Sunday, August 19, 2007
Suites Alba Resort & Spa
Praia da Albandeira apto. 1025
Carvoeiro ~~ Algarve ~~ Portugal
www.suitesalbaresort.com
tel . 00351 282 380 700
Exposição de pintura . António Pessoa
Primavera e Verão
Parece que afinal de contas o artista consegue fazer prevalecer a sua vontade,dando-se a conhecer um pouco mais no seu próprio país.
Pois,vejamos se para a pintura tem demonstrado ter engenho e arte para dar e vender,faltava tirar a prova dos nove,se ainda assim António Pessoa conseguia convencer Vicente Fernández Lago,a decidir-se finalmente a divulgar de uma forma mais adequada,a sua obra em terras lusas.
O Sr.Fernández Lago,apesar da fama que tem de ser um homem teimoso e muito fiel aos seus caprichos,no que se refere a António Pessoa felizmente sempre parece fazer uma pausa na sua obstinada natureza,concedendo ao artista,por respeito,por hábito e também às vezes até por distração,essa cedência por influência de uma simpatia moral e vamos lá vêr,até mesmo pragmática.
E o resultado começa a estar à vista com três "long play"exposições simultâneas e outras que tantas já programadas para esta temporada
de Primavera-Verão na bela Galiza.
António Pessoa precocemente reformado,que é como quem diz,como se sabe,porém pelo menos na sua atitude e modelo de vida dá visiveis sinais de estar bem onde está, restringindo o seu circulo de amigos intimos ao minimo imprescindivel e desta forma preservando uma certa qualidade social,que não só o inspira e o enriquece espiritualmente,como o vai por assim dizer protegendo de más influências e de interferências
negativas.
Intrinsecamente desinteressado por questões mundanas como fama,dinheiro,compromissos sociais cerimoniosos e acima de tudo cada vez
mais insensível ao ritmo estupefaciente das grandes urbes,Home Studio-Antonio Pessoa reveste-se cada vez mais de uma atmosfera de trabalho plástico,silêncio e pensamento,estudo,análise politica e social,invenção,lazer e contemplação.
Esta exposição patente ao público todos os meses de Primavera e Verão adapata-se bastante ao critério estético e até climático de António
Pessoa,artista bastante habituado à atmosfera da Dolce Vita do sul da Peninsula desde a sua adolescência,apesar de ter vivido seis anos entre Londres e Amsterdam.
Ainda que Worlwide seja um projecto que lhe vai exigir ceder e abdicar do conforto semi-tropical no qual se encontra como um peixe dentro de água,para enfrentar-se à turbulência de cidades como Nova Iorque,Chicago,Los Angeles,Dallas e até mesmo em sua casa,Barcelona,facto que verdade seja dita para o artista consiste muito mais em sofrimento do que em prazer,António Pessoa faz o sacrificio e toma inteiramente a responsabilidade perante si mesmo e naturalmente perante os muitos colaboradores que dependem e vivem exclusivamente do e para o projecto.
Obviamente ainda sem certezas concretas é contudo muito possivel que o pintor português venha durante estes meses de Primavera e Verão
a marcar algumas vezes presença neste paraiso algarvio,obviamente dependendo também da sua voluminosa agenda.
Tendo sido sempre a sua região favorita em Portugal,onde o artista já viveu e passou longas temporadas desde a sua adolescência,o Algarve
continua a provocar-lhe essa sensação de bem-estar e êxtase o que muito provavelmente pode significar que de facto apareça por aí,quanto mais não seja para dar um ar da sua graça.
Sém dúvida que vale a pena se a alma não é pequena,pegar na familia,meter-se no Popó e vir até cá aos belos Algarves,claro está no Carvoeiro,
Suites Alba Resort & Spa,em jeito de férias e naturalmente com os sentidos apurados para visualizar uma das colecções hoje em dia,mais representativas das artes plásticas portuguesas.
Veronica Amaral
Praia da Albandeira apto. 1025
Carvoeiro ~~ Algarve ~~ Portugal
www.suitesalbaresort.com
tel . 00351 282 380 700
Exposição de pintura . António Pessoa
Primavera e Verão
Parece que afinal de contas o artista consegue fazer prevalecer a sua vontade,dando-se a conhecer um pouco mais no seu próprio país.
Pois,vejamos se para a pintura tem demonstrado ter engenho e arte para dar e vender,faltava tirar a prova dos nove,se ainda assim António Pessoa conseguia convencer Vicente Fernández Lago,a decidir-se finalmente a divulgar de uma forma mais adequada,a sua obra em terras lusas.
O Sr.Fernández Lago,apesar da fama que tem de ser um homem teimoso e muito fiel aos seus caprichos,no que se refere a António Pessoa felizmente sempre parece fazer uma pausa na sua obstinada natureza,concedendo ao artista,por respeito,por hábito e também às vezes até por distração,essa cedência por influência de uma simpatia moral e vamos lá vêr,até mesmo pragmática.
E o resultado começa a estar à vista com três "long play"exposições simultâneas e outras que tantas já programadas para esta temporada
de Primavera-Verão na bela Galiza.
António Pessoa precocemente reformado,que é como quem diz,como se sabe,porém pelo menos na sua atitude e modelo de vida dá visiveis sinais de estar bem onde está, restringindo o seu circulo de amigos intimos ao minimo imprescindivel e desta forma preservando uma certa qualidade social,que não só o inspira e o enriquece espiritualmente,como o vai por assim dizer protegendo de más influências e de interferências
negativas.
Intrinsecamente desinteressado por questões mundanas como fama,dinheiro,compromissos sociais cerimoniosos e acima de tudo cada vez
mais insensível ao ritmo estupefaciente das grandes urbes,Home Studio-Antonio Pessoa reveste-se cada vez mais de uma atmosfera de trabalho plástico,silêncio e pensamento,estudo,análise politica e social,invenção,lazer e contemplação.
Esta exposição patente ao público todos os meses de Primavera e Verão adapata-se bastante ao critério estético e até climático de António
Pessoa,artista bastante habituado à atmosfera da Dolce Vita do sul da Peninsula desde a sua adolescência,apesar de ter vivido seis anos entre Londres e Amsterdam.
Ainda que Worlwide seja um projecto que lhe vai exigir ceder e abdicar do conforto semi-tropical no qual se encontra como um peixe dentro de água,para enfrentar-se à turbulência de cidades como Nova Iorque,Chicago,Los Angeles,Dallas e até mesmo em sua casa,Barcelona,facto que verdade seja dita para o artista consiste muito mais em sofrimento do que em prazer,António Pessoa faz o sacrificio e toma inteiramente a responsabilidade perante si mesmo e naturalmente perante os muitos colaboradores que dependem e vivem exclusivamente do e para o projecto.
Obviamente ainda sem certezas concretas é contudo muito possivel que o pintor português venha durante estes meses de Primavera e Verão
a marcar algumas vezes presença neste paraiso algarvio,obviamente dependendo também da sua voluminosa agenda.
Tendo sido sempre a sua região favorita em Portugal,onde o artista já viveu e passou longas temporadas desde a sua adolescência,o Algarve
continua a provocar-lhe essa sensação de bem-estar e êxtase o que muito provavelmente pode significar que de facto apareça por aí,quanto mais não seja para dar um ar da sua graça.
Sém dúvida que vale a pena se a alma não é pequena,pegar na familia,meter-se no Popó e vir até cá aos belos Algarves,claro está no Carvoeiro,
Suites Alba Resort & Spa,em jeito de férias e naturalmente com os sentidos apurados para visualizar uma das colecções hoje em dia,mais representativas das artes plásticas portuguesas.
Veronica Amaral
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Anselm Kiefer
“I’m interested in reconstructing symbols. It’s about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.” Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth
June 21–September 9, 2006
For more than thirty-five years, Anselm Kiefer has considered fundamental questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos, undertaking a visual exploration of the concept of spirituality and the relationship between heaven and earth. The son of an art educator, Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany, in 1945, during the final months of World War II. In 1965, Kiefer began to study law, not because he felt a great desire to become a lawyer, but because he was fascinated by the more philosophical and spiritual aspects of law. As part of his quest to “think quietly about the larger questions,” he spent three weeks at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette, in France. This visit was a turning point for Kiefer, who decided to abandon his law studies and pursue his interest in art. He enrolled at the university at Freiburg and later studied informally in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), whose use of unusual materials, allusions to history, mythology, religion, and art, and direct response in his imagery to the Holocaust would become important facets of the younger artist’s work.
Kiefer’s art can be called labyrinthine or maze-like due to the complexity and layering of his references, symbols, and images, which intertwine such diverse sources as treatises on alchemy; Nordic, Greek, Egyptian, and early Christian mythology; and mystical Jewish texts. The artist often creates apocalyptic visions, as in the ominous Jerusalem, 1985 (at left), and the euphoric Isaac, 2005. Heaven and earth. Hope and skepticism. Creation and destruction. These apparent opposites lie at the core of Kiefer’s work, which consistently delves into these dualities and suggests the ways in which they overlap and merge with one another.
This sense of layering is essential to an understanding of Kiefer’s art as a whole. While individual pieces are powerful in themselves, viewing an array of works conveys the depth and complexity of their interrelationships, as well as the extent of the artist’s innovation. Kiefer has never limited himself to one medium, and his groundbreaking approaches to painting and sculpture are equaled by his assertion of the book as a visual art form. His materials, a blend of traditional media and natural elements including clay, earth, ash, and dried plants, as well as his signature lead, not only evoke the potential and limitations of transformation, but are often as symbolically charged as his imagery.
