20th century iconic art works at High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
October 13, 2012 - January 20, 2013

In the exhibition Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, is explorin the development of modern and contemporary art by selecting key years in art history that represent watershed moments in the 20th century.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (American, 1923-1997), Girl with Ball, 1961

Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 60¼ x 36¼ inches (153 x 91.9 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Philip Johnson, 421.1981

The exhibition presents approximately 100 works of art created during the years 1913, 1929, 1950, 1961, and 1988, as well as the art of today.  The exhibition examines the years prior to the start of World War I and the Great Depression, the lead-up to postwar American prosperity and the years preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and how artists responded to and were influenced by events on the world stage.

The exhibition also presents the works of contemporary artists Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse, and Sarah Sze, whose work extends themes first explored in the 20th century and updates them for the 21st century.

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 is one of the largest surveys of 20th-century art to ever be exhibited in the southeastern United States. Co-organized by the High Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), as part of the two museums’ ongoing collaboration, the exhibition is on view since October 13, 2012, through January 20, 2013.

“These periods of time ushered in new ways of thinking that forever transformed the artistic landscapes,” said Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., Director. “We’re delighted that this partnership with MoMA will enable our visitors to see how the work of artists from different eras was influenced by major historical events.”

The exhibition includes iconic works from each represented year, including:

· 1913: Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

· 1929: Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist painting Illumined Pleasures

· 1950: Willem de Kooning’s landmark of Abstract Expressionism, Woman, I

· 1961: Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop art masterpiece Girl With Ball  

· 1988: Jeff Koons’s famed porcelain sculpture Pink Panther

Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, has chosen Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse and Sarah Sze to highlight the art of 2013. Sarah Sze, who will represent the United States in the 2013 Venice Biennale, created a site-specific installation for the High. Aaron Curry debuts three new works—monumental, polychromed steel sculptures titled “Boo,” “Thing” and “Deadhead”—which are installed on the Museum’s lawn. Rounding out the selection, a large three-dimensional painting by Katharina Grosse are on display on the skyway level of the Wieland Pavilion. 

“Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse, and Sarah Sze are artists who push the boundaries of artistic practice,” said Rooks. “Each is known for their conceptually open-ended and physically immersive works that invite viewers to walk through and around them. In the process of physically exploring these works, viewers draw out the present moment, stretching time toward moments yet to come.”

AARON CURRY (born 1972), on view through May 2013

Originally trained as a painter, Aaron Curry turned to sculpture while he was an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he first became interested in the flat planes that characterized the work of David Smith and Isamu Noguchi. Aaron Curry’s interplay between two and three dimensions encourages viewers to walk around his work, creating new lines of sight as planes of color rotate into nothingness. In his own words, his sculptures are “almost like a cubist painting . . . [they] refer to the surface but give you illusion at the same time. It’s an awkward space that I still find rather exciting to play with.” Since earning his M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he has exhibited in dozens of group shows throughout the United States and Europe as well as solo shows in Los Angeles, Berlin, London and New York. In 2010, Aaron Curry received a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, an experience that culminated in an exhibition at the Schinkel Pavilion in early 2011. His work has been praised by critics Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith, the latter of whom proclaimed Curry’s work to be “physically inventive and sculpturally inclined.”

KATHARINA GROSSE (born 1961), on view through January 20, 2013

The Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse’s distinctive approach to painting and installation is characterized by the simultaneous expansion and elimination of boundaries for painting, “Abstract Expressionism opened up new ways to look at painting, but it also hindered, to a certain extent, painting’s development. Negating painting’s illusionism narrowed it down to applying paint to a flat surface. I have a totally different approach. I don’t think that a painting is a coherent, closed system that only takes place within its borders.” Her works challenge traditional notions of painting and architectural space and invite viewers to confront their spatial boundaries. Katharina Grosse resists identification with specific media, historical movements or other affiliations, preferring instead to remain as uninhibited as possible. Since 1996 she has exhibited in more than 30 solo shows and several dozen group shows in galleries and museums across the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Tate St. Ives in England, the Museum for New Art in Freiburg, Germany, and Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (Wanafoto has published a post about this exhibition with pictures of Katharina Grosse artworks). In 2011 she installed her monumental installation “One Floor up More Highly” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which received critical praise, including the article, “Chromatic Theater,” published in Art in America. In addition to her artistic practice, Katharina Grosse is currently a professor of fine arts at the Arts Academy of Dusseldorf.

