Christian Ferreira Presents "Heringa/Van Kalsbeek: Drie" at the Wapping Project, London

Written by Archibald Cummings Monday, 21 May 2012 22:24

London.- Christian Ferreira is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Heringa/Van Kalsbeek’s sculptural work. Titled "Drie" the exhibition will feature an elegantly curated selection of three of the Dutch duo, Heringa/Van Kalsbeek’s abstracted sculptures housed in the industrial surrounds of the Accumulator Tower of The Wapping Project, London. The exhibition opens on May 6th and is on view until June 19th 2011. Chaotic in their appearance the works are reminiscent of bestial wildlife photography caught in motion. Created from steel, resin and polyurethane mixed with found objects such as feathers, cloth and coral the work has a rich assemblage like quality.

Read more: [Christian Ferreira Presents "Heringa/Van Kalsbeek: Drie" at the Wapping Project, London]

Carrie Marill's latest body of work at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale

Written by Harold Peterson Monday, 21 May 2012 22:21

SCOTTSDALE, AZ.- Exquisitely attuned to the graphic signals of the universe, painter Carrie Marill translates the ephemera of the visual world into intriguing and sophisticated works. The artist’s unflinching aesthetic curiosity threads through series inspired by such disparate influences as 18th century European landscapes and Asian textile design. Hi n Lo, Marill’s latest body of work, addresses a question that struck her after a trip to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and, subsequently, the American Folk Art Museum: “Why is an Op Art piece valued as ‘high’ art and an intricate quilt considered ‘low’?” On exhibition through January 28th at Lisa Sette Gallery.

Read more: [Carrie Marill's latest body of work at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale]

Richard Avedon's Lively Fashion Images at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Written by Vincent Baldino Monday, 21 May 2012 22:19

BOSTON, MA.- Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was the man who brought fashion photography to life. Instead of perpetuating static images of human mannequins posing stiffly in magazines, Avedon depicted his models as real women whose energy and exuberance complemented their modern lifestyles. Considered one of the great image-makers of the 20th century, he redefined fashion photography and his lasting contributions are explored in the traveling exhibition Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, a major retrospective devoted exclusively to his work in this medium. On view in the Foster Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), from August 10, 2010, through January 17, 2011, the exhibition highlights approximately 140 objects, including photographs, magazines, engravers’ prints, and contact sheets that span almost six decades of his successful career.

Read more: [Richard Avedon's Lively Fashion Images at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]

Top-Photographers at Flo Peters Gallery

Written by Phil Shalmers Monday, 21 May 2012 22:16

 

HAMBURG, GERMANY - Flo Peters Gallery presents Alfred Wertheimer “Elvis at 21” and “Music”: 140 photographs by international top-photographers like Marc Seliger, Bob Gruen, Jim Marshall, Gordon Parks, Mick Rock, Don Schlitten, Jonathan Mannion, Harry Benson and Frank Stefanko.

Read more: [Top-Photographers at Flo Peters Gallery]

National Portrait Gallery Unveils New Portrait of Camila Batmanghelidjh

Written by Flavor Flave Monday, 21 May 2012 22:13

LONDON - A new portrait of "Kids Company" founder Camila Batmanghelidjh, who has helped transform the lives of young people in inner-city London, goes on display at the National Portrait Gallery for the first time today. The portrait of Batmanghelidjh, the Iranian-born psychotherapist and social reformer, is the work of artist Dean Marsh, and was commissioned as part of the First Prize for his winning the BP Portrait Award competition at the Gallery in 2005.

Read more: [National Portrait Gallery Unveils New Portrait of Camila Batmanghelidjh]

The Schirn Kunsthalle Shows a Comprehensive Solo Exhibition of Francesco Clemente

Written by Thomas Schindler Monday, 21 May 2012 22:10

Frankfurt.- The Schirn Kunsthalle is pleased to present a comprehensive solo exhibition, with monumental works by the Italian painter Francesco Clemente. "Francisco Clemente: Palimpsest" is on view now and remains on exhibit through September 4th. Francesco Clemente, born in 1952 in Naples, has pioneered an extraordinary pictorial language that draws on a variety of timeless symbols, myths, cultures, and philosophies. Frequently charged with eroticism, his oeuvre also has a profound religious quality. The variety of mediums which he employs and the subject matter of his work are deeply informed by Clemente’s nomadic artistic life. Since the 1970s he has continually travelled between Italy and India, adding New York City to his preferred places of residency since 1980. This exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle is the first comprehensive showing of his paintings and drawings in Germany in more than a quarter century. The exhibition brings together some forty works made between 1978 and 2011.

