Cindy Sherman, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Cindy Sherman 
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 
6 December 2003 – 7 March 2004

The first ever solo exhibition of the work of internationally renowned artist Cindy Sherman in Scotland opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Organised by the Serpentine Gallery in London, this fascinating show is also Cindy Sherman’s first survey exhibition in the UK for a decade. Around fifty photographs are brought together in Cindy Sherman, spanning thirty years of the artist’s career and including her latest works.

Cindy Sherman (b.1954) is widely recognised as one of the leading artists of our time. Although never interested in making self-portraits, Sherman shapes her own image with a bewildering array of disguises, using make-up techniques, wigs, costumes and prosthetics to create the subjects of her photographs.

Cindy Sherman’s provocative and intriguing portraiture often explores the themes surrounding female identity and stereotype in Western culture. Her work has been hugely influential on a younger generation of photographic and performance artists, raising her to iconic status in contemporary art.

Cindy Sherman first came to prominence in the mid-1970s with her series Untitled Film Stills – black-and-white photographs in which she imitated both the performers and settings of Hollywood B-movies, combining the roles of director, photographer and leading actress. In the 1980s she began to work on a larger scale and in colour, making reference to art history, fashion photography, television, horror movies and pornography. Recently she has created a series of portraits of ‘ordinary’ women with extraordinary character. 

The exhibition also provides an opportunity to view Cindy Sherman’s latest works for the first time in Scotland. Turning her attention to clowns, she examines costume and pretence in its most exaggerated and caricatural form.

Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, says: “We are delighted to be continuing our relationship with the Serpentine Gallery by bringing this exhibition to Scotland, and her first Scottish audience. Cindy Sherman is an outstanding contemporary artist.”

The landmark exhibition is being extended to include a specially produced display of Cindy Sherman’s work at Omni, Greenside Place, Edinburgh. Originally seen in London, the series of ten large billboards were commissioned collaboratively by the Serpentine Gallery and London Underground’s public art programme ‘Platform for Art’. The Billboard Commission comprises specially produced versions of Sherman’s works made between 1983 and 2002 and will be on view at Omni from 7 January to 7 March 2003. 

Cindy Sherman launches a series of exhibitions and displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – throughout 2004-5, ‘A Year of American Art’ features work by some of the giants of postwar and contemporary American art, including Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be available to accompany the show, published by the Serpentine Gallery and priced at £14.95. 

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 
Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org

Celebrating Contemporary Craft - Arkansas Arts Center's Exhibition

Celebrating Contemporary Craft 

Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR

December 5, 2003 - February 22, 2004

CELEBRATING CONTEMPORARY CRAFT is an exhibition organized by the Arkansas Arts Center to recognize the contributions of Alan DuBois, curator of decorative arts, who will retire in June 2004. Alan DuBois has selected approximately 100 contemporary craft pieces from the Arkansas Arts Center Collection. Works were chosen for their high quality and importance to the collection. A broad range of media including glass, basketry, wood and ceramics is on view.

The Arkansas Arts Center began collecting contemporary craft in 1968 and now houses over 600 works. In 1989, Alan DuBois joined the Arkansas Arts Center and has been instrumental in achieving national recognition and in doubling the size of contemporary craft collection.

ALAN DUBOIS said, "We are beginning to see the fruits of the decision made by the Arkansas Arts Center Board of Trustees and Foundation Board to collect contemporary craft pieces. The works are shared in exhibitions around the country and the museum and its unique collections have a national reputation." 

Arkansas Arts Center 
www.arkarts.com

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - Architecture

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

December 4, 2003 - January 31, 2004

Profoundly beautiful and powerfully evocative, the recent body of work entitled Architecture by internationally-acclaimed Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is presented at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. This series of large-scale black-and-white photographs dissolves the lines between time, memory, and history in icons of modernist architecture as disparate as the United Nations Headquarters by Wallace K. Harrison, Luis Barraagan’s Satellite Towers, the Saint Benedict Chapel by Peter Zumthor and Minoru Yamazaki’s World Trade Center.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He has described this new body of work as "architecture after the end of the world." Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for taking years to work on his series of long-exposure photographs on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural images run counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time.

The architectural icons in his most recent series represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series Hiroshi Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture was recently seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and is accompanied by a major publication and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Louise Bourgeois, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Stitches in Time

Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

26 November 2003 - 22 February 2004

The first large-scale exhibition in Ireland by Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time includes an extraordinary group of life-size sewn fabric busts, a series of cell-like vitrines, housing curious scenes of torture and ecstasy, and a small group of totemic figures, reinterpreting in fabric Bourgeois’s very first sculptures of the late 1940s and ‘50s. Over 20 pieces, most created in the last three years, are accompanied by a selection of the artist’s graphic work including 'He disappeared into Complete Silence', 1946, her first major suite of etchings and poems in which she unfolds tales of loss and loneliness.

Born in 1911, LOUISE BOURGEOIS was one of the first artists to assert the importance of autobiography and identity as subjects for contemporary artists. Her family background and childhood in the suburbs of Paris and the traumatic relationship between her father, mother and governess have continued to underpin her work throughout her long career. 'Seven in a Bed', 2001, for example, seems to distil the artist’s memory of far distant weekend mornings when she and her siblings would tumble into bed with their parents, but the Janus-like addition of extra heads warns us that things, especially people, are not always what they seem.

In the 1980s Louise Bourgeois began making a series of theatrical spaces entitled 'Cells', representing different types of pain – “the physical, the emotional and the psychological, and the mental and the intellectual”. The 'Cells' are self-contained or partial enclosures which can be experienced either by entering the space or by encountering it close up through mesh walls, doors or windows. These works are the anthesis of Bourgeois’ famous monumental installations, such as the three vast towers, 'I do, I undo, I redo', commissioned for the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.

Some of the most arresting of Louise Bourgeois’ recent works are a series of extraordinary upright and front-facing fabric heads, of which three can be seen in the exhibition. Sewn with a crudeness that belies their structural sophistication, they are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear moist from exhalation and their eyes apparently focus directly on the viewer, or seem to deliberately glance away. These are difficult works to confront; a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.

Born in Paris during the heyday of Cubism, Louise Bourgeois moved to New York following her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater. Her first exhibition of sculpture took place in 1949. Although her early work was respected by contemporaries, it was not until she was 71 that she received wider acclaim for her first major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition revealed a sculptor of startling originality and a unique ability to work with many different materials, from marble and bronze to latex and fabric. The event gave Louise Bourgeois the confidence and opportunity to set out, in fascinating detail, not only the domestic dramas of her childhood but also the architecture, furnishings and artefacts which had surrounded her as the child of a mother whose family had been engaged in the Aubusson tapestry industry and a father who was a dealer in restored tapestry and antique furniture.

