Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts a Comprehensive Survey of Works by William Kentridge

Written by Ian Patrick Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:09

FORT WORTH, TX.- William Kentridge: Five Themes, a comprehensive survey of the contemporary South African artist's work, opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Featuring more than 75 works in a range of media—including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books—the exhibition is co-organized by SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. Curated by Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the past three decades. Although the exhibition highlights projects completed since 2000 (many of which have not been seen in the United States), it will also present, for the first time, Kentridge's most recent work alongside his earlier projects from the 1980s and 1990s—revealing as never before the full arc of his distinguished career. On view 12 July through 27 September, 2009.

Following its presentation at The Modern, the survey will travel to the Norton Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Plans for the European tour—which will tentatively include Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem—are being finalized. Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated catalogue, complete with a DVD produced by the artist for this special occasion.

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work, Kentridge has earned international acclaim for his interdisciplinary practice, which often fuses drawing, film, and theater. Known for engaging with the social landscape and political background of his native South Africa, he has produced a searing body of work that explores themes of colonial oppression and social conflict, loss and reconciliation, and the ephemeral nature of both personal and cultural memory.

Kentridge first gained recognition in 1997, when his work was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and in the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials, which were followed by prominent solo exhibitions internationally. His art was widely introduced to American audiences in 2001 through a traveling retrospective—cocurated by Neal Benezra when he served as deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago—which primarily included works made before 2000. William Kentridge: Five Themes brings viewers up to date on the artist's work over the past decade, exploring how his subject matter has evolved from the specific context of South Africa to more universal stories. In recent years, Kentridge has dramatically expanded both the scope of his projects (such as recent full-scale opera productions) and their thematic concerns, which now include his own studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, and the cultural history of postrevolutionary Russia. His newer work is based on an intensive exploration of themes connected to his own life experience, as well as the political and social issues that most concern him.

Although his hand-drawn animations are often described as films, Kentridge himself prefers to call them "drawings for projection." He makes them using a distinctive technique in which he painstakingly creates, erases, and reworks charcoal drawings that are photographed and projected as moving image. Movement is generated within the image, by the artist's hand; the camera serves merely to record its progression. As such, the animations explore a tension between material object and time-based performance, uniquely capturing the artist's working process while telling poignant and politically urgent stories.

Concerning the artist's innovative film installations of the past ten years, Rudolf Frieling adds: "Kentridge has been considered primarily as an artist who draws for projections. Yet his recent installation-based films explore an expanded cinema space and question the very foundation of what it means to produce and perceive a moving image."

The Five Themes
"Parcours d'Atelier: Artist in the Studio"
The first section of the exhibition examines a crucial turning point in Kentridge's work, one in which his own art practice became a subject. According to the artist, many of these projects are meant to reflect the "invisible work that must be done" before beginning a drawing, film, or sculpture. This theme is epitomized by the large-scale multiscreen projection 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003), an homage to the early French film director, who, like Kentridge, often combined performance with drawing. The suite of seven films—each depicting Kentridge at work in his studio or interacting with his creations—has only been shown once before in the United States and will be accompanied by a rarely seen group of related drawings, forming an intimate portrayal of the artist's process.

"Thick Time: Soho and Felix"
A second section of the exhibition is dedicated to Kentridge's best-known fictional characters, Soho Eckstein, a domineering industrialist and real estate developer whose troubled conscience reflects certain miens of contemporary South Africa, and his sensitive alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, who pines for Soho's wife and often functions as a surrogate for the artist himself. The centerpiece of this section, an ongoing work entitled 9 Drawings for Projection, comprises nine short animated films: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), Monument (1990), Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991), Mine (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), WEIGHING . . . and WANTING (1998), Stereoscope (1999), and Tide Table (2003). These projections, along with a key selection of related drawings, follow the lives of Soho and Felix as they struggle to navigate the political and social climate of Johannesburg during the final decade of apartheid. According to Kentridge, the Soho and Felix films were made without a script or storyboards and are largely about his own process of discovery.

"Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession"
In 1975 Kentridge acted in Ubu Rex (an adaptation of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's satire about a corrupt and cowardly despot), and he subsequently devoted a large body of work to the play. He began with a series of eight etchings, collectively entitled Ubu Tells the Truth (1996), and in 1997 made an animated film of the same name, as well as a number of related drawings. These works also deal with the South African experience, specifically addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings set up by the nation's government in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during apartheid. Other highlights in this grouping include the film Shadow Procession (1999), in which Kentridge first utilizes techniques of shadow theater and jointed-paper figures; the multipanel collage Portage (2000); a large charcoal-and-pastel-on-paper work entitled Arc Procession (Smoke, Ashes, Fable) (1990); and some of the artist's rough-hewn bronze sculptures.

"Sarastro and the Master's Voice: The Magic Flute"
A selection of Kentridge's drawings, films, and theater models inspired by his 2005 production of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute for La Monnaie, the leading opera house in Belgium, will be a highlight of the exhibition. The artist's video projection Learning the Flute (2003), which started the Flute project, shifts between images of black charcoal drawings on white paper and white chalk drawings projected onto a blackboard, forming a meditation on darkness and light. Preparing the Flute (2005) was created as a large-scale maquette within which to test projections central to the production of the opera. Another theater model, Black Box/Chambre Noire (2006), which has never been seen in the United States, addresses the opera's themes, specifically through an examination of the colonial war of 1904 in German South-West Africa, and of the genocide of the Herero people. What Will Come (has already come) (2007), a consideration of colonialism in Ethiopia, presents an anamorphic film installation in which intentionally distorted images projected onto a tabletop right themselves only when reflected in a cylindrical mirror. This work was recently acquired, under the guidance of Rosenthal, by the Norton Museum of Art.

"Learning from the Absurd: The Nose"
The fifth section comprises a multichannel projection made in preparation for Kentridge's forthcoming staging of The Nose, a Metropolitan Opera production that will premiere in New York in March 2010. The Nose—a 1930 Dmitri Shostakovich opera based on Nikolai Gogol's absurdist short story of 1836—concerns a Russian official whose nose disappears from his face, only to turn up, in uniform, as a higher-ranking official moving in more respected circles. Kentridge's related work, I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), on view in the United States for the first time, is a room-size installation of projected films that use Gogol's story as the basis for examining Russian modernism and the suppression of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s.

Visit the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at : http://www.themodern.org/

Tate Modern presents 'UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980's'

Written by Wallace Savan Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:07

LONDON - A new display at Tate Modern, UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s, will offer an opportunity to re-appraise Neo-Expressionist painting a quarter of a century after its emergence. Drawing on the collections of UBS and Tate, Paintings from the 1980s, will bring together eleven large-scale works by the key international painters who were at the forefront of this new form of figurative painting. On exhibition 12 November 2008 through 13 April 2009.

Read more: [Tate Modern presents 'UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980's']

The BMW Art Car Collection on the Internet ~ Legendary Collection Virtual Video Tour

Written by Kendell Youngerman Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:04

MUNICH.- Just in time to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the BMW Group’s international cultural commitment, the legendary BMW Art Car Collection can now be seen for the first time within a virtual video tour on the Internet. For the first time, an extensive virtual overview of the origin, history and development of the collection is available on the Internet. In addition to extensive photographic material, a film has been devoted to every single one of the 17 “works of art on wheels”, each of which was designed by an internationally well-known artist. Historic racing footage and artists’ statements as well as renowned representatives from art and culture are to be seen.

Read more: [The BMW Art Car Collection on the Internet ~ Legendary Collection Virtual Video Tour]

Major Outdoor Florida Exhibition by Internationally Acclaimed Artist Yayoi Kusama

Written by Casper Benning Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:02

CORAL GABLES, FL.- This December, the world famous Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will present Yayoi Kusama at Fairchild as part of its annual visual art program. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, known for her distinctive sculptures and paintings that involve hand-worked repetition and bold patterning, will be exhibiting works from the exuberant new sculptural ensemble Flowers that Bloom at Midnight (2009), a group of her classic Pumpkins, as well as Guidepost to the New Space, a multi-part floating work specifically conceived for Fairchild’s Panandus Lake.

This will be the first time anywhere in the world that all these sculptures have been shown together in an outdoor setting. “Yayoi Kusama at Fairchild” will open on December 5, 2009, to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, and will be on view through May 30, 2010.

