2016-12-28

2228 - 20170409 - U.S.A. - CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS - Harvard Art Museums presents exhibition examining the materiality of recent sculpture by Doris Salcedo - 04.11.2016-09.04.2017

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Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2008. Wooden table, wooden armoires, concrete, and steel. Private collection. © Doris Salcedo. Photo: Sergio Clavijo; courtesy of the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York, and White Cube, London
 
The Harvard Art Museums present Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, a new special exhibition featuring recent works by Salcedo, an internationally acclaimed artist whose sculpture and installations transform familiar, everyday objects into moving and powerful testimonies of loss and remembrance.
An examination of both mourning and materiality, the exhibition focuses on the last 15 years of Salcedo’s career and the artist’s use of unexpected materials in startling, seemingly impossible ways. Each of Salcedo’s sculptures is a response to political violence and social injustice, and is constructed in such a way that it absorbs the viewer without offering explicit explanation, even for those who have no direct experience of the subject matter. The exhibition was curated by Mary Schneider Enriquez, the Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums, and is on view in the museums’ Special Exhibitions Gallery from November 4, 2016 through April 9, 2017.

A lifelong resident of Bogotá, Colombia, Salcedo began her career producing works that responded to the testimonies of survivors of oppression and political violence in her home country. In recent years, she has broadened her focus to include victims of civil war and oppression worldwide.

“Doris Salcedo’s subject matter is not unique to Colombia or to the impact of civil war; rather, the themes she addresses are current and applicable across the globe. Her work is absolutely timely, and there is no better place than a university museum to focus on the role that art can play in deepening awareness and understanding of such complex issues,” said Martha Tedeschi, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot of the Harvard Art Museums. “Through this exhibition we invite all to explore these sociopolitical issues, but also to consider how Salcedo engages with sculpture as a medium, responding to and departing from conventions.”

The Materiality of Mourning focuses on key aspects of the artist’s oeuvre since 2001, examining an important group of Salcedo’s recent works and the decisive challenges they pose to sculpture’s traditions. There are four separate installations, with nine objects in total, including monumental cement-and-wood furniture pieces, ghostly cloaks made of thousands of needles, groupings of contorted stainless steel chairs, and a room-size tapestry composed of rose petals.

“By using materials from one’s private, everyday life in unexpected and unsettling ways, Salcedo transforms the familiar into the strange, producing works that speak vividly and powerfully about the issues she addresses,” said Schneider Enriquez. “Salcedo builds complex layers, centimeter by centimeter, a veritable skin bearing the wounds and history of political violence,” she added.

Accomplishing the “impossible”
Since 2008, Salcedo has incorporated organic materials that challenge temporal limits in her works. She has collaborated with scientists and engineers to find ways for soil, grass, rose petals, and other objects to be suspended in a particular, unlikely state in order to express haunting absence and the silence of remembrance. Testing the properties and parameters of these materials, she deliberately blurs the lines between the permanent and the ephemeral, between sculpture and performance, by creating works that are gestures of mourning. Her most recent sculptures convey a presence just on the verge of disappearing—a parallel to how memories of those lost to violence linger even as they threaten to reced 
“‘Impossible’ is the word that, for me, defines the creative act, an act in which—as Derrida instructs us—one should do only what is impossible,” states Doris Salcedo in her essay in the accompanying catalogue. “The impossible appears in my work when I need to make the ground cry drops of water that will join together to slowly write the names of those victims whose lives this society refuses to grieve. Or when, against all odds, grass grows underneath a wooden table, or when a shroud is made with rose petals that do not wither. Sometimes my task seems impossible, because each time I need to make a radically different piece to honor the singularity of each and every victim’s experience.”

Works on view
The museums’ recent acquisition A Flor de Piel (2013) is being shown publicly for the first time in this exhibition. A room-size tapestry comprised of thousands of carefully preserved red rose petals, hand-stitched together with waxed thread, the work is intended as a shroud for a nurse who was tortured to death in the Colombian war.

Because of its materiality, shape, and size, A Flor de Piel is a complicated piece for the museums to care for and display; it poses unique challenges for conservators. However, the skill and expertise of staff in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies make the museums the perfect home for such an object. Through intensive discussions with Salcedo’s studio, Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist and director of the Straus Center; Angela Chang, conservator of objects and sculpture and assistant director of the Straus Center; and Schneider Enriquez are exploring how best to protect and care for the work, as they develop plans for its display, storage, and future conservation.

Additional objects in The Materiality of Mourning include a selection of Salcedo’s seminal sculptures, on loan from private and public collections as well as from the artist herself. Several works incorporate domestic furniture in unsettling configurations. Thou-less (2001–02), for instance, is comprised of carved, stainless steel chairs that are at once familiar and strange.

Other works highlight how Salcedo has recently pushed her commitment to materiality and its expressive possibilities to new extremes. These include four works from the Disremembered series (2014–16), individual ephemeral blouse-like sculptures that are constructed of handwoven silk threads filled with tiny needles. Each Disremembered sculpture provides a spectral contrast to Salcedo’s dense, physically imposing works, such as the two Untitled furniture pieces (2008) made of wood, metal, and concrete—with a combined weight of over 1,800 pounds—that will also be shown in the exhibition.
 
 

 
 Harvard Art Museums - Doris Salcedo - 04.11.2016-09.04.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-12-21

2227 - 20170528 - U.S.A. - RENO - NEVADA - Nevada Museum of Art presents Peter Stichbury's first museum exhibition in the United States - 05.11.2016-28.05.2017

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Peter Stichbury, Mona Stafford, 1976, 2014. Oil on linen 23.6 x 19.7 inches. Photo: Jason Mandella.
 
New Zealand-based artist Peter Stichbury has created a series of paintings and drawings linked to unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Fascinated by the stories of individuals who claim to have witnessed UFOs and/or extraterrestrials, he explores their motives, objectives, and reliability through portraits and related works. The artworks are informed by his meticulous research, which includes reading books and newspaper articles and consulting websites and video documentation. Peter Stichbury: Anatomy of a Phenomenon opened November 5 and will remain on view through May 28, 2017 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery located at 160 West Liberty Street in downtown Reno.  
The works in this gallery, the artist’s first museum exhibition in the United States, are inspired by national and international occurrences. Stichbury took a special interest in the 1994 southern Nevada UFO sightings at Nellis Air Force Base. This incident began when someone inside the facility leaked video footage of a flying object to the media. The video appeared on the television show Hard Copy, igniting intense interest and debate among UFO believers and doubters alike. Officials at both Nellis Air Force Base and the Pentagon declined to comment, leading Stichbury and many other members of the public to wonder about the motives behind the leaked footage. Was the individual a genuine whistleblower, or did this represent an incident of sanctioned disinformation, disseminated by an arm of the U.S. military?

