In the print, the object is imbued with the monumental scale of an Aztec ruin. B. Wurtz’s dramatic elevation of an object as unglamorous as rubble tends to generate a cascade of reflexive questions: Does the promotion of the commonplace come with a commensurate downgrade of the much worshipped objects that sit behind reverent glass in museums?

The sculptures, pleasing in their visual immediacy, tend to reward even momentary reflection. In HA HA (1976), B. Wurtz encloses a handful of crumpled, Post-It-sized papers inside a clear plastic box. A note on top of the box discloses the work’s eponymous title “HA HA,” along with its author and date of completion. Despite scribbles that threaten to obscure it, the paper is still legible, unlike its crumpled cousins that are locked inside. There’s a certain pleasure to contemplating the work: Are the locked papers discarded jokes? Or are they promising ideas lost to relentless self-ridicule? The diminutive box portends a drama of creativity and self-doubt.

B. Wurtz’s forms are constantly probing at the nature of abstraction. In Untitled (1994), two metal hooks anchor wires that hold painted canvas flags. The flags are similar in pattern, but chromatically opposed. A narrative drama materializes with each hook resembling a boisterous partisan. The personification is typical of B. Wurtz’s particular taste for the mock heroic, with two identical hooks absurdly locked in ideological or literal battle. In the work, abstraction and representation, often discussed as opposites, are revealed to be dimensions of the same phenomenon.

In all the sculptures, scale plays an indispensable role, modulating the materials and their impact. In addition to the diminutive sculptures for which the artist is well known, B. Wurtz creates in the other extreme. In 2018, the artist completed his now-iconic Kitchen Trees for the New York City Public Art Fund, transforming City Hall Park with towering columns of colorful colanders exploding with plastic fruit. Taken together, B. Wurtz’s sculptures probe our conceptions of humor and profundity, reverence and play, scale and importance.

B. Wurtz has been the subject of over 52 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues, including: Feature Inc. (1987, 1991, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006, New York); Gallery 400 (2000, Chicago); White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis); Kunstverein (2015, Freiburg, Germany); and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2015, Ridgefield, Connecticut). In 2015, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a major solo-exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.

B. Wurtz’s work has also been included in over 174 group exhibitions, including: Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection (2011, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence); and Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.)

Garth Greenan Gallery represents B. Wurtz.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 

www.garthgreenan.com

Robert Colescott @ New Museum, NYC - Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

Art and Race Matters: 

The Career of Robert Colescott

New Museum, New York

June 30 - October 9, 2022

Featuring approximately forty paintings, “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” highlights the sixty-year-long career of Robert Colescott. Colescott’s bold and richly rendered works traverse art history to offer a satirical take on issues of race, beauty, and twentieth century American culture. Often ahead of his time, Robert Colescott explored the ways in which personal and cultural identities are constructed and enacted through the language and history of painting. He anticipated urgent contemporary discussions around the power of images and shifting political and social values, while asserting the continuing validity of painting as a critical medium for exploring these questions. This exhibition offers a long overdue celebration of Colescott as one of the most consequential artists of his time.

Robert Colescott is perhaps best known for works made during the 1970s in which he reimagined iconic artworks to examine the absence of Black men and women as protagonists in dominant cultural and social narratives. Paintings like George Washington Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) offer irreverent parodies of familiar masterpieces, while incisively critiquing America’s often brutally discriminatory past and present. His transgressive use of racial stereotypes to interrogate hierarchies of power was echoed in the strategies of younger artists in the 1990s such as Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. Along with a provocative approach to humor, Robert Colescott’s paintings also demonstrate an adventurous formal evolution and a studied analysis of the history of Modernism. In its complex interplay of high art and vernacular traditions alike, his work has opened new possibilities for chronicling the history of America while ridiculing its grandiosity and biases, exerting a profound impact on generations of artists grappling with similar issues.