“Fairchild is absolutely thrilled to bring Yayoi Kusama’s enchanting art works to South Florida,” said Bruce Greer, Fairchild’s board of trustees’ President. “Her surreal, botanically inspired monumental sculptures, brought together with Fairchild’s world-famous tropical garden landscape, are sure to provide a magical experience for visitors of all ages.”

Flowers that Bloom at Midnight consists of vividly painted, giant cast flowers measuring between five and sixteen feet in height. These sinuous baroque forms will provide a lively contrast with the monolithic Pumpkins. The multi-part floating work Guidepost to the New Space, a series of rounded “humps” in fire-engine red with white polka dots, will protrude enigmatically from the water in a pond on the 83-acre garden. Thus Kusama’s artificial garden will unfold in all its psychedelic glory, against the exotic backdrop of Fairchild’s gardens with their equally rare and wondrous tropical vegetation. All sculptures in the exhibition are on loan from Gagosian Gallery.

Yayoi Kusama is one of the world’s leading artists and a living legend of the international art avant-garde. Flamboyant yet profound, her oeuvre encompasses unique masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as mass production and popular culture. Kusama also produces playful sculpture on a monumental scale. Her first large-scale sculpture appeared in 1994, a huge, vivid yellow pumpkin covered with an optical spot pattern, which was installed at the end of a jetty on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Sea, Japan.

She has since completed several major sculptural commissions—ensembles of huge, brightly hued, triffid-like plants and flowers—for public institutions in Japan and abroad including The Visionary Flowers (2002), Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Nagano, Japan; Tulipes de Shangri-La (2003), Eurolille, Lille, France; Tsumari in Bloom (2003) Matsudai-machi Higashikubiki-gun, Niigata, Japan; and The Hymn of Life: Tulips (2007), Beverly Hills City Council, Los Angeles.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929. Her work is in the collections of leading museums throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Major exhibitions of her work include Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan (1987); Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York (1989); “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1969,” LACMA, 1998 (traveling to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), 1998–99; Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000 (traveling to selected venues in Europe and Korea), 2001–2003; “KUSAMATRIX”, Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004 (traveling to Art Park Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo Art Park, Hokkaido); “Eternity – Modernity”, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004–2005; and “The Mirrored Years,” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008,which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and will open at the City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand later in 2009.

“Yayoi Kusama at Fairchild” is part of an annual exhibition series in support of the Garden’s conservation work, educational outreach programs and commitment to cultural enhancement in South Florida. Fairchild houses internationally important collections of rare tropical fruit and cycads as well as the largest palm collection in the U.S. The Garden maintains an international conservation program, which works with more than 20 countries to preserve some of the worlds’ rarest species and tropical habitats. Fairchild’s major art exhibitions have included world-renowned artists such as Mark di Suvero, Roy Lichtenstein, and Dale Chihuly. Visit : http://www.fairchildgarden.org/

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:01

This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here .

When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.

Most ambitious exhibition of Lucian Freud's work opens at the National Portrait Gallery

Written by Lloyd Gardner Wednesday, 08 February 2012 23:14

London - Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011) was one of the most important and influential artists of his generation. Paintings of people were central to his work and this major exhibition, spanning over seventy years, is the first to focus on his portraiture.Produced in close collaboration with the late Lucian Freud, the exhibition concentrates on particular periods and groups of sitters which illustrate Freud's stylistic development and technical virtuosity. Insightful paintings of the artist's lovers, friends and family, referred to by the artist as the 'people in my life', will demonstrate the psychological drama and unrelenting observational intensity of his work. On exhibition 9th of February through 27th of May. "Lucian Freud: Portraits" then moves to Fort Worth from July 1 to Oct. 29. Auping said he was eager to bring the show to the United States, where the fleshiness of Freud's paintings initially came as a shock. "We have nothing like this in America," Auping said. "We are the land of Photoshop. We are the land of sleek models. We are the land of no wrinkles. "It disturbed our sense of abstraction and minimalism. (But) over the years we came to embrace Freud."

Featuring over 100 works from museums and private collections throughout the world, some of which have never been seen before, this is an unmissable opportunity to experience the work of one of the world's greatest artists.

There is a vast amount of flesh — clear and smooth or wrinkled and mottled — on display in the latest show at Britain's National Portrait Gallery, a retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud. Freud was the most renowned British portrait painter of the 20th century, and he found that clothes often got in the way.