There is a history of reported incursions into military facilities by UFOs, specifically over nuclear weapons storage areas. In the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO sighting, for example, an object hovered above the base, causing missiles to become inoperable. Was the perpetrator extraterrestrial, or could this have been a human-caused incident related to espionage and national security? How can citizens grasp the sophistication of human technology, its parameters and capabilities, and the shroud of secrecy surrounding such technology? These questions, and the ongoing tension between reality and folklore embedded in UFO culture, provide compelling subject matter for Stichbury’s uncanny psychological explorations.
 
 
 
Nevada Museum of Art - Peter Stichbury - 05.11.2016-28.05.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-12-14

2226 - 20170225 - U.S.A. - SAN FRANCISCO - CALIFORNIA - Expansive presentation surveying the career of Frank Stella in San Francisco - 05.11.2016-26.02.2017

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Frank Stella, "Lac Laronge III," 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 162 in (274.3 × 411.5 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. © 2016 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 
.The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present Frank Stella: A Retrospective, an expansive presentation surveying the career of this towering figure in post-WWII American art. Fifty works, including paintings, reliefs, sculptures and maquettes, are being displayed at the de Young, representing Frank Stella’s prolific output from the late 1950s to the present day. This is the first comprehensive U.S. presentation devoted to the artist since 1970.
“Frank Stella’s impact on abstract art is unmatched,” says Max Hollein, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “This retrospective is timely and important for San Francisco audiences. To see the development of an artist who created ‘masterpieces’ just one year out of college, who is still working as a major force today—it is impressive to see an extraordinary body of work that spans six decades.”

Stella first burst into the New York art world in 1959, at the age of twenty-three, when four of his Black Series (1958-1960) paintings were included in the group exhibition, Sixteen Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art. In the following six decades he has remained one of the most important and influential figures in the evolution of modern art. Stella anticipated and pioneered many of the explosive changes in the art world, and remains an enduring figure of both critical and popular attention, as well as controversy.

“Frank Stella’s works span the spectrum of art from Minimalist to Maximalist,” notes Timothy Anglin Burgard, Curator-in-Charge of American Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “In both ambition and achievement, his work appears to be the output of a dozen different artists. By combining intellectual rigor with aesthetic audacity these works have transformed the history of art.”

As part of the exhibition, Das Erdbeben in Chili [N#3] (The Earthquake in Chile) (1999) – one of Stella’s largest works, measuring 12 x 40.5 ft. – has been installed in Wilsey Court.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective comes to the de Young after a premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York and a showing at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. It is on view in San Francisco from November 5, 2016 through February 26, 2017. The curator for the de Young’s presentation is Timothy Anglin Burgard

IN DETAIL
The exhibition opens with paintings that Stella created as he forged his identity as an artist, including East Broadway and Great Jones Street (both 1958). Both works emulate and critique Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art movement of the time, but also reveal Stella’s early interest in the manipulation of space.

The artist’s subsequent work, the legendary series of Black paintings (1958–1960) which includes Die Fahne hoch! (1959) are formed exclusively of parallel bands of black paint separated by thin strips of unpainted canvas. Simple in form but far-reaching in their implications, these paintings inspired both painters and sculptors associated with the emerging Minimalist art movement.

The following Aluminum (1960) and Copper (1961) series employ shaped canvases, a radical innovation that rejected the traditional conception of a painting as a pictorial “window” into another space or realm. Works such as Creede II (1961) blur the boundaries between the art and its environment.

Turning from the monochromatic palettes of his previous works, Stella reintroduced vivid colors in the Benjamin Moore (1961) series, created with commercial house paints. Jasper’s Dilemma (1962) from the Mitred Maze (1962–1963) series, confront both the artist and the viewer with a choice between the seductive pleasures of color and the intellectual possibilities of monochrome.

While non-rectangular formats have been used throughout painting’s history, few artists have explored the potential of these forms with comparable rigor and insight as Stella. The Irregular Polygons (1966–1967) series, including Conway I (1966) and Chocorua IV (1966), marked a pivotal movement that bridged Stella’s emphasis on two dimensions in his early striped paintings and the potential for working in three dimensions in his later relief works.

Stella’s monumental works from the Protractor (1967–1971) series, such as Damascus Gate Stretch Variation III (1970), challenged the art world idea that modern art should not be beautiful, let alone popular. The artist believed that abstract painting had reached a crucial stage—embraced by critics, collectors, and curators, but lagging behind new developments in contemporary art.

Seeking to make abstract painting relevant again, Stella subverted the traditional boundaries of the medium with the Polish Village (1970–1974) series, projecting his works into the viewer’s space. Subsequent works such as Eskimo Curlew (1976), from the Exotic Bird (1976–1980) series and Talladega (1980), from the Circuit (1980–1984) series, incorporate an increasingly sculptural vocabulary of solids and voids.

Stella developed his own expanded conception of space in the Cones and Pillars (1984–1987) series, which included works such as Gobba, Zoppa e Collotorto (1985). Monumental reliefs from the Moby-Dick (1986–1997) series such as The Whiteness of the Whale (USB-1, 2X) (1987) expand space further with forms that suggest perpetual energy and motion.

The exhibition concludes with recent works, including those that Stella has created using advanced technologies such as computer-aided design software and three-dimensional printing. In works including K.144 (2013), which evokes the experience of listening to music in space and time, Stella has de-emphasized the sculptural properties of mass and weight, in favor of gravity-defying forms that convey the ways in which sounds can fill—and seemingly shape—space.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936, Frank Stella attended Phillips Academy, in nearby Andover, and Princeton University, where he studied art history and painting. After graduation, he established permanent residence in New York City and achieved near-immediate fame with his Black Paintings (1958–1960). Throughout his career, Stella has continued to challenge and expand the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Though his early work influenced and allied him with the emerging Minimalist movement, Stella did not regard himself as an adherent of Minimalism, and his art has become visually more complex and dynamic over the years. Evolving away from a restrained aesthetic, Stella’s compositions became increasingly ambitious and exuberant in form, color, and scale.
 