This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the depth of Robert Colescott’s legacy as a standard bearer for figuration in the 1970s, a forerunner of the appropriation strategies of the 1980s, an overlooked contributor to debates around identity politics in the 1990s, and a sage pioneer in addressing some of the most challenging issues in global culture today. The exhibition builds upon the New Museum’s long history with the artist, including “Robert Colescott: A Retrospective,” a touring survey of his work that was presented at the museum in 1989.

“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley. It is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. The presentation at the New Museum is coordinated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.newmuseum.org

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Robert Colescott @ George Adams Gallery, NYC - Frankly...

Robert Colescott: Frankly...

George Adams Gallery, New York

Through July 1, 2022

The George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the late artist, Robert Colescott (1925-2009). Celebrated for his incisive send-ups of art-historical tropes and the experience of being a Black man in the United States, Robet Colescott’s paintings continue to engage and provoke. This exhibition will feature works predominantly from the 1990s, a period which encompasses his selection in 1997 as representative of the United States at the 47th Venice Biennale.

Race is at the center of Robert Colescott’s paintings as a meaty, many-faceted concern that he tackles from every direction. His language is one of stereotypes and appropriation, used to often-comic effect while lampooning the basis of such prejudices. Weaving figures into complex, narrative sequences that combine aspects of current events, racial politics and popular culture, Colescott brings to light the inherent contradictions of society while refusing to shirk from the less than savory aspects. From the late 1980s on, his paintings grew more complex in their compositions and layering of vignettes, references and regions of bold color. In a conversation from 1989, Robert Colescott noted this shift, explaining, “the more years I take on, the more aware I am of the complexities of it all, of life, of art, and of my reactions.”

One of the more pervasive subjects of Robert Colescott’s work is inter-racial tensions, particularly in the context of sex - as he put it, “you can’t talk about race without talking sex in America.” In the painting Frankly My Dear... I Don’t Give a Damn (1990) he references the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” and its famous line. While one of the most lauded films in history, since its release, “Gone With the Wind” has been infamous for its problematic depiction of slavery. In the foreground of the painting, a Rhett Butler-esque man cradles a swooning woman - not the heroine of the film but a Black woman in a check dress and turban, presumably meant to indicate her servitude. Here Colescott is subverting the central love story of the movie, co-opting Butler’s parting line into a defiance of racial prejudices. Such considerations also appear in Blues’ Angel (1990), picturing a suave Black singer with a white woman in a blue dress looking on. The title is likely a reference to the New York nightclub, The Blue Angel, which opened in 1943 and was one of the first de-segregated clubs in the city. Colescott may also be playing with the name - in her blue dress, is it the woman or the singer who is the “Angel” here?

Beyond such controversial references, other, more mainstream cultural icons appear in Colescott’s work, including Dagwood Bumstead (1996), the everyman of comic fame, preparing to bite into his signature sandwich while his wife Blondie looks on disapprovingly. In a more biographical turn, the painting Signs and Monuments (Kilroy) (1999) incorporates a number of personal references while more broadly offering a send up of capitalism. The ‘Kilroy’ of the title derives from a popular graffiti tag employed by service men during WWII. Usually written as “Kilroy was here” along with a cartoon of a man peering over a wall, Colescott, who served in the Army during the war and most certainly was familiar with the image, reproduces the tag with few alterations besides abbreviating the line. Elsewhere in the painting, a bloated cartoon face features the caption ‘The Sphinx’ and a few outlines of pyramids round out the allusion to Colescott’s time spent in Cairo in the late ’60s – a formative experience.

While Robert Colescott spent less than two years in Egypt, the effect was profound. His study of Egyptian art, both ancient and contemporary, informed his approach to figurative painting, including the emergence of race as a subject that he would go on to finesse after his return to the States in 1969. It also marked a stylistic shift: his use of acrylics over oils and an increasingly colorful palette, both of which characterize Robert Colescott’s work for the rest of of his career. Particularly in his later works, there is a balance of expressionistic passages and a biting, very American satire. As Robert Colescott described it, the result is “an integrated ‘one-two punch’,” where the first impact is “‘Oh wow!’ And then, ‘oh shit!’ when they see what they have to deal with in subject matter.”

