Chi Peng photoworks, Groninger Museum, Groningen - Me, Myself and I. Chi Peng, photoworks 2003 - 2010

Me, Myself and I. Chi Peng, photoworks 2003 - 2010

Groninger Museum, Groningen

27 March - 25 September 2011

The Groninger Museum presents an exhibition of photos by Chi Peng (1981). This exhibition, entitled Me, Myself and I, features both early and recent work. Chi Peng’s talent manifested itself during his study period at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, from which he graduated in 2005. Chi Peng regularly exhibits at home and abroad, and his work was previously on display in the Groninger Museum in the group exhibition New World Order. Modern Installation Art and Photography from China, in 2008. Me, Myself and I is Chi Peng’s first major solo exhibition outside China. On the basis of this exhibition, the Groninger Museum has managed to make a substantial acquisition.

As a consequence of China’s one-child policy, Chi Peng grew up without brothers or sisters. His multiple use of self-portraits, as in the series entitled I Fuck Me, in which he has sex with his alter ego, or the images of an escapist dream world, appear to reflect feelings of loneliness and isolation rather than of narcissism. Growing up and maturity form important themes in his work. The enormous dynamics, the irresistible progress of China, as well as themes concerning (sexual) identity and accompanying feelings of optimism, doubt, uncertainty and loneliness, are all expressed in images where reality and fiction meet one another.

One example of this is the series entitled Sprinting Forward. Several alter egos of Chi Peng are to be found at various locations in Beijing. They seem to be fleeing from red aeroplanes. ‘It is about the young generation and our, perhaps naive, expectations with regard to the present and the future. It has also to do with the tensions that are connected with the process of growing up, the increasing pressure to achieve, and the anxiety for failure,’ explains Chi Peng. Works such as Why Should I Love You and I Am Sorry, I Just Don’t Love You articulate what many Chinese people have experienced in the big cities in the recent past – radical urban renewal that has alienated many residents from their own surroundings.

The most recent series Mood is Never Better than Memory is clearly more reflective and tranquil. Feelings of loneliness and isolation also appear here in the foreground. There are scenes where Chi Peng has situated two alter egos near the sea or on an island with a flock of seagulls above, circling around them like a sinister cloud.

Curators: Mark Wilson and Sue-an van der Zijpp.

Guest curator: Feng Boyi.

Chi Peng – Me, Myself and I

A book accompanies the exhibition. Hardcover/full colour, 152 pages. Authors include: Richard Vine, Feng Boyi, Ai Weiwei. Publisher: Hatje Cantz. ISBN: 978-3-7757-3132-4.

GRONINGER MUSEUM

Museumeiland 1, 9711 ME Groningen, The Netherlands

www.groningermuseum.nl

Modernist Jewelry Arthur Smith

 

Exhibition Catalog is available at Brooklin Museum

 

From the Village to Vogue:
Modernist Jewelry of ART SMITH

From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith will honor the gift of twenty pieces of silver and gold jewelry created by the Brooklyn-born modernist jeweler ARTHUR SMITH (1917–1982), primarily from CHARLES RUSSEL, Smith’s companion and heir. This small exhibition is on view at the Brooklyn Museum since May 14, 2008 through March 14, 2010 (and not May 17, 2009 as previously announced)

The presentation of Art Smith jewelry will be enhanced by archival material from the artist’s estate, including his working tools, the original shop sign designed by Smith, period photographs of models wearing his jewelry, preparatory sketches, and account books. Presented along with Smith’s work are twenty-three pieces of modernist jewelry from the permanent collection by such artists as Elsa Freund, William Spratling, Frank Rebajes, Eva Eisler, Ed Weiner, Claire Falkenstein, Jung-Hoo Kim, and others. Inspired by surrealism, biomorphicism, and primitivism, Art Smith’s jewelry is dynamic in its size and form. Although sometimes massive in scale, his jewelry remains lightweight and wearable due to his awareness of the female form. The jewelry dates from the late 1940s to the 1970s and includes his most famous pieces, such as a “Patina” necklace inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder; a “Lava” bracelet, or cuff, that extends over the entire lower arm in undulating and overlapping forms; and a massive ring with three semiprecious stones that stretches over three fingers.

Trained at Cooper Union, Art Smith, an African American, opened his first shop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1946. He later moved the business to 140 West Fourth Street, where it remained throughout his career. Not only one of the leading modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century, Smith was also an active supporter of black and gay civil rights, an avid jazz enthusiast, and a supporter of early black modern dance groups.

This exhibition is organized by Barry Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is supported by the Harold S. Keller Fund with additional support from the Donald and Mary Oenslager Fund.

On View Since May 14, 2008 through March 14, 2010, at Brooklyn Museum

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/

Updated 12-2009

Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and my Head, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

YOKO ONO 

BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD 

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

14 December 2008 – 15 March 2009 

Yoko Ono is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and has an international exhibition career spanning nearly 50 years. BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents YOKO ONO BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD, comprising work by Yoko Ono from the 1950s to the present day.

This is one of the largest exhibitions of Yoko Ono’s work to date and is a major collaborative project with Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany curated by Thomas Kellein and Jon Hendricks. BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD occupies two gallery floors of BALTIC with additional works located outside the building.

The exterior artworks form part of the 2008 NewcastleGateshead Winter Festival and are located in prominent locations around NewcastleGateshead. ONOCHORD uses light to form a code spelling out “I Love You” or “•, ••, •••” and is presented as a large projection of light from the top of Castle Keep, Newcastle. ONOCHORD takes place daily from Sunday 14 December to Wednesday 31 December from 3.30pm until 8.00pm. A special participatory event incorporating ONOCHORD happens outside BALTIC on Sunday 14 December at 6.00pm. Visitors to BALTIC Square are invited to send and receive “I Love You” messages to and from each other and the Castle Keep.

Yoko Ono’s Film No. 5 (Smile), made in 1968, is projected onto Gateshead Quay on Saturday 13 December from 5.30pm – 9.30pm and on the west face of the Newcastle Civic Centre tower on Thursday 18 December from 4.00pm to 8.30pm. The film, shot with a high-speed camera, records a single smile of John Lennon that evolves over the course of fifty-one minutes. 

From Wednesday 17 December visitors to BALTIC will be able to book a ride in Coffin Car, a work originally titled Riding Piece in 1962. The car, (a classic English Daimler hearse) will be located adjacent to BALTIC on South Shore Road and will take visitors for journeys throughout Gateshead and Newcastle. Coffin Car will be available on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 11.00am - 4.00pm. Yoko Ono has a strong and irrepressible desire for peace. This desire can be immediately recognised in her Imagine Peace billboards; BALTIC is presenting an Imagine Peace banner measuring an impressive 14.5 metres by 18 metres situated on the north face of BALTIC’s landmark building throughout the exhibition.

Wish Trees, where visitors are invited to express their hopes and dreams by writing wishes on paper and hanging them on one of the trees, are located on Level 4. Wishes from all the trees will be gathered at the end of the exhibition, and sent to the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Videy Island, Iceland, to join the rest of the wishes Yoko Ono has collected from around the world.

Inside BALTIC, the exhibition covers more than 1400m² of gallery space containing sculpture, paintings, drawing, photography, films and sound installations, as well as participation works. For the first time in four years the large picture window at the rear of the Level 3 gallery is uncovered to bathe the floor in natural light.

Among the 50 works featured in the exhibition is Play it by Trust, a conceptual chess set, made from white Italian Carrara marble. A version of the work was first exhibited in London at Yoko Ono’s legendary exhibition at the Indica Gallery in 1966.