Now in her 92nd year Louise Bourgeois’s artistic practice has spanned the best part of the last century. She has always led the field of innovation, often working at more than one remove from the well-known avant-garde movements of her lifetime: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art.

The exhibition is selected by Frances Morris, Senior Curator, Tate Modern, and is co-curated by her with Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibitions at IMMA.

A catalogue published by IMMA and August Projects, with an essay by Frances Morris, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Llewellyn L. Berry III and Alex Downs, Parish Gallery, Washington DC - LewLex

Llewellyn L. Berry III and Alex Downs: LewLex

Parish Gallery, Washington DC

November 21 - December 3, 2003 

Parish Gallery presents an exhibition of recent works by local photographers, Llewellyn Berry and Alex Downs entitled “LewLex”. 

Llewellyn Berry was a teacher in the DC Public Schools for 32 years where he taught Photojournalism, Radio Production and Broadcast Journalism, media related courses and English. In retirement Llewellyn Berry continues his work as a photographic artist.  “I have long had a fascination with black and white images. I prefer black and white films of the 30’s and 40’s because I grew up with them and early on they made a profound stylistic impression on me.  In my own exploration of photographic images, many elements excite me.  I like structures with dynamic line and shape configurations.  I am particularly enamored of landscape photography in the tradition of Ansel Adams, the rural studies of PH Polk, the urban studies of Black Americans by James Van Der Zee and the photojournalistic style of Henri Cartier Bresson. Chiaroscura, the use of light and dark or highlights and shadows in photography, make everyday objects and visions profound in the way shape and texture, juxtaposition and conscious placement of objects define the world in which I live.”

Alex Downs is an artist who works across a range of media from photography, film and audio, to print, motion graphics and video.  He is a design veteran with over seven years experience in print and new media design.  He enjoys creating photographs which are concurrently provocative, elegant, combustible, exquisite and sumptuous. Born in Ohio during the twilight of the sixties, he now lives and works in the Metropolitan DC area.  His photographic career commenced while he was studying at Morehouse College in Atlanta, which in turn eventually led to a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art.

PARISH GALLERY - GEORGETOWN

1054 31st Street, NW, Washington DC 20007

www.parishgallery.com

Sophie Calle, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Beaubourg - SOPHIE CALLE. M'AS-TU VUE

SOPHIE CALLE. M'AS-TU VUE

Centre Pompidou, Paris

19 novembre 2003 - 15 mars 2004

Le Centre Pompidou consacre une importante exposition à l'oeuvre de Sophie Calle. Présentée sur 1100 m2, cette manifestation est la première exposition d'envergure de l'artiste dans un musée français depuis plus de dix ans. L'exposition offre l'occasion de réunir des travaux anciens, depuis 1979, dont certains très peu montrés en France. Elle propose aussi un important corpus d'oeuvres nouvelles et inédites, dont la plupart ont été créées pour l'événement, notamment l'ensemble de Douleur exquise (1984-2003) et l'oeuvre récente Unfinished (2003).

Née en 1953 à Paris, Sophie Calle part au début des années 70 pour un long périple à travers le monde. C'est lors d'un séjour en Californie en 1978, qu'elle prend ses premières photographies « sans vocation » : des tombes portant les inscriptions « Father » et « Mother » . Elle vient de découvrir ce qui pourrait « plaire à son père ». À son retour à Paris, elle commence ses premières filatures d'inconnus dans la rue, dérive contrôlée dans la ville qu'elle agrémente de photographies et de textes, consignés dans des carnets. Le travail de Sophie Calle a pu être ainsi apparenté à celui des artistes des années 60-70, où le statut de l'image photographique concernait la trace, la preuve objective de leurs expériences et de leurs performances.

L'oeuvre de Sophie Calle se donne à voir depuis plus de vingt ans sous la forme d'installations de photographies et de récits, dont l'articulation et l'agencement se rapprochent davantage d'un art narratif issu lui aussi des années 70. En réalité, les oeuvres de Sophie Calle constituent l'aboutissement et le prolongement de situations mises en scène et vécues sur un mode autobiographique. Le sillon dans lequel s'inscrivent ses premiers travaux reflète une relation entre l'art et ta vie singulièrement distincte du registre neutre, distancié et informatif des oeuvres conceptuelles. Sophie Calle s'est engagée dans les années 80 dans une voie spécifique, qui donne une place importante à l'affect et au sentiment . L'artiste construit des règles du jeu et des rituels dans le but d'améliorer sa vie, de lui rendre sa dimension existentielle.

SOPHIE CALLE . M'AS-TU VUE : Thématiques et oeuvres de l'exposition

Cette exposition permet pour ta première fois de croiser l'ensemble des thématiques développées par l'artiste depuis vingt ans. Le parcours s'articule principalement autour du thème du lit, déployé tout d'abord à travers le premier travail de Sophie Calte, Les Dormeurs (1979) . Pour ce projet, l'artiste avait convié durant une semaine plus d'une vingtaine d'inconnus et amis à venir dormir dans son lit, à raison de huit heures chacun.

L'ensemble des photographies et récits des Dormeurs fut montré à la XIème Biennale de Paris en 1980, première exposition de Sophie Calte qui décide alors de « devenir une artiste ». Le lit est au centre de la Chambre à coucher (2003), dans laquelle on rencontre les emblèmes de ses Autobiographies développées depuis 1988 . Le Voyage en Californie (2000-2003) est une installation narrant le périple outre-Atlantique du lit de L'artiste à l'attention d'un inconnu désirant y vivre le deuil d'une histoire sentimentale.

On retrouve ce leitmotiv en filigrane dans un grand nombre d'oeuvres, notamment dans la magistrale Douleur Exquise (2003), produite en français et montrée ici pour la première fois. Ce projet, déployé en trois volets, est fondé sur l'expérience exhumée d'une rupture sentimentale remontant à 1984 et vécue alors par l'artiste comme le moment le plus douloureux de sa vie . Enfin, le fil conducteur du «lit» trouvera son prolongement avec la projection du film No Sex Last Night/Double Blind (1992), road-movie aux Etats-Unis réalisé avec Greg Shephard.

Les problématiques de l'absence, de la disparition et du manque traversent également toute l'exposition . La Filature, commandée en 1981 par le Centre Pompidou pour une exposition consacrée aux « Autoportraits photographiques », est le récit à double-voix de l'enquête d'un détective sur une journée de l'artiste. Sophie Calte réitère l'expérience en 2001, à la manière cette fois d'un bilan de sa vie d'artiste, lorsqu'elle réalise Vingt ans après selon l'initiative de son galeriste Emmanuel Perrotin.