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

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Haegue Yang @ SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen - Double Soul

Haegue Yang: Double Soul

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Through 24 July 2022

Haegue Yang

Photograph by Cheongjin Keem

SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark) presents the first-ever solo presentation in Denmark of the internationally acclaimed South Korean artist Haegue Yang. Her distinctive and pluralistic worlds, expressed in works that engage all the senses, often engage with notions of movement and trajectories. The exhibition Haegue Yang: Double Soul presents a range of Yang’s original and multi-faceted works, including a sixteen-metre high suspended kinetic piece made of blinds, creature-like sculptures covered in bells, sound and text pieces, drying racks embellished with electric light bulbs and much more.

An extensive selection of works from 1994 to 2020 are on view in this show  alongside new pieces commissioned by SMK, such as a sculpture duo, Sonic Intermediates – Double Soul, inspired by the work and life of two pioneering artists in the SMK collection, Pia Arke (1958–2007) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), who, each in their own way, resonate with Yang’s artistic explorations and subjective mapping of modernities.

Preoccupied with countering reductive categorisations, Yang focuses on the entangled relations between folklore and contemporary culture, industrial manufacturing and craft, the factual and the imaginary, the quotidian and the exceptional as well as vulnerability and confidence among other seemingly oppositional and disparate ideas.

SMK - NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 Copenhagen K

www.smk.dk

Derrick Ofosu Boateng @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery, Accra, Ghana - The Shades of Our Proverbs

Derrick Ofosu Boateng

The Shades of Our Proverbs

ADA \ contemporary art gallery, Accra, Ghana

8 June - 10 July, 2022

DERRICK OFOSU BOATENG

Self Portrait [Prayer purifies the soul, charity purifies

wealth, and the bath purifies the body] 2021

Courtesy Derrick Ofosu Boateng and ADA \ contemporary art gallery

DERRICK OFOSU BOATENG

Asafo Ntoma [One does not treat an important matter

as if it were a mere trifle] 2021

Courtesy Derrick Ofosu Boateng and ADA \ contemporary art gallery

DERRICK OFOSU BOATENG is a Ghanaian fine art photographer and practitioner, inspired by the rich and authentic traditional cultures of Africa and the continent’s contemporary practices. Through the use of visual iconography and poetry, he brings the teachings and proverbs of Ghana’s Akan tribe to life, revealing the positivity, strength and joys within his community.

The Shades of Our Proverbs is a body of work from 2021 – 2022 that unveils Boateng’s imaginary narratives through embedded proverbial sayings from the Akan tribe of Ghana. The bright-coloured pictographic images serve as a wonderful amalgamation of interpreting ancient rituals through a modern lens. Boateng wants his audiences to draw on indigenous knowledge in their critical understanding of the world around us. Asafo Ntoma: (One does not treat an important matter as if it were a mere trifle), for example, boarders on the universal ethics of taking matters seriously and acknowledging the superficial. The subject, draped in traditional Ghana kente cloth, playfully poses with his boxing gear, ready to take the world on.

The vibrant digital portraits, take the viewer on an exciting visual journey, bursting with life, feel-good mundane scenes, saturated colours, whimsical motifs and emotive metaphors.

I started this journey with passion and that passion is what has led me to perceive an extraordinary beauty. Nothing has changed with respect to the richness of African art, it is the bridge of understanding that is broken. Many see but do not understand the intensity of the messages that are being disseminated, look closely and witness visual proverbs.- Derrick Ofosu Boateng

The Shades of Our Proverbs is viewed as a vehicle for communicating Boateng’s visual proverbs as crafted from belief systems and behavior of groups and individuals within the society. Each subject or image is inspired by an Akan proverb, creating enhanced realities and interactive energies.