The land itself, whether barren or wooded, has played a central role in Kiefer’s work. Landscapes, including Winter Landscape, 1970 (at left), The Book, 1979–85, and The Hierarchy of Angels, 1985–87, offer explorations of the connections between the seemingly desolate earth battered by human history and the heavenly realm. Wooded scenes, which in paintings like Man in the Forest, 1971, appear set within a forest primeval, suggest ancient narratives like the Norse legend of the Yggdrasil, in which the universe is envisioned as a sprawling evergreen. Equally, Kiefer’s trees allude to the Judeo-Christian Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the biblical Garden of Eden and the Jewish Tree of Life, as well as pre-Christian traditions of nature-based medicinal magic. The artist represents himself in many of these paintings, either as the sole figure in a landscape or symbolically as a palette linking the earth and sky. In the case of Resurrexit, 1973, his presence is implied by the stairs at the top of the image that lead to an unseen realm, perhaps heaven or merely the attic room in the Oden Forest that Kiefer used as his studio in the 1970s.
Symbolically complex works like Quaternity, 1973 (at left), present even more challenging metaphors of spirituality. Set in the wooden interior of Kiefer’s studio, three fires are labeled as Vater (Father), Sohn (Son), and hl. Geist (Holy Ghost): the Christian Trinity. Yet here there are four earthbound elements (the title of the work derives from the Latin root word for four) that comprise this heavenly order. The interpretation is further complicated by the fact that the fourth element is a serpent, clearly labeled Satan, that emerges from the shadows and is connected to the flames by visible lines. The artist repeatedly uses fire as a potent symbol of the link between heaven and earth—fire exists in the sky (in the form of lightening and stars) and on land, made by humans. It is a double-edged presence that is a source of light (knowledge) but also a potential destructive force.
The stars themselves are an important symbol in paintings such as Star Fall, 2004, Voyage to the End of Night, 2004, and the enormous book The Secret Life of Plants, 2001 (at left). Many of these works, with their named stars or patterns recalling the outlines of constellations, resemble the astronomical charts that have recently become of interest to the artist. Although it may seem ironic that a monumental book titled The Secret Life of Plants would contain fields of stars instead of botanical studies, for Kiefer both the heavens and plants represent earth’s beginnings and the eternal process of transformation—from creation to destruction to regeneration—that is crucial to all of his work. This play of word and image occurs repeatedly; thus The Milky Way, 1985–87, rather than offering an expansive view of the galaxy is dominated by a vast, charred landscape with a gash at its center labeled die Milchstrasse (the Milky Way) and a funnel with tendrils that connect it to the sky.
Kiefer’s focus on star charts is also a means of looking back to a time when the night sky evoked the possibility of a mysterious heavenly realm and planets were strange messengers that suggested our beginnings. His representations of the seven heavenly palaces and the merkaba (or merkawa)—both from the ancient Hebrew book the Sefer Hechaloth, which describes the journey from earth in a chariot (merkaba or merkawa) through seven heavenly palaces to the final palace revealing God—are equally a part of the artist’s continued exploration and relation of ancient to modern. As he has said, the “palaces of heaven are still a mystery. . . I am making my own investigation.”
Deborah Horowitz, based on texts by Michael Auping from the exhibition catalogue
The exhibition is organized by Michael Auping, chief curator of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, whose association with Kiefer dates back almost two decades. The presentation at the Hirshhorn is coordinated by curator Valerie Fletcher.
Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher in 1966. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys's interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany's contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. In this same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer's work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno's declaration: �"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973, Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh's representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist's mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer's work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm (1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist's continued preoccupation with his homeland�s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art's redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer's interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete (1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer's preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer's official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer's ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock's drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer�s recent work. The pages of his artist�s book The Secret Life of Plants (1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sewon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), and Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001). He lives and works in Barjac, France.
“I’m interested in reconstructing symbols. It’s about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.” Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth
June 21–September 9, 2006
For more than thirty-five years, Anselm Kiefer has considered fundamental questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos, undertaking a visual exploration of the concept of spirituality and the relationship between heaven and earth. The son of an art educator, Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany, in 1945, during the final months of World War II. In 1965, Kiefer began to study law, not because he felt a great desire to become a lawyer, but because he was fascinated by the more philosophical and spiritual aspects of law. As part of his quest to “think quietly about the larger questions,” he spent three weeks at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette, in France. This visit was a turning point for Kiefer, who decided to abandon his law studies and pursue his interest in art. He enrolled at the university at Freiburg and later studied informally in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), whose use of unusual materials, allusions to history, mythology, religion, and art, and direct response in his imagery to the Holocaust would become important facets of the younger artist’s work.
Kiefer’s art can be called labyrinthine or maze-like due to the complexity and layering of his references, symbols, and images, which intertwine such diverse sources as treatises on alchemy; Nordic, Greek, Egyptian, and early Christian mythology; and mystical Jewish texts. The artist often creates apocalyptic visions, as in the ominous Jerusalem, 1985 (at left), and the euphoric Isaac, 2005. Heaven and earth. Hope and skepticism. Creation and destruction. These apparent opposites lie at the core of Kiefer’s work, which consistently delves into these dualities and suggests the ways in which they overlap and merge with one another.
This sense of layering is essential to an understanding of Kiefer’s art as a whole. While individual pieces are powerful in themselves, viewing an array of works conveys the depth and complexity of their interrelationships, as well as the extent of the artist’s innovation. Kiefer has never limited himself to one medium, and his groundbreaking approaches to painting and sculpture are equaled by his assertion of the book as a visual art form. His materials, a blend of traditional media and natural elements including clay, earth, ash, and dried plants, as well as his signature lead, not only evoke the potential and limitations of transformation, but are often as symbolically charged as his imagery.
The land itself, whether barren or wooded, has played a central role in Kiefer’s work. Landscapes, including Winter Landscape, 1970 (at left), The Book, 1979–85, and The Hierarchy of Angels, 1985–87, offer explorations of the connections between the seemingly desolate earth battered by human history and the heavenly realm. Wooded scenes, which in paintings like Man in the Forest, 1971, appear set within a forest primeval, suggest ancient narratives like the Norse legend of the Yggdrasil, in which the universe is envisioned as a sprawling evergreen. Equally, Kiefer’s trees allude to the Judeo-Christian Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the biblical Garden of Eden and the Jewish Tree of Life, as well as pre-Christian traditions of nature-based medicinal magic. The artist represents himself in many of these paintings, either as the sole figure in a landscape or symbolically as a palette linking the earth and sky. In the case of Resurrexit, 1973, his presence is implied by the stairs at the top of the image that lead to an unseen realm, perhaps heaven or merely the attic room in the Oden Forest that Kiefer used as his studio in the 1970s.
Symbolically complex works like Quaternity, 1973 (at left), present even more challenging metaphors of spirituality. Set in the wooden interior of Kiefer’s studio, three fires are labeled as Vater (Father), Sohn (Son), and hl. Geist (Holy Ghost): the Christian Trinity. Yet here there are four earthbound elements (the title of the work derives from the Latin root word for four) that comprise this heavenly order. The interpretation is further complicated by the fact that the fourth element is a serpent, clearly labeled Satan, that emerges from the shadows and is connected to the flames by visible lines. The artist repeatedly uses fire as a potent symbol of the link between heaven and earth—fire exists in the sky (in the form of lightening and stars) and on land, made by humans. It is a double-edged presence that is a source of light (knowledge) but also a potential destructive force.
The stars themselves are an important symbol in paintings such as Star Fall, 2004, Voyage to the End of Night, 2004, and the enormous book The Secret Life of Plants, 2001 (at left). Many of these works, with their named stars or patterns recalling the outlines of constellations, resemble the astronomical charts that have recently become of interest to the artist. Although it may seem ironic that a monumental book titled The Secret Life of Plants would contain fields of stars instead of botanical studies, for Kiefer both the heavens and plants represent earth’s beginnings and the eternal process of transformation—from creation to destruction to regeneration—that is crucial to all of his work. This play of word and image occurs repeatedly; thus The Milky Way, 1985–87, rather than offering an expansive view of the galaxy is dominated by a vast, charred landscape with a gash at its center labeled die Milchstrasse (the Milky Way) and a funnel with tendrils that connect it to the sky.
Kiefer’s focus on star charts is also a means of looking back to a time when the night sky evoked the possibility of a mysterious heavenly realm and planets were strange messengers that suggested our beginnings. His representations of the seven heavenly palaces and the merkaba (or merkawa)—both from the ancient Hebrew book the Sefer Hechaloth, which describes the journey from earth in a chariot (merkaba or merkawa) through seven heavenly palaces to the final palace revealing God—are equally a part of the artist’s continued exploration and relation of ancient to modern. As he has said, the “palaces of heaven are still a mystery. . . I am making my own investigation.”
Deborah Horowitz, based on texts by Michael Auping from the exhibition catalogue
The exhibition is organized by Michael Auping, chief curator of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, whose association with Kiefer dates back almost two decades. The presentation at the Hirshhorn is coordinated by curator Valerie Fletcher.
Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher in 1966. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys's interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany's contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. In this same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer's work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno's declaration: �"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973, Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh's representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist's mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer's work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm (1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist's continued preoccupation with his homeland�s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art's redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer's interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete (1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer's preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer's official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer's ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock's drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer�s recent work. The pages of his artist�s book The Secret Life of Plants (1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sewon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), and Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001). He lives and works in Barjac, France.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
ARCO rechaza a la galeria Félix Gómez
El comité de la Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid (Arco) no ha admitido para la próxima edición a la galería Félix Gómez de Sevilla porque su stand en la última edición "no ha obtenido los puntos suficientes", según explicó la directora de Arco, Rosina Gómez Baeza, al galerista. Con esta negativa, la presencia andaluza en el certamen se reduce a seis galerías: Juana de Aizpuru, Rafael Ortiz, Cavecanem, las tres de Sevilla; Magda Bellotti, de Algeciras; Carmen de la Calle, de Jerez, y Fernando Serrano, de Moguer (Huelva).