The artist, who died in July at age 88, approached the human body the way his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud approached the mind — determined to unmask its secrets. The exhibition, which kicks of with a royal preview for the Duchess of Cambridge features more than 100 paintings completed over 70 years, many of them nude studies of the artist's friends and family.


Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas — where the show will move after its London run — said Freud was often asked why he painted so many nudes. "He would say, every time: 'It's the most complete portrait,'" Auping said.

The exhibition opens with early head-and-shoulders portraits from the 1940s and '50s, then moves on to the to vast, monumental nudes for which Freud became famous. He painted standing up in his London studio, layering oil paint on large canvases with a broad, coarse-haired brush. Many of the paintings have generic names — "Naked Solicitor," ''Man in a Blue Scarf" — but the portraits are revealing images of the artist's inner circle, or sometimes Freud himself, often naked and looking vulnerably exposed. Freud kept his focus on depicting the human body even when the prevailing fashion in art turned to abstraction.

National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne said that for seven decades Freud looked at people with an "unrelenting, determined eye."

"They sometimes feel in your face and very explicitly naked," Nairne said of the paintings. "But that was always with the cooperation of the sitter. In the end, they were sympathetic.

"None of these are casual sitters. They are not figures — they are individuals."

Berlin-born Freud, who moved to Britain with his family in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, painted his mother, his brother, his daughters Bella and Esther, and an eclectic array of acquaintances. The subjects of his paintings range from performance artist Leigh Bowery and supermodel Kate Moss to Brig. Andrew Parker-Bowles, a horse-riding friend (who got to keep his uniform on).

He was at work until the very end. The exhibition includes Freud's unfinished final painting, "Portrait of the Hound," which shows his assistant David Dawson and whippet Eli, and appears to have been cut off mid-brushstroke. Most of Freud's sitters seem to have loved the experience of posing for the master. Sue Tilley, subject of several nudes including "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" — which sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million, a record for a living artist — remembers long sessions of chat and laughter. She said Freud was "a complete one-off ... exciting, interesting, funny and serious — every single personality trait wrapped up in one person."


"Lucian Freud: Portraits" is open to the public from Thursday until May 27, then moves to Fort Worth from July 1 to Oct. 29. Auping said he was eager to bring the show to the United States, where the fleshiness of Freud's paintings initially came as a shock. "We have nothing like this in America," Auping said. "We are the land of Photoshop. We are the land of sleek models. We are the land of no wrinkles. "It disturbed our sense of abstraction and minimalism. (But) over the years we came to embrace Freud."

British society embraced him, too. Freud gained the ultimate sign of respectability in 2000 when he painted Queen Elizabeth II — fully clothed. The naturalistic portrait, dubbed daring by some and disrespectful by others, is not on display here. But the show does have royal approval. The Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Prince William, is a patron of the National Portrait Gallery and attended the show  — greeting Freud's daughters Bella and Esther Freud.

Tilley said she wasn't worried the duchess would be put off the Freud exhibition by all the flesh on display — a roomful of it Tilley's.

"I'm not embarrassed about her seeing me naked — I'm a human being," Tilley said. "I may not be the most gorgeous one under the sun but that's what I am."

"It's art, you know. Poor woman, I'm sure she's seen things before," she said.

World Renowned Spanish Abstract Artist Antoni Tàpies Dies at Age 88

Written by William Grimes Wednesday, 08 February 2012 21:11

New York (New York times).- Antoni Tàpies, a largely self-taught Spanish abstract painter whose seductive, tactile surfaces, often scratched with mysterious graffiti-like marks, made use of unconventional materials like marble dust, ground chalk, sand and earth, died on Monday in Barcelona. He was 88. Douglas Baxter, a friend of the artist and president of the Pace Gallery, which has represented him since 1992, announced the death in a statement. Mr. Tàpies (pronounced TAH-pee-ess) came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950's as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.

Using a wide variety of materials, on canvases and boards that often suggested walls, doors, windows or gates, he grounded his work in the brute reality of the Spanish street and in the turbulent political dramas of his youth in Catalonia, including the Spanish Civil War and a Catalan nationalist movement. “The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me,” he told the French dealer and art critic Michel Tapié in 1969. “My first works of 1945 already had something of the graffiti of the streets and a whole world of protest — repressed, clandestine, but full of life — a life which was also found on the walls of my country.”