Taking as its starting point Clemente’s early works on paper, the show also includes both large format paintings and more recent, spectacular monumental watercolours. Conceptualized in close cooperation with the artist, the exhibition brings to light for the first time the close resemblance of Clemente’s aesthetic to the manner in which references are actualized in a palimpsest: effacement, partial erasure, and superimposition of writing surfaces. In so doing it reveals a concern at the centre of his oeuvre: Clemente’s conviction in his role as an artist as a kind of universal witness of consciousness. Realized in a variety of media such as pastel, fresco, oil, gouache and watercolor, Clemente’s work interweaves traditional likenesses and narratives with more personal motifs and stories. In his paintings forms and lines seem to emerge and recede forming multilayered records of experience. This aesthetic is quite similar to the technique of the palimpsest, employed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Applied on used scrolls of parchment, it involved scraping, erasing and washing the older manuscripts to yield a clean sheet for reuse, although in fact traces of the original texts often remained visible. The similarity of his method of working to a palimpsest is far from coincidental. Instead such a technique points back to the origins of his artistic inclinations. As Clemente recently put it: “The original impulse in my life as an artist was to write and to break from writing into image.” His concern with language was already evident at the young age of twelve, when a collection of his poems, Castelli di Sabbia was published. Thereafter he studied Greek and Latin in high school, before moving to Rome in 1970, where he increasingly came to believe that art was the “last oral tradition alive in the West.” It was then that he first saw it as his task to make work that had a political consciousness was the call of the day.


Since then he has single-mindedly pursued giving form to images that might help bring about an increased awareness of the need to break with established  notion of Self in order to expand awareness. It was this goal and his deep interest in philosophy and spirituality that led Clemente to India for the first time in 1973. He would spend more than half of the 1970s, at irregular intervals, particularly in the southern city of Madras on the east coast, present-day Chennai. He lived a simple life with actress Alba Primiceri, whom he met in 1974 and married soon after. It wasn’t long before he had set up a studio, begun to collaborate with local artists and exchange ideas with members of the Theosophical Society there. In the late 1970s art critics increasingly linked his work the so-called “Italian Transavantgarde.” Although the “group,” which also included painters Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, attracted a great deal of international attention, Clemente soon disassociated his work from theirs. Clemente visited New York for the first time in 1980. Soon after arriving he not only began to collaborate with such writers as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, but the contemporary composer Morton Feldman. In 1981 – at the same time the so-called death of painting was being fervently proclaimed – Clemente decided to explore even more intensively the possibilities of this medium. Part of this activity resulted in his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.

His non-conventional techniques of painting as well as his openness to collaborating with other artists contributed to Clemente rapidly becoming a rising star of the international art scene. His works were exhibited both at documenta 7 in Kassel (1982) and the Venice Biennial (1988, 1993 and 1995). Solo shows were held at such renowned institutions as the Nationalgalerie Berlin (1984), Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover (1984/85), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999), and MADRE Museum, Naples (2009). The exhibition “Francesco Clemente. Palimpsest” at Schirn Kunsthalle is divided into three distinct gallery spaces. The first section is dedicated to three monumental watercolors, collectively entitled “A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows” (2009), each measuring over 18 meters long and 185 centimeters high. With their scroll-like format and fluid, metamorphosing forms, the works, appear to be almost natural, powerful palimpsests of the human spirit – landscapes, as it were, of spiritual evolution. These large format watercolors, composed of constantly changing layers of color, evoke various states of consciousness, which ebb away only to then take on new dimensions. For the second gallery space the artist has created a series of large, semi-abstract photographic images transformed into a kind of “wallpaper.” Applied directly to the walls of the Schirn rotunda and extending more than fourteen meters in length, it features fragments of letters, objects, works and snapshots from his Broadway studio in New York City. This “wallpaper” evokes the poetic and culturally eclectic context from which Clemente’s art continues to emerge. In the third and last gallery space visitors encounter some thirty of Clemente’s key works from 1978 to 2011.