"Es como si hubiesen formado un consejo de guerra en el que sólo puedes esperar que te fusilen. El comité de Arco es algo muy frío, si no llevas propuestas radicales no estas bien visto a los ojos de Dios. No tienen en cuenta el trabajo de todo el año que haces en la galería", afirma Félix Gómez, quien participa desde hace seis ediciones en la feria madrileña, la más importante de cuantas se celebran en España."No sólo no admiten a dos galerías andaluzas que tienen méritos suficientes para entrar en la feria, sino que echan a Félix Gómez, un profesional que participa en Arco desde hace tiempo y mantiene abiertos dos espacios", se queja Magda Bellotti, presidenta de la Asociación de Galerías Andaluzas de Arte Contemporáneo (Agaac).
"Nos sentimos desolados por el escaso reconocimiento a la labor que desarrollamos en Andalucía para elevar el nivel cultural, abrir mercado y promocionar a nuestros artistas", ha escrito Bellotti en una carta dirigida a Rosina Gómez Baeza que envió a finales de noviembre y a la que aún no ha tenido respuesta.
Reconsideración
"Hemos pedido al comité que reconsidere su decisión, ya que la salida de Félix Gómez agrava la difícil situación de Andalucía en la feria. Si en el comité no hay nadie que conozca el trabajo que realizamos en Andalucía, como ocurre actualmente, no pueden valorar con rigor", añade la presidenta de la asociación andaluza que reúne 18 galerías de arte contemporáneo.
"Yo siempre he querido representar a Sevilla en Arco, pero lo que le gusta al comité son las galerías que participan en ferias internacionales. La mayoría van perdiendo dinero, pero yo no tengo dinero para eso, subsistimos de milagro", asegura Félix Gómez que trabaja con artistas de prestigio como Manuel Salinas, Félix de Cádernas, María Gómez, Juan Maestre o Carlos Montaño.
El comité de la Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid (Arco) no ha admitido para la próxima edición a la galería Félix Gómez de Sevilla porque su stand en la última edición "no ha obtenido los puntos suficientes", según explicó la directora de Arco, Rosina Gómez Baeza, al galerista. Con esta negativa, la presencia andaluza en el certamen se reduce a seis galerías: Juana de Aizpuru, Rafael Ortiz, Cavecanem, las tres de Sevilla; Magda Bellotti, de Algeciras; Carmen de la Calle, de Jerez, y Fernando Serrano, de Moguer (Huelva).
"Es como si hubiesen formado un consejo de guerra en el que sólo puedes esperar que te fusilen. El comité de Arco es algo muy frío, si no llevas propuestas radicales no estas bien visto a los ojos de Dios. No tienen en cuenta el trabajo de todo el año que haces en la galería", afirma Félix Gómez, quien participa desde hace seis ediciones en la feria madrileña, la más importante de cuantas se celebran en España."No sólo no admiten a dos galerías andaluzas que tienen méritos suficientes para entrar en la feria, sino que echan a Félix Gómez, un profesional que participa en Arco desde hace tiempo y mantiene abiertos dos espacios", se queja Magda Bellotti, presidenta de la Asociación de Galerías Andaluzas de Arte Contemporáneo (Agaac).
"Nos sentimos desolados por el escaso reconocimiento a la labor que desarrollamos en Andalucía para elevar el nivel cultural, abrir mercado y promocionar a nuestros artistas", ha escrito Bellotti en una carta dirigida a Rosina Gómez Baeza que envió a finales de noviembre y a la que aún no ha tenido respuesta.
Reconsideración
"Hemos pedido al comité que reconsidere su decisión, ya que la salida de Félix Gómez agrava la difícil situación de Andalucía en la feria. Si en el comité no hay nadie que conozca el trabajo que realizamos en Andalucía, como ocurre actualmente, no pueden valorar con rigor", añade la presidenta de la asociación andaluza que reúne 18 galerías de arte contemporáneo.
"Yo siempre he querido representar a Sevilla en Arco, pero lo que le gusta al comité son las galerías que participan en ferias internacionales. La mayoría van perdiendo dinero, pero yo no tengo dinero para eso, subsistimos de milagro", asegura Félix Gómez que trabaja con artistas de prestigio como Manuel Salinas, Félix de Cádernas, María Gómez, Juan Maestre o Carlos Montaño.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery
The World Is YoursCurated by Liz Jonckheer
July 19 – August 17, 2007Opening Reception: Thursday July 19, 6-8pm
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring the work of five artists: Jonathan Allen, David Brooks, Luke Butler, Rä di Martino and KB Jones. The World Is Yours suggests that the world is what you make of it, and points to the artists’ creation of their own language.
Jonathan Allen's paintings and works on paper recycle pop imagery, abstraction, political iconography, and the mundane to evoke his eccentric vision. His surreal dreamscapes often examine the bizarre contradiction, and absurdities, of today's cultural and political climate. Allen weaves together a variety of media and techniques; oil/acrylic paint, pen/ink rendering, pencil, pastel, and collage elements to create seamlessly relevant works of art.
David Brooks’ work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. The fact that the world is comprised of countless ecosystems and innumerable autonomous relationships within them inspires Brooks in his attempt to define and map the individual within the “seemingly endless environment of now”. The whole is implied by the parts – and in Brooks’ case, the parts are the medium of his sculptures.
Luke Butler toys with contemporary mythology. To him, “The End” is a classical figure that looms in our consciousness despite our ability to see right through it. As a static image floating in a frame it seems contradictory, absurd, and poignant – an anti-picture. He also suspects that ubiquitous, overpowering figures like the Presidents of the United States must also be little human men, vulnerable characters whose preoccupations could look a lot like his, and maybe even yours.
Rä di Martino is interested in the relationship between our intimate sphere, memory, subconscious and the fictions we create around ourselves. Her most recent film, The Red Shoes, recalls a story and resembles something - a hazy memory or dream - from somewhere – déjà vu, perhaps. The Red Shoes can be read as found footage and a sort of day dream, (the film was shot ‘day for night') and while the title and scene are familiar, the viewing experience is more than what it seems.
KB Jones’ subject matter is drawn from images of her childhood in Africa, and her life today in Brooklyn, and speaks to the powers of association and suggestion. Her paintings manage to be both familiar and enigmatic at the same time. She has developed her own visual vocabulary which subtly communicates itself to the viewer – figures emerge from textures, only to dissolve into the surface of the picture plane, once again.
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is located at 621 West 27th Street on the ground floor. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday from 11am-6pm. For further information or images please contact the gallery at 212-255-0979 or visit our website at www.oliverkamm.com.
The World Is YoursCurated by Liz Jonckheer
July 19 – August 17, 2007Opening Reception: Thursday July 19, 6-8pm
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring the work of five artists: Jonathan Allen, David Brooks, Luke Butler, Rä di Martino and KB Jones. The World Is Yours suggests that the world is what you make of it, and points to the artists’ creation of their own language.
Jonathan Allen's paintings and works on paper recycle pop imagery, abstraction, political iconography, and the mundane to evoke his eccentric vision. His surreal dreamscapes often examine the bizarre contradiction, and absurdities, of today's cultural and political climate. Allen weaves together a variety of media and techniques; oil/acrylic paint, pen/ink rendering, pencil, pastel, and collage elements to create seamlessly relevant works of art.
David Brooks’ work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. The fact that the world is comprised of countless ecosystems and innumerable autonomous relationships within them inspires Brooks in his attempt to define and map the individual within the “seemingly endless environment of now”. The whole is implied by the parts – and in Brooks’ case, the parts are the medium of his sculptures.
Luke Butler toys with contemporary mythology. To him, “The End” is a classical figure that looms in our consciousness despite our ability to see right through it. As a static image floating in a frame it seems contradictory, absurd, and poignant – an anti-picture. He also suspects that ubiquitous, overpowering figures like the Presidents of the United States must also be little human men, vulnerable characters whose preoccupations could look a lot like his, and maybe even yours.
Rä di Martino is interested in the relationship between our intimate sphere, memory, subconscious and the fictions we create around ourselves. Her most recent film, The Red Shoes, recalls a story and resembles something - a hazy memory or dream - from somewhere – déjà vu, perhaps. The Red Shoes can be read as found footage and a sort of day dream, (the film was shot ‘day for night') and while the title and scene are familiar, the viewing experience is more than what it seems.
KB Jones’ subject matter is drawn from images of her childhood in Africa, and her life today in Brooklyn, and speaks to the powers of association and suggestion. Her paintings manage to be both familiar and enigmatic at the same time. She has developed her own visual vocabulary which subtly communicates itself to the viewer – figures emerge from textures, only to dissolve into the surface of the picture plane, once again.
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is located at 621 West 27th Street on the ground floor. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday from 11am-6pm. For further information or images please contact the gallery at 212-255-0979 or visit our website at www.oliverkamm.com.
Graham Caldwell
GRAHAM CALDWELL
Graham Caldwell (b. 1973, Washington, D.C.) studied glass making at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (BFA 1998); the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine (1998); The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York (1998); Umeleckprumyslova (School of Applied Arts) in Prague, Czech Republic; Pilchuk Glass School, Stanwood, Washington (1997); and Parsons School of Design, New York City (1992-1995). After completing his studies, Caldwell returned to live and work in Washington, D.C., where his sculptural installations have been on view at Addison/Ripley Fine Art (2003); the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2003); the Millennium Art Center (2001); and the Octagon Museum of the American Architectural Association (2001).