 
 
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Expansive presentation surveying the career of Frank Stella - 05.11.2016-26.02.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-12-07

2225 - 20170115 - U.S.A. - SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Exhibition at Asian Art Museum brings love, bravery, friendship and fiery battle to life - 21.10.2016-15.01.2017

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The Asian Art Museum presents The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe, an exhibition of ancient and contemporary artwork and multimedia depicting sacred stories as old as the Bible, longer than the Odyssey, and a source of creative inspiration from India to Indonesia. 
On view Oct. 21, 2016 – Jan. 15, 2017, The Rama Epic — organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco — is unprecedented in scale and scope, with 135 sculptures and paintings, masks, puppets, and examples of temple architecture. Objects and artworks originate from India, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, and are borrowed from museums across the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

Countless generations have grown up with this extraordinary tale, also known as the Ramayana (“Rama’s Journey”). By exploring the key characters of this beloved classic, the exhibition immerses visitors in the enduring appeal of Rama: the legendary prince; Sita: his long-suffering love; Hanuman: their faithful monkey lieutenant; and Ravana: the ten-headed lord of the demons, whose abduction of Sita sets the drama in motion.

Artworks from 1,500 years ago to today reveal how depictions of these characters — as well as their regional variations — have evolved over the centuries, with rare temple sculptures and paintings made for 17th-century royal courts appearing alongside works by contemporary artists reinterpreting the story in innovative ways.

“This exhibition does more than introduce one of the world’s greatest adventure stories to new audiences. It’s about gaining fresh insight into its chief characters, the hero Rama, his heroine Sita, their ally Hanuman, and their foe Ravana,” says exhibition curator Forrest McGill. “We’ve organized our presentation around these figures so that each one can shine in a different light, bringing out the nuances in an ancient story that has continued to be retold in art and performance to emphasize new, relevant meanings. Its eternal — and vividly human — values of compassion, loyalty, duty and valor are values all audiences can connect to in their daily lives.”

Diverse artworks from across southern Asia outline key story arcs
Many of the unique works featured in the exhibition have never travelled before to America, and the Asian Art Museum will be the only venue for visitors to experience The Rama Epic.

Each gallery focuses on one of the four main characters and explores their entire journey through the epic. A dazzling array of fine art is displayed alongside video excerpts of theatrical performances, TV miniseries, and other contemporary popular media, juxtaposing the diverse ways that Rama, Sita, Hanuman, and Ravana have appeared in various cultures at various times in history. Highlights include:

• Eight examples of the remarkably large and detailed paintings from the “Mewar Ramayana” as well as two of its Sanskrit text pages on loan from the British Library. Commissioned by a Hindu king, the chief artist of the set of paintings was Muslim. From the golden age of Indian court painting, it could be the most sumptuously illustrated version of the epic ever, with as many as 450 paintings originally made by teams of artists over the course of 1649-1653. Not to be missed from the Mewar is Mourning for the death of Ravana, a splendid painting showing Ravana’s many wives weeping over his body.

• The glorious, three-tiered Theatrical mask of Ravana comes from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where it is the crowning glory of a set of royal gifts bestowed in honor of America’s 1876 centennial by the King of Siam (Thailand), whose father was so memorably depicted in The King and I. With nine heads (the tenth being the live dancer’s) stacked on top of one another, the work is a rare example of a gilded theatrical mask surviving for almost a 150 years, having escaped the wear-and-tear of the stage.

• Hanuman conversing, a large bronze dated to 1000-1100, and borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Holes in the base for dowels tell us that the statue would have once graced a temple in southern India where on festival occasions he would have been carried through the streets in religious processions, festooned with flowers and decked in jewels and rich textiles.

• A lushly painted accordion manuscript from around 1870, depicting Scenes of the Rama epic, comes to us from the final years before the British conquest of Myanmar. Most likely made specially for the royal library in Mandalay and featuring detailed illustrations of Sita attired as a Burmese princess in glittering gold, the images appear without text, demonstrating that even in Buddhist countries the Ramayana permeated cultural contexts.

• The Shadow puppet of Hanuman wooing Ravana’s niece Punnakay, part of a complete series of Cambodian puppets crafted in 1973 in the days before the genocidal wave of the Khmer Rouge wiped out a centuries-old artisanal tradition. Created by the last generation of local artisans trained in time-honored traditions, and now housed in Paris’s Musée national des arts asiatiques–Guimet, the perforated animal hide stands over four and half feet tall and illuminates how in Southeast Asia Hanuman is beloved as much as a Casanova as for his skills as a warrior, his cleverness and devotion.

“The Rama Epic really connects you to these characters no matter who you are or what kind of art you enjoy,” says Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu. “It’s why we also include artworks like the pastel portrait of Sita from 1893 by French symbolist Odilon Redon. Although from Europe, this work shows the creative resonance of the story among artists of the avant-garde no matter the time or place, highlighting it as an important cultural reference point not only in Asia, but around the world today.”

New art, performances, and multimedia bring Rama Epic to life
• During the exhibition, the museum will host a series of dance performances from India, Cambodia, and Indonesia, supplemented with the interpretive magic of live storytellers and in-gallery clips of performers from across southern Asia as well as television series which are cherished touchstones for hundreds of millions of Rama epic-enthusiasts around the globe.

• Commissioned by the Asian Art Museum, acclaimed Indian documentary director Benoy Behl’s newest work, The Rama Epic Live, will be shown continuously. Behl’s sensitively observed film about performance traditions like dance and drama will allow both those familiar with the tale as well as newcomers to appreciate the Ramayana as it is interpreted around Asia. A longer version of the film will premiere at the museum on Saturday, Dec. 3 at 1:30PM.

• An original 60-minute exhibition audio tour, conceived to feel like a serial radio play, immerses visitors in the plot by incorporating the voice work of four actors of South Asian heritage as the main characters. Carefully crafted dialogue based on the classical version of the tale by Valmiki will mix with musical effects to bring the whole world of the Ramayana to life. Available for download for FREE on the museum’s website starting in mid-October.



Asian Art Museum - The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe - 21.10.2016 - 15.01.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


2016-11-30

2224 - 20171231 - U.S.A. - ALBANY - NEW YORK - New York State Museum - Hudson Valley Ruins - 20.08.2016-31.12.2017

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This photography and architecture exhibition is based on the work of Robert Yasinsac and Thomas Rinaldi. Their 2006 book, Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape, studies the region's forgotten cultural treasures. In addition to great river estates, the book profiles sites more meaningful to everyday life in the Valley: churches and hotels, commercial and civic buildings, mills and train stations. Included are works by some of the most important names in American architectural history, such as Alexander Jackson Davis and Calvert Vaux.