DERRICK OFOSU BOATENG

Derrick Ofosu Boateng is a fine art photographer and practitioner of an African Art movement that creates through the lens of Hue-ism. Inspired by the richness of African culture, Derrick Ofosu Boateng’s contemporary photography aims to influence the world’s perception of Africa and its art, often viewed through a limited lens in film and media. Through Derrick Ofosu Boateng’s art, he is inspired to represent the beauty in the meaning of color and visual poetry of everyday African culture, lifestyles and behaviors thereby “changing the perception on how the world views Africa.”

Though taken in Ghana, Derrick Ofosu Boateng believes that the intimate images he captures are a representation of life anywhere on the continent. "Photography has always made me happy, since I was a child, and now it means something important to me because it is the way I have to defend the idea that there is more to Africa than the negativity portrayal." In the global art industry, Africa is still underrepresented, and Derrick Ofosu Boateng strives to connect with an international audience through the reach of his social media platforms, art fairs and respected global galleries.

ADA \ contemporary art gallery

Villaggio Vista, North Airport Road

Airport Residential Area, Accra, Ghana

www.ada-accra.com

David Salle Exhibition @ Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

David Salle

Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

June 10 – July 15, 2022 

Artist David Salle always finds his way back to the fundamental building blocks of painting: line, shape, color, texture, and most importantly, composition. An imagist at heart, Did avSalle has spent much of his career exploring how images can be constructed from those basic elements. His work demonstrates the essential, even inescapable reciprocity of image and pure painting. In his first exhibition with Gladstone, David Salle presents a new series of paintings that each tell their own story through a pictorial language merged with the materiality – the facticity – of paint.

In the current body of work, David Salle revisits his past to tell new stories. For this exhibition, the artist has repurposed previous works by enlarging, cropping, re-printing, and then painting over existing images to create brand new ones. This amalgamation of past, present, and future compounds the narrative potential of his figures, producing a complex yet legible mode of storytelling. Male and female figures, some nude and others clothed, a few with heads and many without, bisect the picture plane. Floating in space like flying maquettes, the bodies are tangled and overlaid by various motifs that Salle regularly employs in his work such as trees or ladders, or simple geometric forms. Indeed, the depiction of simplified forms as stand-ins for the human body, as 'bodies-in-the-making' is a leitmotif of these works. These forms take on various identities - sometimes a torso, other times a mattress, or a box, or a dented hourglass; the work seems to say, 'Look at what we are made of.'

As an artist who has made extensive use of photography, David Salle’s work highlights the importance of perspective and superimposition, as well as strong contrasts of light and shadow to create dynamic relationships between figures that float, fly, and ooze throughout the picture. Built-up in stages, the works combine seemingly unrelated images in diverse and disjunctive representational styles. Salle's images may seem unrelated at first glance, but in fact, exist in carefully calibrated image harmonies. Neither meaningless nor random, the relationships between images are abstract, as in music; the image clusters make precise chords of associations and resonances. As in all art, the how is as important as the what. Some figures seem embedded in passages of swirling paint; others are painted in slashing black outlines, while still others are achieved with delicate brushstrokes of yellow-ochre or Venetian red. In some of the works, David Salle's color is naturalistic; in others decidedly not. In one piece, a detached red nose is suspended against an oozing pink background while an outstretched hand is painted in blue, while faces and mannequins weave and twist in and out of the scene. Painted atop magazine covers and ads, the works pile up, each one bolder than the next. One element leads to another, which leads to another, and on and on, ending in a state of expectant animation.

DAVID SALLE (b. 1952, Norman, OK) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 1970, at the age of 17, David Salle joined the legendary foundational class of the California Institute of the Arts, where his mentor was the Conceptual artist, John Baldessari. At Cal Arts, David Salle developed an affinity for the cinematic language of montage, as reflected in his early works of the 1970s. In the early 1980s, David Salle came to prominence as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, artists who questioned the status of the image through appropriation and by confronting mass media on its own terms. Distinct from others in his generation, David Salle's work has always been rooted in the complexities and demands of painting. 