Another work, SkyLadder, may be read as an allegory for the exhibition’s title, BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD as it invites us to consider an imaginary, spiritual space centred between the sky and earth. The 29 Skyladders situated on Level 4 were originally seen at the Liverpool Biennial earlier this year; each donated ladder is accompanied by a hand written note and personal wishes from its contributor.

My Mommy is Beautiful, is a participatory piece in which visitors to BALTIC are invited to bring photographs, along with thoughts and memories about their mothers, to be permanently attached to the blank canvases. At the conclusion of the exhibition, the filled canvases will be sent to the artist in New York. 

Two film representations of the legendary Cut Piece (1966 and 2003) where Yoko Ono allowed an audience to cut items of her clothing are shown side by side on Level 3. Within Quay, BALTIC’s learning space, visitors are invited to use ‘IMAGINE PEACE’ and ‘I LOVE YOU’ ink stamps to send positive messages to other countries around the globe in Map Peace. Finally moving up to Level 5 visitors can take time to participate in Mend Piece (1966) where hundreds of smashed white cups and saucers can be reconstructed using glue and string. 

YOKO ONO: BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD is accompanied by a 208-page exhibition catalogue edited by Thomas Kellein, director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

YOKO ONO BIOGRAPHY 

Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi. 

As a young artist, Ono left New York in 1962 in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In the same year at the Sōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts as artworks, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in numerous editions. Some of the works in it date back to the early 1950s. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she continues to move forward in unexplored territories in her art. 

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 

Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA 

www.balticmill.com

Updated Post

Nan Goldin, Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles

Nan Goldin
Naomi with my dog Yuri and other pictures
Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles
December 12, 2008 - January 17, 2009

Nan Goldin est l'une des plus importantes photographes actuelles. En adoptant l'esthétique directe de l'instantané photographique, elle a réuni une documentation de sa propre vie et celle de ses amis depuis plus de 30 ans. Sont exposées, dans la salle de gauche, une série de rares photographies noir et blanc datant du début des années 70 . Prises à Boston entre 1972 et 1974, Nan Goldin propose une observation intime du monde des drag queens et des homosexuels. Photographiant son entourage, elle débute à ce moment tout le travail autobiographique pour lequel elle est aujourd'hui reconnue. L'essentiel se retrouve déjà dans cette série qui montre de façon décalée ce que la société considère comme des marginaux.

Photographiant des amis, des drogués, des laissés-pour-compte issus du monde de la nuit à Boston ou New York, Nan Goldin laisse derrière elle des traces autobiographiques implacables alternant moments de détresse et moments de grâce. Toute cette observation de la vulnérabilité humaine rend son travail essentiel.

Nan Goldin travaille sur la représentation des êtres qui lui sont chers dans la solitude, la détresse, l'amusement, la défonce, les gestes quotidiens. Elle développe un travail narratif qui a connu un énorme retentissement avec la présentation de son diaporama The Ballad of sexual dependency composé de plus de sept cents images dans les années 80. Comme tout corpus d'oeuvres qui ausculte le réel dans ce qu'il a de marginal et de « peu propre », cette série, dont sont visibles à l'exposition trois photographies : un autoportrait intitulé Me on top of my lover, Suzanne in yellow hotel room et Brian in hotel room, Mexico, peut déranger. A travers la description de sa réalité, Nan Goldin pose son oeil sur les questions de la limite et de la détresse, de la norme et de la marginalité, de l'autodestruction comme issue potentielle, de la misère affective,...

La seconde salle regroupe des photos en couleur étalées sur une période plus longue. Bien que le secret de la vie intime est souvent exhibée de façon crue dans le travail de Goldin, les oeuvres ici présentées évoquent l'amour, la tendresse et la fragilité et contrebalancent de cette façon la désespérance d'autres travaux. Les clichés de personnes couchées, dormant, rêvant, faisant l'amour mettent en exergue le lit comme lieu de vie.

Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles
www.meessendeclercq.be

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape 

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 

4 December 2008 - 1 March 2009 

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape,  the first exhibition in the temporary exhibition spaces of the new National Portrait Gallery, is about people and place. Australian art is full of rich expressions of ideas and feeling about the landscape. This exhibition, with its evocative works drawn from public and private collections across Australia, invites visitors to reflect on what places mean to people, and on how our views of ourselves are shaped by place. Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape has been organised by the National Portrait Gallery and curated by Andrew Sayers with Dr Sarah Engledow and Wally Caruana.

We all have relationships with specific places and in many ways these relationships define us. Open Air explores many dimensions of these relationships as they have been expressed in art. Including paintings, photographs, bark paintings and sculpture, the exhibition brings together the works of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists whose work incorporates deep personal responses to the land. It reveals the importance of land in Indigenous self-definition; the engagement of landscape and historical figures (such as Daisy Bates and Burke and Wills); landscapes of alienation; landscapes with significant family associations and art in which the idea of ‘presence’ is fundamental. 

The exhibition includes conventional portraits as well as opening up a new and distinctly Australian way of looking at portraiture; it goes beyond a definition of a portrait simply as ‘a picture of a face’, to embrace representations of the order of nature and of ancestral stories within the landscape. The exhibition includes the work of some of the major Australian artists of the twentieth century and the present: Mawalan, Wandjuk and Banduk Marika, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Tim Johnson, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Bea Maddock and Russell Drysdale.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600

www.portrait.gov.au

Dan Colen at Gagosian Gallery London - I live there… and An allegory of faith… exhibitions

DAN COLEN
Gagosian Gallery Davies Street, London
I live there…, 27 November - 17 December 2008

An allegory of faith…, 18 December - 7 February 2009

Gagosian Gallery presents Dan Colen's first solo exhibition in London.

The exhibition comprises three components of equal importance: The first is a group of cartoon drawings by a hired illustrator who refers to the notebooks that Colen has filled with art that he has made and wants to make, as well as declarations, common thought, and uncommon fantasy. The second is a large and detailed oil painting entitled An allegory of faith..., which depicts the bench in the woods where Walt Disney's Cinderella first meets her Fairy Godmother. The third is a printed booklet of snapshots taken by Colen in Central Park over the course of an afternoon, evening and night, that visitors to the exhibition can take away. The three exhibition components are connected by the otherworldly dark forest and a marked lack of human presence, which is underscored by the vitrine-like quality of the Davies Street storefront gallery.

Seen through the glass window, Colen's painting reflects on the still ardently debated issues raised by Modernist art critic and historian Michael Fried in his seminal studies, "Art and Objecthood" (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 1980 – the threat posed to aesthetic experience by the "theatrical" materiality of the Minimalist object and, conversely, the theatricality produced by "a consciousness of viewing" at the expense of total aesthetic absorption. Colen's bench-painting, which maps a selective trompe l'oeil rendering of a received cartoon image onto the formalism of John McCracken's lacquered plank, limns the space between sculpture, painting, and pure illusion. In Colen's incarnation of Disney's animation, Cinderella has been removed (thus leaving space for the viewer's projection) leaving just the trail of magic dust that appears when the Fairy Godmother moves, metaphysically, in and out of space.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY 17-19 Davies Street
London W1K 3DE

Imprimante photo A1 et A0 HP Designjet Z3200

Imprimante photo A1 et A0 HP Designjet Z3200

Une imprimante professionnelle grand format

L'imprimante photo grand format A1 et A0 HP Designjet Z3200 est destinée aux professionnels de la création, en particulier les photographes professionnels, les créateurs d'art numérique, les concepteurs graphiques et les professionnels de la prépresse. Elle doit leur permettre de produire des tirages noir et blanc et couleur d'une très haute qualité, issus de photographies numériques, de reproductions d'oeuvres d'art, de conceptions grand format et d’épreuves de haute précision, à fort impact et qui résistent à l'épreuve du temps.