The exhibit is divided into three parts: the upper, middle, and lower sections of the Hudson River Valley. Sites have been selected for their general historical and architectural significance, their relationship to important themes in the region’s history, their physical condition or “rustic” character, and their ability to demonstrate a particular threat still faced by historical buildings in the region. The exhibition will look at a few sites that have changed, for better or for worse, in the past ten years since the book’s publication.




  New York State Museum - Hudson Valley Ruins - 20.08.2016 - 31.12.2017



 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-11-23

2223 - 20170116 - U.S.A - HOUSTON - TEXAS - Degas: A New Vision - 15.10.2016-16.01.2017

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Edgar Degas, Sulking, c. 1870, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1918. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, image source: Art Resource, NY
 
This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the exclusive U.S. venue for Degas: A New Vision, the most significant international survey in three decades of the work of Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917). While Degas’s reputation has often been confined to his ballet imagery, the artist’s oeuvre is rich, complex, and abundant, spanning the entire second half of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Degas: A New Vision assembles some 200 works from public and private collections around the world, and showcase Degas’s abiding interests across painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and sculpture.

The MFAH has developed this major retrospective with the National Gallery of Victoria, in association with Art Exhibitions Australia. Some 60 additional loans are exclusive to the Houston presentation, including such major works as Dancers, Pink and Green, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as preparatory drawings reunited with the iconic paintings that evolved from them, including Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer's Opera “Robert the Devil.”

Not since the 1988 landmark retrospective Degas—organized by Henri Loyrette, then at the Grand Palais in Paris; Gary Tinterow, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the late Jean Sutherland Boggs of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—has the artist’s career been fully assessed. “The objective of Degas in 1988 was to piece together Degas’s work as a whole, in an accurate chronology; though it may seem surprising now, that had never been done,” said MFAH director Gary Tinterow. “That exhibition led to a revival of interest in Degas, and dozens of shows focused on individual subjects of his work—the bathers, the dancers, the jockeys, the portraits—or his influence on other artists. Now, we are able to benefit from that scholarship and, led by Henri Loyrette, the preeminent Degas biographer and scholar, put Degas back together again, and see the artist anew.”

“Degas: A New Vision will explore Degas’s measured continuity, his journey as he reworks one painting after another, and his total refusal to settle on a definitive composition,” commented Henri Loyrette, the Paris-based Degas scholar and former director of the Louvre who is the organizing curator of the exhibition. “This is the distinctive genius of Degas, which makes him both a precursor and particularly relevant to today. Each period looks at the artist in a different way. What can he tell us today? That is the basic purpose of this show.”

Degas: A New Vision reveals the continuity within Degas’s work from the beginning to the end of his career, as he restlessly moved among the media of oil painting, drawing, pastel, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, all the while employing common themes and approaches, revisiting poses and motifs that he had used decades earlier, and reworking paintings that he kept in his studio.

Degas’s earliest work, from the mid-1850s, is rooted in the Renaissance; in one early self-portrait he depicts himself as a Florentine courtier. By the late 1850s, Degas had shifted to multi-figure compositions, among them the double portrait of his brother-in-law and sister, Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (1865). This vignette of daily life, set in a nondescript, bourgeois environment, reveals a fascinating interplay of the couples’ relationship: in this depiction, Thérèse remains no more than the shadow of her husband, half hidden behind the table, with one hand grasping her cheek and the other anxiously reaching for Edmondo.

From paintings like the Morbilli portrait, Degas moved to modern history painting based on classical subjects, experimenting as he deployed multiple figures on a canvas. In two studies for Young Spartans Exercising and Scene of War, both from the mid-1860s, Degas uses a range of expressive posture and unusual pose that had not been seen before in painting. In addition, both works feature posed figures that Degas would revisit in very different contexts 20, even 40 years later.

By the late 1860s, Degas had abandoned these mythological and classical subjects. “After a great many essays and experiments and trial shots in all directions, he has fallen in love with modern life,” the great critic, artist, and writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote in 1874, following a visit to Degas’s studio.

At his height, in the 1870s and 1880s, Degas pursued every facet, high and low, of modern life: café scenes, in his iconic In a café (1875), also known as L’absinthe; jockeys and steeplechases, in Out of the Paddock (Racehorses) (1868–72) and Before the Race (c. 1882); student ballerinas in Dance Foyer of the Opera at Rue Le Peletier (1872), The Dance Class (1873), and Dancers, Pink and Green (1890); everyday routines in the brothel, in The Name Day of the Madam (1879); life below stairs, in Women Ironing (1884–86). A trip to visit his mother’s family in Louisiana produced his famous A Cotton Market in New Orleans (1873). All are complex, multi-figure compositions with the focus on the incidental or the moment of anticipation: a young dancer about to perform a step; the top-hatted silhouette of a standing man in a room crowded with young ballerinas; the man reading the newspaper amid the bustle of the cotton exchange.

Still, Degas continued to mine his earlier work for poses and postures. The young lady leaning on her elbows toward a man at his desk in the 1870 interior Sulking, who looks up at the viewer as if interrupted, becomes the older woman in a pensive tête-à-tête in the 1885 Conversation. Degas would continue to explore variations on a single subject, such as the female nude, creating them in different media across more than half a century. A lesser-known aspect of this creative journey included a short, but intensive, foray into photography. Degas’s photographs—the majority of which were produced during the year 1895 and feature his inner circle of family members, friends, and fellow artists—reveal how the artist used the medium both as part of a creative continuum that included paintings and pastels and as an experiment with a new form of visual expression, resulting in photographic figure studies, portraits, and self-portraits that stand alone as works of art in their own right. Degas: A New Vision will unite over 20 of his surviving photographs for the first time since the 1998 exhibition Edgar Degas: Photographer, which debuted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

“Thirty years ago, no one even considered Degas’s late work, but the 1988 exhibition changed the public’s mind,” Loyrette said. Tinterow added, “The revelation then was how strong and modern the end of Degas’s career was—allowing us to see, for example, how artists like Lucien Freud can show us the shocking modernity of late Degas, and how we can appreciate the extravagant color and expressive line.” Degas himself said that by the 1890s he had given himself over to “an orgy of color.” The two figures in Combing the Hair (The Coiffure, 1896; once owned by Henri Matisse) are rendered in a blaze of red; The Bathers and other late studies depict female nude figures—alone or in groups; some composed, others random. For Degas, these expressions of the female form showed women as they saw, rather than imagined, themselves.