"I am interested in the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, as is exemplified by the joints of skeletons, the bifurcations of plants, or the veinwork of the electrical grid. Joints between parts are important events within individual works, and the concept of connection and interdependence is a central theme. The connections often involve lines which open into volumes or congeal into droplets. My sculptures embody the fluidity of glass and its ability to amass light. The parts are purposefully joined together to structure the amorphousness of their arrangement, and to fasten them to their own weightlessness. They are simultaneously invisible and visible. I am looking for the bones of the invisible."
Graham CaldwellElizabeth's Tears (detail), 2002Glass, steel, water and wood96 x 612 x 42 in. (243.8 x 1554.5 x 106.7 cm) overall Graham CaldwellAquifer, 2003Glass, steel, concrete and water96 x 26 x 22 in. (243.8 x 66 x 55.9 cm) Graham CaldwellEntanglement, 1999Solid and blown glass58 x 44 x 12 in. (147.3 x 111.8 x 30.5 cm) Graham CaldwellSelf Propagating Trap, 1998 Solid glass86 x 54 x 16 in. (218.4 x 137.2 x 40.6 cm) Graham CaldwellUntitled, 2003Solid glass and steel9 x 16 x 6 in. (22.9 x 40.6 x 15.2) Graham CaldwellExtended Conjoined Ring, 2003Blown glass and steel13 x 19 x 4 in. (33 x 48.3 x 10.2 cm)
Graham Caldwell (b. 1973, Washington, D.C.) studied glass making at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (BFA 1998); the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine (1998); The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York (1998); Umeleckprumyslova (School of Applied Arts) in Prague, Czech Republic; Pilchuk Glass School, Stanwood, Washington (1997); and Parsons School of Design, New York City (1992-1995). After completing his studies, Caldwell returned to live and work in Washington, D.C., where his sculptural installations have been on view at Addison/Ripley Fine Art (2003); the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2003); the Millennium Art Center (2001); and the Octagon Museum of the American Architectural Association (2001).
"I am interested in the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, as is exemplified by the joints of skeletons, the bifurcations of plants, or the veinwork of the electrical grid. Joints between parts are important events within individual works, and the concept of connection and interdependence is a central theme. The connections often involve lines which open into volumes or congeal into droplets. My sculptures embody the fluidity of glass and its ability to amass light. The parts are purposefully joined together to structure the amorphousness of their arrangement, and to fasten them to their own weightlessness. They are simultaneously invisible and visible. I am looking for the bones of the invisible."
Graham CaldwellElizabeth's Tears (detail), 2002Glass, steel, water and wood96 x 612 x 42 in. (243.8 x 1554.5 x 106.7 cm) overall Graham CaldwellAquifer, 2003Glass, steel, concrete and water96 x 26 x 22 in. (243.8 x 66 x 55.9 cm) Graham CaldwellEntanglement, 1999Solid and blown glass58 x 44 x 12 in. (147.3 x 111.8 x 30.5 cm) Graham CaldwellSelf Propagating Trap, 1998 Solid glass86 x 54 x 16 in. (218.4 x 137.2 x 40.6 cm) Graham CaldwellUntitled, 2003Solid glass and steel9 x 16 x 6 in. (22.9 x 40.6 x 15.2) Graham CaldwellExtended Conjoined Ring, 2003Blown glass and steel13 x 19 x 4 in. (33 x 48.3 x 10.2 cm)
Saturday, July 21, 2007
BANK-ART. Los Angeles,CA
Bank
www.bank-art.com
Los Angeles,CA
GRAHAM CALDWELL : Dark Field View
The nature of optics, and the act of seeing is a common thread in the glass sculptures of Graham Caldwell’s solo debut at Bank. Dark Field View refers to the method of lighting microscope slides to better see the transparent, glasslike micro animals. Once their edges create a ghostly while border against a dark background, a way is provided to look at these organisms, a method to explore what is nearby and all around - like a drop of water teeming with strange life.
Attracted to the more visceral and water like qualities of glass, Caldwell’s structures cluster organic shapes that appear to melt or drip from the wall. Repetition of shapes, reflection and magnification permeate the work. Caldwell starts by creating his pieces in a glass blowing studio, employing ancient glass making techniques. He makes his glass creations first; the blobs, wands and tusks, before adding steel structures that serve to mount the work.
In pieces such as Flagella, long sinewy arms reach toward the viewer with a delicate hook at their end, cradling a strand or rope of glass, much like water that had been flowing and has now somehow been instantly frozen and made permanent.
For Proprioceptor, a large surveillance like piece,Caldwell has assembled about 40 circular mirrors, attached to hinged brackets that twist and turn in all directions. The intention is to overwhelm the viewer with images; a distorted and multifaceted nature of looking, and the oppressiveness of being watched and monitored.
Graham Caldwell is a Washington DC based artist working primarily with glass. He has exhibited with Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Octagon Museum (the oldest museum in the US dedicated to design and architecture) and Moca Washington, DC. Caldwell’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Artnet, Sculpture Magazine and the Washington Post. This is Caldwell’s west coast debut.
www.bank-art.com
Los Angeles,CA
GRAHAM CALDWELL : Dark Field View
The nature of optics, and the act of seeing is a common thread in the glass sculptures of Graham Caldwell’s solo debut at Bank. Dark Field View refers to the method of lighting microscope slides to better see the transparent, glasslike micro animals. Once their edges create a ghostly while border against a dark background, a way is provided to look at these organisms, a method to explore what is nearby and all around - like a drop of water teeming with strange life.
Attracted to the more visceral and water like qualities of glass, Caldwell’s structures cluster organic shapes that appear to melt or drip from the wall. Repetition of shapes, reflection and magnification permeate the work. Caldwell starts by creating his pieces in a glass blowing studio, employing ancient glass making techniques. He makes his glass creations first; the blobs, wands and tusks, before adding steel structures that serve to mount the work.
In pieces such as Flagella, long sinewy arms reach toward the viewer with a delicate hook at their end, cradling a strand or rope of glass, much like water that had been flowing and has now somehow been instantly frozen and made permanent.
For Proprioceptor, a large surveillance like piece,Caldwell has assembled about 40 circular mirrors, attached to hinged brackets that twist and turn in all directions. The intention is to overwhelm the viewer with images; a distorted and multifaceted nature of looking, and the oppressiveness of being watched and monitored.
Graham Caldwell is a Washington DC based artist working primarily with glass. He has exhibited with Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Octagon Museum (the oldest museum in the US dedicated to design and architecture) and Moca Washington, DC. Caldwell’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Artnet, Sculpture Magazine and the Washington Post. This is Caldwell’s west coast debut.
Arndt-Partner-Berlin,de
Arndt-Partner
www.arndt-partner.de
Facing the challenge of a continuously developing art scene, Arndt & Partner emphasizes a program free of trends or (formal) standards. The discovery of emerging Berlin artists and the formation of an international program with artists who often have not yet exhibited in Berlin nor Germany, have become the cornerstones of the gallery profile. Parallel to the solo presentation of emerging and established artistic positions, thematic group exhibitions also shape the profile of the gallery.
In 2006, at a time in which commercial galleries are increasingly confronted with growing responsibilities in the field of artistic production and exhibition-making, Arndt & Partner decided to expand and open an additional space right above the main 360sqm Gallery 1st Floor. The 400 sqm Gallery 2nd Floor allows for large-scale, complex and museum-like installations . Along with this spatial expansion, the gallery's artistic program has been redefined and condensed.
Participating at important international art fairs, Arndt & Partner has developed an international network operating from Berlin which is further broadened by its branch in Zurich. Our Swiss gallery shows works by gallery artists which are not yet represented in Switzerland and initiate an extended forum to younger, especially Swiss positions. Furthermore, we opened our New York City office with an project space in 2007.
Please refer to our website for further information or ask for our gallery magazine Checkpoint, which will inform you about the activities of Arndt & Partner, Berlin, New York and Zurich.
Exhibition Program Berlin 2007:
Gallery 1st Floor: Thomas Hirschhorn, Stand-alone, April 28 - July 7Dennis Scholl, für immer faltung im zimmer der tränen, July 17- September 22 (opening July 14) Veronika Brovall, Wurzel-Füllung, July 17- September 22 (opening July 14) Wang Du, October 2 - November 24 (opening September 29)Wei Dong, November 20 - January 12, 2008 (opening November 17)
Gallery 2nd Floor: Franz West, April 3 - May 5The Aggression of Beauty II: Muntean/Rosenblum, Joe Coleman, Wim Delvoye, Natalie Frank, Keith Tyson among others, May 22 - June 17Sweet Bird of Youth, curated by Hedi Slimane, June 26 - August 31 (opening June 23) Aya Uekawa, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1) Sue de Beer, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1) Shi Xinning, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1)Jon Kessler, October 30 - november 24 (opening October 27)
Exhibition Program Zurich 2007:
Karsten Konrad, March 16 - April 21Conceptual Paper: Artschwager, Acconci, Burden, Hadid, Hujar, Kusama, Oppenheim, Thek, Pope.L, April 27- June 3William Cordova, Pachacuti (Stand up next to a mountain), June 11 - July 21Marcus Knupp, August 28 - September 29 (opening August 25) Alexej Meschtschanow, October 5 - November 10 (opening October 4)
www.arndt-partner.de
Facing the challenge of a continuously developing art scene, Arndt & Partner emphasizes a program free of trends or (formal) standards. The discovery of emerging Berlin artists and the formation of an international program with artists who often have not yet exhibited in Berlin nor Germany, have become the cornerstones of the gallery profile. Parallel to the solo presentation of emerging and established artistic positions, thematic group exhibitions also shape the profile of the gallery.