Après avoir suivi, filé, « inquiété » des inconnus, Sophie Calle poursuit sa démarche en repoussant le regard au-delà. Les Aveugles (1986) évoquent la question de voir sans être vu, mais aussi la délicate notion de la beauté, en tant que représentation mentale. « Quelle est selon vous l'image de la beauté ? » demande l'artiste à des aveugles de naissance. Quelques années plus tard, il s'agit alors de comparer les descriptions de peintures monochromes faites par des aveugles, avec les écrits théoriques de leurs auteurs : Sophie Calte réalise La Couleur aveugle (1991) et questionne « l'expérience du monochrome ». La disparition et le manque sont toujours au coeur de son oeuvre Last Seen (1991), où l'absence physique de tableaux dérobés au Musée Isabella Stewart Gardner de Boston, fait place aux descriptions des conservateurs, gardiens et autres permanents du musée concerné.

Mais c'est surtout avec une oeuvre inédite, Une jeune femme disparaît (2003), que l'artiste place le point d'orgue de toutes ses thématiques . Un fait divers a croisé le destin de Sophie Calte, lorsque ta presse a mêlé son nom à celui de Bénédicte V., disparue après l'incendie de son appartement de Ille-Saint-Louis en 2000. L'artiste exhume des cendres les photographies réalisées par la jeune femme, agent d'accueil au Centre Pompidou, qui admirait Sophie Calte . L'avis de recherche de la disparue est dispersé dans différents espaces du Centre Pompidou, hors des limites de l'exposition elle-même.

À la fin du parcours, le visiteur est confronté à des images de distributeurs automatiques de billets - images de visages anonymes dont Sophie Dalle tente en vain, à plusieurs reprises, d'exploiter les qualités esthétiques. Elle réalise pour l'occasion une vidéo inédite, Unfinished (2003) qui devient le récit et la mise en scène de cet échec, mais aussi de la relation à ce qui fait oeuvre, à travers la problématique du «style» de l'artiste.

L'itinérance de l'exposition SOPHIE CALLE . M'AS-TU VUE est prévue, en 2004, à l'Irish Museum of Modern Art de Dublin, au Martin-Gropius-Bau de Berlin ainsi qu'au Ludwig Forum de Aachen.

Commissaire : Christine Macel conservateur pour l'art contemporain en charge du service Création Contemporaine et Prospective. Musée national d'art moderne. Centre Pompidou.

CENTRE POMPIDOU - BEAUBOURG - PARIS

www.centrepompidou.fr

Janine Antoni & Paul Ramirez Jonas, Miami Art Museum

Janine Antoni And Paul Ramirez Jonas
Miami Art Museum
November 14, 2003 – January 18, 2004

Miami Art Museum (MAM) presents the first museum exhibition in the United States of collaborative works by artists JANINE ANTONI and PAUL RAMIREZ JONAS. The exhibition is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by Lorie Mertes, MAM curator, as part of the museum’s New Work series of projects by contemporary artists.

Janine Antoni and Paul Ramírez Jonas presents two major works, one of which has been commissioned especially for this exhibition by MAM and is the first piece visitors are encounter upon entering the gallery. Titled Mirror, the work is a massive sculpture that dominates the center of the space and consists of a stairway made from 26 stacked wood beams – each beam 12 x 12-inches -- and a free-standing curtain that is seven-foot tall and runs for 25 feet. Made of heavy red fabric, the curtain spans the length of the space dividing the room in half by appearing to magically enter and exit cleanly through the middle of the stairs. Visitors can negotiate their path through the gallery by walking around the curtain or by using the imposing stairway. The title, Mirror, refers to the physical nature of the piece and the viewer’s participatory experience. The second work, Always New, Always Familiar, is a room-sized video installation that consists of two views of the seascape filmed simultaneously from the front and back of a moving boat.

In each of these works there are distinct points of negotiation between two separate and sometimes disparate elements that combine to create a single work. While physically very different, each of the works are similar in that they map or diagram aspects of a relationship, stressing separation as well as union.

Janine Antoni and Paul Ramírez Jonas are internationally recognized artists each known for their distinct bodies of work. Less well known is the fact that the married couple, with family ties to South Florida, has been creating collaborative videos and photographs since 1999. Focusing on process, the passage of time and the trace of the body, their collaborative works serve as poetic metaphors for the nature of relationships.

“I have long admired the work of each artist and was very intrigued when I discovered that they had collaborated over the years,” said Curator Lorie Mertes. “It’s not unusual for artists to collaborate in order to explore ideas and processes that may not evolve from their individual work. The results of these collaborations vary widely, however. In the case of Janine and Paul, I was excited at how this particular melding of artistic sensibilities resulted in something entirely new and compelling.”

JANINE ANTONI

Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Antoni has had major exhibitions of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; S.I.T.E. Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. The recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, Janine Antoni currently resides in New York.

Antoni is known for works that blur the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Transforming such everyday activities as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, Antoni uses her own body as the primary tool for making sculpture. She has chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving a blanket the following morning. For her most recent work she learned to balance and fall from a tightrope.

PAUL RAMIREZ JONAS

Paul Ramirez Jonas was born in 1965 and raised in Honduras. He received his BA from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and earned an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Ramírez Jonas has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Beaver College Art Gallery, Glenside, PA; Postmasters Gallery, NY; White Cube, London; White Columns, New York; and Artists Space, NY. Group exhibitions include: Pictures, Patents, Monkeys and More...On Collecting at the ICA, Philadelphia in 2002; Every Day, Public Art Fund, New York; Globe>Miami

Ramirez Jonas’ work, using various media, deals with the inevitability of time and its consequences: memory, attention, and expectation. In works that combine scientific inquiry and the inevitability of futility, the artist has done everything from recording his climbs to the highest points of each state in the country and remaking Thomas Edison’s first recording machine to making an attempt at stopping time by waking up at dawn and chasing after the sun by driving as far west as possible before it sets—all the while questioning whether progress resides in the future, and history in the past.

About the Curator: MAM Curator LORIE MERTES has been with the museum since 1994. She has curated solo exhibitions by artists such as Jim Hodges, Liisa Roberts and Alexis Smith, as well as curating New Work Miami: Robert Chambers and Frank Benson, New Work Miami: Dara Friedman and Robert Thiele, and mantle, a special project by the critically acclaimed artist Ann Hamilton commissioned by MAM in 1998.  LorieMertes recently served as the MAM Curator for the American Tableaux: Many Voices, Many Stories, Shirin Neshat and Roberto Matta: Painting Drawings of the 1940s traveling exhibitions and is overseeing the Kerry James Marshall exhibition that opens in February 2004. Her additional projects in process include a solo exhibition by California-based artist Russell Crotty that opens at MAM next March and New Art, the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship winners for September 2004.