Des encres performantes et durables

Grâce aux 12 encres à pigments HP Vivera dont une nouvelle encre rouge chromatique HP 73, la HP Designjet Z3200 offre une reproduction des couleurs PANTONE à 95% pour cent : 95 % de couverture de PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM et systèmes PANTONE GOE, basé sur les essais internes HP.

Les encres noires HP Quad-Black produisent des transitions uniformes et des gris neutres francs tandis que l’amplificateur de brillance HP assure une régularité remarquable sur les supports brillants. L'imprimante photo HP Designjet Z3200 combine qualité d'image exceptionnelle, reproductibilité des couleurs et durabilité jusqu’à 200 ans. Cette durée repose sur une estimation de la permanence d'image réalisée par HP Image Permanence Lab en fonction d'essais sur une gamme de papiers photo, d'art et spéciaux HP.

Un spectrophomètre intégré

La HP Designjet Z3200 bénéficie en outre du HP Color Center qui simplifie l'étalonnage des couleurs et le profilage des médias en particulier avec le spectrophotomètre intégré : un spectrophotomètre I1 de Xrite. L'étroite collaboration entre HP et Xrite garantit une solution fiable qui a été testée pour répondre aux exigences des clients. Il permet aux utilisateurs de générer eux-mêmes des profils ICC personnalisés pour des papiers spéciaux et des conditions d'environnement spécifiques pour garantir la répétabilité d'une impression à l'autre et d'une imprimante à l'autre sur un large éventail de supports HP et compatibles.

La HP Designjet Z3200 optimise la production, et le rendement des encres : le dispositif de contrôle optique des gouttes d’encre assure un niveau de très hautes performances par des programmes d'entretien automatique.

Des supports variés

L'imprimante dispose de plus de 50 média d’impression différents d’origine HP sous différents formats, conçus pour les encres à pigment HP Vivera, depuis les papiers photographiques et d'art numérique jusqu'aux média couchés et graphiques, y compris le nouveau papier baryté HP Baryte Satin Art. Ce support offre une qualité d'image exceptionnelle exigée par les plus grands professionnels de la photographie. Lorsque le papier HP Baryte Satin Art et les encres à pigment HP Vivera sont utilisés ensemble, ils permettent d'imprimer des images qui ont l'aspect et le toucher traditionnels des papiers barytés argentiques classiques.

Programme de certification HP RIP

La HP Designjet Z3200 est intégrée dans le programme de certification HP RIP (HP RIP Certification Program), qui connaît un franc succès. Ce programme de certification étoffe l’offre des solutions RIP disponibles pour les imprimantes HP Designjet Z3200 afin d’aligner au mieux les attentes des utilisateurs et le niveau de performances de l’imprimante. Les RIP certifiés porteront la désignation unique "Certified for HP Designjet Z3200". Les essais portent sur la qualité d'impression, la productivité, les profils de supports pris en charge par HP ou personnalisés, ainsi que d'autres caractéristiques importantes, comme l'étalonnage et le profilage. Le statut "Homologué HP Designjet Z3200" ne sera attribué qu'aux entreprises tierces qui ont prouvé la conformité à ces critères.

Coopération Nikon et HP

D'autre part, Nikon et HP coopèrent dans le cadre d'une solution de la prise de vue à l'impression pour la reproduction d'oeuvres d'art. HP et Nikon ont annoncé en octobre 2008 une nouvelle coopération pour créer de nouvelles possibilités pour les photographes professionnels, qui permettra à leurs clients d'augmenter la productivité, d'élargir la créativité et de doper leur activité en optimisant le flux des travaux de photographie de la prise de vue à l'impression.

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Plus d'informations sur : http://www.hp.fr/

Photo (c) HP - Tous droits réservés

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead - Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus 

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

25 November 2008 – 15 February 2009

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art explores the history and works of Fluxus through the renowned Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. This unprecedented exhibition of over three-hundred and fifty works from 1961 – 1978 is the largest display of Fluxus ever mounted in Britain. 

Fluxus is often historically regarded as a global network of influential and vibrant artists who shared a unique, if not united, aspiration to revolutionise the avant-garde. Through the introduction of concept art, intermedia, and radical performance practices, Fluxus pioneered an aesthetic appreciation for the everyday. By intentionally confusing the boundaries of how and when an artwork could begin or end, exiting a room, making a salad, or ending a war were transformed into performative works of art. 

Reflecting its international network of artists, Fluxus began in many places from as many creative perspectives. The origins of this network have been traced to the teachings of John Cage, the serial compositions of German composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and the organisational talents of graphic designer, architect, and artist George Maciunas. Maciunas was the self-appointed chairman of Fluxus. His political and agitprop approach to Fluxus aspired to a complete overhaul of the complacent bourgeois art world. George Maciunas dreamed of a Fluxus whose collective spirit enabled the availability of Fluxkits, Fluxfeasts, Fluxfests, and Fluxfilms for the price of a paperback. Having coined the phrase Fluxus in 1961, Maciunas organised a series of groundbreaking European performance festivals beginning in 1962 that set the tone for countless Fluxus events that continue throughout the world in theatres, galleries, and on the street. 

Centring on George Maciunas’s contributions to Fluxus until his death in 1978, The Dream of Fluxus is curated by Thomas Kellein of Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany in collaboration with Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. 

This collection of works, many of which were acquired directly from the George Maciunas estate in 1984, began with Gilbert Silverman’s interest in the work of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks in the early 1970s. Silverman adds: “You have to understand that real collectors are on a major ego trip and that the idea of collecting something is to have something more than someone else, that if I worked very hard and really fast I could put together the biggest Fluxus collection in the world.”

Artists whose works feature in George Maciunas, The Dream of Fluxus include: Genpei Akasegawa, Eric Andersen, Ay-O, Jeff Berner, George Brecht, Gieseppe Chiari, John Chick, Jack Coke’s Farmer’s Co-op, Robert Filliou, Albert Fine, Ken Friedman, Henry Flynt, Geoffrey Hendricks, Hi Red Center, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Joe Jones, Per Kirkeby, Jane Knizak, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, John Lennon, Carla Liss, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Olivier Mosset, Claes Oldenburg, Serge Oldenbourg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Jock Reynolds, Willem de Ridder, James Riddle, Takako Saito, Paul Sharits, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Yoshi Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and La Monte Young.

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 

Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA

www.balticmill.com

Robert Morris, Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976 at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Robert Morris 

Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 

November 4 - December 20, 2008

Leo Castelli Gallery presents “Robert Morris, Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976”, an exhibition of small-scale sculptures by the well-known American artist. First exhibited at the Green Gallery in New York in 1963, these sculptures have over the years become one of Robert Morris’ most unique and iconic bodies of work. This is the first time the public have the chance to see several of these works together since Robert Morris’ retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1994.

Art critics have often described these sculptures as Neo-Dada because of the close relation they have with Duchamp’s work. Pharmacy, 1962, for example, consists of a pseudo-scientific structure where facing mirrors reflect a central glass slide on which one side there is a painted green form; the other the same form painted in red. This work directly relates to the 1914 sculpture by Duchamp entitled Pharmacie.

In other sculptures, however, the relationship to Duchamp is not as explicit and more often relates to Duchamp’s general interest in investigations of perception and measurement. Recurrent in several works are rulers, like Ruler and Shadow, 1962, where a measuring ruler sticks out of a wood panel, creating a shadow on it that is then raised in relief; or in Untitled (Cock/Cunt), 1963 consisting of two artist made rulers hinged together and mounted on a painted wood base. When the rulers are closed on to one another the words “cunt” and “cock” can be read on the wood. These rulers also are illustrative of another of Robert Morris’ interests: memory. His rulers are not exact in their measurement, not because they are not intended to be, but rather because he made them by memory, according to what his idea or recollection of one “inch”.