The rich, painterly textures and sober use of color in his “matter paintings” lent a moving solemnity — the critic John Russell referred to their “seignorial dignity” — to works that “seemed to have been not so much painted as excavated from an idiosyncratic compound of mud, sand, earth, dried blood and powdered minerals.” Mr. Tàpies chafed at being characterized as an abstract painter. At the same time, he refused to explicate the tantalizing scratches, letters and crosses that seemed to offer the viewer a text. His dreamlike symbols, fished from the soup of the unconscious, suggested an ancient language waiting to be deciphered, but Mr. Tàpies declined to assist. He did, however, place his work in the realm of the sacred, but a world far removed from his strict Catholic upbringing. “In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal,” he said on the BBC arts program Omnibus in 1990. “I think it’s a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.”

Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on Dec. 13, 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. At 17, Mr. Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens. To please his father, he enrolled in the University of Barcelona to study law, but he continued to produce art and for two months studied drawing at the Valls Academy. With the Catalan poet and playwright Joan Brossa, he founded Dau al Set (“The Seven-Spotted Die”), a progressive arts magazine, and, at an exhibition of his work in Barcelona, befriended Miró, a decisive influence. In 1954 he married Teresa Barba Fàbregas. They had three children, Antoni, Miguel and Clara. His earliest works were collage-based abstract paintings on cardboard that anticipated the arte povera movement of the 1960s in their use of such humble materials as string and scraps of paper. After studying in Paris, where he met Picasso, a fellow Spaniard, Mr. Tàpies began exhibiting regularly and, after the Surrealist adventures of his “magic period,” he set about transforming himself into a painter who, as the critic Roland Penrose put it in his monograph “Tàpies” (1978), “a painter who was to create mysteries in matter itself.”

In 1953 he had his first shows in the United States, at the Marshall Field Art Gallery in Chicago and the Martha Jackson gallery in New York, where he first saw the work of the Abstract Expressionists. “They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1995. “I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.” In 1958 Mr. Tàpies represented Spain in the Venice Biennale with his compatriot Eduardo Chillida. Four years later, he was given a solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The art critic Stuart Preston, reviewing the Guggenheim exhibition in The New York Times, wrote: “The word subtlety is crude when applied to the astonishing textural and coloristic variations that Tàpies, whose taste is unerring to the point of preciosity, manages to confect.” (Mr. Tàpies’s work had also been part of the Guggenheim’s inaugural exhibition in 1959.) With the rise of Pop Art and Conceptualism, Mr. Tàpies’s reputation declined in the United States, although many of his “object works” of the late 1960s and early ’70s incorporate some elements of both movements, with a Surrealist spin. Works like “Mattress” (1971), an actual mattress painted with blood-like stains and ripped down the center to reveal horsehair stuffing, and “Desk and Straw” (1970), a rather worn wooden office desk piled high with heaps of straw, suggested the influence of Robert Rauschenberg.

In one of his more whimsical works, “Sock” (1971), he affixed a man’s white sock to a canvas. This theme would return with a vengeance in 1992, when the new National Museum of Catalan Art commissioned a work of sculpture for its central hall. Mr. Tàpies created a furor when he submitted a model for a dirty sock that, when executed, would rise to a height of 40 feet. The sculpture was never made. In 1984 Mr. Tàpies created the Tàpies Foundation, dedicated to the study of modern art. In 1990 it opened a museum and library in the premises of a former publishing house in Barcelona. Its holdings include nearly 2,000 examples of his work. He was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1994 and at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid in 2000. Age did not diminish his output, although much of his work after 1980 returned to old themes and images. In January 2010 he exhibited his work at the Toni Tàpies Gallery in Barcelona, owned by his son Antoni, and in the following March his work of the past 20 years was the subject of an exhibition organized for the reopening of the Tàpies Foundation after an extensive renovation. “My illusion is to have something to transmit,” he said when his museum opened in 1990. “If I can’t change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it.”