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org

Stephan Balkenhol, Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm

Stephan Balkenhol
Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm
November 15 - December 5, 2003

Galleri Lars Bohman presents an exhibition of new sculptures and drawings by the German artist STEPHAN BALKENHOL. In his third exhibition at the gallery, Stephan Balkenhol continues his investigation of the figurative sculptural tradition, updating a classical impulse from a present-day perspective.

Stephan Balkenhol deploys a vocabulary from traditional sculpture - carved wood, pedestals, polychrome - to singular, very contemporary ends. His subject is the human figure, but his intention is to reflect on the present, not commemorate the past. This vitality can be seen in what the artist calls ‘the adventures of the small man in white shirt and black pants,’ an ‘everyman’ who always maintains a serene presence even in the face of frequently outrageous circumstances.

Stephan Balkenhol creates figures that are ordinary rather than idealised, and anonymous rather than heroic, this is further emphasised by his use of wood rather than marble or bronze. His sculptures convey a universal humanism, and his colourfully painted figures may be seen as the familiar strangers that occupy our everyday lives, young men and women wearing ordinary clothing and introspective expressions, without any explicit reference to profession, function or social status.

Stephan Balkenhol’s unconcern with meticulous realism is corroborated by his emphasis on the production process, which can be perceived in the evidence of a usually hasty handling of the surface. Stephan Balkenhol’s sculptures and pedestals are hewn from one block of wood (often soft woods such as wawa or poplar) and then the surface is hand-painted, except for the flesh of the figure which is left natural. The wood is carved so that every bite of the chisel is visible and these splintered and chisel-marked surfaces suggest a raw fragility. Whether sculpting humans, animals, or scenes from his imagination, there is always something strange and enticing about his mute, reserved and peacefully contemplative figures. The artist’s presence is discernible in every mark, reinforcing the humanity of his enterprise.

These works acknowledge the ever-present complexities between the individual and the universal. Neal Benezra, Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has stated: ‘At a time when all manner of political, social, and cultural dogma seems open to question, it may just be possible for Stephan Balkenhol to breathe new life into figurative sculpture.’

STEPHAN BALKENHOL was born in Fritzlar/Hessen, Germany in 1957, and lives and works in Meisenthal, France. He attended the Hochschule för Bildende Künste in Hamburg and studied for Ulrich Ruckreim. He is professor at the Academie für Bildene Künst, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany; Le Rectangle and Goethe Institute, Lyon, France; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London in 2003. Begegnungsstätte Kleine Synagoge Erfurt, Erfurt in 2002. Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain and Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany in 2001.

GALLERI LARS BOHMAN
Karlavägen 16, 114 31 Stockholm
www.gallerilarsbohman.com

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter 

McKee Gallery, New York 

November 11 - December 23, 2003 

From Plato to Descartes to the present time philosophy's inquiry into the duality of mind and matter was the basis for explaining human individual and social existence. The events of the mental world were absolute, pure and superior; the events of the physical world, received through the senses and nourished by our appetites, were impure, clumsy, chaotic. Although both mind and matter were parts of the human composition, mind was considered the higher order in life.

At the time Philip Guston broke through the prescriptions against figuration, mind was considered the higher order in art as well. Abstract Expressionism had a spiritual momentum and then Color Field dogma narrowed the artist's realm of possibilities. But Philip Guston had much more to say. He opened the door, believing that the whole truth of human existence, the world of the mind and the world of the senses, was the proper subject of art, and it alone could satisfy him as a human being and as an artist. He was comfortable in the perfect realm of the intellect, but he was a man in time and space as well, where the everyday life of painting, sleeping, eating, politics, his wife Musa, were essential.

The inspiration for this show is a painting called Pyramid and and Shoe 1976, currently on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which Philip Guston accepts the duality of mind and matter and redresses the imbalance. The pyramid is the symbol of absolute pure thought and the clumsy shoe stands beside it as an everyday imperfect object. They are on equal footing. From 1968 until his death in 1980, Philip Guston continued to paint forms derived from the intellect and forms derived from the material world. Unlike some critical assertions, he never abandoned either source as a fertile terrain for painting.

The first section of this exhibition is devoted to Matter: the physical world. Paintings such as Painter's Head 1975, Anxiety 1975, Eating 1977, Alfie in Small Town 1979, and drawings Untitled (pasta) 1969, Objects on Table 1976.

The second section is Mind: forms of the intellect. Balance 1979, To J.S. 1977 (the Surrealist poet, Jules Supervielle), Martyr 1978, Aegean 1978.

The third room includes work with related forms. Wall Forms and Blue Sea 1978 is the more mental version and Rock 1978 the more material one; Untitled 1968 and Untitled 1980, relate in the same way.

Philip Guston's figuration, now widely admired as some of the greatest work of 20th Century American art, was revolutionary in the 1970's. Guston wondered why people didn't understand the paintings, since, after all, they are about us.

A retrospective exhibition is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until January 4, 2004. It was organized by the Museum of Modern Art at Fort Worth, and will continue on to the Royal Academy, London, opening January 20, 2004.

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.mckeegallery.com

Yitzhak Golombek, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv - “Gaya”

Yitzhak Golombek - “Gaya”

Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

November 8 - December 13, 2003

"Exhibited is a garden surrounded by cardboard sculptures, each a still life, about the height of a three-year-old. The objects – packaging, sewing notions and ornaments – which are piled up into towers or strewn on the floor like archeological ruins, are from a home where nothing is thrown away 'in case it might come in handy some day.' The back garden sits on a balcony belonging to a family of refugees. A universe of three generations huddling together and clinging to one another while holding on to inanimate objects that harbor the touch of the father, the son, the daughter. At the same time, the exhibit aims to achieve maximal receptiveness to materials and forms, and to construct from the compressed parcels the alphabet of an independent sculptural language."

Yitzhak Golombek

DVIR GALLERY

11 Nahum st., Tel Aviv 63503

www.dvirgallery.com

Jonah Freeman & Michael Phelan, John Connelly Presents, New York - "The Giving Tree"

Jonah Freeman & Michael Phelan 

"The Giving Tree"

John Connelly Presents, New York

November 7 — December 13, 2003

John Connelly Presents announces the first solo exhibition of the collaborative work of Jonah Freeman and Michael Phelan. In keeping with previous efforts, Freeman and Phelan use disparate means to explore the contemporary cultural landscape. References to nature, autobiography, popular culture and banal architectural forms are meshed into an installation of painting, video, light and sculpture.