In 2006, at a time in which commercial galleries are increasingly confronted with growing responsibilities in the field of artistic production and exhibition-making, Arndt & Partner decided to expand and open an additional space right above the main 360sqm Gallery 1st Floor. The 400 sqm Gallery 2nd Floor allows for large-scale, complex and museum-like installations . Along with this spatial expansion, the gallery's artistic program has been redefined and condensed.
Participating at important international art fairs, Arndt & Partner has developed an international network operating from Berlin which is further broadened by its branch in Zurich. Our Swiss gallery shows works by gallery artists which are not yet represented in Switzerland and initiate an extended forum to younger, especially Swiss positions. Furthermore, we opened our New York City office with an project space in 2007.
Please refer to our website for further information or ask for our gallery magazine Checkpoint, which will inform you about the activities of Arndt & Partner, Berlin, New York and Zurich.
Exhibition Program Berlin 2007:
Gallery 1st Floor: Thomas Hirschhorn, Stand-alone, April 28 - July 7Dennis Scholl, für immer faltung im zimmer der tränen, July 17- September 22 (opening July 14) Veronika Brovall, Wurzel-Füllung, July 17- September 22 (opening July 14) Wang Du, October 2 - November 24 (opening September 29)Wei Dong, November 20 - January 12, 2008 (opening November 17)
Gallery 2nd Floor: Franz West, April 3 - May 5The Aggression of Beauty II: Muntean/Rosenblum, Joe Coleman, Wim Delvoye, Natalie Frank, Keith Tyson among others, May 22 - June 17Sweet Bird of Youth, curated by Hedi Slimane, June 26 - August 31 (opening June 23) Aya Uekawa, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1) Sue de Beer, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1) Shi Xinning, September 4 - October 20 (opening September 1)Jon Kessler, October 30 - november 24 (opening October 27)
Exhibition Program Zurich 2007:
Karsten Konrad, March 16 - April 21Conceptual Paper: Artschwager, Acconci, Burden, Hadid, Hujar, Kusama, Oppenheim, Thek, Pope.L, April 27- June 3William Cordova, Pachacuti (Stand up next to a mountain), June 11 - July 21Marcus Knupp, August 28 - September 29 (opening August 25) Alexej Meschtschanow, October 5 - November 10 (opening October 4)
Friday, July 20, 2007
Galeria Magda Bellotti
Galeria Magda Bellotti
Madrid,Spain
www.magdabellotti.com
La Galería Magda Bellotti se funda en Algeciras (Cádiz) en 1982; en 2001 se traslada a Madrid, donde abre nuevo espacio en el llamado triángulo de oro, entre el Museo Thyssen, el Prado y el Reina Sofía.La nueva galería madrileña consta de cuatro espacios diferenciados; dos salas que se encuentran a nivel de la calle, y otros dos espacios en un semisótano; uno de los espacios llamado Sala Algeciras es un "guest room"; un espacio dedicado a proyectos específicos e intercambios con artistas de otras galerías. Por todo ello, se exhiben dos exposiciones al mismo tiempo.La galería desde su fundación ha querido acercar el arte contemporáneo, fundamentalmente español, al público, y generar un coleccionismo entonces inexistente en España.Desde un primer momento la galería ha prestado un especial interés a los artistas jóvenes, a los que ha promocionado con exposiciones, edición de catálogos, publicidad, así como asistiendo a ferias nacionales e internacionales. Muchos de los artistas que comenzaron a trabajar en la galería son referentes indispensables en el panorama artístico nacional.Los artistas que representa la galería son:Ángeles Agrela, Evaristo Bellotti, Paloma Gámez, Alfredo Igualador, Paco Lara-Barranco, Santiago Mayo, Paloma Peláez, Gabriela Kraviez, Manolo Quejido, Fernando Renes, Antonio Sosa, Chema Cobo, Mercedes Carbonell, Javier Casaseca, Luis Gordillo, Teresa Lanceta, Mario Martín Crespo, Marysol, Fram Ramírez, Laia Solé y Baltazar Torres. Un grupo de artistas que trabajan en distintas disciplinas artísticas: pintura, escultura, dibujo, fotografía y vídeos, instalación y animación; algunos son artistas con una sólida trayectoria artística a sus espaldas y otros son jóvenes artistas.
Madrid,Spain
www.magdabellotti.com
La Galería Magda Bellotti se funda en Algeciras (Cádiz) en 1982; en 2001 se traslada a Madrid, donde abre nuevo espacio en el llamado triángulo de oro, entre el Museo Thyssen, el Prado y el Reina Sofía.La nueva galería madrileña consta de cuatro espacios diferenciados; dos salas que se encuentran a nivel de la calle, y otros dos espacios en un semisótano; uno de los espacios llamado Sala Algeciras es un "guest room"; un espacio dedicado a proyectos específicos e intercambios con artistas de otras galerías. Por todo ello, se exhiben dos exposiciones al mismo tiempo.La galería desde su fundación ha querido acercar el arte contemporáneo, fundamentalmente español, al público, y generar un coleccionismo entonces inexistente en España.Desde un primer momento la galería ha prestado un especial interés a los artistas jóvenes, a los que ha promocionado con exposiciones, edición de catálogos, publicidad, así como asistiendo a ferias nacionales e internacionales. Muchos de los artistas que comenzaron a trabajar en la galería son referentes indispensables en el panorama artístico nacional.Los artistas que representa la galería son:Ángeles Agrela, Evaristo Bellotti, Paloma Gámez, Alfredo Igualador, Paco Lara-Barranco, Santiago Mayo, Paloma Peláez, Gabriela Kraviez, Manolo Quejido, Fernando Renes, Antonio Sosa, Chema Cobo, Mercedes Carbonell, Javier Casaseca, Luis Gordillo, Teresa Lanceta, Mario Martín Crespo, Marysol, Fram Ramírez, Laia Solé y Baltazar Torres. Un grupo de artistas que trabajan en distintas disciplinas artísticas: pintura, escultura, dibujo, fotografía y vídeos, instalación y animación; algunos son artistas con una sólida trayectoria artística a sus espaldas y otros son jóvenes artistas.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Tricks of the Trade
Tricks of the Trade
I am a collector.’ Ah yes, the magic words around which the entire shaky constellation of the contemporary art world now revolves; a phrase to pump the heartbeat of everyone from dealer to artist to museum director. And yet, there remains something strange, something askew, awkward even, about the rise to prominence and dominance of the ‘c’ word, an underlying malaise as worthy of psychoanalysis as economics. But of the power and prestige of the collector there can be no doubt. Nor can one question their increasing importance throughout every zone of the contemporary art infrastructure, from the humblest alternative gallery to the major international institutions, it seems the ‘c’ has become our ultimate fetish.Last year saw the publication in English of A Passion for Art (Thames & Hudson), a chunky super-glossy tome devoted to delicious photographs by Philippe Chancel of some of the world’s most prominent current collectors, accompanied by a suitably reverential text by Irene Gludowacz and Susanne van Hagen. A library of books on collectors would surely include monographs on the great figures of the past, scholarly and often somewhat critical histories of the Medici family, the Frick and Mellon collections; multi-volume catalogue raisonné put out by collectors themselves, whether Saatchi or Robert Lehman; and racy autobiographies such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Confessions of an Art Addict (André Deutsch). By contrast A Passion for Art is a straightforward homage, if not hagiography, of the most successful, photogenic and obsessively bulimic collectors, presented as ideal role models to the rest of us mere mortals. One of the authors, Susanne van Hagen, is typical of this breed herself: a striking beauty married to a British financier, based in Paris rather than her native Germany, she has a ubiquitous presence at every art fair and biennial around the globe. She is a typical ‘collector’ in so much as the power of that term alone guarantees her automatic respect and entry with no further questions asked. It is true that once you are known as an art collector very few will pause to wonder what you actually own, let alone what you’re worth.What has changed in the last decade is that the really big collectors, such as those worshiped in this book, now operate as public museums with all the puissance of any long-established state cultural institution. For example, the selection process for New York’s ‘International Studio & Curatorial Program’ fully blurs all boundaries between private collections, corporate art holdings and museums, as the jury includes curators from the Rubell and Eileen & Peter Norton collections, the Hirshhorn and Whitney Museums, and the company Neuberger Berman LLC. These collectors now have such wide and important ‘stock’ they are increasingly listed like any other organisation. Thus the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a not-for-profit institution that commissions artworks in Milan, always list their collaborating artists as being part of ‘the most important public and private collections worldwide’, without any differentiation between the two entities. Here the Guggenheim is listed right next to the Deste Foundation, the Seattle Museum is alongside the Fondation Pinault, the Israel Museum is indistinguishable from the Jumex Collection, and the collections of Elaine Dannheisser or Gilles Fuchs all appear to be the same thing as that of the Castello di Rivoli.In addition, the collector is now presented as a cure for every woe: all a struggling artist needs is the right collectors on their CV, museums must merely find their local millionaire supporter, and each new gallery should immediately obtain their own ‘c’. And whether it is because they are apparently so much richer, or publicly funded institutions are relatively poorer, private collectors are increasingly the major museum donors, to the extent that they determine acquisition policy more than any in-house curator. Thus when Harvey Shipley-Miller of the Judith Rothschild Foundation spent several years and millions of dollars buying drawings by new young artists, and then donated them to MoMA in New York, the museum had to go through the pretence of pondering before gratefully accepting this pre-planned gift. Likewise the two substantial shows of the ‘Leipzig School’ touring American museums are both from private collections (those of the Rubells and Michael Ovitz). The institutional purchasing process is so long and cumbersome there are usually no works left to buy by the time any museum gets lumbering around to deciding something may be of interest. This essentially means that it is individual collectors who now determine the ‘history of art’ rather than official state institutions. If an important enough collector decides to buy a certain artist or movement, they will eventually dictate their taste to the institutions. If all the curators in all the museums of the world were unanimous that, say, the ‘New Leipzig School’ was drab and dreary derivative tosh, it could make no difference to its historical importance matched against those collective collectors’ might.But what is a collector anyway? Merely someone who owns more than one object from a similar series? Then it only takes ownership of two works to qualify. And indeed if you should happen to own just one picture, but it was Picasso’s single most important and famous painting, you would be qualified as a major collector even without any actual collection. Today’s collectors are judged by the number of works they own (a ridiculous criteria comparable to a schoolyard competition), but also the current fame of the artists and hence their financial value. Just about everyone connected to the art world is technically a collector as everybody owns at least two art works of some description. Whether these were received as gifts or bought at a flea market, we can all quite accurately announce ourselves as more or less collectors.But as a collector, your status is dependent on the fluctuating fortunes of those artists you own. A collector with 1,000 works by a totally unfashionable or forgotten artist is not taken as seriously as a collector with just two works by the hottest superstar of the moment. Thus collectors make the market but are also made or broken by it, their importance judged by their stable of bets. Likewise every dealer and every gallerist is also ipso facto a collector, and surprisingly often their long-term wealth and success depends upon one of their artists whom they always had in stock, but could never sell, and who only decades later becomes a valuable commodity. As the old adage goes, it is not what you sell but what you keep that matters, or to put it more bluntly, the longer a dealer keeps a work the less valuable it becomes, the longer a collector keeps it, the more valuable it seems.