SARAH SZE (born 1969), on view through January 20, 2013

Educated at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts, New York, Sarah Sze has emerged as one of the foremost installation artists of her generation. Best known for her elaborate and gravity-defying installations—microcosmic spaces of dizzying complexity—her work often seems to be a three-dimensional collage in which the placement of every object holds meaning both outside the work and within it. Her coupling of familiar objects—towels, chairs, ladders, for exmaple—with ones that are less immediately identifiable provokes the viewer to create rich associations between otherwise unrelated items. Over the last fifteen years, she has shown in group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Monographic exhibitions of her work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Whitney; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Her permanent installations are on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkley. Sarah Sze has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Atelier Calder prize and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and most recently she has been selected to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Sarah Sze lives and works in New York City. 

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 continues a multi-year, multi-exhibition collaboration between the High and MoMA, which began in 2009 with “Monet Water Lilies,” the first in a series of six exhibitions, followed by “Modern by Design” in summer 2011 and “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters,”. The initiative builds on successful past collaborations between the High and MoMA that resulted in four exhibitions presented in Atlanta between 1997 and 2000. This project extends ties between the institutions through professional exchanges, development of educational programs and publications and reciprocal admission benefits. 

This exhibition is organized by Jodi Hauptman, MoMA Curator of Drawings, and Samantha Friedman, MoMA Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings, in collaboration with David Brenneman, the High’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art, and Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 is accompanied by a fully illustrated 

catalogue.

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia 30309
Museum's website: www.high.org

Jota Castro Motherfuckers never die - Exhibition at Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands

Jota Castro Motherfuckers never die 
Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands
Curator: Roel Arkesteijn 
7 September - 2 December 2012

Jota Castro (Lima, Peru, 1965), a French-Peruvian artist living in Brussels, Belgium, is one of today’s most prominent activist artists. At the end of the 1990s he retired from his work as a diplomat at the European Union and the United Nations to devote himself fully to his activities as an artist and curator. Jota Castro has curated exhibitions including The Fear Society / Pabellón de la Urgencia for the 2009 Venice Biennale and more recently, Dublin Contemporary 2011. In his artistic work, he exposes the machinations of contemporary (consumer) society, sometimes with biting, politically incorrect humor, and he champions the protection of intellectual freedom and democracy. Jota Castro’s exhibition at Museum Het Domein, in the Nertherlands, deals with problems caused by the global economic crisis and developments in European politics. 

Jota Castro, London Calling, 2012, flag, safety pin, 200 x 290 cm. 

Courtesy Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

In a 2005 interview with Jerôme Sans, Jota Castro posited that ‘Society is changing and the powers that be are getting scared. People are looking for new references, they’re in search of information, they’re discussing it, sharing it. Our society is like clay waiting to be redefined, to be modeled unambiguously. For an artist, our age is the best of times!’ The artist’s recent work embodies a hope for radical change to our (consumer) society. In a visual register that could be characterized as political minimalism, Jota Castro reflects on such diverse subjects as crippling mortgages in the United States, recent genocides, the migration out of Africa, our dependence on oil, Chinese-American trade relationships, the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest due to Western consumption, and other forms of economic and ecological exploitation of Latin America. 

Jota Castro, Seguro. 

Courtesy Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

The exhibition Motherfuckers never die is the largest solo exhibition of Jota Castro’s work in the Netherlands. A large selection of the artist’s recent drawings, sculptures, and installations, supplemented by a few older key works, will be on display. Many of these works have not been previously shown or have been created especially for the exhibition. The exhibition takes its name from a new sculpture, created for the occasion, that condemns drastic cuts to the Dutch cultural budget. Such attacks on the freedom of expression have always been an issue, the artist states, and he hopes bring this to the viewer’s attention. In this context, Jota Castro’s work can be seen as an arena for free speech, subversive positions, and the desire for hopeful radical alternatives. 

On Sunday, October 7th, at 2pm, Jota Castro will speak about his work and will hold a conversation with Museum Het Domein’s curator of contemporary art, Roel Arkesteijn.

Museum Het Domein Website: www.hetdomein.nl

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought at CaixaForum Barcelona

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought at CaixaForum Barcelona
Curator: Helena Tatay
Through 28 October 2012

CaixaForum Barcelona presents works created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by artists that explore and question systems of representation

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought is a major exhibition, presented by CaixaForum Barcelona, featuring cartographies drawn up by twentieth- and twenty-first century artists who explore and question the systems of representation that humans have used for centuries as a way of understanding the chaos that is life.