More or less installed chronologically, they unfold as a kind of painted palimpsest. At once epigrammatic and expansive, these works attest to the artists’ continual processing of visual information in which some forms survive, while others die out. Following the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, a site just a few blocks from Clemente’s studio, he increasingly felt the urgency to continue making art that might help building bridges between people and worlds. Such works as “For an History of Women” (2009) and “Camouflage Paradise” (2010) push even further to the limit the possibilities of using “contemplative languages still alive in spite of the onslaught perpetrated by industrial society.” Their expanding and contracting sequential like forms, articulate to his growing conviction in his role as an artist as a kind of universal witness of consciousness. Far more than a mere collagist, over the past 40 years Clemente has been steadily pioneering a new kind of history painting with a quiet, yet insistent mediative power.

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is one of Germany’s most renowned exhibition institutions. Since its founding in 1986, the Schirn has mounted approximately 180 exhibitions, including major survey shows devoted to the Vienna Jugendstil, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, to women Impressionists, to subjects such as “shopping — a century of art and consumer culture,” the visual art of the Stalin era, new Romanticism in contemporary art, and the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large solo exhibitions have featured artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Julian Schnabel, James Ensor, James Lee Byars, Yves Klein, Peter Doig, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Georges Seurat. And artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Ayse Erkmen, Carsten Nicolai, Jan De Cock, Jonathan Meese, John Bock, Michael Sailstorfer, Terence Koh, Aleksandra Mir, Eberhard Havekost, and Mike Bouchet have developed new exhibitions for the Schirn. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt showcases highly charged themes and topical aspects of artists’ oeuvres with an incisive voice and from a contemporary standpoint. As a site of discoveries, the Schirn offers its visitors an original, sensory exhibition experience as well as active participation in cultural discourse. Visit the kunsthalle's website at ... http://www.schirn.de

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Monday, 21 May 2012 22:09

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.

The Muskegon Museum of Art to Show New Deal Art From the Smithsonian Collection

Written by Samuel Thornbury Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:50

Muskegon, Michigan.- The Muskegon Museum of Art is proud to present "1934: A New Deal for Artists" from February 16th through May 6th 2012. The exhibiton celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project by drawing on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection of vibrant paintings created for the program. The 56 paintings in the exhibition are a lasting visual record of America at a specific moment in time. George Gurney, deputy chief curator, organized the exhibition with Ann Prentice Wagner, independent curator. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America’s spirit. During the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Public Works of Art Project, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934.

The purpose of the program was to alleviate the distress of professional, unemployed American artists by paying them to produce artwork that could be used to embellish public buildings. The program was administered under the Treasury Department by art professionals in 16 different regions of the country. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program were encouraged to depict “the American Scene,” but they were allowed to interpret this idea freely. They painted regional, recognizable subjects ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community, and optimism. These artworks, which were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capture the realities and ideals of Depression-era America.


The exhibition is arranged into eight sections: “American People,” “City Life,” “Labor,” “Industry,” “Leisure,” “The City,” “The Country,” and “Nature.” Works from 13 of the 16 regions established by the Advisory Committee to the Treasury on Fine Arts are represented in the exhibition. The Public Works of Art Project employed artists from across the country including Ilya Bolotowsky, Lily Furedi, and Max Arthur Cohn in New York City; Harry Gottlieb and Douglass Crockwell in upstate New York; Herman Maril in Maryland; Gale Stockwell in Missouri; E. Dewey Albinson in Minnesota; E. Martin Hennings in New Mexico; and Millard Sheets in California. Ross Dickinson paints the confrontation between man and nature in his painting of southern California, Valley Farms (1934). He contrasts the verdant green, irrigated valley with the dry, reddish-brown hills, recalling the appeal of fertile California for many Midwestern farmers escaping the hopelessness of the Dust Bowl. Several artists chose to depict American ingenuity. Stadium lighting was still rare when Morris Kantor painted Baseball at Night (1934), which depicts a game at the Clarkstown Country Club’s Sports Centre in West Nyack, N.Y.

