The Cincinnati Art Museum Showcases Claude Monet in Giverny

Written by Trevor Middleton Monday, 06 February 2012 21:56

Cincinnati, Ohio.- The Cincinnati Art Museum is proud to present "Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection" on view through May 13th. Through twelve major paintings only on view at the museum, this exhibition will examine the range of Impressionist master Claude Monet’s work in Giverny, France. Claude Monet (1840-1926) retreated to Giverny, the small village northwest of Paris, in 1883, and then spent the next 43 years there experimenting with landscape and garden painting. The works of art he painted there are among the most recognizable in Western Art. Organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum, "Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection" takes you on an artistic journey, from early Impressionist-inspired landscapes of waterways outside Giverny to serial depictions of specific garden motifs, such as his famous water lilies, to the immersive environment of large-scale works such as the late wisterias.

Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection tells a chronological narrative of artistic self-discovery culminating with two oversize depictions of wisterias, paintings Monet originally conceived to hang above the enormous wall-sized cycles of painted water lilies of the artist’s last years. The two exhibited paintings—brought together for the first time since they were in Monet’s studio around 1920—combine to make up a garland of wisterias nearly twenty feet long.  “Monet here combines sky and water to create a reflective, surrounding atmosphere that makes clear the debt owed by contemporary art to Monet and his immersive environments.”  Leca explains the theme of reflection that plays out in this rare collection of paintings:   “Monet thought about reflection in many ways and understood the multiple associations linked to the term. He himself tells us of his obsession with representing the many reflective effects of moving water; just as his deliberate experimentation in paint was a sort of reflection, a thinking through of his process”. Cincinnati Art Museum  Director, Aaron Betsky, adds: “We are delighted to bring this exceptional grouping of Monet masterpieces to the Midwest and to illuminate these iconic works anew as part of our ongoing program of in-depth exhibitions treating some of the great chapters of European painting”. Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection is organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities. The exhibition is curated by Benedict Leca, curator of European painting, sculpture and drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum.


Located in scenic Eden Park, the Cincinnati Art Museum features an unparalleled art collection of more than 60,000 works spanning 6,000 years. In addition to displaying its own broad collection, the Art Museum also hosts several national and international traveling exhibitions each year. The art museum has paintings by several European Masters, including: Master of San Baudelio, Jorge Ingles, Sandro Botticelli ("Judith with Head of Holofernes"), Matteo di Giovanni, Mattia Preti, Strozzi, Frans Hals, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo ("St. Thomas of Villanueva"), Peter Paul Rubens ("Samson and Delilah") and Aert Vander Neer. The collection also includes works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet ("Rocks At Belle Isle") and Pablo Picasso. The museum also has a large collection of paintings by American painter Frank Duveneck ("Elizabeth B. Duveneck"). In the late nineteenth century, public art museums were still very much a new phenomenon, especially as far west as Cincinnati. Following the success of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia, the Women’s Art Museum Association was organized in Cincinnati with the intent of bringing such an institution to the region for the benefit of all citizens. Enthusiasm for these goals grew steadily and by 1881 the Cincinnati Museum Association was incorporated.  Just five years later, in May 1886, a permanent art museum building was completed in Eden Park and was heralded worldwide as “The Art Palace of the West.” The Cincinnati Art Museum enjoyed the support of the community from the beginning. Generous donations from a number of prominent Cincinnatians grew the collection to number in the tens of thousands of objects, which soon necessitated the addition of the first of several Art Museum expansions. In 1907 the Schmidlapp Wing opened, which was followed by a series of building projects. The addition of the Emery, Hanna and French wings in the 1930s enclosed the courtyard and gave the Art Museum its current rectangular shape and provided the space in which our American, European and Asian collections are currently shown.