I am a collector.’ Ah yes, the magic words around which the entire shaky constellation of the contemporary art world now revolves; a phrase to pump the heartbeat of everyone from dealer to artist to museum director. And yet, there remains something strange, something askew, awkward even, about the rise to prominence and dominance of the ‘c’ word, an underlying malaise as worthy of psychoanalysis as economics. But of the power and prestige of the collector there can be no doubt. Nor can one question their increasing importance throughout every zone of the contemporary art infrastructure, from the humblest alternative gallery to the major international institutions, it seems the ‘c’ has become our ultimate fetish.Last year saw the publication in English of A Passion for Art (Thames & Hudson), a chunky super-glossy tome devoted to delicious photographs by Philippe Chancel of some of the world’s most prominent current collectors, accompanied by a suitably reverential text by Irene Gludowacz and Susanne van Hagen. A library of books on collectors would surely include monographs on the great figures of the past, scholarly and often somewhat critical histories of the Medici family, the Frick and Mellon collections; multi-volume catalogue raisonné put out by collectors themselves, whether Saatchi or Robert Lehman; and racy autobiographies such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Confessions of an Art Addict (André Deutsch). By contrast A Passion for Art is a straightforward homage, if not hagiography, of the most successful, photogenic and obsessively bulimic collectors, presented as ideal role models to the rest of us mere mortals. One of the authors, Susanne van Hagen, is typical of this breed herself: a striking beauty married to a British financier, based in Paris rather than her native Germany, she has a ubiquitous presence at every art fair and biennial around the globe. She is a typical ‘collector’ in so much as the power of that term alone guarantees her automatic respect and entry with no further questions asked. It is true that once you are known as an art collector very few will pause to wonder what you actually own, let alone what you’re worth.What has changed in the last decade is that the really big collectors, such as those worshiped in this book, now operate as public museums with all the puissance of any long-established state cultural institution. For example, the selection process for New York’s ‘International Studio & Curatorial Program’ fully blurs all boundaries between private collections, corporate art holdings and museums, as the jury includes curators from the Rubell and Eileen & Peter Norton collections, the Hirshhorn and Whitney Museums, and the company Neuberger Berman LLC. These collectors now have such wide and important ‘stock’ they are increasingly listed like any other organisation. Thus the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a not-for-profit institution that commissions artworks in Milan, always list their collaborating artists as being part of ‘the most important public and private collections worldwide’, without any differentiation between the two entities. Here the Guggenheim is listed right next to the Deste Foundation, the Seattle Museum is alongside the Fondation Pinault, the Israel Museum is indistinguishable from the Jumex Collection, and the collections of Elaine Dannheisser or Gilles Fuchs all appear to be the same thing as that of the Castello di Rivoli.In addition, the collector is now presented as a cure for every woe: all a struggling artist needs is the right collectors on their CV, museums must merely find their local millionaire supporter, and each new gallery should immediately obtain their own ‘c’. And whether it is because they are apparently so much richer, or publicly funded institutions are relatively poorer, private collectors are increasingly the major museum donors, to the extent that they determine acquisition policy more than any in-house curator. Thus when Harvey Shipley-Miller of the Judith Rothschild Foundation spent several years and millions of dollars buying drawings by new young artists, and then donated them to MoMA in New York, the museum had to go through the pretence of pondering before gratefully accepting this pre-planned gift. Likewise the two substantial shows of the ‘Leipzig School’ touring American museums are both from private collections (those of the Rubells and Michael Ovitz). The institutional purchasing process is so long and cumbersome there are usually no works left to buy by the time any museum gets lumbering around to deciding something may be of interest. This essentially means that it is individual collectors who now determine the ‘history of art’ rather than official state institutions. If an important enough collector decides to buy a certain artist or movement, they will eventually dictate their taste to the institutions. If all the curators in all the museums of the world were unanimous that, say, the ‘New Leipzig School’ was drab and dreary derivative tosh, it could make no difference to its historical importance matched against those collective collectors’ might.But what is a collector anyway? Merely someone who owns more than one object from a similar series? Then it only takes ownership of two works to qualify. And indeed if you should happen to own just one picture, but it was Picasso’s single most important and famous painting, you would be qualified as a major collector even without any actual collection. Today’s collectors are judged by the number of works they own (a ridiculous criteria comparable to a schoolyard competition), but also the current fame of the artists and hence their financial value. Just about everyone connected to the art world is technically a collector as everybody owns at least two art works of some description. Whether these were received as gifts or bought at a flea market, we can all quite accurately announce ourselves as more or less collectors.But as a collector, your status is dependent on the fluctuating fortunes of those artists you own. A collector with 1,000 works by a totally unfashionable or forgotten artist is not taken as seriously as a collector with just two works by the hottest superstar of the moment. Thus collectors make the market but are also made or broken by it, their importance judged by their stable of bets. Likewise every dealer and every gallerist is also ipso facto a collector, and surprisingly often their long-term wealth and success depends upon one of their artists whom they always had in stock, but could never sell, and who only decades later becomes a valuable commodity. As the old adage goes, it is not what you sell but what you keep that matters, or to put it more bluntly, the longer a dealer keeps a work the less valuable it becomes, the longer a collector keeps it, the more valuable it seems.
Keith Edmier
Keith Edmier
Childhood never leaves us. The particularities of the time and place in which we grow up are branded deep in our psyches, shaping adult desire. Keith Edmier dropped out of art school to work in Hollywood, producing special effects for horror movies. Before that, in his teens, he had a part-time job in a dental lab, where he first came into contact with the pink dental acrylic that has become one of his trademark materials. These facts help to provide a context for the form his work has taken; the content of his uncanny figurative sculptures, however, has its roots deeper in his autobiography, in his early years growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s. His unsettling sculptures revisit a ’70s suburban America of the mind.Edmier’s work celebrates popular culture’s intrusion into our dreams, the way media images insinuate themselves into our unconscious like uninvited guests. The cast of characters that populate his artwork are drawn from personal history (family members, school friends) and from collective memory (celebrities of the day, victims of newsworthy tragedies, people who might have graced the pages of supermarket tabloids). Edmier explores how, in the media age, ‘real’ people can take on the psychological weight of celebrities while famous faces can be as comforting or as alienating as family.
Like confessional poetry his work proves the adage that the more personal the story the more universal its appeal. His take on memorial statuary, Emil Dobbelstein and Henry J. Drope, 1944 (2000), casts his grandfathers in the role normally reserved for the apocryphal unknown soldier. The two men are flatteringly pictured as they were in their prime, handsome and brave in military uniform. In Edmier’s sculpture it is forever 1944, before Emil committed suicide and Henry grew into the old man his grandson knew. We are invited to put knowingness aside and look at them through the rose-tinted view of a young boy’s admiration.
The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides traces comparably uncynical territory. A fellow child of the American Midwest, Eugenides is similarly brazen about confronting the sentimental. The Virgin Suicides (1993), his languidly charged love letter to lost youth, conjures the fierce passions of early adolescence from the safe distance of middle age. Edmier’s Jill Peters (1997) could be one of the novel’s well-loved, ill-fated Lisbon girls; she even has their golden hair. If Edmier’s grandfathers are bronze heroes, Jill Peters is a hazy waxworks dream girl. As pure and white as the hill of snow on which she stands so awkwardly, Jill is a careworn memory bleached by time. The object of Edmier’s schoolboy affections, she is preserved in virginal white, her eternally blank features ripe for projection. She is not a girl so much as the faded recollection of a girl, the portrait of a crush.It’s easy to see why the young Edmier was smitten: Jill sports a perfect all-American hairstyle, feathered like Farrah Fawcett’s. In Edmier’s youth, Jill and Farrah were both unobtainable objects of desire; as an artist he has managed to suspend time, preserving this early adulation. Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000 (2000 – 2002), a collaboration with Fawcett in which he and the erstwhile art student and Charlie’s Angel made full-size classical nude portrait sculptures of each other, is a bizarre and poignant exercise in belated wish-fulfilment. Reclaiming the heroes of his childhood has become a recurring Edmier motif: he has also made work celebrating Evel Knievel, Janis Joplin and John Lennon.