Ray Strong’s panoramic Golden Gate Bridge (1934) pays homage to the engineering feats required to build the iconic San Francisco structure. Old Pennsylvania Farm in Winter (1934) by Arthur E. Cederquist features a prominent row of poles providing telephone service and possibly electricity, a rare modern amenity in rural America. The program was open to artists who were denied other opportunities, such as African Americans and Asian Americans. African American artists like Earle Richardson, who painted Employment of Negroes in Agriculture (1934), were welcomed, but only about 10 such artists were employed by the project. Richardson, who was a native New Yorker, chose to set his painting of quietly dignified workers in the South to make a broad statement about race. In the Seattle area, where Kenjiro Nomura lived, many Japanese Americans made a living as farmers, but they were subject to laws that prevented foreigners from owning land and other prejudices. Nomura’s painting The Farm (1934) depicts a darker view of rural life with threatening clouds on the horizon.


Muskegon was a prosperous and booming town during the 1870s and 80s.  Charles H. Hackley and other local leaders were determined to save Muskegon after the sawmills closed by making this town “one of the most distinctive cities of its size in the country.”  In the next eleven years, Hackley invested a good part of his fortune towards meeting that goal. Hackley was convinced that emphasis on such public projects as progressive new schools, a library and a hospital would attract new growth.  The idea of building an art museum for Muskegon was always high on Hackley’s list of priorities.  Hackley died in 1905 before realizing his dream of an art gallery. However, Hackley left to the Muskegon Public Schools Board of Education, through a bequest in his will, an expendable trust of $150,000, to be used to purchase “pictures of the best kind”. By 1910, having begun with Hackley Picture Fund the acquisition of some of the most treasured and valuable works of art still in the Museum’s present day collection, the Board of Education wisely determined that a museum-quality facility should be built. They then proceeded to purchase the lots next to Hackley Public Library and began construction of a facility for their growing and important art collection. Upon completion, the Board of Education chose to honor the inspiration for the project, which, of course, was Charles Hackley, and named their newest building the Hackley Art Gallery. In 1979, ground was broken for a $1.6 million addition to the Hackley Art Gallery, also funded by the L.C. & Margaret Walker Foundation.  Construction was completed in 1980 and with that, the Hackley Art Gallery changed its name to the Muskegon Museum of Art with the Hackley Galleries and the Walker Galleries. The museum's permanent collection is the envy of many and their changing exhibition schedule is rich with opportunities for our community to experience art and artists from around the world. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.muskegonartmuseum.org

Weserburg Museum opens exhibition dedicated to Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (WOLS)

Written by Daniel Kopparberg Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:48

BREMEN, GERMANY - He is one of the most prominent artists of the 20th century, yet scarcely anyone knows his name. Art history views him as the pioneer of Art Informel painting, and yet the complexity of his artistic existence defies any categorization. In 1932, just nineteen years old, he leaves Germany to have his finger on the pulse of time in Paris. He gains access to bohemian circles there but continues to be a loner. For throughout his life he struggled for an existence beyond the middle-class, and in doing so not lastly slid into the vicissitudes of the National Socialist war against European culture. Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, who began calling himself WOLS in 1937, is one of the most colorful artist personalities of the last century.

Read more: [Weserburg Museum opens exhibition dedicated to Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (WOLS)]

The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art Hosts "Surrounding Bacon and Warhol"

Written by Sigismund Themptander Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:46

Oslo.- The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is proud to present "Surrounding Bacon and Warhol", on view at the museum until October 2nd. This exhibition takes Francis Bacon (1909–1991) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) as its starting point. Bacon and Warhol were two great artists of the 20th century with very different approaches to creativity, to the processes of working, to the nature of images and to the notion of art in general. Bacon, who painted in the first person, transferred his visceral energy and enigmatic symbols and metaphors directly to the canvas, while Warhol, who worked in the third person, adopted existing forms and figures from the media and made them his own through various techniques of reproduction. And while Bacon belonged to a long and rich tradition of Expressionistic painters, Warhol marked the beginning of a new, more distanced development in contemporary art – Pop. Both produced meaningful works, however, that are ambiguous, complex and highly influential.

Read more: [The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art Hosts "Surrounding Bacon and Warhol"]

Artist Marta Minujin Builds a "Tower of Babel" in Buenos Aires

Written by Luis Andres Henao Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:43

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters).- A spiraling tower made from thousands of books in dozens of languages is the latest landmark to dot the skyline of Buenos Aires, named the World Book Capital this year. Called the Tower of Babel, the 82-foot (25-meter) high installation by Argentine artist Marta Minujin is made from 30,000 bricks, donated by readers, libraries, and more than 50 embassies.