The artist’s perception of himself can be seen in several sculptures that are quite unconventional and revolutionary self-portraits for their time. I-box, 1962, is comprised of a wooden box covered in sculpmetal with a pink door in the shape of the letter I. When the door is opened it reveals a photograph of the artist naked. Self-Portrait (EEG), 1963, is based on the artist’s electroencephalogram, the measurement of electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp. The artist concentrated on himself for the length of time it took the electroencephalograph to inscribe lines equal to his height. He then used a lead label to distinguish each line and its corresponding region of the brain.

The works are constructed of wood, plaster or lead. These sculptures are often painted in a light gray color that gives them their characteristic appearance.

LEO CASTELLI GALLERY

18 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.castelligallery.com

Tom Wesselmann, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

Tom Wesselmann

Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

November 1 — December 20, 2008

Honor Fraser presents a retrospective of works by Tom Wesselmann.

This exhibition brings together a collection of works that span the career of this Pop Icon. From his brash and bold series of American Nudes to slick and evocative Smokers Studies, the exhibition highlights the career of one of the countries breakthrough voices from the Sixties.

Growing up in suburban Ohio,Tom  Wesselmann came to painting late, first starting to cartoon while enlisted in the Korean War. After returning from the army and with the support of the G.I. Bill, he attended the University of Cincinnati and received a degree in psychology and began studying art. Finding his voice in cartooning, he was able to sell his work to magazines and at the urging of an art professor in Ohio, he moved to New York to study at the Cooper Union. There he started to collage and was trained under the electric shadow of Abstract Expressionism. Wrestling with all of these new influences, Tom Wesselmann fought to find his artistic voice, focusing on a new path in a return to a figurative framework. Experimenting with the boundaries of the painted plane, he flattened images and gave his work an immediacy and slick monumental feel no matter what scale he chose to work in.

Anchoring the exhibition is Great American Nude #38, 1962, a spectacular example of Tom Wesselmann's early work. The formal composition of the painting places a smiling nude amidst a sea of red, white and blue. The work meshes familiar icons, a 50's pin-up girl, an army poster and a distant view of an exotic vacation locale. Instead of overtly erotic, his portrayal of the female nude is raw and brazenly in your face, a thematic thread he continues through the following decades of his career.

Stemming from his love of collage, Tom Wesselmann dips into the visual imagery of Americana, creating a patchwork of the familiar that creates works of arresting color and form. Still Life #49, 1964, a three-dimensional collage of a Seven-up bottle and orange, is an exemplary piece by the artist and encapsulates this play on commonplace objects. His still-lifes are catalogs of graphic design, advertising logos, and billboards, all evidence of daily life.

Though Tom Wesselmann's work matured in the same era as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, unlike these artists he chose not to transform his imagery through a filter, favoring a clear expression of the figural and visual form. His work is rooted in the American experience with an iconography reflecting the charged era of pop sensibility coupled with his deliberate honesty.

HONOR FRASER GALLERY

2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034

www.honorfraser.com

Third European Month of Photography in Berlin

The Third European Month of Photography in Berlin take place from 1 to 30 November 2008. For the first time it comes with a motto – 'Never seen before' is its proud claim, and it has inspired the delight in discovery and innovative imagination of the institutions taking part. More than 130 galleries, project rooms, museums and cultural institutes are involved this year, promising a packed series of exhibitions, private views, events, symposiums and workshops. For a period of 30 days the concentrated programme will draw attention to the medium of photography, offering the public new and unusual insights and giving the international photographic scene a platform for discussion.

Besides the many exhibitions and events distributed at venues throughout the city, the Month of Photography is offering two central locations this year as well:

The Berlinische Galerie in Kreuzberg, with the exhibitions 'Mutations II – Moving Stills', 'Soweit das Auge reicht – Berliner Panorama-Fotografien aus den Jahren 1951 – 1952' and 'Hans Robertson – Die Berliner Jahre. Fotografien 1927 – 1933' .The Third Month of Photography was solemnly opened here on Saturday, 1 November at 7.00 pm in the presence of the Governing Mayor of Berlin. At the same time the Award of the European Month of Photography, provided by Alcatel, was awarded in Berlin for the first time.

The Uferhallen in Berlin-Wedding, with five exhibitions from the field of contemporary photography. Here the opening will take place on Saturday, 8 November at 6.00 pm. Starting from Sunday, 9 November and on the following three weekends, the Uferhallen will also be hosting various events, symposiums, screenings and conferences dealing with different aspects and issues of photography.

ORGANISATION: Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH - Project manager: Oliver Bätz - Curator: Thomas Friedrich - Project coordinator: Kathrin Kohle - FUNDING: Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin Senatskanzlei Kulturelle Angelegenheiten Alcatel-Lucent - PRESS WORK: Philip Krippendorff / Celia Solf - Stefan Hirtz.

See also : The Month of Photography in Paris (in french / en français)

Updated 

Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris : Nouvel espace d’exposition dans le Marais

La Galerie Jeanne Bucher a ouvert son nouvel espace dans le quartier historique et novateur du Marais. Fondée en 1925 par Jeanne Bucher rue du Cherche-Midi, la galerie se situe dans un climat d’avant-garde en exposant les grands créateurs de l’art moderne : Arp, Braque, Campigli, De Chirico, Max Ernst, Giacometti, Gris, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lapicque, Laurens, Fernand Léger, Lipchitz, André Masson, Miro, Mondrian, Picabia, Picasso, Tanguy et Torres-Garcia. Son destin se poursuit en 1947 sous la direction de Jean-François Jaeger qui déménage la galerie, en 1960, à son adresse historique actuelle et développe son activité avec des représentations directes d’artistes des années 1950 et 1960, dont: Bissière, Dubuffet, Jorn, Nevelson, Reichel, Staël, Tobey, Vieira da Silva avec quelques expositions mémorables d’art primitif dans les années 60. Elle est rejointe en 2003 par ses enfants Frédéric et Véronique qui poursuivent durant 4 années ce travail en famille.

Aujourd’hui, alors que Frédéric Jaeger se sent plus enclin à la conservation d’un patrimoine et souhaite s’ouvrir aux arts primitifs, Véronique Jaeger poursuit l’aventure de la galerie « dans son esprit de découverte et de recherche d’origine ». Elle confirme cette orientation en s’installant dans le Marais et en ouvrant un nouveau lieu capable d’offrir aux artistes internationaux pour lesquels elle s’engage, des conditions d’exposition exceptionnelles.

La Galerie Jaeger Bucher, dénommée ainsi en vue d’assimiler les deux identités de son histoire et de l’actualiser, s’installe au 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge dans deux locaux de 600m2 au total, repensés par l’architecte Dominique Perrault dont les travaux ont été mis en œuvre par l’agence Uaps.

Exposition inaugurale : Expansion - Résonance Michael Biberstein, Zarina Hashmi, Rui Moreira, Hanns Schimansky, Susumu Shingu, Pat Steir, Fabienne Verdier, Paul Wallach,Yang Jiechang en dialogue avec les figures tutélaires de la Galerie Jeanne-Bucher 

20 Octobre 2008 – 20 décembre 2008

L’exposition inaugurale EXPANSION-RESONANCE entend donner le ton des questions qui animent la Galerie Jaeger Bucher. Elle  réunit autour des questions d’espace et de temps, dans un dialogue avec des « figures tutélaires » de la Galerie Jeanne Bucher, des sculptures Maya, Sépik, Olmèque, Dogon, et des œuvres de Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Masson, Miro, Ernst, Tobey, Bissière, Staël, Vieira da Silva, Szenes et Dubuffet,  et à travers une œuvre choisie, le travail des neuf artistes internationaux qui feront chacun l’objet d’une exposition personnelle en 2009 et 2010 : le peintre suisse américain Michael Biberstein, la graveur-sculpteur indienne Zarina Hashmi, le dessinateur portugais Rui Moreira, le dessinateur allemand Hanns Schimansky, le sculpteur japonais Susumu Shingu, la peintre américaine Pat Steir, la peintre française Fabienne Verdier, le sculpteur américain Paul Wallach, l’artiste chinois Yang Jiechang.