Although organized chronologically overall, the exhibition also presents specific groupings devoted to a particular theme or technique. In all, some 200 works trace Degas’s career, across painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. The exhibition is drawn from private collections around the world as well as public collections that include those of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Harvard Art Museums; Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid; and the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.
 
 
 
 
Museum of Fine Arts Houston - Degas: A New Vision - 15.10.2016 - 16.01.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-11-16

2222 - 20170115 - U.S.A. - DENVER - COLORADO - Clyfford Still: The Works on Paper - 14.10.2016-15.01.2017

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Clyfford Still

In celebration of its fifth anniversary year, the Clyfford Still Museum presents Clyfford Still: The Works on Paper, the first-ever exhibition of Still’s drawings, and the largest exhibition of Still’s work at the Museum to date. The exhibition, on view October 14, 2016–January 15, 2017, features more than 240 works, shedding new light on this integral but historically overlooked part of Still’s creative process. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition reveals the centrality of drawing to Still’s practice and offer an intimate look at the evolution of his style from figuration to fully realized abstractions.

In addition to offering a chronological study of Still’s works, the exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of works in many different media, the majority of which have never before been on public view. Among the exhibition highlights is a significant group of oil-on-paper compositions made between 1943 and 1944, selections from the more than 1,200 pastels that Still created in the final 10 years of his life, and a series of figurative portraits and landscapes—many featuring Still and his family—created in the mid-1920s. The exhibition also draws on the extensive Clyfford Still Archives housed at the Museum, featuring items such as technical studies made by Still while working in the San Francisco Bay Area shipyards during the onset of World War II and various sketches and notations that seem to lay out the abstract forms of his later work. The exhibition concludes with the artist’s final dated and signed work, a pastel-on-paper composition created in 1980.

“Five years into our deep dive into the creative process behind Still’s revolutionary work, this exhibition reveals more about this mysterious artist than anyone could have considered possible when we opened,” says director and exhibition co-curator Dean Sobel. Senior Consulting Curator David Anfam adds, “Still’s works on paper constitute a vast template and laboratory for the mechanics of Still’s art as a whole. Famously, drawing reveals an artist’s proficiency in a way that painting, with its more seductive materiality, can readily disguise.”

Despite the fact that Clyfford Still drew prolifically throughout his career, historically it has been next to impossible to view Still’s works on paper; only seven are known to exist in public collections outside Denver. The variety and sheer volume of Still’s drawings—more than 2,300 works in Denver’s collection housed at the Museum, compared with approximately 830 paintings—attest to the significant role that draftsmanship played in his work, particularly when compared to his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Still explored graphite, charcoal, pastel, crayon, pen and ink, oil paint, gouache, and tempera, as well as lithography, etching, woodcut, and silkscreen. In some cases, paintings—including such breakthrough canvases as Still’s PH-235 (1944-N-No. 1), widely considered to be the first mature iteration of Abstract Expressionism—grew directly out of sketches or more finished drawings. On the other hand, many works are fully realized pieces in themselves rather than preparatory steps.

Clyfford Still: The Works on Paper is curated by CSM Director Dean Sobel, Senior Consulting Curator David Anfam, and Bailey Harberg Placzek, assistant curator and collections manager.




Clyfford Still Museum - Clyfford Still: The Works on Paper - 14.10.2016 - 15.01.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-11-09

2221 - 20170108 - U.S.A. - CINCINNATI - OHIO - Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth - 15.10.2016-08.01.2017

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Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Undergrowth with Two Figures (detail), 1890, oil on canvas, Bequest of Mary E. Johnston, 1967.1430.
 
Centered on Vincent van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new exhibition, Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, takes visitors up close with celebrated woodland landscapes from October 15, 2016–January 8, 2017.

This exhibition—presented only at the Cincinnati Art Museum—brings an important group of artworks on loan from around the world together for the first time.

Exploring the works of the Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries, the exhibition traces the evolution of the Dutch artist’s love of the natural world, powers of observation and mastery of detail through this special group of landscape paintings spanning his career.

This exhibition is the first to take a close look at Van Gogh’s poetic depictions of the forest floor, known as sous-bois, the French term for “undergrowth.” These odes to nature were a reaction to the increasing industrialization and urbanization of society.

The exhibition allows visitors to compare Van Gogh’s treatment of this theme with examples by those who influenced and inspired him, including Théodore Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Twenty artworks are borrowed from museum collections in Canada, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Japan and more, and are joined by works from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s own important collection of French paintings and works on paper.

“Visiting this exhibition is like taking a walk in the woods with Van Gogh and fellow artists,” explains Julie Aronson, Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. “Vincent van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures is widely recognized as one of the great masterpieces of Van Gogh’s late career. It is also a visitor favorite—often the favorite—among the many extraordinary works in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s galleries. This exhibition is a revelation that puts this significant work in the context of the art of its time.”

Since the Cincinnati Art Museum’s acquisition of Undergrowth with Two Figures in 1967, the museum has made this treasure available in major exhibitions around the world. It will travel to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2018.

In Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, the painter is brought to life for visitors with his own words about the intimate relation between nature and art and the artists he admired, extensively quoted from his voluminous correspondence with his brother Theo. These letters serve as inspiration for the exhibition’s interactive activity, which involves a hands-on letter-writing experience. Another interactive employs Google technology to allow visitors to explore Undergrowth with Two Figures on a touch screen, revealing the texture and brushstrokes of the painting in greatly enlarged detail.

With this exhibition, the Cincinnati Art Museum is leading the way with original scholarship in one of the few areas of Van Gogh study that remains to be explored. The accompanying catalogue, also titled Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, examines Van Gogh’s engagement with the sous-bois subject from various perspectives. Co-published by D Giles Limited, it will be available for sale at the Cincinnati Art Museum and online this fall. Cornelia Homburg, art historian and one of the world’s foremost Van Gogh experts, is among the authors. She will be speaking at the Cincinnati Art Museum on October 16.

To shed further light on Van Gogh’s artistic milieu, the exhibition also includes Unlocking Van Gogh’s World, a rich display of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prints from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection. In addition to Van Gogh, Artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, James McNeill Whistler and others are included in this supporting exhibition.
 