Read more: [Artist Marta Minujin Builds a "Tower of Babel" in Buenos Aires]

Pierre et Gilles Retrospective opens at C/O Berlin the International Forum For Visual Dialogues

Written by B.L. McKendrick Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:42

BERLIN.- C/O Berlin, International Forum For Visual Dialogues, will present the retrospective of French artists Pierre et Gilles from July 25 through October 4, 2009. As only venue in Germany, C/O Berlin presents the exhibition as the first of Pierre et Gilles in fifteen years. The show comprised a total of 80 unique large-format works – from their early photographies of the 1970s to the brand new pictures that were never shown in public before

“It’s hard to think of contemporary culture without the influence of Pierre et Gilles, from advertising to fashion photography, music video, and film. This is truly global art.” Jeff Koons.

The cosmos of the worldwide renowned French artist duo is a vivid, colorful world poised between baroque sumptuousness and earthly limbo. Pierre et Gilles create unique hand-painted photographic portraits of film icons, sailors and princes, saints and sinners, of mythological figures and unknowns alike. Pierre et Gilles pursue their own, stunningly unique vision of an enchanted world spanning fairytale paradises and abyssal depths, quoting from popular visual languages and history of art. Again and again, they re-envision their personal dream of reality anew in consummate aesthetic perfection.

Pierre et Gilles are among the most influential artists of our time. In their complex, multilayered images, they quote from art history, transgress traditional moral codes, and experiment adeptly with social clichés. Their painterly photographic masterpieces exert an intense visual power that leaves the viewer spellbound.

Over the last thirty years, Pierre et Gilles have created photographic portraits of numerous celebrities including Marc Almond, Mirelle Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, Serge Gainsbourg, Iggy Pop, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Nina Hagen, Madonna, and Paloma Picasso. They work almost exclusively in an opulently furnished studio, where their subjects are costumed lavishly and placed before three-dimensional backgrounds. Pierre photographs the model, and Gilles retouches and hand-colors the print. The reproducible portrait is rendered unique through painting, which highlights each detail with carefully selected materials and accessories.

The artist duo Pierre et Gilles (b. 1950 and 1953, respectively) have been living and working together since 1976. Influenced by Pop Art, Gilles first painted a photograph by Pierre in the year 1977. This form of collaboration between photography and painting became the trademark of their work, which has remained unique and has exercised a defining influence on contemporary photography.

By the end of the 1980s, Pierre et Gilles were depicting non-Christian mythological figures such as Neptune, Sarasvati, and Médusa. This interest in religious subjects was coupled with a growing fascination with secular ideologies. Le Petit Communiste ­ Christophe (1990), for example, which shows a uniformed Soviet soldier with the familiar tear trickling down his face, was created the year after the Berlin Wall fell. Le Petit Chinois ­ Tomah (1991), in which a white-shirted Asian man confronts the viewer with a bloodied knife in hand, can be read as the image of a defiant China. From a slightly different perspective, Le Petit Mendiant ­ Tomah (1992), centers on the grinning countenance of an anonymous beggar, whose outstretched hand contrasts with a profusion of glittering stardust filling the air around him. The viewer cannot decide whether the beggar’s acceptance of his fate transcends his mortal needs or if the West’s tendency to romanticize all aspects of the East, even its underside, is being spoofed.

In their work of the last ten years, the range of subject matter and moods has further matured. Though Pierre et Gilles continue to depict celebrities, as represented in frequently startling portraits of Catherine Deneuve (1991), Nina Hagen (1993), Sylvie Vartan (1994), and Juliette Greco (1999), they are just as likely to produce more humorous images, such as the campy I Love You ­ Dominique Blanc (1992) and the melodramatic Le Papillon Noir ­ Polly (1995). Some of the most recent images have introduced a melancholic tone that is new for their work, as evinced by the faraway look in one of their favorite model’s eyes in Tentation ­ Jiro Sakamoto (1999) or in the seemingly empty helmets in Autoportraits sans Visage (1999). But their most elaborate series of the 1990s, Les Plaisirs de la Forêt, comprising erotic scenes in a nocturnal forest, highlights the combination of erotic tension, elaborately executed settings, and attention to minute detail that characterizes Pierre et Gilles’s surprisingly diverse oeuvre.