The exhibition, organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation, pursues one of the organisation’s long-standing goals, that of  helping to increase the capacity to generate knowledge and awareness of the most recent art whilst fostering greater understanding of contemporary creativity and breaking down the barriers that often prevent such art from reaching wider audiences.

To this end, the Foundation’s cultural programme focuses particularly on the most recent artistic manifestations, both in the exhibitions it organises – including such recent shows as  The Cinema Effect. Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image; Displaced Modernity: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstract Art and those devoted to such artists as Hannah Collins, Omer Fast and Pierre Huygue – and in the acquisition policy followed with regard to the Contemporary Art Collection. 

The ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection is formed, at present, by more than 900 works by some of the most important artists of the last 30 years. Today, this collection is unquestionably a reference in the art world, as is demonstrated by the fact its works are regularly requested on loan  for exhibitions all over the world. Moreover, the Foundation organises frequent  exhibitions at its CaixaForum centres, as well as travelling shows that tour Spain, Europe and the rest of the world.

In order to further intensity its cultural activities, moreover, ”la Caixa” Foundation also establishes strategic alliances with major museums around the world, such as the Louvre and the Prado. This line of action also includes the agreement between ”la Caixa” and MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) Foundation to jointly manage their respective contemporary art collections, establish a coordinated acquisition policy and co-produce exhibitions based on these collections.

In this latest presentation of contemporary art works, ”la Caixa” Foundation takes a universal concept as the starting-point: the human need to understand and represent the world around us.

The central aim of this exhibition is, therefore, to explore the ways in which contemporary artists have used cartographic language to subvert traditional systems of representation, propose new formulas or  suggest the very impossibility of representing a globalised, ever more chaotic world.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought features more than 140 works, including installations, video installations, paintings, drawings, projections, digital art, maps, etc., from a wide range of institutions and galleries, such as MOMA, the Pompidou Centre, Museo Reina Sofía, IVAM, MUSAC, MACBA, Fundació Joan Miró, the Hirshhorn Museum and ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection itself.

We map our world in order to gain a glimpse of the reality in which we live. Since time immemorial, maps have been used to represent, translate and encode all kinds of physical, mental and emotional territories. Our representation of the world has evolved in recent centuries and, today, with globalisation and the Internet, traditional concepts of time and space, along with methods for representing the world and knowledge, have been definitively transformed. In response to this paradigm shift, contemporary artists question systems of representation and suggest new formulas for classifying reality.

The ultimate aim of Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought, an exhibition that seeks to draw a map formed by cartographies created by twentieth- and twenty-first century artists, is to invite the visitor to question both the systems of representation that we use and the ideas that underpin them.

 

 

Joaquín Torres García, América invertida, 1943.
© Joaquín Torres García, Museo Torres García

 

The exhibition, organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation, is comprises more than 140 works in a wide range of formats - from maps and drawings to video installations and digital art - on loan from the collections of several major contemporary art galleries. The artists represented include such essential figures as Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum and Richard Long, shoulder-to-shoulder with a roster of contemporary artists, including Art & Language, Artur Barrio, Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Erick Beltrán, On Kawara, Alighiero Boetti, Thomas Hirschhorn and Francis Alÿs, amongst others. Finally, the exhibition is completed by a series of revealing documents drawn up by experts from other fields, such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Lewis Carroll and Carl Gustav Jung.

Öyvind Fahlström, Column no. 2 (Picasso 90), 1973.
Photograph: Alexander Hattwig, Berlin

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: The artists whose works are featured in the exhibition are:

Ignasi Aballí
Francis Alÿs
Efrén Álvarez
Giovanni Anselmo
Art & Language
Zbynék Baladrán
Artur Barrio
Lothar Baumgarthen
Erick Beltrán
Zarina Bhimji
Ursula Biemann
Cezary Bodzianowski
Alighiero Boettti
Christian Boltanski
Marcel Broodthaers
Stanley Brouwn
Trisha Brown
Bureau d’Études
Los Carpinteros
Constant
Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla
Salvador Dalí
Guy Debord
Michael Drucks
Marcel Duchamp
El Lissitzky
Valie Export
Evru
Öyvind Fahlström
Félix González-Torres
Milan Grygar
Richard Hamilton
Zarina Hashmi
Mona Hatoum
David Hammons
Thomas Hirschhorn
Bas Jan Ader
On Kawara
Allan Kaprow
William Kentridge
Robert Kinmont
Paul Klee
Yves Klein
Hilma af Klint
Guillermo Kuitca
Emma Kunz
Mark Lombardi
Rogelio López Cuenca
Richard Long
Cristina Lucas
Anna Maria Maiolino
Kris Martin
Gordon Matta-Clark
Ana Mendieta
Norah Napaljarri Nelson
Dorothy Napangardi
Rivane Neuenschwander
Perejaume
Grayson Perry
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Vahida Ramujkic
Till Roeskens
Rotor
Ralph Rumney
Edward Ruscha
Carolee Schneemann
Robert Smithson
Saul Steinberg
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Willy Tjungurrayi
Joaquín Torres García
Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
Adriana Varejao
Oriol Vilapuig
Kara Walker
Adolf Wölfli