Publication du catalogue d’exposition en novembre 2008.

Galerie Jaeger Bucher 

5 & 7 rue de Saintonge - 75003 Paris

www.galeriejaegerbucher.com

Afghanistan or The Perils of Freedom - Photographs by Stephen Dupont at the NYPL - The New York Public Library

Contemporary Life in Afghanistan Placed in Stark Focus in Photography Exhibition at The New York Public Library

A man cycling past the ruins of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, September 2005. © The New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Art and Architecture Collection. Photo: Stephen Dupont, "Bamiyan", 2005.

U.S. Marines, 2nd Battalion, Echo Company on weapons search in Asadabad, August 2005. © The New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Art and Architecture Collection. Photo: Stephen Dupont, "Searching for Weapons," 2005.

With his discerning eye, unreserved bravado, and profound capacity for compassion, photographer Stephen Dupont plunges us deep into the heart of modern life in one of the world’s most forlorn and austere countries, Afghanistan. The barren beauty of its harsh landscape and sure tenacity of its people are juxtaposed here against the grief and terror that permeate everyday life.

Stephen Dupont is an award-winning photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, and war correspondent. He is internationally recognized for his work in some of the world’s most dangerous areas, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire.

This exhibition, featuring photographs of Afghanistan from two portfolios recently acquired for the Library’s Photography Collection, is his first solo show in New York. Excerpts from two of Dupont's films, A Survivor's Tale and Stoned in Kabul, will be shown continuously in the Library’s South Court Visitor's Auditorium (first floor).

"Dupont’s sustained documentation of the conflict in Afghanistan, even when it was not headline news and in an age defined by its short attention span, lends both force and cohesion to his work,” says Stephen Pinson, Assistant Director of Art, Prints and Photographs and Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library. “His extended focus on the country has resulted in a series of images that vividly depict how life continues during perpetual war as well as single images that have helped to define and change the nature of that war.”

The exhibition features selected photographs from Dupont’s work in Afghanistan, where he has covered everything from civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s to the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the ongoing war on terrorism. These evocative images detail daily life: the men exercising in a dilapidated gymnasium in Kabul; the four women shrouded head to toe in their burqas awaiting medical consultations; the silhouette of a man cycling past the haunting ruins of the Buddhas of Bamiyan; and the young mujahid amputee in front of a bullet-ridden wall. Darker images punctuate the exhibition as well: a 4-month old child, her entire body burned, being carried in a U.S. Military Base Hospital; a woman and young girl crouching frightened as soldiers search their home; two young men shooting heroin in Kabul; and burning bodies of Taliban fighters.

Also included are photographs from the series Axe Me Biggie, a phonetic rendering of the Dari for “Mister, take my picture!” Dupont made these portraits during the course of one day (March 13, 2006) with a Polaroid camera in a makeshift studio in the streets of Kabul. While the primary subjects of the portraits are the sitters, the street life behind the sitters gives the photographs an added degree of stirring brio. One can almost feel the heat and hum of the crowd pushing towards the camera and its cameraman. It is through these images that the indomitable Afghan spirit Dupont so admires comes through acutely: a man with a bouquet of flowers and his knapsack staring mystified into the camera as bystanders behind him do the same; an older man in traditional dress looking scholarly and grandfatherly; the reluctant gaze of the young girl delicately holding a carton of eggs, and a gentleman in a suit jacket and button-up shirt, who looks nothing if not regal, intensely courting the camera.

Together, these photographs tell a poignant story of poverty, warfare, and broken promises, but also of perseverance, unmitigated resolve, and hope, as they refocus attention on the state of Afghanistan today.

About Stephen Dupont

Stephen Dupont was born in Sydney, Australia in 1967.

His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, among numerous other publications.

He has earned many of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo contest, Pictures of the Year International competition, the Australian Walkley Award, and the Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award.

In 2007, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanitarian Photography to continue Narcostan or The Perils of Freedom, a multimedia project documenting the effects of the rampant drug trafficking that has developed in Afghanistan since 2001.

In April of 2008, he survived a suicide bombing while traveling with an opium poppy eradication team in Kabul.

About The Photography Collection

The Photography Collection of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs comprises approximately 400,000 photographs, including examples of almost every photographic process from the earliest daguerreotypes to contemporary digital images.

The Photography Collection was developed in 1980 when images culled from other NYPL departments and branches were brought together to form a new division. The historically stated focus of the collection has been “documentary photography,” a term originally coined in the 1930s to describe the work of photographers who attempted to document specific social conditions. The Photography Collection, which has significant holdings in this area, actually encompasses a much broader range of the medium, including images made for commercial, industrial, and scientific application as well as images for the press and other print media, the vernacular of amateur snapshot photography, and original works intended for exhibition and/or the art market.

For more information on the Photography Collection, visit www.nypl.org/news/treasures for a video about the collection.

Afghanistan, or The Perils of Freedom: Photographs by Stephen Dupont will be on view from November 7, 2008 through January 25, 2009 in the Stokes Gallery (third floor) at The New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library, located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Exhibition hours are Monday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Closed all federal holidays and Sunday, Dec. 7. Admission is free.

For more information, visit www.nypl.org

This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani and Adam Bartos, Jonathan Altman, and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

About The New York Public Library - The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers – the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Science, Industry and Business Library – and 87 branch libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The New York Public Library serves over 16 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 25 million users internationally, who access collections and services through its website, www.nypl.org

Noah Davis: Nobody, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City

Noah Davis: Nobody 

Roberts & Tilton, Culver City 

October 11 – November 8, 2008 

For his first solo exhibition, Nobody, NOAH DAVIS has created a series of highly political abstract paintings. Noah Davis selects purple as the sole color on each of the three large-scale canvases. While the current socio-political atmosphere is prevalent in this Election year, the works remain fundamentally formal in appearance. Davis remarks on basic principles of composition and color theory, bringing to mind the early abstractions of Arthur Dove, the Minimalist drawings of Richard Serra and Paul Rand in his approach to Corporate graphic design. Titled, 2004, the series of new work is intended as fashionable paintings for 2008. These paintings are intended as historical documentation; each painting's seemingly compositionally arbitrary form is in fact the shape of a United States "swing state" in the 2004 presidential election. These paintings are as much about painting as they are about the politics of painting; Noah Davis presents documentation paintings that exhibit a misunderstanding of politics, and the politics of art.

ROBERTS & TILTON

5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232

www.robertsandtilton.com

David Bates, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - The Tropics

David Bates: The Tropics
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
October 2 - November 1, 2008

John Berggruen Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by American artist, David Bates. David Bates: The Tropics is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Barnaby Conrad, III.

Steeped in experience and tempered by personal memory, the seventeen new paintings included in this exhibition extend David Bates's penchant for creating geographically specific bodies of work one step further. As seen with the Grassy Lake series of the 1980s and 2004-2005, and the Galveston Series from the late 1980s and early 1990s, David Bates's latest paintings take the Caribbean, particularly Turneffe Island off the coast of Belize and the Bahamian Islands of Andros and Abaco, as the watery back drops for his worldly drama. It is in this setting that his weathered fishermen, much like the Galveston fisherman and the venerable guides of Grassy Lake in his previous works, are fully realized as timeless protagonists. 