Visit C/O Berlin, International Forum For Visual Dialogues at : http://www.co-berlin.info/co-neu/web/Aktuell/start.php

The Malmö Konsthall Presents Chris Johanson's Playful & Humorous Works

Written by Agnetha Wallenberg Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:40

Malmö, Sweden.-  The Malmö Konsthall is pleased to present "Chris Johanson – Alright Alright", on view through November 27th. The American artist Chris Johanson (born 1968) is a self-taught product of San Francisco’s skateboard and graffiti culture. In his playful and humorous works he comments on what it is like to be human and live in today’s society. He works in widely varying media such as painting, film, installation and music. Johanson grew up in a suburb of San José in California and began his artistic career as a teenager. He painted skateboards and made posters and flyers for his friends, and then gradually began using public space to comment on American society. Even his early drawings show a spontaneous and slightly naïve imagery. He still likes to work in public spaces such as department stores and bookshops or directly in the street environment while also exhibiting at established galleries and museums.

Read more: [The Malmö Konsthall Presents Chris Johanson's Playful & Humorous Works]

Abstract Art in South & North America at the Amon Carter Museum

Written by Thomas Cleveland Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:36

FORT WORTH, TX.- On June 26, the Amon Carter Museum presents Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first to bring together South American and U.S. geometric abstraction and includes a range of paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films. Constructive Spirit will be on view through September 5; Admission is free.

Read more: [Abstract Art in South & North America at the Amon Carter Museum]

The Georgia Museum of Art Shows Watercolors From the Permanent Collection

Written by Madeline Hughes Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:32

Athens, GA.- The Georgia Museum of Art presents "American Watercolors from the Permanent Collection" from May 14th until August 7th in the Lamar Dodd Gallery. This exhibition features American watercolors from the mid-19th century to the 1970s from the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art. Paintings by Jasper Francis Cropsey, William Stanley Haseltine and Frederic Remington demonstrate the importance of the medium in American 19th-century art while American moderns Charles Burchfield, John Marin and Andrew Wyeth represent true masters of watercolor.

Some American painters used the medium to create drawings or compositional studies, including Elaine de Kooning in her sketch of a sculpture in Paris. Others used it to make a final, finished product, emphasizing technique and enjoying its immediacy and spontaneity. "Palm Springs Chairs" (1975) by Robert Bechtle is a highly detailed and meticulously painted watercolor that has the feel of a vacation snapshot of a motel pool.

The Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily 19th- and 20th-century; American, European and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art.


From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of an old library on the university’s historic North Campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university’s burgeoning east campus. There, 79,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection—a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook.

Much of the museum’s collection of American paintings was donated by Holbrook in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. Included in this collection are works by such luminaries as Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence and Theodore Robinson. Over the years it has been impossible to separate the history of the museum from the story of Holbrook’s generosity.


In April 1996, the Georgia Museum of Art opened a new building on the East Campus of the university as part of the Performing and Visual Arts Complex, which also includes the School of Music, the Performing Arts Center, and, now, the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The new building allowed for larger and more ambitious exhibitions and a new emphasis on professional practices. The museum has become a leader, in particular, among university museums, and its educational programs have been the most tangible example of the balance it strives to achieve among state, local, and university audiences as it seeks to fulfill its trifold mission of teaching, research, and service. The Green Center also includes the Green Library, which greatly expanded the museum’s library of art books and has served as a model for the archival aspects of the other centers. The Pierre Daura Center was established at the museum in 2002 with a gift from Martha Randolph Daura in honor of her father and joined the Green Center and the Jacob Burns Foundation Center, bringing its own extensive archives of Pierre Daura’s papers. These three centers, plus the newly founded C. L. Morehead Jr. Center for the Study of American Art, make up four study centers that are a focus of the expanded and renovated building, facilitating research in the humanities and access to the museum’s curators. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.georgiamuseum.org

Ken Grant ~ New Paintings at White Bird Gallery

Written by Fannie March Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:29

 

Cannon Beach, Oregon - Ken Grant’s paintings capture unique moments in time whether it be the reality of changing light through a window, shadows cast from lone objects in otherwise empty rooms or surreal scenes contrived with wit and fantasy. Grant paints interiors of rooms, chairs, still-lifes, and figurative works rendered in a highly refined style that resembles photo realism.

Read more: [Ken Grant ~ New Paintings at White Bird Gallery]

Sunday, 27 May 2012 00:41