 
 
Cincinnati Art Museum - Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth - 15.10.2016 - 08.01.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-11-02

2220 - 20170318 - U.S.A. - HOUSTON-TEXAS - Blaffer Art Museum presents first major museum exhibition for Analia Saban - 24.09.2016-18.03.2017

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This exhibition, the first major museum presentation of Argentinian artist Analia Saban, surveys her last decade of practice through 30 works that explore everyday objects through unconventional usage of materials.

Surveying art history as if it were a ‘murder scene,’ she peels back (researches, deconstructs, reconstructs) layers of material histories and subject matters in search of new directions and possibilities. Saban’s initial project included tracing and annotating paint strokes of existing paintings in an analytical process that culminated in literally stripping pictures of their material substance and iconography, and culminated into a rolled up ball of colored strips of painted fabric from a plethora of unraveled paintings.

Stripe Hand Towel, Bag with Canvas, and Fitted Bed Sheet, all 2011, chart her experiments with acrylic paint cast into viscerally affecting simulations of common household objects such as towels, sheets and plastic bags attached to or containing a canvas. In her 2010-12 Decant and the more recent Bulge series (begun 2014), encaustic paint forms swelling bodies protruding from their support. Applied to canvas by pouring hot encaustic paint into plastic bags that are peeled away when the medium has cooled off and hardened, these encaustic masses proudly display the marks of their prior aggregate state as both their subject and form.

In her Draped Marble series (begun in 2014), marble is broken, glued and fastened to exquisitely crafted wooden sawhorses to evoke folded towels left out to dry. Recalling Saban’s earlier works in cast acrylic, these sculptures displace classic associations of material and application both within art history and consumer culture.

Currently working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, she uses the constituent parts of each as her very subject matter. Creating dialogue between media’s historically defined conventions and their manifestations within the anatomy of individual artworks, her work is deeply inscribed in the ongoing process of conditional evolution and boundary-pushing renegotiation of the possibilities of media-based practices. What contributes to the uniqueness of her approach is a decidedly feminist sensibility, the frequent inscription of her physical and psychic self, and a good dose of wry humor.

Born in 1980 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Saban currently works in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. She received a BFA in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001, followed by an MFA in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. The artist has exhibited extensively at institutions worldwide, including National Museum of Norway, Oslo; Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; MARCO Museum in Vigo, Spain; among others. Her works are represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York; Norton Museum of Art in Florida; Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.




Blaffer Art Museum - Analia Saban - 24.09.2016 - 18.03.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-26

2219 - 20170319 - U.S.A. - LOS ANGELES - CA - Major museum survey of Toba Khedoori's oeuvre in Los Angeles - 25.09.2016-09.03.2017

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Toba Khedoori, Untitled (branches 1), 2011–12, oil on linen, 31 3/4 × 41 3/8 in., private collection, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London, © Toba Khedoori, photo © Tim Nighswander, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
 
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announces Toba Khedoori (September 25, 2016–March 19, 2017), a major museum survey of Khedoori’s oeuvre over the past 22 years. The exhibition presents the artist’s more recent oil-on-canvas paintings alongside her earlier large-scale works on paper, demonstrating the impressive arc of her artistic production over the past two decades. The exhibition includes more than 25 works and is curated by Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and formerly the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of contemporary art at LACMA, with Christine Y. Kim, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA. Following its run at LACMA, Toba Khedoori will be on view at PAMM from April 20–September 24, 2017.

Toba Khedoori has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1990. Her early works are notable for their precise draftsmanship and for their use of negative space—often at a very large scale. Khedoori frequently depicts architectural forms from distanced perspectives, rendering commonplace objects and spaces familiar yet decontextualized. In recent years, she has transitioned from paper to canvas, producing smaller scale works that hover between representation and abstraction. Like her earlier compositions, these works are enigmatic and acutely detailed; in an art world awash with rapidly moving images and saturated colors, Khedoori remains committed to the silent, slow, and exacting process of working by hand.

Sirmans said, “Toba Khedoori elevates the experience of the commonplace by treating ordinary objects and bits and pieces of nature as if they were precious baubles. Her attention to detail, her surrealist wit, and her appreciation for the magic of the everyday remind us to take stock of what surrounds us.”

“Looking at this survey of Khedoori’s work in the context of recent exhibitions at LACMA, one can see a focus emerging that is indicative of a changing world of art,” said Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Considering the show alongside monographic exhibitions of Agnes Martin, Diana Thater, and Helen Pashgian as well as the long-term installation of Maria Nordman’s YANG-NA, it is clear that there is rapidly growing recognition of the work of women artists. In addition, the exhibition extends LACMA’s efforts to trace the recent history of art in Southern California, which includes Thater and Pashgian, as well as John Altoon, Asco, Edward Kienholz, Ken Price, Noah Purifoy, and James Turrell.”

Toba Khedoori is arranged in loose chronological and thematic order. The exhibition begins with large paintings on paper that ushered her into the contemporary art scene in the early 1990s. Her breakthrough came with monumental paintings on paper, such as Untitled (doors) (1996) and LACMA’s own Untitled (hallway) (1997), within which detritus from her studio floor appears embedded in the wax surfaces. Depicting common objects and architectural features and occupying a space between painting and drawing, these impressive works seem to withhold as much as they reveal. While Khedoori’s works are emphatically two-dimensional, the scale of those early paintings brings them into dialogue with the actual experience of architecture, which she often represents in fragments. While Khedoori’s emphasis the quotidian as subject matter serves as a sober update of Pop Art’s embrace of common objects, her placement of these everyday objects within undefined and thus mysterious surroundings invites an almost surreal unease.

Departing from the large scale and two-dimensionality found in Khedoori’s early work, the exhibition transitions into the artist’s paintings of the early 2000s. Here scale, shadows, and contrast become more varied and dramatic. Untitled (clouds) (2005), for example, is a vertical format with its entire upper half is filled with billowy clouds while the lower half is mostly empty space. Before 2005, almost all of Khedoori’s works are horizontal, suggesting the horizon line of nature and landscapes in the history of art while creating a surprising contrast with the everyday objects shown within these frames. Untitled (clouds), on the other hand, is oriented vertically and the clouds occupy the frame of the picture with no sky around them.

Untitled (black fireplace) (2006) and Untitled (white fireplace) (2005) feature an almost photorealist depiction of wood burning in a fireplace. In these works, she takes the same subject and paints it twice, changing only the color of the space surrounding the image of the fireplace. Using encaustic, she makes one work black; the other is simply oil and wax on paper, like her earlier works. Through this contrast, she encourages viewers to examine these differences, inviting them to question the copy in a world where the idea that something cannot be reproduced has long ago vanished.