 

Art & Language. Study for Index: Map of the World, 2001.
Acrílico, lápiz y Tipp-Ex sobre papel

The exhibition, which opens with reflections by the cartographer Franco Farinelli and ends with an interview with the philosopher Alexander Gerner, also features several eighteenth-century manuscript maps from the National Library. Moreover, some sections also feature dialogues between contemporary artists and outstanding experts from other fields, such as  Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Carl Gustav Jung and Lewis Carroll.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Physical, mental and emotional territories

Humans have always needed to design and build structures in order to understand the chaos that is life. Maps break down  reality into fragments, enabling it to be presented in the shape of tables. In this way, we translate and codify, not only physical space, but also knowledge, feelings, desires and life experiences. 

Representing the Earth on a plane, projecting a three-dimensional object in two dimensions, was an astounding transformation. This  process enables us to grasp the idea of space, which has shaped European  thinking. As the geographer Franco Farinelli notes, since the beginning of European knowledge there has been no other way of knowing things except through their image. It is difficult for us to go beyond their appearance, their representation.

In the seventeenth century, classifications and phenomena began to be drawn on a plane. Mapmaking knowledge was combined with statistical skills. In this way, data maps emerged, helping to visualise knowledge and converting it into science. A century later, linked to the colonial expansion of certain European countries, scientific cartography came into being.  At the same time, maps of emotions began to appear in French salons hosted by women. Since then, maps have been used to represent and make visible physical, mental and emotional territories of all kinds.

In the twentieth century, technical advances such as the airplane and photograph, which enabled reality to be reproduced exactly, wrought changes in the way the world was represented. Moreover, non-material communication – the telegraph and the telephone  – caused the “crisis of space” that was so ably reflected by the cubists.

Internet finally dispelled all traditional concepts of time and space. The contemporary space is a heterogeneous space. We are aware that we live in a network of relations and material and non-material  flows, but we still do not possess a model to represent this invisible network. We live in tension between what we were and can think and these new things that we are unable to represent.

This exhibition explores a theme that has unattainable ramifications. Based on art (a microspace for freedom in which models of knowledge can be reconsidered and redefined) it proposes a map – arbitrary, subjective and incomplete, like all maps – of the cartographies formulated by twentieth-century
and contemporary artists. This map invites us to question the systems of representation that we use, and the ideas that underlie them.

 

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Cartographic language

The reduction of the Earth to a two-dimensional graphic image constituted a technical and cultural revolution. It enabled gradually built up knowledge about the territory to be transmitted whilst also, acting as an interface between us and the world, it changed our relationship with reality and helped to shape and inform European knowledge. 

In order to represent the world and other things, we project them onto the abstract space of geometry, which takes no account of nuances or qualitative differences between places. In this process, the geographic space takes on the properties pertaining to its material  support, the map. As Karl Schlögel points out, there can be nothing that resembles a correct figure on cartographic maps; the map’s rectangular coordinates iron out the world’s wrinkles.

Art and Language, Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson,
Map of itself (Map of an area of dimensions 12" × 12", indicating 2,304 1/4" squares), 1967. MACBA Collection. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Consortium. Philippe Méaille Collection.

Cartographic language translates the world’s reality. However, like all languages, it imposes its rules and establishes limits. Representation transforms the chaos of the world into its opposite, a logical space. 

Since the early-twentieth century, countless artists, like the Surrealists, have played with the cartographic language. Lewis Carroll, Art & Language played with cartographic grammar. As well as artists like Stanley Brouwn or Artur Barrio turning its logic into something apparently absurd.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Types of space

Knowledge of the space, reflection about its nature as collective representation and the need to classify and define the different types of spatial representations; these are all characteristics of our time. 