According to David Bates, "These pictures are really analogies made out of chunks of color. They're certainly not literal depictions. I work from spot drawings and color notes, rarely from photographs. But you know, in the tropics, there's always real people living real lives in tune with the rhythm of the wind and water. An exotic landscape marinated in the sun with a light scent of salt, sea, citrus and a splash of rum. I try to capture this feeling. I want that visceral energy in the pictures."

Carl Little writes, "Relying on memory might distort the truth of a specific visage or locale, but it also adds a level of abstraction, a quality [David Bates] admires in folk art and which he emulates." 1 Abstraction in folk art is among one of the many tendencies that has had a major affect on Bates's career. African American Folk artists, including Bill Traylor and William Hawkins, as well as early-American Modernist Marsden Hartley, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse and Homer are also influences that have appeared in Bates's work throughout the years, sometimes meshing together within a single canvas. This sophisticated blending of the soulful traditions of the American south with the canonized practices of European painting is apparent in works like Fisherman's Lunch (2008) — which is a nod to the Duke of Urbino's portrait by the Italian Renaissance artist, Piero della Francesca — yet is more subconscious than deliberate. "For me painting is pretty direct, " states Bates, "You see a subject that you think is incredible either emotionally, psychologically, or purely aesthetically, and then you slather paint around until the painting has the dignity, integrity, and beauty of that subject." 2

David Bates (b. 1952) was born and raised near Dallas, Texas. He had an early introduction to the arts through his mother, Janelee, who had studied illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago and was passionate about Modern design and aesthetic. Bates developed as a painter in the 1970s with his enrollment in the arts program at Southern Methodist University. Eventually receiving both his BFA and MFA from SMU, Bates also spent 1977 in New York as a student in the highly acclaimed Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today he lives and works in Dallas. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at John Berggruen Gallery as well as at Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, DC Moore in New York City, and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. David Bates's work is in numerous public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

1 Little, Carl. 2004. David Bates. New York: DC Moore Gallery. 

2 Karnes, Andrea. 2004. David Bates: Night Vision. Dallas: Dunn and Brown Contemporary.

JOHN BERGGRUEN GALLERY
228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.berggruen.com

Emil Nolde, Grand Palais, Paris - Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Emil Nolde 1867-1956

Grand Palais, Paris

25 septembre 2008 - 19 janvier 2009

Musée Fabre, Montpellier

7 février - 24 mai 2009

L’expressionnisme allemand reste un sujet neuf en France. Emil Nolde (1867-1956), l’un des représentants majeurs de ce courant, n’a à ce jour bénéficié d’aucune rétrospective. Pour la première fois dans notre pays, une exposition ambitieuse rend hommage à cette grande figure de l’art moderne en réunissant quatre-vingt dix peintures (dont la présence exceptionnelle du polyptique {La vie du Christ} de la fondation Nolde à Seebüll, en Allemagne) et soixante-dix aquarelles, gravures et dessins. Cet ensemble est présenté selon un parcours chronologique découpé en douze sections thématiques ({La montagne enchantée, Un pays, Années de combat, Tableaux de bibles et légendes, L’oeuvre graphique, Nuits de Berlin, Welt, Heimat, "Phantasien" et « images non peintes », La mer}). Pour le grand public, ce sera donc une découverte ; pour les connaisseurs, une occasion unique de voir rassemblés des tableaux provenant du monde entier et illustrant la totalité de l’oeuvre. D’abord sculpteur ornemaniste sur bois, Nolde vient tard à la peinture. Formé à Munich et à Paris en 1900, il se singularise très vite par une peinture farouche, qui a retenu la leçon de Van Gogh. Les jeunes artistes de {Die Brücke} lui demandent son soutien : il est de tous les combats pour imposer un art nouveau, jusqu’à son exclusion de la Sécession de Berlin en 1911. Partagé entre son enracinement dans la terre du Schleswig, à la frontière du Danemark, et sa fascination pour la métropole, Berlin, entre son goût pour la solitude et le spectacle de la vie sociale, ce fils de paysan à la fois rude et doux, construit une oeuvre unique qui suscite bien des incompréhensions. Nolde qui pensait incarner l’esprit allemand dans la peinture moderne, fut cependant fort maltraité lors de l’arrivée des nazis au pouvoir. Son adhésion au Parti national socialiste en 1934, ne lui épargna pas d’être publiquement diffamé et de figurer parmi les artistes « dégénérés » lors de l’exposition de 1937. Le vieil homme, âgé de 70 ans, refusa cependant de se soumettre aux diktats esthétiques du régime et fut frappé, en 1941, d’une interdiction totale de peindre. Reclus à Seebüll, il produisit alors clandestinement un millier de petites aquarelles, ces émouvantes « images non peintes » dont certaines sont ici montrées. La reconnaissance internationale ne tarde pas après-guerre, et Nolde est consacré de son vivant comme l’un des artistes les plus importants de notre temps. L’oeuvre de Nolde est remarquable par d’extraordinaires accords colorés, un trait sans concessions, et une verve narrative inégalée. L’être humain est au centre de ses préoccupations, magistralement restitué dans les portraits, les maternités, les couples. Les paysages et les natures mortes sont autant de songes colorés, où la contemplation de la vie ordinaire, de la nature, est transfigurée par l’audace de la palette. Les sujets religieux bouleversent toutes les tentatives faites dans ce domaine à l’époque moderne, et s'efforcent de retrouver les racines d’une religion primitive, proche de l’homme. Tour à tour grinçant ou serein, Nolde peint à la fois le théâtre social et l’humanité tout entière. D’une longévité plutôt rare pour l’époque – 89 ans – il traverse les deux guerres et laisse une oeuvre foisonnante qui continue de dialoguer aujourd’hui avec l’art le plus contemporain.

Une exposition organisée par la Réunion des musées nationaux et la Communauté d’agglomération de Montpellier / musée Fabre où elle sera présentée du 7 février au 24 mai 2009. 

Commissaire de l'exposition : Sylvain Amic, conservateur en chef du patrimoine, musée Fabre, Montpellier 

Scéénographe : Yves Kneusé 

______________________

German expressionism is a new subject in France. Emil Nolde (1867-1956), one of the main representatives of the movement, has never had a retrospective. For the first time in France, an ambitious exhibition pays homage to this great figure of modern art by bringing together ninety paintings (including the polyptych {Life of Christ} from the Nolde foundation in Seebüll, Germany) and seventy watercolours, engravings and drawings. This ensemble is presented in a chronological sequence divided into twelve themes ({The Enchanted Mountain, A Country, Fighting Years, Paintings of bible stories and legends, Graphic Work, Berlin Night, World, Homeland, ”Fantasies” and “unpainted painting”, The Sea}). For the general public, it will be a discovery ; and for connoisseurs, a unique opportunity to see paintings brought together from all over the world illustrating his entire oeuvre. Working firstly as a wood carver and ornamentist, Nolde came to painting later in life. He was trained in Munich and Paris in 1900 and quickly became known for his wild painting which had learned much from Van Gogh. The young artists in {Die Brücke} asked for his support : he battled for a new art form on all fronts and was even excluded from the Berlin secession in 1911. Divided between his roots in Schleswig, on the Danish border, and his fascination for the metropolis of Berlin, between his taste for solitude and the spectacle of social life, this rough yet tender artist of peasant stock constructed a unique oeuvre which was often misunderstood. Nolde, who believed he incarnated the German spirit in modern painting, was nonetheless very badly treated when the Nazis came to power. His membership of the National Socialist Party in 1934 did not spare him from public defamation and he figured among the “degenerate” artists in the 1937 exhibition. Already seventy, he refused to submit to the aesthetic diktats of the regime and in 1941 was forbidden to paint altogether. He withdrew to Seebüll and secretly produced a thousand small watercolours. A few of these moving "unpainted images" are included in the exhibition. International recognition came swiftly after the war and Nolde was acclaimed during his lifetime as one of the most important artists of his time. Nolde’s work is remarkable for its extraordinary colour combinations, uncompromising line and unmatched narrative verve. The human being is his main concern, brilliantly presented in portraits, mother and child figures, and couples. Landscapes and still lifes are like bright dreams, in which contemplation of everyday life and nature is transfigured by his audacious colours. His religious subjects overturn all attempts made in this field in the modern period and try to find the roots of a primitive religion, close to man. Turnabout scathing and serene, Nolde paints both the social theatre and all mankind. He lived to a great age for his time – 89 – traversed both world wars and has left an oeuvre which continues to dialogue with the most contemporary art work today.