Renovations during the late 1940s and early 1950s divided the Great Hall into two floors and the present main entrance to the Art Museum was established. The 1965 completion of the Adams-Emery wing increased our facility resources yet further, adding space for the permanent collection, lecture halls and temporary exhibition galleries. In 1993, a $13 million project restored the grandeur of the Art Museum’s interior architecture and uncovered long-hidden architectural details. This project included the renovation of one of the Art Museum’s signature spaces, the Great Hall. In addition, new gallery space was created and lighting and climate control were improved. The Art Museum’s temporary exhibition space was expanded to approximately 10,000 square feet to accommodate major temporary exhibitions. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the Art Museum’s collection numbered over 60,000 objects and, today, is the largest in the state of Ohio.  In 2003, the Cincinnati Art Museum deepened its ties with the Greater Cincinnati community by opening the popular and expansive Cincinnati Wing, the first permanent display of a city’s art history in the nation.  In addition, on May 17, 2003, the Art Museum eliminated its general admission fee forever, made possible by The Lois and Richard Rosenthal Foundation. In 2006, the Art Museum marked its 125th anniversary with 125 days of programs and events for the community to celebrate.  In addition, a Facilities Master Plan, approved by the Board of Trustees in February 2006, provided a plan for growth that will serve the Art Museum for the next two decades. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

Irish Museum of Modern Art shows Spanish Artist Ferran Garcia Sevilla

Written by Donna Mitchell Monday, 06 February 2012 21:38

DUBLIN.- An exhibition by Ferran Garcia Sevilla, a leading Spanish artist whose career has embraced many of the most influential art movements of the past 40 years, opened to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 10 June 2010. Ferran Garcia Sevilla presents 42 paintings in the artist’s characteristically eclectic style, which draws on influences as diverse as his travels in the Middle East, philosophy, Eastern cultures, comic books and urban graffiti. The exhibition comprises works from 1981 to date and includes well-known earlier works, alongside a group of more recent, previously unseen pieces, all illustrating the extraordinary visual richness of Garcia Sevilla’s work.

The earlier works in the exhibition date from the 1980s, when Garcia Sevilla was one of the principal proponents of the so-called return to painting. This followed a period as an outstanding figure in the vibrant Catalan Conceptual Art scene centred on Barcelona, where he had settled from Palma de Majorca in 1969. Paintings such as Ruc series, created after a trip to Nepal in 1986, brought Garcia Sevilla great international acclaim, as part of an explosion of Spanish art on the international scene, which also included artists such as Juan Mũnoz, Cristina Iglesias, José Maria Sicilia and Miquel Barceló. During the 1980s he showed regularly throughout Europe and beyond, with solo show in Spain, France, the UK and Japan. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986, in Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 and in ROSC 1988, which took place in number of locations around Dublin, including the Royal Hospital Kilmainham now the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Works from this period such as the celebrated Deus series from 1981 demonstrate the artist’s interest in exotic cultures and mythologies, while their execution, with rapid brush strokes and splashes and drips, suggest the immediacy of primitive rituals. The Ruc paintings show a further development of these mythic or symbolic forms in a more graphic style and include what the artist himself has described as some of his most powerful images. Always controversial, he also began to introduce, sometimes self-mocking, phrases into his paintings, such as “If you discover the secret I’m sure you’ll get depressed” in Muca 17.

Towards the end of the 1980s Garcia Sevilla works take on a more three-dimensional form incorporating everyday objects, including books, shoes and light bulbs. His use of floor tiles in the Mosaico series refers directly to the work of the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who used broken ceramics in, for example, his design for Parc Güell. The early 1990s sees the introduction of still further new imagery in the form of coloured discs, hands, feet and arrow motifs in the Sama series from 1990, while the many works that make up the Xa series from 1995 contain primarily black and red forms reminiscent of scaffolding or of the iron grilles used in 19th-century balconies in Barcelona.

Towards the end of the 1990s, in series such as Tepe, Garcia Sevilla’s work becomes more introverted, featuring drips, intertwining and superimposed lines, dots and nets. While these motifs suggest balloons, gun shots, fireworks and comets as well as force-fields, graphs and atmospheric phenomena, they may also simply be results of the properties of paint as a material. In some cases, he exaggerates the dripping effect further by rotating his canvases. These works were the last to be seen for some time and marked a move from the narrative to the lyrical in which specific references are abandoned.

In 1998 Garcia Sevilla stopped exhibiting in solo exhibitions, alienated by what he saw as an overly-commercialised art scene. He continued, however to create work with the same vigour as before and works began to emerge again in a solo show in Barcelona in 2007. In the Moll series from 2008, for example, the dot has become the predominant element, seemingly referring to notions such as the dissolution of reality or the disintegration of matter. Sometimes they are spread over the expanse of the painting; on other occasions, they form constellations and molecular chains.