The final gallery in the exhibition showcases the artist’s most recent work, including two paintings depicting branches and leaves. In Untitled (leaves/branches) (2015), Khedoori executes the line, color, and proportions of foliage with technical mastery. In contrast to the photorealistic quality of these works, other pieces in this final gallery move toward grids and abstraction, such as Untitled (tile) (2015), a geometric study of a mosaic tile floor reflecting light from an unseen source.

Toba Khedoori was born in Sydney, Australia in 1964. She received her BA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1988) and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (1994).

Her work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (2003); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2002); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997).

Khedoori was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994) and a MacArthur Foundation Grant (2002). Curators have included her in numerous international group exhibitions such as the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); 2nd Seville Biennal (2006); Liverpool Biennial (2006); 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004); and the Whitney Biennial (1995).

Prominent museums that hold her work in their permanent collections include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Basel; Albertina, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles
 
 
 
 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Toba Khedoori - 25.09.2016 - 09.03.2017 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-20

2218 - 20161231 - U.S.A. - GREENWICH-CONN -"Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors' Private Collections" at the Bruce Museum - 24.09.2016-31.12.2016

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Jenny Saville, The Mothers, 2011. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 106 5/16 x 86 5/8 in. Collection of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
 
Only yesterday, it seems, one was hard-pressed to name more than a handful of successful women artists; now the list would be extensive, and the choices rich and varied. Although numerous recent exhibitions have featured women’s art, the collecting of art created by women has received scant attention. In fact, private collections are in the process of being dramatically transformed, shifting to focus on contemporary artists, women in particular. 

The Bruce Museum opens Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections. Greenwich and the nearby communities in Fairfield and Westchester counties are home to a number of the finest contemporary collections, and thus to some of the most exciting art by women being made today. Her Crowd will offer the rare opportunity to see what some of America’s most influential collectors of contemporary art consider beautiful, important, and compelling. Themes specific to women continue to be of significance: motherhood, food, sexuality; beauty and its discontents; stereotypes of femininity and their undoing; intersections of gender and race. Equally important for Her Crowd is the current powerful resurgence of abstraction in its myriad forms: minimalist patterning, expressive mark-making, and painterly exuberance. Many artists represented in the show traffic in unexpected collisions: of the second and third dimension, of the carefully crafted and the found object, of the concrete and the immaterial. Running the gamut from established figures to brilliant newcomers, the exhibition includes remarkable work by Yayoi Kusama, Kiki Smith, Betye Saar, Annie Lapin, Margaret Lee, Carol Bove, Dana Schutz, Jessica Stockholder, Jenny Saville, and Tara Donovan, among others. Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections will offer a glimpse into the exciting interchange between contemporary artists and their passionate collectors.

The exhibition is co-curated by Kenneth E. Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator of Art, and Mia Laufer, PhD candidate (Washington University in Saint Louis) and Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow.
 
 
 
 
Bruce Museum - "Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors' Private Collections"
24.09.2016 - 31.012.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-12

2217 - 20161230 - U.S.A. - CHICAGO, IL - Smart Museum of Art presents collection of 830 photographic works - 22.09.2016-30.12.2016

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An extraordinary collection of 830 photographic works spanning from 1844 to 2012, bequested to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, forms the basis of an expansive new exhibition, There was a whole collection made: Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman, September 22–December 30, 2016. The exhibition of more than 300 works is curated by Laura Letinsky, Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the College at the University of Chicago, and herself an acclaimed photographer, and Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curator of Contemporary Art.

There was a whole collection made mines the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman’s 2014 gift of over eight hundred photographic works by 414 artists to the Smart Museum, essentially establishing a major new resource for the public as well as scholars of the history and theory of photography. The exhibition draws extensively from the collection, which the Guttmans built over 31 years, and includes rare vintage prints by pioneers of the medium like William Henry Fox Talbot and David Octavius Hill; modern works by Hannah Höch, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, and Helen Levitt; contemporary classics by Diane Arbus, Malick Sidibé, Chuck Close, and Carrie Mae Weems; and much more. The exhibition opens with a dramatic salon-style wall of nearly fifty works and afterward is organized into five thematic sections: the natural and built world; photographic experimentation; documentary; portraiture; and “fifteen minutes of fame,” which features portraits of famous and not-sofamous people by other famous, and not-so-famous photographers.

“Rather than seeking to collect, for example, all the works of a specific artist, period, or place, or the best known or most precious, Lester and Betty Guttmans’ choices grew out of their inquisitiveness and wide-ranging interests in the world,” said exhibition co-curator Laura Letinsky. “The breadth of historical, technological, and conceptual strategies, as well as the variety of subject matter, demonstrate an ongoing curiosity. It is a thoroughly eclectic and a fantastically personal gathering of images expressive of the Guttmans’ full, deep lives.”

“This exhibition marks the Smart Museum’s first opportunity to publicly celebrate the Guttmans’ inspiring collection and the generosity of their bequest,” added co-curator Jessica Moss. “At the Smart—Lester and Betty’s neighborhood museum—their passion and curiosity will live on as their collection becomes a vital resource not only for teaching and research but also for all to enjoy.”

There was a whole collection made is accompanied by a fully illustrated multi-author catalogue published by the Smart Museum and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

The Guttmans were married for 50 years and worked together at Argonne National Laboratory, where Lester Guttman (1919–2006) was a senior scientist and editor of the Journal of Applied Physics and Betty Guttman (1922–2014) was a technical librarian. Betty was also an alumna of the University of Chicago (SB 1943) and the couple were longtime Hyde Park residents. While photography was just one of their shared pursuits—they were also patrons of art and music in Chicago and, as amateur mycologists, coedited the journal McIlvainea—they enjoyed the deep pleasure of living with art that one knows well.



Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago - Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman
22.09.2016-30.12.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-05

2216 - 20170212 - U.S.A. - EAST LANSING - MICHIGAN - Broad Art Museum - Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists - 27.08.2016 - 12.02.2017

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Geng Xue, Mr. Sea, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Klein Sun Gallery, New York

Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists focuses a critical lens on the artistic production of a group of highly talented, emerging women artists from China. Collectively, the artists in this exhibition investigate a wide-range of themes and issues, including the status of women in China; cultural and gender identity; interpersonal relationships; and more broad sociopolitical dynamics, both in China and beyond. Importantly, their probing investigations stir discussion and draw attention to their diverse and varied experiences.