Sotheby’s London Announce Sale of South Asian Modern & Contemporary Art

Written by Gilbert Madison Wednesday, 08 February 2012 20:52

LONDON.- Sotheby’s London announce its sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art to take place on the 31st May 2011. Comprised of 62 lots, several with unprecedented provenance, the auction is expected to fetch in excess of £2.8 million. Highlighting the sale will be works by Sayed Haider Raza. His Bindu is an important 1985 work and is one of the earliest large depictions of the Bindu by the artist. Raza’s preoccupation with nature is apparent in his use of primary colours to highlight the elements of nature; red, blue, yellow, white and black respectively represent fire, water, wind, earth and the sun. It is estimated at £400,000-600,000.

Another important work by Raza from his Paris period is Rue des Fossés St Jaques, an oil on canvas estimated at £300,000-500,000. Raza and his wife, the painter Janine Mongillat, were friends of the current owner’s family and they rented a studio from them at Rue des Fossés St Jaques. Painted a year after Raza was awarded the ‘Prix de la Critique’, this painting depicts the view from the studio window and represents an important early phase in Raza’s career where he abandons the confines of traditional watercolour and takes on oil developing a unique idiom where space and colour seem to feed into one another. In 1958, the painting was photographed with the artist by Henri Cartier Bresson.

Maqbool Fida Husain’s The Sixth Seal, estimated at £400,000-500,000, exemplifies the eclectic balance between Husain’s cubist modern style of painting and Indian traditional sensibility and subject matter. This work, which was formerly in the Collection of Chester and Davida Herwitz , incorporates so many of the artist’s most recognisable themes and symbols. Traditional forms of ancient Indian miniatures, sculptures, dance and folk art manifest themselves in one painting. The painting is made up of six vignettes a compositional device used by the artist in a number of his early works from the late 1950s and early 1960s. This work is published in Bartholomew and Kapur’s seminal book on Husain and was exhibited at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art’s India: Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian art in 1982.

Illustrated is Jehangir Sabavala’s oil on canvas The Tree, which is estimated at £65,000-75,000. This painting is part of the Tungabhadra landscapes that were painted in 1965 following a visit by the Sabavalas to South India. The artist was moved by the ruins at Hampi and in particular by the starkness of the artificial lake in the Tungabhadra river, at the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

A further highlight is Manjit Bawa’s Untitled estimated at £100,000-150,000. Manjit’s subjects are often inspired by ancient iconography and myths but his primary concern was not with the narrative of the works but with their spatial and chromatic relationships. The artist’s use of colour was grounded in his formal training as a silk-screen printer and his study of Rajput and Pahari miniature paintings. The simplicity of line and form is contrasted by the subtle graduation of colour and the artist’s use of chiaroscuro. His figures possess a plasticity; sculptural in form yet suspended weightlessly in a space that is void of time and context.

The sale will also include Subodh Gupta’s Hungry God, estimated at £300,000-400,000. Subodh Gupta's monumental sculpture Hungry God, which in 2010 was exhibited at SESC Pompéia’s Urban Manners 2, Contemporary Artists from India in Sao Paulo, is composed of a wavelike mass of stainless steel pans, milk pails and tiffins. These steel utensils have now become iconic symbols of Gupta's work. The artist uses these domestic household objects to comment on the underlying social and economic tensions that arise from India's progressive modernisation. These objects represent familiar features of Indian life which continue to transcend the conflicts between urban and rural existence; wealth and poverty; the religious and the vernacular.


The auction will also feature Subodh Gupta’s Untitled, estimated at £120,000-180,000, which was exhibited in The Empire Strikes Back Indian Art Today show at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2010. Gupta’s preoccupation with ready-made objects from India transcends the boundaries of the mediums with which he works in. In this painting, stainless steel and copper-bottomed pots, pans and tiffins occupy a position of importance. Immaculately painted, these objects are revered by the artist and suggest an air of ambition and prosperity, congruent with India’s flourishing economy. The photorealistic detail of these pots are starkly contrasted with the abstract, minimalistic background. They hang seductively in the foreground, alluding to the complex and evolving aspect of consumerism in India.

Two early oils by Francis Newton Souza’s Untitled, estimated at 25,000-35,000, is an oil on board dated 1954. The sale will also include Francis Newton Souza’s Untitled, an oil on board, estimated at £35,000-45,000. Acquired directly from the artist by the writer and poet Stephen Spender, both these works are property from the Estate of Sir Stephen and Lady Spender