2012-03-27

U.S.A. - ATHENS-GEORGIA - To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America

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George Ault (1891-1948)

Bright Light at Russell’s Corners, 1946
Oil on canvas 19 5/8 x 25 inches Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Lawrence





This is the first major exhibition of Ault’s work in more than 20 years and includes 47 paintings and drawings by Ault and his contemporaries. It centers on four paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell’s Corners in Woodstock, N.Y. The mystery in Ault’s series of nocturnes captures the anxious tenor of life on the home front. "To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America" is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum with generous support from Dolores and John W. Beck, Joan and E. Bertram Berkley, Diane and Norman Bernstein Foundation, Janet and Jim Dicke, Sheila Duignan and Mike Wilkins, Barney A. Ebsworth, Tania and Tom Evans, Kara and Wayne Fingerman, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation, Joffa and Bill Kerr, Robert S. and Grayce B. Kerr Foundation, John and Gail Liebes Trust, Paula and Peter Lunder, Betty and Whitney MacMillan, Margery and Edgar Masinter, Oriana McKinnon, Susan Reed Moseley, and Betty and Lloyd Schermer. Additional funding is provided through the museum's William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment Fund and Gene Davis Memorial Fund. The C.F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum's traveling exhibition program, Treasures to Go.


Georgia Museum of Art      18.02.2012 - 16.04.2012


Website & source :Georgia Museum of Art
 
Website : Athens
 
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2012-03-20

U.S.A. - ASPEN-COLORADO - Mark Grotjahn

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Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Green Butterfly Yellow MG), 2003. Collection of David Teiger. Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Photo: Thomas Müller.



Barry Schwabsky, art critic at The Nation, explores how the work of Mark Grotjahn engages with the development of abstract painting.

Mark Grotjahn makes conceptually grounded paintings that collide abstract and figurative elements to unsettle the conventions of each. By continuously combining the seemingly incompatible poles of abstraction and figuration, realism and expressionism, rational logic and intuitive process, Grotjahn stakes a claim for the continued vitality of both abstraction and painting itself.

In his Perspective and Butterfly paintings, Grotjahn combines varying schemes of one-point perspective—used since the Renaissance to produce the illusion of depth on a flat surface—to create mesmerizing abstractions. By upending the horizon line, the Butterfly paintings float free of perspectival grounding and oscillate between geometric abstraction and spatial illusion. While these works appear at first glance to be rigidly formal and graphic, their surfaces are often layered over underpaintings, which create tonal shifts and textured surfaces that reveal the process of their own making.

In a more recent body of Face paintings, Grotjahn builds up complexly layered surfaces on sheets of primed cardboard mounted on linen. The basic elements of painting—line, color, and texture—are gradually worked into these penetrating images.

Grotjahn's mask sculptures extend the artist's idiosyncratic investment in the process and ritual of painting into three dimensions. Five of these masks are on view in Aspen Snowmass: one on the grounds of the museum and the others, one each, on the four ski mountains. The five sculptures are also featured on this season's Grotjahn-designed, limited-edition lift tickets. The Aspen Art Museum's exhibition is the artist's first comprehensive museum survey in the United States, including work Grotjahn has produced from the late 1990s to the present.

Mark Grotjahn was born in 1968 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. His work has been included in major group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other international venues. Grotjahn was included in the 54th Carnegie International in 2004 and the Whitney Biennial in 2006. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center; Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.


Aspen Art Museum   17.02.2012 - 29.04.2012


Website  & source : Aspen Art Museum

Website : Aspen

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2012-03-13

U.S.A. - ANN ARBOR-MICHIGAN - Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life

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Ken Friedman, A Flux Corsage, 1966-76, clear plastic box with paper label containing seeds. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection: Gift of the Friedman Family; GM.986.80.40.



Fluxus emerged in the early 1960s as a loose, international network of artists, composers, and designers-"led" by Lithuanian-born American artist George Maciunas (1931-1978)- that was noted for blurring the boundaries between art and life. Fluxus artists like Maciunas, Nam June Paik, George Brecht, and Yoko Ono, among many others, challenged the notion of high art by creating unassuming, often humorous objects and performances that redefined the terms of artistic production by demonstrating the idea that "anything can be art and anyone can do it." Because of their disregard for traditional artistic media, many of the objects in the exhibition are-often by design-acutely resistant to conventional forms of museum display. Variously conceived as carriers of ideas, absurdist send-ups of consumer products, and invitations to direct, playful participation by the viewer, these works attempt to undermine the idea that art is separate from the activity of living one's life. Through 116 works, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life will introduce visitors to the study and appreciation of art as an exciting and intellectually rewarding experience, and to the notion that art is something that can play an active role in their own approaches to life's essential questions.

This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art and was generously supported by Constance and Walter Burke, Dartmouth College Class of 1944, the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund, and the Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Fund. UMMA's installation is made possible in part by the University of Michigan Health System, the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, Arts at Michigan, and the CEW Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.


 University of Michigan Museum of Art    25.02.2012 - 20.05.2012

 
Website & source : University of Michigan Museum of Art
 
Website: Ann Arbor
 
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