At the center of the installation "The Giving Tree", 2003 offers us the holy grail of absurd 21st Century convenience in the form of a ready-made rotisserie chicken and BBQ. As the rotating heart of the exhibition, the rotisserie is both contained and reflected by the mirrored surfaces of the sculpture's core. The geometric intersecting planes of "The Giving Tree's exterior reflect and diffract the rest of the works that infiltrate the gallery space, including "Love is Colder Than Death", 2003 a large wall drawing of throbbing black and white lines. This reference to the synthetic manipulation of perception and space found in "Love is Colder than Death" is also echoed in a suite of sixteen small, colorful paintings on an opposite gallery wall, each titled after a different street name of LSD.

The disorientating, op-art vibrations of "Love is Colder than Death" are taken to the extreme in "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters", 2003 where two video monitors are matched tête-à-tête in a futile dialogue between technology and nature. One pulses endlessly with the black and white blips of 300 indistinguishable and relentless sonic beats per minute while the other captures a lone but talkative prairie dog in a desolate field. The dialogue between these two disparate subjects is both humorous and heart breaking.

Other sculptural works reflect the collision between culture and nature that is a central theme in the exhibition. "Soul Man", a sturdy piece of drift wood turned into an endearing sidekick with two small carefully placed plastic eyes; and "A Season in Hell" liberates nine resilient penguins from a cardboard box of shimmering faux snow.

Jonah Freeman's work has most recently been shown at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City; Public Art Fund at the Brooklyn Public Library; Galerie Edward Mitterand, Geneva, Switzerland; The Prague Biennale I, Prague, Hungary and the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

Michael Phelan's work has most recently been included in "Social Fabric", Lothringer 13, Munich, Germany, "Painting as Paradox", Artist Space, "How Come", Stephan Stux, New York, NY, "High Desert Test Sites", A-Z West, Joshua Tree, CA., and at Leo Koenig Gallery in New York City.

JOHN CONNELLY PRESENTS

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.johnconnellypresents.com

Knut Asdam at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Knut Åsdam 

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

29 October 2003 - 4 January 2004

An exhibition of two filmworks by the Norwegian multi-media artist Knut Åsdam opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 29 October. In this, his first showing in Ireland, Åsdam seeks to demonstrate how the architecture of a city can embody contemporary life.

'Filter City', 2003, is Knut Åsdam most ambitious film/video work to date. The work focuses on two women, their relationship to each other, to a larger social group and to a city that is in constant transformation – architecturally, socially and politically. The film is mostly shot outdoors in modern apartment/housing complexes, using scenes that are interchangeable with different Western cities. Through dialogue and filmic description of places and people, Knut Åsdam brings the characters into a narration with a city that is constantly changing socially and politically. 'Filter City' was first shown at the recent Istanbul Biennial.

The second work 'Cluster Praxis', 2002, deals with dancing as a form of social practice, and particularly as an expression of the desire for collectivety. The work is structured around the sound – a narrative mix of voice and ambient soundscapes – dominated by a five-minute-long poetic monologue. Writing in Artforum, Jordan Kantor, described the work as tracing an ever-deepening subjectivity with the “objective” camera.

Knut Åsdam was born in 1968, in Trondheim, Norway, and studied in London at Wimbledon College of Art and Goldsmiths College. He has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe and was selected for the Nordic pavilion in the 1999 Venice Biennale. His most recent shows include solo exhibitions at Klmens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, and Tate Britain, London.

A publication, with an essay by Simon Sheikh, Curator and Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Co-ordinator of the Critical Studies Programme, Malmo Art Academy, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie

Stefana McClure, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York - Lost in Translation

Stefana McClure: Lost in Translation 

Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York 

October 24 – November 29, 2003 

Cristinerose | Josee Bienvenu Gallery present Lost in Translation, an exhibition by Stefana McClure. This is her second solo show at the gallery. Concurrently, her work is included in Drawings of Choice from a New York Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio. She has recently participated in exhibitions at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, at Yale University Art Gallery and at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, California.

Stefana McClure investigates the structure and visual properties of language. She is captivated by the physical appearance of subtitles, closed captions, intertitles, dictionary definitions, and the layout of text on a page. The exhibition comprises three bodies of work: a large group of films on paper (including a wall installation of scattered mini DVD drawings and a “video wall”); a series of ten dictionary drawings and five fiction filmed drawings. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Stefana McClure spent twelve years in Japan, she now lives in New York but remains fascinated by the gray area that exists between languages and cultures.

Stefana McClure turns text into image. Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize her drawings. To make her films on paper she watches a film frame by frame, and inscribes successively all the subtitles on top of each other on a background of transfer paper. As the successive layers of information are transferred off, the surface of the colored paper gets slowly eroded. The image is built by removing. Hours of translated dialogues are reduced to a ghost form, dense in the middle, fading towards the edges. The hypersensitivity and intrinsic memory of the transfer paper enables these multi-layered works to become palimpsests. They have the iridescent glow of high tech video screens.

The Video Wall, an installation of Passionless Moments: Japanese subtitles to a film by Jane Campion, as shown on thirteen different television monitors, recreates the electronics store experience of simultaneously viewing the same video on multiple screens. The installation explores the qualities of clarity, precision of focus, image distortion and interference distinct to each monitor. For this piece, she deliberately looked for irregularities inherent in mass-produced rolls of graphite transfer. The scratchy gray backgrounds have the feeling of used home video tapes. The Scatter Wall (of mini DVDs and Audiovox format films) is a celebration of cinema in the form of a random scatter of 47 films on paper. Installed on a sky blue wall, the works included range from English subtitles to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love to Japanese intertitles to a number of early silent films by Yasujiro Ozu to English subtitles to Jour de fete by Jacques Tati, depicted on a bright yellow screen.

She subjects herself to a series of “non-decisions” and lets the material dictate its own rules. The size of the work is determined by the format of the TV monitor on which the film was viewed or by the physical dimensions of the text she has decided to transcribe. The color and texture of the transfer paper is restricted to availability on the office supply market: graphite, red wax, yellow, pink, light blue, dark blue, white and black.