Since the 1980s, David Salle has received international recognition, with solo exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Spiral Hall Museum, Tokyo; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His 1999 retrospective was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and traveled to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. His work has also been shown at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. In 2016, a solo exhibition was held at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. His most recent survey exhibition was held at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich. David Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, and as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His collection of critical essays, How To See, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.

GADSTONE GALLERY

12 Rue du Grand Cerf, 1000 Brussels 

www.gladstonegallery.com

The Picasso Century @ NGV, Melbourne - National Gallery of Victoria

The Picasso Century

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

10 June – 9 October 2022

The world-premiere Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition, The Picasso Century, charts the extraordinary career of Pablo Picasso in dialogue with the many artists, poets and intellectuals with whom he intercepted and interacted throughout the 20th century, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Françoise Gilot, Valentine Hugo, Marie Laurencin, Dora Maar, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Dorothea Tanning and Gertrude Stein.

Exclusively developed for the NGV by the Centre Pompidou and the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the exhibition features over 80 works by Picasso alongside over 100 works by more than 60 of his contemporaries, drawn from French national collections, as well as the NGV Collection. Audiences will also have the opportunity to discover a rich selection of works by artists rarely exhibited in Australia, including Natalia Goncharova, Julio González, Wifredo Lam, Suzanne Valadon and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Curated by noted scholar of 20th century painting Didier Ottinger, Deputy Director of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Picasso Century examines the diverse influences, encounters and collaborative relationships that steered Picasso through many distinct artistic periods, such as his Blue Period, Cubism and Surrealism, and draws lines between Picasso’s famous creations and the world around him.

By exploring Picasso’s career through his personal, artistic and intellectual engagement with his peers, the exhibition provides a unique insight into the artistic legacy of one of the 20th century’s most influential and celebrated artists, as well as the community of artists from which he emerged.

Victoria’s Minister for Creative Industries Danny Pearson said: ‘The Picasso Century brings together master works from across Picasso’s career, alongside those from other leading artists and innovators of the time. This world-premiere Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition will be an absolute treat for art lovers from across Victoria and beyond, and a massive drawcard to our creative state this winter.’

Laurent Le Bon, President, Centre Pompidou, said ‘Picasso reunited at last with Australia and his fellow accomplices and travellers. I am delighted with this collaboration between two French institutions and the National Gallery of Victoria: this exceptional partnership will allow the Australian public to discover Picasso’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and the works of the artists with whom he never ceased to interact. I wish to extend a warm thank you to all those who have made this magnificent project possible.’

Cécile Debray, President, Musée national Picasso-Paris, said: ‘The Picasso Century offers an original, broad approach that allows us to grasp the artist’s career in his artistic and cultural context, from his formative years to his posterity. It thus offers an astonishing journey through the Parisian and cosmopolitan art scene of the 20th century. A Picasso, no longer a genius “ex-nihilo” but an artist in the world, with his friendships with poets, cubists, surrealists, his political commitments, his love affairs with artists, his circles of disciples and admirers.’

‘I am delighted by this partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which testifies to the ties of friendship and proximity between France and Australia, but also that the French museums participating in this major exhibition have the opportunity to be ambassadors of French heritage and of a historic artistic scene that was the foundation of Western modernity.’

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: ‘This exhibition offers visitors an extraordinary insight into the development of modern art and the preeminent figure at its centre, Pablo Picasso. Through more than 170 works of art – including many that have never been seen in Australia – audiences will come to appreciate the many ways in which Picasso influenced – and was influenced by – the artistic community that surrounded him.’

Fifteen thematic sections organise The Picasso Century, which trace the many distinct periods that shaped the artist’s career over more than seven decades, while also situating his work within a broader artistic and geographical context. Each exhibition section provides a nuanced perspective on a rich century of artistic experiment, in which Picasso stands prominently among many innovators.