Beverley Edmier, 1967 (1998) conflates personal and collective memory with such casual intensity it takes your breath away. The portrait of the artist’s mother as a young woman depicts her heavily pregnant and tenderly lifting up her blouse to reveal a translucent belly through which the foetal self-portrait of the artist is visible. She is rendered in clear pink plastic acrylic, the sort of material used to make cheap, bright toys. The colour extends to her wardrobe: pink blouse, scarf, gloves, tights and shoes complement her suit, a replica of the pink wool Chanel ensemble worn by Jackie Kennedy on the day of her husband’s assassination. If the reference isn’t immediately obvious, close inspection reveals that the jacket’s buttons feature the Presidential seal. Not content merely to make a self-portrait in utero, Edmier uses the sculpture to comment on one of the most traumatic events in modern American history. Birth, death, maternal and marital devotion, small-scale miracles and large-scale tragedies are all condensed in a sweetly disquieting contemporary take on the Visible Woman, a popular educational toy in the 1970s. The Visible Woman was a Barbie doll for the science geek: a smiling figure sporting transparent plastic skin and a range of removable internal organs. It is just the sort of thing that might have appealed to a boy who went on to make prosthetics for horror films.
The excesses of the plant kingdom provide a similar source of fascination and horror. Victoria Regia (First and Second Night Blooms) (1998) loom large over the viewer. In a potent psychological metaphor the sculptures expose the mysterious flora that lie beneath the surface of nocturnal lily ponds. The flowers perform an act of hermaphrodite transformation while the broad, heavily veined lily pads cast lurid pink shadows on their spectators. The sexual connotations of flowers are not new to art, but in Edmier’s world heady eroticism is tamed by materials that flaunt their deliberate artifice. Keith’s Paphiopedilum (2001) is the acrylic cast of a dying slipper orchid the colour of dried blood. Edmier’s lilies and orchid, as well as his other meticulous casts of flowers such as A Dozen Roses (1998), Snowdrops (1998) and Fireweed (2002 – 2003), are hyperrealist depictions of how flowers loaded with all their cultural and emotional weight might look in a regressive dream.
Childhood never leaves us. The particularities of the time and place in which we grow up are branded deep in our psyches, shaping adult desire. Keith Edmier dropped out of art school to work in Hollywood, producing special effects for horror movies. Before that, in his teens, he had a part-time job in a dental lab, where he first came into contact with the pink dental acrylic that has become one of his trademark materials. These facts help to provide a context for the form his work has taken; the content of his uncanny figurative sculptures, however, has its roots deeper in his autobiography, in his early years growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s. His unsettling sculptures revisit a ’70s suburban America of the mind.Edmier’s work celebrates popular culture’s intrusion into our dreams, the way media images insinuate themselves into our unconscious like uninvited guests. The cast of characters that populate his artwork are drawn from personal history (family members, school friends) and from collective memory (celebrities of the day, victims of newsworthy tragedies, people who might have graced the pages of supermarket tabloids). Edmier explores how, in the media age, ‘real’ people can take on the psychological weight of celebrities while famous faces can be as comforting or as alienating as family.
Like confessional poetry his work proves the adage that the more personal the story the more universal its appeal. His take on memorial statuary, Emil Dobbelstein and Henry J. Drope, 1944 (2000), casts his grandfathers in the role normally reserved for the apocryphal unknown soldier. The two men are flatteringly pictured as they were in their prime, handsome and brave in military uniform. In Edmier’s sculpture it is forever 1944, before Emil committed suicide and Henry grew into the old man his grandson knew. We are invited to put knowingness aside and look at them through the rose-tinted view of a young boy’s admiration.
The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides traces comparably uncynical territory. A fellow child of the American Midwest, Eugenides is similarly brazen about confronting the sentimental. The Virgin Suicides (1993), his languidly charged love letter to lost youth, conjures the fierce passions of early adolescence from the safe distance of middle age. Edmier’s Jill Peters (1997) could be one of the novel’s well-loved, ill-fated Lisbon girls; she even has their golden hair. If Edmier’s grandfathers are bronze heroes, Jill Peters is a hazy waxworks dream girl. As pure and white as the hill of snow on which she stands so awkwardly, Jill is a careworn memory bleached by time. The object of Edmier’s schoolboy affections, she is preserved in virginal white, her eternally blank features ripe for projection. She is not a girl so much as the faded recollection of a girl, the portrait of a crush.It’s easy to see why the young Edmier was smitten: Jill sports a perfect all-American hairstyle, feathered like Farrah Fawcett’s. In Edmier’s youth, Jill and Farrah were both unobtainable objects of desire; as an artist he has managed to suspend time, preserving this early adulation. Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000 (2000 – 2002), a collaboration with Fawcett in which he and the erstwhile art student and Charlie’s Angel made full-size classical nude portrait sculptures of each other, is a bizarre and poignant exercise in belated wish-fulfilment. Reclaiming the heroes of his childhood has become a recurring Edmier motif: he has also made work celebrating Evel Knievel, Janis Joplin and John Lennon.
Beverley Edmier, 1967 (1998) conflates personal and collective memory with such casual intensity it takes your breath away. The portrait of the artist’s mother as a young woman depicts her heavily pregnant and tenderly lifting up her blouse to reveal a translucent belly through which the foetal self-portrait of the artist is visible. She is rendered in clear pink plastic acrylic, the sort of material used to make cheap, bright toys. The colour extends to her wardrobe: pink blouse, scarf, gloves, tights and shoes complement her suit, a replica of the pink wool Chanel ensemble worn by Jackie Kennedy on the day of her husband’s assassination. If the reference isn’t immediately obvious, close inspection reveals that the jacket’s buttons feature the Presidential seal. Not content merely to make a self-portrait in utero, Edmier uses the sculpture to comment on one of the most traumatic events in modern American history. Birth, death, maternal and marital devotion, small-scale miracles and large-scale tragedies are all condensed in a sweetly disquieting contemporary take on the Visible Woman, a popular educational toy in the 1970s. The Visible Woman was a Barbie doll for the science geek: a smiling figure sporting transparent plastic skin and a range of removable internal organs. It is just the sort of thing that might have appealed to a boy who went on to make prosthetics for horror films.
The excesses of the plant kingdom provide a similar source of fascination and horror. Victoria Regia (First and Second Night Blooms) (1998) loom large over the viewer. In a potent psychological metaphor the sculptures expose the mysterious flora that lie beneath the surface of nocturnal lily ponds. The flowers perform an act of hermaphrodite transformation while the broad, heavily veined lily pads cast lurid pink shadows on their spectators. The sexual connotations of flowers are not new to art, but in Edmier’s world heady eroticism is tamed by materials that flaunt their deliberate artifice. Keith’s Paphiopedilum (2001) is the acrylic cast of a dying slipper orchid the colour of dried blood. Edmier’s lilies and orchid, as well as his other meticulous casts of flowers such as A Dozen Roses (1998), Snowdrops (1998) and Fireweed (2002 – 2003), are hyperrealist depictions of how flowers loaded with all their cultural and emotional weight might look in a regressive dream.
Galerie Guy Bartschi
Galerie Guy Bartschi
Geneva,Switzerland
www.bartschi.ch
In 1990, Galerie Guy Bärtschi opened in the Geneva countryside. Then in 1995, it moved to the heart of Geneva’s ‘old town’.
During the inauguration of its new space, the gallery presented works by Georges Rousse.
Since 1992, the gallery has published a catalogue for each of its exhibits. These catalogues have a preface written specially by a writer, a poet or an art critic.
In 1997, the gallery simultaneously became a member of the Association Genevoise des Galeries d’Art Moderne (AGGAM) and of the Association des Galeries Suisses (AGS). The gallery also presented at its first international fair, ART 28 ’97. Later that year in Novemer the gallery also presented at FIAC 97 with “Etat des lieux”. The gallery continues to regularly participate in the following fairs:
Art Bruxelles – Art Cologne – FIAC – ARCO
Galerie Guy Bärtschi has become more and more interested in artists who are able to present within the confines of its various spaces/environments and they are specially commanded and financed for the occasion. In 2001, Jan Fabre exhibited a specific project in the caves along with a monumental sculpture in the gallery; Giuseppe Penone brought together an installation for his exhibition with an imprint theme; While, Not Vital realized an installation piece throughout the gallery, all specially created for the occasion.
Since 1997, the gallery’s work has also been presented on the Internet when its www.bartschi.ch site was created. The site is regularly updated in order to inform the public of new exhibitions. In 1999, its first virtual catalogue was presented with a visit in situ of the gallery. The site was completely revamped and updated with a database in November 2003.
The editing branch of Galerie Guy Bartschi has completed in 1999 by the creation of the society, Bärtschi-Salomon Editions. This society has published artist monographs since 2000 similar to those of Georges Rousse and Henri Michaux in 2001. Hervé Graumann will be presented at the start of 2005 and then Jan Fabre.
In 2003, the Galerie Guy Bärtschi moved to Plainpalais on rue du Vieux-Billard in the Bains quartier, right next to MAMCO and CAC. It occupies a space of 500 m2. The gallery has two exhibition rooms: one is a 270 m2 rez-de-chaussée for the principle exhibitions and the second a 100 m2 room for emerging artists. The remaining space is set aside for the permanent collection.
The Galerie Guy Bärtschi inaugurated this new space in November 2003 during the AGGAM’s Open House with a presentation of Cornelia Parker’s work in the ‘Espace Galerie’ and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy in the ‘Espace Projet’.
In 2004/2005, the gallery presented artists it has represented for 10 years including: Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Philippe Favier, as well as some for the first time including: Dieter Appelt, Carmen Calvo and Guy Limone. In May 2004, it inaugurated a new collective exhibition with a death theme, entitled ‘La mort devant soi’ with Dieter Appelt, Olivier Blanckart, Christian Boltanski, Wim Delvoye, Jan Fabre, Nan Goldin, Hervé Graumann, Teresa Margolles, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Cornelia Parker, Guiseppe Penone, Paul Rebeyrolle, Samuel Rousseau and Not Vital.