The series of ten dictionary drawings present a distillation of Kenkyusha’s New Collegiate Japanese- English Dictionary, a dictionary that prides itself on the wealth of examples it provides, and the first “serious” Japanese-English dictionary the artist acquired when she moved to Japan. The drawings offer tribute to knowledge. The architectural structure of the dictionary gradually reveals itself as more and more layers of information are removed. Also based on books, Stefana McClure inaugurates a new series entitled fiction filmed drawings. Each of the five works capture and condense an entire novel, short story or play on which a film was subsequently based. Among them: The Birds: a story by Daphne Du Maurier, Double Indemnity: a novel by James M. Cain and Rashomon: a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

Josée Bienvenu Gallery

529 West 20th Street, New York NY, 10011

www.joseebienvenugallery.com

Hayley Tompkins, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC

Hayley Tompkins

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

October 11 - November 15, 2003

My street's very, very quiet, and no-one brings anyone in here - it's very private.

But there are these motor homes and

20 people in black suits,

standing in the middle of my street, So I pull up.

In my car and I've got my hair pulled back - and he

starts to take pictures. No make-up, no nothing.

So I said, "Fine" I see myself like that every day.

I think I'm very free. On + on.

Once you overcome an obstacle,

You springboard into the future.

Borrow it.

His / her / it's life activity. Conscious life activity.

Find it.

Life is interesting and short

It's not supposed to be easy, and if it is

You're probably just in denial and you're existing here

Like a zombie.

No zombies.

That's what I love about -

-Sue Tompkins

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Hayley Tompkins. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Hayley Tompkins has recently participated in exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria and at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. This is her second solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery.

The exhibition features Hayley Tompkins' trademark watercolors on paper as well as paintings on wooden board, a new medium for her. Hayley Tompkins sees these paintings on board as an "attempt to retrieve images of other paintings in my mind. Like remembering. The paintings feel aged to me already, like I am making ready-made objects and inserting them into history straight away."

In this exhibition, a number of works are hung on a large cubical structure built in the center of the gallery space. As viewers navigate around the structure, Hayley Tompkins' installation unfolds. The artist sees encountering the structure as "a gestalt, 'unwhole' experience" because only one part of the exhibition is visible at a time. The four walls of the box-structure provide a stage of sorts, where the paintings are installed to express their distinctive qualities. Some of the works contain references to stage or costume design. Hayley Tompkins cites Malevich, Sonia Delaunay and Oskar Schlemmer as influential for their work, as well as for their holistic approaches as artists-cum-stage designers. Other works in the exhibition are hung to emphasize their surreal content.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

516 wEST 20th Street, New York City

www.andrewkreps.com

Laura Owens at Milwaukee Art Museum

Laura Owens 
Milwaukee Art Museum
October 18, 2003 - January 18, 2004 

Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens is one of the most highly regarded young painters working today. The exhibition Laura Owens, on view in the Milwaukee Art Museum's Vogel/Helfaer Contemporary Galleries is the first major monographic survey of the artist's work and traces her development from 1997 to the present. Incorporating a wide and imaginative range of subjects and techniques, her work moves with ease between high and low, personal and social, figuration and abstraction. The exhibition, Laura Owens' most significant presentation to date, features approximately 20 paintings and several drawings, including a group of new large-scale works created for this presentation. 

Laura Owens is part of an international movement of emerging painters who investigate the formal issues of the medium through a highly personal blend of abstract and representational imagery. Her work incorporates an eclectic range of visual references, including English embroidery, Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, European and American modernism, and her own photography. Her unique style moves from landscape to abstraction with energetic, thick brushstrokes, fanciful childlike doodles, whimsical collage and sophisticated fine line drawings. 

"Laura Owens is one of the most important painters to emerge in the past decade," said Margaret Andera, exhibition coordinator at MAM and associate curator. "We are happy to be able to have her work on view for Milwaukeeans and visitors to enjoy." 

The Milwaukee Art Museum's presentation of Laura Owens allows viewers to track the artist's development and to forge links between works that, in many cases, have never been shown together. Laura Owens is creating significant new, large-scale paintings for the exhibition. Among them is Untitled (2002), a spacious desert landscape comprised of washes of color, strange sponge effects, and cacti drawn in outline with paint squeezed from a tube. 

Laura Owens' paintings, which challenge traditional concepts of painting, are often grandly scaled. They envelop the viewer and incorporate the walls and floors of the room in which they were made or exhibited. Her practice takes the exhibition site into account and she frequently plays with the installation of works to enhance their meaning. Installed on one wall but spaced apart, her two-panel painting Untitled (1999) features monkeys who beckon to each other across the blank space between them. The viewer who stands between the two canvases ends up occupying the virtual space of the work of art. Another work, Untitled (2000) is one of a pair of works created for an installation at Inverleith House in Edinburgh; it was both inspired by and made to compete with the view from the gallery windows of the surrounding botanical garden. 

Laura Owens' work has been included in the most important surveys of new painting, including Examining Pictures (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999), Painting at the End of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001), Painting on the Move (Kunstmuseum, Kunsthalle, and Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Basel, 2002), as well as the 1999-2000 Carnegie International and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002-03). 

Born in 1970 in Euclid, Ohio, Laura Owens is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and the California Institute of Arts, Valencia. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Since her first solo show in 1995, Laura Owens has exhibited extensively and has enjoyed wide international exposure and substantial critical acclaim. Her works are in the collections of MOCA, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and coordinated at MAM by Margaret Andera, associate curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a major catalogue, with essays by exhibition curator Paul Schimmel and art historian Thomas Lawson. Nationally, Laura Owens is made possible by the generous support of Mark S. Siegel, The Pasadena Art Alliance, Kathi and Gary Cypres, David Hockney and Betye Monell Burton. 

The exhibition comes to the Milwaukee Art Museum after its debut at MOCA and showing at the Aspen Art Museum (August 2 - September 28, 2003). After MAM, the exhibition travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (March 4 - May 9, 2004).

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202
www.mam.org

Updated 02.07.2019

Childe Hassam at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh - Prints and Drawings from the Collection

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 4, 2003 - February 8, 2004

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), the best-known American painter in the Impressionist style, began his artistic career in his native Boston, working first as a wood-engraver, then as an illustrator, and eventually established himself as a painter of city life. Childe Hassam began to paint in the Impressionist style after he visited Paris between 1887 and 1889. In his paintings, he portrayed life in urban America, primarily his winter home of New York City, and the country landscapes of New England, where he spent his summers. Although Childe Hassam did not consider himself an Impressionist, his paintings and drawings are as filled with color and sunlight as the works of the French painters who inspired him.

In 1915, Childe Hassam took up printmaking–first etching and later lithography. Over the course of his career, Childe Hassam produced some 375 etchings and 42 lithographs. His earliest prints reflect his interest in the effect of light on objects in the landscape. As he achieved technical mastery as a printmaker, his approach became bolder and more decorative. He exploited the inherent contrast between black ink and white paper to emphasize light and shadow.