Edward Ruscha, 9 to 5, 1991
”la Caixa” Foundation Contemporary Art Collection
© Colección Arte Contemporáneo Fundación "la Caixa"

The idea of space, which shaped European knowledge, has impregnated all the realms of our thought. We speak of personal, public, symbolic and many other types of spaces. Space is, today, the metaphor that is most often repeated in our discourses. This is, no doubt, because we feel that, through space, we free ourselves from the linear nature of language and writing. In it, thought finds expression for its plurality and dynamism. 

Michel Foucault defined the transformation of the notions of time and space through the idea of “other” spaces, which are neither here nor there: the telephone call or the Internet space, as well as the mirror space and the sound space. Non-material communication has changed our notion of time and space. Little by little, we find different forms in the time-space relationship in the images around us.

This section contains works by artists in which space and time are linked in different ways. There are social spaces outside time (Constant), countries of the mind (Evru), displacements of mirrors (Robert Smithson), invisible spaces (Giovanni Anselmo), empty spaces generated during the running time of a film (Hiroshi Sugimoto), sound spaces (Milan Grygar), a million years organised in just one space (On Kawara) and many more.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Social and political cartographies 

Far from being merely descriptive, maps impose a structure on the world, describing it in terms of power relations and cultural practices. In the modern period, topographic and data maps have played a very important role in the constitution of nation-states and empires.

Topographic maps, which reduce the world to a single plane, provide an “ideal” space in which the modern territorial state and its colonialist policies draw straight lines: the former, drawing borders in an abstract way, the latter – railway lines and roads – to cross it and increase the speed at which goods are exchanged.

Whilst we continue to hold the same idea of territorial space, processes of globalisation have decreased spatial barriers. Moreover data on patterns of activity and planetary capitalist relations –capital flows, business concentrations and their geographical and political ramifications– are so abundant that we are lost in a mire of information. We experience complex perceptions. Immersed in world markets for material goods, messages and migrants, we need to delimit and define the singularity of the territory we inhabit. The states need them in order to express a distinctive cultural value, and we, in order to feel and construct our own identity.

Through critique of the geographic discourse, some artists question the existing political and social order. Others attempt to make sense of the vast quantity of data on capital flows, power relations and political events, which are so difficult to understand, or organise diagrams and cartographies to make them visible.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Cartographies of the body

The body is our measure of the world. We use our bodies to perceive and delimit the space around us. We measure in feet and in palms, and we speak of celestial bodies or major arteries in the city.

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967.
Dorothee and Konrad Fischer Collection.

Throughout history, we can find countless examples of cartographic maps with human forms. The equivalence between the Earth and the body was developed socially in the eighteenth century as part of a new ideal for the representing the territory topographically. Romanticism, on the other hand, sought the echoes of its feelings and images of the self in sublime, disturbing nature. For the subject, the body-Earth equivalence is established by taking the body as part of the cosmic meaning of life.

 

Michael Druks, Druksland–Physical and Social, 15 January 1974, 11.30 am 1974 © Michael Druks. Photo: England & Co Gallery, London

In the twentieth century, the body-Earth fusion generated images of footprints in mud (Ana Mendieta), bodies marked on the map (Adriana Varejão) and traces of the body moving over the canvas (Yves Klein).

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Cartographies of experience and life

However, topographic cartography is always a drawing of a lifeless form that does not represent what moves and breathes, not the territory or city that is travelled over and experienced (Bas Jan Ader). When we move through the space, we break the fixed nature of the cartographic subject, which, by moving, awakens its emotions. Cartographies made by the body’s movement, as in dance (Loïe Fuller) or performance (Carolee Schneemann), draw evanescent maps of the space of representation in real time.

If we try to make a cartography of our life, having resource to memory, we will find a mixture of houses and cities, everyday occurrences and social events, fears and desires that fuse into an ethereal amalgam that resounds to the echoes of our relations. If we attempt to order this amalgam onto the linear time that governs the world or to draw it on a plane, we realise that the internal and external, personal and social limits that we establish to separate the human being from the world become porous or disappear altogether. In the maps that represent our lives there are no borders between what is perceived and what is felt, nor is there any distinction between social and personal territories.

That is why many artists infuse time lived into the spaces of common topographic maps (Grayson Perry, Zarina Hashmi, Guillermo Kuitca) or use ordinary postcards to record their everyday, repetitive movements (On Kawara). Other artists draw the landscapes of their inner journey in search of America (Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla) or create an internal cartography of desolation by filming the empty places of extermination in Uganda (Zarina Bhimji).