CURATOR: Sylvain Amic, senior curator, Musée Fabre, Montpellier

SCENOGRAPHER: Yves Kneusé

GRAND PALAIS, PARIS

3 avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris

www.grandpalais.fr

MUSEE FABRE, MONTPELLIER

39 boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, 34000 Montpellier 

www.museefabre.fr

Charley Toorop, Museum Boijams Van Beuningen, Rotterdam - Surtout pas des principes!

Surtout pas des principes! Charley Toorop

Museum Boijams Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

27 September 2008 – 18 January 2009

A total of 120 works have been gathered for the Charley Toorop (1891-1995) retrospective, including almost all her self-portraits. The exhibition ‘Surtout pas des principes! Charley Toorop’ has been put together by Marja Bosma, who has also written a book of the same name about the life and work of one of the foremost female Dutch artists of the 20th century.

Both the exhibition and the book contain a wealth of information about Charley Toorop, clarifying associations and highlighting influences, making it easier to see how key works from her oeuvre fit into her larger body of work. This large-scale retrospective clearly highlights Toorop’s importance for Dutch art.

For Charley Toorop, painting was the ultimate form of self-realisation, making her work both unavoidable and imposing. A perfect example of this is the self-portrait from 1928 that was recently acquired by Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.

Charley Toorop was the daughter of the symbolist Jan Toorop, who was one of the foremost artists in the Netherlands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His ‘salad oil’ style is a term that remains in use even today. Toorop prepared his only child for life as an artist and despite being predestined to take up music, she chose instead to follow in her father’s footsteps. Rather than attending art school, she learned the trade from him. At an early age, she was part of ‘Het Signaal’, a predecessor of the Bergense School. Her work in those days was expressionistic in nature, featuring vibrant colours and sweeping brush strokes, which she combined with darker undertones and dissonant colours. A mystical experience of nature underpinned this work, which was representative of the Bergense School from the outset.

After an unsuccessful marriage to Henk Fernhout, with whom she had three children, she established herself in a house built specially for her in Bergen called ‘De Vlerken’, where she worked steadily on her painting career. Painting always occupied the primary position in her life. She travelled regularly, particularly to France. She also stayed regularly in Brussels. Her circle of friends was made up principally of prominent artists and intellectuals including the poets Adriaan Roland Holst and Henny Marsman, painter Piet Mondriaan, sculptor John Rädecker, architects Rietveld and Oud and the anarchist thinker Arthur Lehning.

Charley Toorop’s social and political commitment was the catalyst for her to develop her work into a style of confrontational realism, where she presented her subjects head on. This applies not only to her remarkable self-portraits in which she penetrates the viewer with her steely gaze, but also to her portraits of farmers, labourers and fishermen.

Publication: The retrospective ‘Surtout pas des principes! Charley Toorop’ is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue.

MUSEUM BOIJMANS VAN BEUNINGEN

Museumpark 18-20, 3015 CX Rotterdam

www.boijmans.nl

William Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld - Paths to Fame, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Paths to Fame: 

William Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld

The Courtauld Gallery, London

30 October 2008 - 25 January 2009

Nine magnificent watercolours, recently bequeathed by the late Dorothy Scharf, are among a collection of thirty outstanding works by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) held at The Courtauld Gallery.  The Courtauld’s collection includes work from across the artist’s career, ranging from an important early view of the Avon Gorge, Bristol, made when Turner was just sixteen years old, to examples of the monumental highly finished watercolours of his maturity and the celebrated expressive late works.  Paths to Fame:  Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld, on view from 30 October 2008 to 25 January 2009, will be the first opportunity to enjoy this superb collection in its entirety.

Throughout his life Turner orchestrated his career with fame in mind.  Intensely ambitious, he travelled the length and breadth of Britain and the Continent in search of inspirational and marketable views.  Following in his footsteps, the exhibition traces the evolution of his extraordinarily inventive and entrepreneurial approach to the making of landscape in watercolour.  The exhibition stresses the vital contribution of patronage and print publication and the role of collectors and friends, most notably the influential art critic John Ruskin, as champions and promoters of his work.

The son of a Covent Garden barber, Joseph Mallord William Turner spent his early years acquiring the traditional skills of architectural draughtsmanship, learning also from earlier topographical watercolourists such as Paul Sandby and Edward Dayes.  He showed precocious talent, entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 at the age of thirteen and having a watercolour accepted for the prestigious annual exhibition only two years later.  He was elected an Associate at twenty-four, the youngest age allowed, becoming a full Academician in 1802.  The Academy was then housed in the Strand block of Somerset House, now home to The Courtauld Gallery.

Focusing on Turner’s early career, the opening section of the exhibition explores the ways in which he set about achieving success.  When only sixteen he embarked on the first of his many sketching tours around the country.  An avid self-promoter, Turner was quick to recognize the value of prints for disseminating his art to the widest possible audience, and from the 1790s his career revolved around travelling, painting and publishing.  Accurately rendered topographical watercolours such as Chepstow Castle (fig.1), produced as a model for an engraving (the second print to be made after his work) for the popular Copper-Plate Magazine, show a technical mastery that was to earn him a fortune as a mature artist.  A later section of the exhibition is dedicated to his watercolour designs for book illustrations, most notably Colchester, Essex (fig.2), made in preparation for an engraving for Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1827-38), the largest and most ambitious series of engravings ever produced from Turner’s designs. 

On his first visit to the Continent in 1802, made possible by the brief peace between Britain and France, Turner headed for Switzerland, attracted by the stupendous Alpine scenery and aware that such awe-inspiring views of mountains, lakes and rivers were increasingly sought after by the art-buying public.  From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 he took to travelling annually through France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, filling sketchbooks with visual records that he later used as reference material for watercolour and oil painting subjects.  The superb view of Rome from San Pietro in Montorio (fig.3) was painted for Turner’s close friend and major patron Walter Fawkes in c.1820.  This work celebrates the artist’s first visit to Italy in 1819 and reflects his response to its beauty, grandeur and light.

Turner’s habit of rearranging the landscape for a more dramatic effect is evident from the exaggeratedly steep mountain slopes he depicted in Mont Blanc from above Courmayeur (fig.6).  The atmospheric image of On Lake Lucerne looking towards Fluelen (fig.7), on the other hand, presents a radically different approach to landscape – a poetic vision that intensified in the 1840s when, dogged with ill health in the last decade of his life, Turner became increasingly conscious of his mortality.  By this time, light and colour and the transitory effects of weather were his prime concern, most vividly evoked in the semi-abstract images of sand, sea and sky displayed in the final section of the exhibition.