Linda Batis, associate curator of fine arts, said "The drawings on view in the exhibition reveal Hassam's natural affinity for the graphic arts as a way to explore color and pictorial structure. They provide insight into a fundamental fact about Hassam's work. He drew and painted what he saw before him."

Childe Hassam enjoyed a long relationship with Carnegie Museum of Art and John Beatty, the museum's first director. Between 1896 and 1935, Childe Hassam exhibited more than 90 paintings at several Carnegie Internationals, the museum's recurring exhibition of contemporary art. He served on the exhibition's Jury of Award in 1903, 1904, and 1910, the year he was also honored with a solo exhibition of paintings. With the purchase of Fifth Avenue in Winter in 1900, Carnegie Museum became the first American museum to acquire one of Childe Hassam's paintings. In 1907, John Beatty purchased 30 drawings from the artist, one of the largest such groups in any museum collection. The etchings and lithographs on view are from a group of 60 prints donated to the museum by the artist's widow in 1940 in recognition of the close relationship between Childe Hassam and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection includes 72 drawings, etchings and paintings. Many of the drawings on view were studies for some of Childe Hassam's most notable paintings. Replicas of some of these are on view alongside the drawings to give visitors a sense of the correlation between the study and the final work. Correspondence between Childe Hassam and John Beatty, which reveals a friendship based on mutual enthusiasm for art, are also on view as part of the exhibition.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

www.cmoa.org

Bill Viola at The National Gallery, London - The Passions

Bill Viola: The Passions

The National Gallery, London

22 October 2003 - 4 January 2004

BILL VIOLA (b.1951) is one of the world’s leading video artists. This major solo exhibition shows 14 works by Bill Viola dating from 1995 to the present, most unseen in the UK, and including two specially commissioned pieces. His work is both at the forefront of technical innovation and deeply rooted in the art of the past. Drawing on images and ideas from the art and philosophy of both European and Eastern traditions he produces work of enormous intensity. The focus of this exhibition will be his ongoing series ‘The Passions’, exploring the power, range and expression of the human emotions. These will be seen with a selection of other art works, including paintings from the National Gallery collection.

The National Gallery’s relationship with Bill Viola began when he was invited to contribute a work in response to a painting in the Gallery’s collection for the exhibition ‘Encounters’ (2000). Taking Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Christ Mocked (The Crowning of Thorns)’ as his starting point, Viola produced his ‘The Quintet of the Astonished’, in which a group of five people, shown in extreme slow motion, display a range of conflicting emotions, from sorrow to bliss.

‘Quintet’ was the first completed work in ‘The Passions’. Deeply influenced by the devotional imagery of the 15th and 16th centuries, these works are for the most part shown on flat digital panel screens whose size, display, texture and sharpness of definition imitate portable painted panels. In ‘Dolorosa’, for example, two hinged screens each show a man and a woman crying in slow motion. This evokes diptychs showing the Man of Sorrows and the weeping Virgin, such as the National Gallery’s examples by Dieric Bouts. Despite the New Testament echoes in this and many of Viola’s works, these figures are anonymous and contemporary, their situation secular and undefined. Another work, ‘Catherine’s Room’ comprises five small screens inspired by the narrative predella panels of Italian Renaissance altarpieces.

Two important works - both previously unseen in the UK - provide a prelude to ‘The Passions’. The exhibition will open with Bill Viola’s first work made in response to an Old Master painting, ‘The Greeting’ (1995) inspired by Pontormo’s ‘The Visitation’, in which a 40-second ambiguous encounter between three women is slowed to last ten minutes. In contrast the powerful and dramatic ‘The Crossing’ (1996) is an all encompassing video and sound installation: on two sides of a single central screen a figure is simultaneously consumed by the elemental forces of fire and water.

His new works, ‘Emergence’ and ‘Observance’ continue ‘The Passions’ series and both derive from Old Master paintings. In ‘Emergence’, based on a fresco by Masolino, two women receive the lifeless body of a man from an overflowing well in a work that can be read as symbolising birth and resurrection. ‘Observance’ is a narrow, vertical composition (derived from Dürer’s ‘Four Apostles’ in Munich) in which people respond to a disturbing sight that occurs out of frame. Their intense emotions and reactions are seen in hyper-slow movement, creating an absorbing and mesmerising ritual of grief.

The exhibition has been organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with The National Gallery. It has been curated by John Walsh, director emeritus at the J.Paul Getty Museum, and in London, by Alexander Sturgis.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Trafalgar Square, London

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Photographs by Larry Racioppo at Brooklyn Public Library - "All This Useless Beauty"

All This Useless Beauty: Photographs by Larry Racioppo 

Brooklyn Public Library 

September 23 - November 18, 2003

From the crumbling stone cherubs of the Bushwick Theater to the peeling plaster ghouls of Coney Island's Spookhouse, LARRY RACIOPPO's artful images remind us of Brooklyn's illustrious past. Neglected but not forgotten, these beautiful old places evoke memories, nostalgia and a sense of history. "What shall we do with all this useless beauty?" -- This quote by Elvis Costello expresses the inspiration behind this collection of provocative, rarely seen, images of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Public Library presents All This Useless Beauty, an exhibition of over 30 large color prints (20" x 24" and 30" x 40") by veteran photographer Larry Racioppo in the Grand Lobby of the Central Library. Larry Racioppo, a Brookyn native, has been photographing New York City's people and places for more than 30 years. In this new exhibition, he captures all the fading glory of Brooklyn's grand old movie theaters, churches and amusement halls. The exhibition takes viewers on a tour of some of Brooklyn's most memorable sites including several photographs of Loews Kings Theater and Coney Island. 

The vivid detail of color and texture in Larry Racioppo's large color prints reveal the striking contrast between the original vibrancy of these venues and their current dilapidation. They leave us with a haunting sense of the many pleasurable experiences that thousands of people had passing through, or by, these sites. In a photograph of the Loews Kings Theater, we look onto a balcony with rows of plush crimson seats beneath a still beautiful chandelier and an exquisite mural of an 18th century grand lady – now covered with plaster dust and peeling paint. A photograph of the Coney Island Spookhouse presents the striking image of a looming red macabre mask and the darkened doorway within it amidst the refuse of an abandoned building.

The power and beauty of these sites still touch us. We smile at a photograph of the Coney Island Playhouse and the raucous cartoon characters painted on the walls – a couple playing cards, the woman left with only a barrel to wear after revealing a bad hand, and a set of 'betty boop' females who cavort across the wall in their heels and ponytails kicking up dust in their chase. Larry Racioppo asks us to look at this beauty now. After having spent years photographing New York and Brooklyn, he offers this carefully selected collection of images.