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Cartographies of the intangible

Discarded by European rationalism and classified as esoteric, astrology, mysticism and occultism, amongst others, have been  sidelined for centuries, consigned to limbo by official culture, along with everything else that exceeds the limits of space and time and cannot be demonstrated empirically.

According to the esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the goal of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something that exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. 

This section features cartographies that make intangible aspects visible. Here are structures whose dimensions are not always ascertained, and which map the vibrational, the suprasensitive, the multidimensional, the unconscious and dreams.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought: Conceptual cartographies 

When we draw conceptual maps or diagrams, we are seeking to give structure to unresolved questions and problems. We order our formulations by drawing a logical plan of relations, with points of intersection, nodes, empty fields, connections and disconnections. In this way, we are able to articulate our thought, giving it shape, form, and making it visible.

The relations between ideas or things appear more clearly because we establish a dynamic and indicate the forces of change that are established between them. This, in turn, enables us to understand the effect of one on the other. Whilst topographic cartography is static, these maps record changes and transformations.  Conceptual maps made using images (and whose mythical origins in the art world are found in Aby Warburg’s  Atlas Mnemosyne) are tools that enable us to conceive of reticular relations and to construct new models of orders and senses.

Kris Martin, Globo terráqueo, 2006.
Colección Teixeira de Freitas, Lisboa, Portugal.
Courtesy of Johann König, Berlin; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.
Photograph: Ludger Paffrath, Berlín

 

The appearance of technological networks greatly boosted diagrammatic and reticular thought. Internet has accentuated the production and dissemination of knowledge, and interaction enables us to create new personal and collective realities. Today, we use conceptual maps and diagrams as tools to help us understand the complex transformations that take place in the world around us. At a time of accelerated change, technological innovation, urban metamorphosis, social transformation and political conflicts, we need new maps that can help us to visualise this transformation.

Curator: Helena Tatay

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought. Organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation. The exhibition opened 25 July and is on view through 28 October 2012 at CaixaForum Barcelona (Av. de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 6-8).

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism – Exhibition at Aquavella Galleries, NYC

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through November 30, 2011

GEORGES BRAQUE: PIONEER OF MODERNISM, a retrospective of seminal paintings curated by Dieter Buchhart, is on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition include over forty major paintings and papiers collés by the artist, all on loan from prestigious international public and private collections. The exhibition marks the first major Braque retrospective in the United States since the Guggenheim Museum’s celebrated exhibition in 1988.

Best known as the co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso* and as the inventor of the papier collé technique, Georges Braque’s legacy is better understood in the context of his lasting influence on artists for the past century. “The purpose of this retrospective is to present the artist not only as the cocreator of Fauvism and Cubism but also as a profoundly passionate, progressive and influential painter all the years of his life, well beyond his early triumphs,” explained William Acquavella.

As a young man, Georges Braque was a leading member of the Fauves, together with Henri Matisse, André Dérain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, before being inspired by the structured compositions of Paul Cézanne. This adherence to structure would guide Braque for the remainder of his career, especially during his close six-year collaboration with Picasso.

Together, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented a new aesthetic by portraying their subjects from multiple vantage points. They created a new pictorial world in which an object was deconstructed and then reconstructed on the basis of geometric criteria. They used forms that resembled geometric cubes, leading art critic Louis Vauxcelles to assign the name “Cubism” to the new movement. Still lifes became Braque’s preferred vehicle for innovation, and he was celebrated for instilling the most everyday objects with a profound spirituality usually reserved for devotional painting. Georges Braque described his fascination with the genre, “A lemon and an orange side by side cease to be a lemon and an orange and become fruit. The mathematicians follow this law; so do we.” In addition to fruit, other familiar objects such as tobacco pouches and musical instruments became frequent sources of inspiration.

At seventy-nine, Georges Braque became the first living artist to be accorded a solo exhibition at The Louvre museum and was awarded state honors at his funeral in 1963. His work is held in the permanent collections of the world’s foremost museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Collection, London; The Albertina, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthaus Zurich; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; many of whom have loaned work for the exhibition.

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism, Exhibition catalogue, 2011
Photo © and Courtesy Acquavella Galleries, New York

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism is accompanied by a 160 page hardcover catalogue which will include essays by Dieter Buchhart, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Richard Shiff.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK, NY
www.acquavellagalleries.com

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 8, 2012