The beginning of the exhibition explores Picasso’s formative years, which encapsulate significant artistic developments, most notably Cubism, the development of which Picasso led with Georges Braque. Considered by many the ‘experiment’ that most radically transformed 20th century art, Cubism saw Western art move away from representing likeness and, among many innovations, introduced multiple and simultaneous perspectives into a composition, resulting in the style’s recognisable fragmented imagery.

The Picasso Century also examines Picasso’s place within the multicultural crucible that was inter-war Paris, and his interaction with other artists and intellectuals including André Breton, Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, Alberto Giacometti and Gertrude Stein. The exhibition is particularly rich with works from Picasso’s Surrealist period, presented alongside works by artists including Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico and André Masson.

The final sections of the exhibition explore Picasso’s work in an increasingly international art world post-1945 and examine the contested artistic output towards the end of his career. His work of the 1950s and 1960s are positioned alongside later generations of painters, including Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning.

The inevitable question of Picasso’s legacy in the 21st century is posed through the inclusion of the 2009 video work I see a woman crying (Weeping Woman), Tate Liverpool by Rineke Dijkstra. This engaging contemporary work invites reflection on Picasso’s position as a point of reference for all who seek to understand the history of 20th century art.

Coinciding with The Picasso Century is a free NGV Kids exhibition titled Making Art: Imagine everything is real featuring a range of hands-on activities and multimedia experiences inspired by methods of working invented by some of the leading European artists included in the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition. While learning about some of the leading artists of the twentieth century in Europe, children make their own surprising works as they explore collage techniques, write poetry and play surrealist games and turn everyday materials into large-scale sculptures.

Exhibition organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Musée national Picasso-Paris, and the National Gallery of Victoria.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA - NVG

180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC 3006 

www.ngv.vic.gov.au

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Rana Begum @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Reflection on Colour and Form

Rana Begum 

Reflection on Colour and Form

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

10 June - 30 July 2022

Rana Begum (b. 1977), who blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting, and architecture, added printmaking to her creative practice when she made her first editions in 2018. As part of her ongoing investigation into the interaction between form, light and colour, this exhibition will showcase Rana Begum’s developments over the past five years and unveil a series of new lenticular editions, small sculptures, and large-scale installations.

Rana Begum’s first foray into printmaking came in the form of two groups of small etchings, (No. 860 and No. 861, 2018), and a series of four larger mesh prints made in 2019. Featuring overlapping fluorescent colours and geometric patterns, these works explore both the ambiance and unpredictability created by neighbouring colours.

Rana Begum’s investigations into colour relationships and visual perceptions are inspired by the urban landscape as well as patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Rana Begum comments, “I love the focus required for printmaking – the need to consider colour and form and how they interact with each other. There is a feeling of deliberation, a slowing down of the production process that makes it more considered, more intentional. However, alongside this there is also an unpredictability, a loss of control, that I find exciting and creatively inspiring.

While printmaking is a relatively new venture for me, I think the principle of methodical process and repetition has always been at the heart of my practice. Having grown up reciting prayers from the Quran, I have always found this feeling of rhythm and repetition meditative.”

Light is essential to her process; for a new series of prints, 88 A – L, (2021) Rana Begum uses light to draw out contrasts. Twelve screenprints have been printed in layers of silver and white, each accented with a primary colour. Light is gently absorbed and reflected across the work, so the viewer experiences a surface akin to reflective materials.

Eight new lenticular editions will be unveiled for the first time, each featuring vibrant geometric colour combinations that change in relation to the viewers’ position as they pass in front of them. Begum’s first experiments in lenticular technology allow her to present colour in continuous flux.

Rana Begum will draw aspects of her editions into the three-dimensional space, in the form of small sculptures and two larger installations. The grids featured in her mesh prints are folded out into the gallery space to create a floor-based installation. For a second installation, the geometry and colour of her screenprints, reminiscent of hazard tape, are reimagined in steel.

These sculptures and installations demonstrate the ongoing dialogue between Rana Begum’s printmaking practice and her explorations in the studio, as printmaking continues to open new possibilities and directions for the artist to explore.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

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