"I've been lucky. While driving around Brooklyn since the mid-1990s, I have chanced upon incredibly beautiful buildings and structures, many of which were closed and sealed, often abandoned. They beckoned to me and I responded by taking their pictures," says Larry Racioppo. "Once grand churches, movie theaters and amusements now stand forlorn, their beauty compromised by the ravages of time and the elements. Many have outlined their usefulness and await demolition as the city reinvents itself. Some are still economically viable and have been transformed into bingo parlors and car repair shops, while others teeter on the edge of extinction. What connects them is their inexorable beauty.

"I want to photograph everything – the exposed bones of a structure, the fragment of a carved stone pediment, the faded detail of a mural in a movie theater lobby, the broken cherubs on a building's façade – before it disappears."

Larry Racioppo's photographs have been widely exhibited and collected. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The New York Historical Society and The New York Public Library. A Brooklyn native, he has been a staff photographer for the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development since 1989. He has a Master's degree in Television and Radio Production from Brooklyn College and a B.A. in Communications from Fordham University.

This body of work has been made possible by the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

"This exhibition is dedicated to The Captain Ron Hellgren, who long ago let me use his cool Nikkor lenses while we photographed in Coney Island; to Rob Gurbo and John Rossi, who know the Boardwalk and the back room at Nathan's; and to my wife, Barbara, who makes the present better than the past." – Larry Racioppo

BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY

www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org

Bruce Davidson: Inside/Outside - Photographs from the artist’s personal archive at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Bruce Davidson: Inside/Outside

Photographs from the artist’s personal archive

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

September 25 – November 1, 2003

The Howard Greenberg Gallery celebrates the opening of the new gallery space with an exhibition of vintage photographs from the personal archive of BRUCE DAVIDSON, the highly respected and award-winning photographer. A selection of works from the early years of Bruce Davidson’s career, most of which have never before been exhibited, are the first photographs to hang on the walls of the Fuller building gallery, designed by Lubrano Ciavarra Design, LLC.

Bruce Davidson is widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers in his field. His work has had a major influence on a generation of photographers, critics, and viewers. Bruce Davidson’s talent was recognized early on by a broad range of institutions at the forefront of journalism, photography, and artistic trends. At the age of twenty-four, Bruce Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine. A year later, in 1958, he was invited to join Magnum Photos, the pre-eminent photo-agency owned by its photographer members. Shortly thereafter, in 1963, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Bruce Davidson has been described as an outsider who gets inside his subjects’ lives. He establishes a rich and meaningful visual vocabulary that brings the dignity and diversity of people to the awareness of others. The photographs in this exhibition are taken from bodies of work from the 1950s and 1960s that have been reproduced in many prestigious publications. These include The Widow of Montmartre (1956), an intimate portrayal of the widow of a French Impressionist painter; The Dwarf (1958), haunting images of a circus clown’s loneliness; Brooklyn Gang (1959), an emotionally charged series of a teenage street gang which later was published in Esquire magazine. Brruce Davidson was the first photographer to be awarded the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967. This enabled him to continue his documentation of one block in East Harlem. East 100th Street, published by Harvard University Press in 1970 and re-published by St. Ann’s Press earlier this year, is now considered a modern classic. The later publication includes 37 additional and previously unseen images. In addition, images from Time of Change (2002), Civil Rights photographs from 1961 to 1965, are featured in the exhibition.

Bruce Davidson continues to lecture, conduct workshops and undertake professional commissions throughout the world. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Palais de Tokyo in France. He has received numerous accolades including two awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Eastman Kodak Reedy Award. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications and his prints have been acquired by many major museums and private collectors worldwide, including Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Topan’s “Masters of Photography” in Japan, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Ludwig Cologne, the George Eastman House, Rochester. He has also directed three films.

John Szarkowski, former Director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art who gave Davidson two solo exhibitions, says of Bruce Davidson’s work: “ Few contemporary photographers give us their observations so unembellished, so free of apparent craft or artifice. The presence that fills these pictures seems the presence of the life that is described, scarcely changed by its transmutation into art.”

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

The Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.howardgreenberg.com

Frank Bowling, Skoto Gallery, NYC - Works from the Studio - Curated by Spencer Richards

Frank Bowling 

Works from the Studio

Skoto Gallery, New York

Curated by Spencer Richards

September 25 - November 1, 2003

Skoto Gallery presents Works from the Studio – an exhibition of paintings by Frank Bowling curated by Spencer Richards. This is the third occasion that Frank Bowling’s work are on display at the Skoto gallery. 

One of the most important artist of his generation, Frank Bowling has spent over forty years in total dedication to the practice and career in art. The axiom of his consumate skill as a master has been over these years gloriously articulated, with a non-flagging intensity and energy on the surfaces of his pictures. Through them, he has extended the paradigms of abstraction, which by 1971 had become the mainstay of his vision.

His pictures are creations that seem to evolve from the collision of chance – chance which is conjured up then assembled through placement of color, drops of paint, rhythm of brushstroke or splash of beer to further explore expressions inherent but still hidden in abstract painting. Their construction is verified in many places – in his head, on the floor or on the wall – before they are stitched canvas to canvas, yielding surfaces which offer themselves to viewers scrutiny masked behind constantly surprising subtlety and occasionally capturing those fleeting moments of magic in picture making.

The pictures in this exhibition illustrate Frank Bowling’s longstanding preoccupation with recolonization of space, of weaving new commentaries around the narratives of the tradition in painting. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and admiration of other artists’ researches in his dynamic abstractions as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism’s formal concerns with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. In the arena of modernism, Bowling as an “outsider” clearly has not only mastered its tenets but extended them, and like the powerful phalanx of Black artists (some of whom have been on the scene since the dawn of the genre) has brought into the arena a different declaration and a new way of making art.

At the Royal College of Art in the 1960s Frank Bowling was one of the brightest of a young generation of painters which included David Hockney, Boshier and Peter Phillips who were soon to initiate the next phase in the evolution of British art. Bowling’s famous painting “The Staircase” synthesized into one huge canvas all the stylistic concerns of the period and in doing so created a new pictorial strategy, namely, making a unified pictorial field with compositional elements belonging to different formal styles.

Frank Bowling’s work works are in several public and private collections around the world including the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, West Indies; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; Lloyd’s of London and The New Jersey Museum of Art, Trenton, New Jersey. Some of his “map” paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s were included in FAULTLINES: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes at the recent 50th Venice Biennale.

SKOTO GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.skotogallery.com