Geneva,Switzerland
www.bartschi.ch
In 1990, Galerie Guy Bärtschi opened in the Geneva countryside. Then in 1995, it moved to the heart of Geneva’s ‘old town’.
During the inauguration of its new space, the gallery presented works by Georges Rousse.
Since 1992, the gallery has published a catalogue for each of its exhibits. These catalogues have a preface written specially by a writer, a poet or an art critic.
In 1997, the gallery simultaneously became a member of the Association Genevoise des Galeries d’Art Moderne (AGGAM) and of the Association des Galeries Suisses (AGS). The gallery also presented at its first international fair, ART 28 ’97. Later that year in Novemer the gallery also presented at FIAC 97 with “Etat des lieux”. The gallery continues to regularly participate in the following fairs:
Art Bruxelles – Art Cologne – FIAC – ARCO
Galerie Guy Bärtschi has become more and more interested in artists who are able to present within the confines of its various spaces/environments and they are specially commanded and financed for the occasion. In 2001, Jan Fabre exhibited a specific project in the caves along with a monumental sculpture in the gallery; Giuseppe Penone brought together an installation for his exhibition with an imprint theme; While, Not Vital realized an installation piece throughout the gallery, all specially created for the occasion.
Since 1997, the gallery’s work has also been presented on the Internet when its www.bartschi.ch site was created. The site is regularly updated in order to inform the public of new exhibitions. In 1999, its first virtual catalogue was presented with a visit in situ of the gallery. The site was completely revamped and updated with a database in November 2003.
The editing branch of Galerie Guy Bartschi has completed in 1999 by the creation of the society, Bärtschi-Salomon Editions. This society has published artist monographs since 2000 similar to those of Georges Rousse and Henri Michaux in 2001. Hervé Graumann will be presented at the start of 2005 and then Jan Fabre.
In 2003, the Galerie Guy Bärtschi moved to Plainpalais on rue du Vieux-Billard in the Bains quartier, right next to MAMCO and CAC. It occupies a space of 500 m2. The gallery has two exhibition rooms: one is a 270 m2 rez-de-chaussée for the principle exhibitions and the second a 100 m2 room for emerging artists. The remaining space is set aside for the permanent collection.
The Galerie Guy Bärtschi inaugurated this new space in November 2003 during the AGGAM’s Open House with a presentation of Cornelia Parker’s work in the ‘Espace Galerie’ and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy in the ‘Espace Projet’.
In 2004/2005, the gallery presented artists it has represented for 10 years including: Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Philippe Favier, as well as some for the first time including: Dieter Appelt, Carmen Calvo and Guy Limone. In May 2004, it inaugurated a new collective exhibition with a death theme, entitled ‘La mort devant soi’ with Dieter Appelt, Olivier Blanckart, Christian Boltanski, Wim Delvoye, Jan Fabre, Nan Goldin, Hervé Graumann, Teresa Margolles, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Cornelia Parker, Guiseppe Penone, Paul Rebeyrolle, Samuel Rousseau and Not Vital.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Galerie Nordenhake - Berlin
Galerie Nordenhake
www.nordenhake.com
MARJETICA POTRÈRURAL STUDIO: THE LUCY HOUSE TORNADO SHELTERAPRIL 27, 2007
Galerie Nordenhake is very pleased to present an exhibition by the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrè, an architect turned sculptor who works at the interface of art, architecture and social science, exploring local innovations in the built environment. For the exhibition, Potrè has installed a site-specific structure that evolved from her case study of the Lucy House in Greensbro, Alabama, designed by the Rural Studio in 2002 for Anderson and Lucy Harris and their three children. Rural Studio is a program founded in 1992 by Samuel Mockbee for architecture students at Auburn University in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest regions in the United States.
Potrè’s work negotiates with the gaps in knowledge that result when urban planners and architects insist on creating order. Notably, Potrè is interested in what architects and planners cannot predict. Notions such as homelessness, the shantytown, outsider communities, and the role of imagination are united in Potrè’s work with an architecture of immediate, personal response.
The ‘Lucy House Tornado Shelter’ is an organic, ‘living’ structure based on the metaphor of the human body’s spontaneous and unplanned behavior. The house includes a built-in tornado shelter topped with a ‘crumpled’ dome. This dome is not the actual shelter; rather, it is protecting the structure underneath. Potrè’s design takes into consideration her work with Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity domes, which she encountered while at the Burning Man Festival. A tensegrity dome involves a coordination of pressure and release, push and pull. The dome is built by adjoining segments at different angles together so that in the overall structure an equilibrium of push and pull occurs between segments weighed on and those weighing.
Potrè’s study evolved out of her interest in architecture that emphasizes ‘self-reliance’ and ‘individual empowerment.’ This is accomplished through the usage of alternative, environmentally sustainable construction materials, combined with little money and much creativity. She investigates how to improve relations between society and the individual, asking what sort of space is available to us for freedom. Transforming scrap material and ‘junk’ into a solid, sturdy structure, Rural Studio’s work has provided the opportunity for many underprivileged families living in substandard housing to move into a house that is not only a home, but a shelter for the soul.
The Lucy House’ unites residential architecture with an emergency provision, the permanent need with the temporary necessity. As with her previous projects, Marjetica Potrè is continuously exploring fundamental human needs: community, safety, and shelter. In addition to the house, Potrè will also exhibit new drawings that are somewhere between an architectural plan and a mental association chart. These drawings give insight into her idiosyncratic process of thinking about urgent problems in urban architecture.
Marjetica Potrè was born in 1953 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has an upcoming exhibition at the end of May at the Barbican Arts Center in London. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas, including at the Sao Paolo Biennial (1996 and 2006), the Venice Biennial (2003), and Manifesta 3 (2000). She has had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2001), Max Protetch Gallery (New York, 2002 and 2005), Galerie Nordenhake (Berlin, 2003), PBICA (Lake Worth, Florida, 2003), the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004), and at the De Appel Foundation for Contemporary Art (Amsterdam, 2004). Her many on-site installations include Dry Toilet (Caracas, 2003), Balcony with Wind Turbine (the Liverpool Biennial, 2004) and Genesis (2005), which is on permanent display at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Potrè has published a number of essays on contemporary urban architecture. In 2005, she was a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most notably the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and recently an IASPIS artist residency in Stockholm, Sweden (2006).
www.nordenhake.com
MARJETICA POTRÈRURAL STUDIO: THE LUCY HOUSE TORNADO SHELTERAPRIL 27, 2007
Galerie Nordenhake is very pleased to present an exhibition by the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrè, an architect turned sculptor who works at the interface of art, architecture and social science, exploring local innovations in the built environment. For the exhibition, Potrè has installed a site-specific structure that evolved from her case study of the Lucy House in Greensbro, Alabama, designed by the Rural Studio in 2002 for Anderson and Lucy Harris and their three children. Rural Studio is a program founded in 1992 by Samuel Mockbee for architecture students at Auburn University in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest regions in the United States.
Potrè’s work negotiates with the gaps in knowledge that result when urban planners and architects insist on creating order. Notably, Potrè is interested in what architects and planners cannot predict. Notions such as homelessness, the shantytown, outsider communities, and the role of imagination are united in Potrè’s work with an architecture of immediate, personal response.
The ‘Lucy House Tornado Shelter’ is an organic, ‘living’ structure based on the metaphor of the human body’s spontaneous and unplanned behavior. The house includes a built-in tornado shelter topped with a ‘crumpled’ dome. This dome is not the actual shelter; rather, it is protecting the structure underneath. Potrè’s design takes into consideration her work with Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity domes, which she encountered while at the Burning Man Festival. A tensegrity dome involves a coordination of pressure and release, push and pull. The dome is built by adjoining segments at different angles together so that in the overall structure an equilibrium of push and pull occurs between segments weighed on and those weighing.
Potrè’s study evolved out of her interest in architecture that emphasizes ‘self-reliance’ and ‘individual empowerment.’ This is accomplished through the usage of alternative, environmentally sustainable construction materials, combined with little money and much creativity. She investigates how to improve relations between society and the individual, asking what sort of space is available to us for freedom. Transforming scrap material and ‘junk’ into a solid, sturdy structure, Rural Studio’s work has provided the opportunity for many underprivileged families living in substandard housing to move into a house that is not only a home, but a shelter for the soul.
The Lucy House’ unites residential architecture with an emergency provision, the permanent need with the temporary necessity. As with her previous projects, Marjetica Potrè is continuously exploring fundamental human needs: community, safety, and shelter. In addition to the house, Potrè will also exhibit new drawings that are somewhere between an architectural plan and a mental association chart. These drawings give insight into her idiosyncratic process of thinking about urgent problems in urban architecture.
Marjetica Potrè was born in 1953 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has an upcoming exhibition at the end of May at the Barbican Arts Center in London. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas, including at the Sao Paolo Biennial (1996 and 2006), the Venice Biennial (2003), and Manifesta 3 (2000). She has had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2001), Max Protetch Gallery (New York, 2002 and 2005), Galerie Nordenhake (Berlin, 2003), PBICA (Lake Worth, Florida, 2003), the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004), and at the De Appel Foundation for Contemporary Art (Amsterdam, 2004). Her many on-site installations include Dry Toilet (Caracas, 2003), Balcony with Wind Turbine (the Liverpool Biennial, 2004) and Genesis (2005), which is on permanent display at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Potrè has published a number of essays on contemporary urban architecture. In 2005, she was a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most notably the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and recently an IASPIS artist residency in Stockholm, Sweden (2006).
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
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