In his later years Turner paid frequent visits to the Kent coastal resort of Margate, attracted by the wide expanse of sea and ever-changing sky.  Works such as Heaped Thundercloud over Sea and Land, Storm on Margate Sands and Margate Pier (fig.9), exemplify Turner’s response to the drama of nature observed on the Kent coast.  One of the highlights of the exhibition, this group of watercolours once formed part of the same sketchbook that was later acquired by the artist and critic John Ruskin from Sophia Caroline Booth, Turner’s landlady and companion.  These late works are characterised by a powerfully expressive experimentation which pushed the boundaries of watercolour technique.  Ruskin described Margate Pier as a ‘study of storm and sunshine...entirely magnificent…’   He was equally enthralled by Dawn after the Wreck (fig.8), writing ‘some little vessel – a collier probably – has gone down in the night, all hands lost: a single dog has come ashore.  Utterly exhausted, its limbs failing under it, and sinking into the sand, it stands howling and shivering.’  Ruskin’s passion for Turner’s late watercolours and his sentimental interpretation of their subject matter helped to perpetuate Turner’s fame as England’s greatest painter in watercolours.

The works from The Courtauld Gallery will be supplemented by closely related loans from Tate and private collections, enabling viewers to trace the development of certain compositions, including the celebrated panoramic view of the Crook of Lune (fig.5), from early sketches and exploratory ‘colour beginnings’ (fig.4) to finished watercolours and, in some cases, published prints. 

The exhibition is being sponsored by The Bank of New York Mellon.

Paths to Fame:  Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld will be accompanied by a special display of selected British watercolours bequeathed to The Courtauld Gallery by Dorothy Scharf in 2007.  This will offer an opportunity to consider Turner’s work in the broader context of British watercolour painting of the 18th and early 19th century.

Paths to Fame:  Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld

A fully illustrated catalogue, Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from The Courtauld Gallery published by The Courtauld Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, accompanies the exhibition. 220 x 254 mm, 180 pages, softback, ISBN: 978-1-905256-33-4, Price £20.

The Courtauld Gallery

Somerset House, Strand

London WC2R 0RN

Projects 88: Lucy McKenzie, MoMA, NYC

Projects 88: Lucy McKenzie 

Museum of Modern Art, New York

September 10 - December 1, 2008 

For Projects 88: Lucy McKenzie, the Museum of Modern Art presents a site-specific installation of newly acquired paintings and prints by artist LUCY McKENZIE (Scottish, b. 1977) as part of its ongoing Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series. McKenzie’s work questions the politics of representation, among other topics, and confronts the ways in which women have historically been portrayed in the media. Her practice incorporates painting, printmaking, drawing, and public performances such as concerts and poetry readings that reference historical models of artist clubs or salons. In 2007, Lucy McKenzie started the interior decoration company Atelier with illustrator Bernie Reid (Scottish, b. 1972) and fashion designer Beca Lipscombe (Scottish, b. 1973) to collaborate on designing public and private social spaces. For this exhibition, their first commission for a museum, Atelier has created an installation that emulates the décor of a turn-of-the-century library. Mural paintings recreating walls paneled in dark wood take their inspiration from Art Nouveau architect Paul Hankar, while the stenciled carpet on the floor derives from design motifs by Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin.

The Brussels-based LUCY McKENZIE recently returned to school in order to master the technique of trompe l’oeil painting seen in this installation. In 2008, she completed a course of traditional study at the Van Der Kelen Institute for decorative painting in Brussels. McKenzie studied for her BA at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Scotland from 1995 to 1999 and at Karlsruhe Kunstakademie in Germany in 1998. Her work has been featured at numerous museums and galleries throughout Europe and the U.S., and she has had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), the ICA Boston (2004), and Tate Britain, London (2003). Group shows include UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2004), the Venice Biennale (2003), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001).

The exhibition is organized by Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Projects series is coordinated by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

CHRISTOPHE CHERIX joined MoMA as Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in July 2007. He was previously the Curator of the Cabinet des estampes in Geneva. Mr. Cherix's specialty is modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on printed art of the 1960s and 1970s, and artists' books. His recent exhibitions include Book/Shelf (2008) at MoMA, which explored artists' use of the book as an object in contemporary art; a survey of vacuum-formed plastic multiples (2007); and a study of the prints of Henri Matisse (2006), both at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. As Commissioner of the 25th Biennale of Graphic Arts in Slovenia in 2003, Christophe Cherix featured artists’ books as well as a range of printed works that expanded traditional definitions of the medium. Among his numerous publications are the catalogues raisonnés of prints by Henri Michaux and Robert Morris.

ABOUT THE ELAINE DANNHEISSER PROJECTS SERIES

Created in 1971 as a forum for emerging artists and new art, the Elaine Dannheisser Projects series plays a vital part in MoMA’s contemporary art programs. With exhibitions organized by curators from all of the Museum’s curatorial departments, the series has presented the work of close to 200 artists to date. 

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - MoMA

Contemporary Galleries, second floor 

www.moma.org

Ignasi Aballi, Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles

Ignasi Aballí
To Show
Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles
September 18, 2008 - October 25, 2008

Pour sa première exposition personnelle en Belgique, Ignasi Aballí a choisi de montrer deux séries importantes de photos ainsi qu’une vidéo. La première série, nommée Manipulaciones, est composée de 4 séquences d’une vingtaine de photos chacune et reproduit des images anonymes issues d’encyclopédies ou de manuels techniques de photographie. Ces illustrations rassemblées par l’artiste représentent des conseils pratiques censés aider l’apprenti photographe à exécuter correctement les gestes de base (comment nettoyer un objectif, comment changer une pellicule, etc…). Aucune valeur esthétique ne réside dans ces clichés puisque leur rôle unique est la description d’une action arrêtée. On tend vers une photo objective, neutre, dénuée d’affect. Tout le monde doit pouvoir comprendre ces séquences.

Dans sa série Demostrar, Aballí puise dans l’iconographie abondante de notre époque en récoltant (et ce depuis des années) des coupures de presse issues de grands quotidiens espagnols. Il a découpé des centaines de photos qui exhibent une personne qui montre quelque chose. Cela va de la mère du martyr qui porte la photo de son fils défunt, d’un policier qui exhibe une preuve à la presse, de manifestants qui revendiquent une cause et qui en portent le symbole, d’un sportif qui brandit un trophée,… L’artiste, en privilégiant la série sur l’unicum, fait ressurgir l’universel en recueillant des centaines de documents passés dans le domaine public. L’oeuvre finale, de format 165 x 120 cm, se compose de plusieurs dizaines de photos scannées et juxtaposées consciencieusement. Ce travail de réappropriation puise dans le réel pour paradoxalement s’en échapper dans la mesure où ces clichés sont sortis de leur contexte et cette décontextualisation, souvent, ne permet plus de comprendre la situation originelle. Le sens de la photo est dissimulé sous une information qui nous est incomplète puisque nous n’avons aucune légende, aucune date, aucun élément sur lesquels nous appuyer. La photo d’une main nous montrant un médicament ne peut en rien nous indiquer le contexte. Ce

médicament est-il neuf, le lance-t-on sur le marché, a-t-il servi à sauver ou à tuer quelqu’un ? Est-ce un produit dopant retrouvé dans la valise d’un sportif ? On peut évidemment allonger cette liste de questions.

En nous enlevant la possibilité de donner une explication intelligible, Aballí nous contraint à nous poser des questions et à redonner du sens à une image orpheline. Il nous propose de considérer comme sujet de la photo le fait même de montrer et non plus l’objet montré. La monstration devient le sujet même du travail. Ce qui l’intéresse ici est évidemment de porter une réflexion sur l’acte photographique et sur la notion que toujours plus d’images tuent le sens de l’image.

On peut considérer qu’avec des artistes tels que Tacita Dean, Peter Friedl, Hans-Peter Feldmann pour n’en citer que quelques-uns, Ignasi Aballí développe une photographie conceptuelle comme genre à part entière dans l’art contemporain.

Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles
www.meessendeclercq.be