The generation of individuals born in China during the 1970s and after witnessed significant changes—including ideological, cultural, social, and in the domestic sphere—as a result of China’s opening up to foreign markets and international exchange. These shifts have in turn motivated artists to experiment within their own artistic practices in order to better understand the struggles and conflicts they encounter both privately and publicly. Following this line of inquiry, Fire Within brings together fresh perspectives and approaches to traditional mediums with the intent to reveal the new forms of consciousness that have emerged in recent years. Taken together, the works on display transcend gender and cultural differences, instead tapping into a more universal sense of human nature.



 
Broad Art Museum - Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists 
 27.08.2016 - 12.02.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


2016-09-28

2215 - 20161204 - U.S.A. - NEW PORT BEACH - CALIFORNIA - Orange County Museum of Art - American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of Duncan Phillips - 06.08.2016-04.12.2016

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Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Red Sun, 1935. Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 28 inches. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1935.

This exhibition, organized by The Phillips Collection, presents a thematic journey that reveals the breadth of America's modernist vision, beginning with the great American art heroes of the late 19th century, whose work set the course for modern art in the United States, and concluding with the Abstract Expressionists, whose new visual language turned American art into a global force. Included are 65 works created between the 1860s and 1960s by artists such as Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Helen Frankenthaler, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe.



 
Orange County Museum of Art - American Mosaic: Picturing Modern Art through the Eye of
Duncan Phillips - 06.08.2016-04.12.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-09-21

2214 - 20161113 - U.S.A. - LOS ANGELES -CALIFORNIA - Getty Museum - London Calling - 26.07.2016 -13.11.2016

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Working in postwar Britain, the artists of the "School of London" rejected contemporary art’s preoccupation with abstraction and conceptualism in favor of the human figure and everyday landscape.
Drawn primarily from the Tate in London, this exhibition highlights the work of six of the leading artists who revolutionized and reinvigorated figurative painting in the later 20th century: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and R.B. Kitaj.




Getty Museum - London Calling - 26.07.2016 -13.11.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


2016-09-14

2213 - 20161105 - U.S.A. - SALT LAKE CITY - UTAH - Utah Museum of Contemporary Art - Berna Reale: Singing in the Rain - 19.08.2016 - 05.11.2016

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Video and performance artist Berna Reale exposes habituated realities in Brazil’s contemporary society with acts that infiltrate the relentless urban routines of Belém, the largest city and capital of the northern Brazilian state of Pará.

Through pointed humor, satirical characters, and striking colors, Reale’s performances in the videos Palomo (2012), Cantando na chuva (Singing in the Rain)(2014), and Untitled (2011) investigate current social conflicts of Brazil involving issues of criminal justice, capitalism, and gender inequality.
Wearing a dog muzzle and an androgynous police uniform in Palomo, Reale sits atop a brightly painted red horse and arbitrarily patrols unusually vacant city streets, an image that simultaneously pokes fun of the police force while soberly suggesting a dormant, violent danger.[1] Naked and hogtied to a horizontal pole in Untitled, the artist is carried through bustling crowds who gawk and point, eliciting questions of how violence against women is often condoned or ignored altogether. In Cantando na chuva Reale is unrecognizable in a gold suit complete with a gold gas mask and a gold umbrella as she dances to the title song of the 1952 Hollywood classic Singin’ in the Rain.  Dancing through a landfill among the catadores (pickers) who routinely sift through the piles of trash in the background, Reale presents a contrast between the backbreaking actions of the workers and the frivolous nature of a material-obsessed world.
Reale’s work depicts a different Brazilian reality that is often substituted for tropical imagery and samba dancers, provoking audiences to consider the different social roles and situations in Brazil and to recognize the universal nature of such matters in their own lives.

[1] During the performance the Belém police lent Reale the uniform and the horse, Palomo, whose name is used as the title for this video. The police force further helped as they painted the horse with Reale and closed off the streets for the filming duration of the video. 
*This content may contain elements that are not suitable for some audiences, viewer discretion is advised.
 
Berna Reale (b. 1965) lives and works in Belém, Pará, Brazil.  She studied Art at the Federal University of Pará and has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Brazil and abroad in Europe.  Her solo exhibitions include “Eccoci” in 2015 in Venice (Italy); “Vapor” in 2014 at Galeria Millan (São Paulo, Brazil); and “Vazio de nós” in 2013 at MAR – Rio Art Museum (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).  Reale’s participation in group exhibitions include Da pedra Da terra Daqui, 34º Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM – Museum of Modern Art (São Paulo, Brazil) 2015; “Amazônia – Ciclos da Mondernidade” Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) 2012; and “From the Margin to the Edge,” Somerset House (London, England), 2012.  In 2010 Reale began a second career as a criminal expert at the State of Pará Centre of Scientific Skills, and her personal experiences in crime, violence and corruption are themes that are explored in her provocative performances and video work. The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) is the first art institution in the United States to exhibit Reale’s work, and therefore the videos shown in the Codec Gallery were chosen to highlight the range of the artist’s diverse performances.
 
 
 
 
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art - Berna Reale: Singing in the Rain - 19.08.2016 - 05.11.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

2016-09-07

2212 - 20161106 - U.S.A.- KALAMAZOO - MICHIGAN - Reaching into Infinity: Chul Hyun Ahn - 02.07.2016-06.11.2016

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An exhibition of light sculptures displayed in the darkened Joy Light Gallery of Asian Art, Reaching into Infinity shows the work of a sculptor exploring light, color, and illusion as he muses on infinite space and spirituality. The Korean-born artist Chul Hyun Ahn combines one-way mirrors and LED lights to create light boxes glowing with geometric forms that recede like portals into distant space. The lack of gallery lighting will draw viewers into Ahn's visions - mesmerizing, mysterious, and meditative. Often described as a light artist, Ahn has pointed out another important element in his work.

"At the root, my art is about space," he says. "Without light, the space was not visible, so I brought light to my artworks so people would experience a sense of deeper space in the direction of the fading light."

Born in 1971 in Busan, South Korea, Ahn received a bachelor's degree from the Chugye University for the Arts in Seoul. He moved to the U.S. in 1997, and studied at Eastern Michigan University before receiving a master's degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ahn has exhibited internationally and his work can be found in numerous private and public collections. He lives and works in Baltimore, where he is represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery.




Kalamazoo Institute of Arts - Reaching into Infinity: Chul Hyun Ahn - 02.07.2016 - 06.11.2016