Born in Palma de Majorca in 1949, Ferran Garcia Sevilla lives and works in Barcelona. Major international exhibitions include Foundation Cartier, Paris, 1997; IVAM, Valencia, 1998; Malmo Konsthall, 1998; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofía, Madrid, 2001; and more recently exhibitions at Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, 2007, and Galería Fúcares, Madrid, 2008. Visit the Irish Museum of Modern Art at: http://www.imma.ie/en/index.htm

Alfred Kubin ~ Drawings, 1897-1909 displayed at the Museum Neue Galerie New York

Written by Gavin Simpson Monday, 06 February 2012 21:37

NEW YORK CITY - The Neue Galerie New York opens the exhibition “Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909,” featuring more than 100 works on paper by the Austrian artist. This is the first major museum exhibition of his work ever held in the United States, and it focuses on his macabre early drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. It will be on view at the Museum Neue Galerie through January 26, 2009. The exhibition is organized by Annegret Hoberg, curator of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

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Wonders of Imperial Russia ~ Collection of the State Hermitage Museum opens in Mexico City

Written by Rudolph Kaiser Monday, 06 February 2012 21:36

 

MEXICO CITY- The most complete collection of Russian imperial art arrives to Mexico, for the first time, through the international exhibition “Czars, Wonders of Imperial Russia. Collections of the State Hermitage Museum”, that will open today at the National Museum of Anthropology (MNA). More than 500 pieces of the highest aesthetic and historical value give account of the czarist Russia daily life between 17th and the early 20th centuries, part of the collection of this Saint Petersburg museum.

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Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s Phantasmagorical Paintings at Hauser & Wirth

Written by George Kendell Monday, 06 February 2012 21:35

New York, NY - Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s phantasmagorical paintings roil with colorful mutant life: plants sprout eyeballs, bodies go about their business while sloughing off limbs and disgorging organs, and dense vegetal landscapes transform into visceral surgical tableaux. Vibrant and perverse, anthropomorphic and surreal, Ziolkowski’s private language is the symbolic expression of a highly concerted imagination that also was shaped by life in a very small town: Zamosc, where the artist was born in 1980, is a remote Renaissance city that began as a fortress in the middle of the lush Roztocze plateau in southeast Poland. Here wild nature penetrates the edges of an idealized urban microcosm that was once a center of intellectual life and seat of Eastern Europe’s Chasidic Jewish community, later stained by Nazi atrocities, and today is home to a concentration of food factories.

Influenced by Zamosc’s dream-like intersection of preserved history and encroaching modernity, Ziolkowski has nurtured an inner world where poetry and ornament, religiosity and eschatology, flourishing life and decay intertwine. This is the universe of Ziolkowski’s art.

On June 30, Hauser & Wirth New York unveiled the first American solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, bringing together more than 50 new works. The exhibition will be presented on two floors of the gallery and will remain on view through July 30.

The exhibition is titled ‘Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains,’ named for a fictional rock band that appears in some of the artist’s images (the word galoty in Polish means ‘short pants’ of the sort worn by Eastern European circus clowns). Among the paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth are several that evoke promotional posters for such fantasy bands. Their members can be counted among the large and colorful population of characters inhabiting Ziolkowski’s work, standing in for the artist’s own moods and serving as composite portraits of both human types and states of mind.

These include jaunty skeletons and autonomous eyeballs that return the viewer’s gaze; implement-wielding doctors in white coats; women with pendulous breasts and animal heads; monks with even more pendulous earlobes, regarding the universe; fat drinkers defecating gold coins; a host of political figures and everyday citizens going about strange business; and Ziolkowski himself, bespectacled and smoking a cigarette as he surveys the scene and waves to us.

‘Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains’ includes surreal portraits, lavishly detailed fantasy landscapes, and works of eccentric figuration that combine the two. Ziolkowski has been profoundly influenced by his small town upbringing, the folk traditions and stories of Poland, and his nation’s more recent and dark history. But while these permeate the atmosphere of his oeuvre, Ziolkowski’s paintings do not dwell in the past. In this regard, Ziolkowski departs definitively from immediate predecessors among leading Polish artists, including Pawel Althammer, Wilhelm Sasnal and Monika Sosnowska, who have used their work to deconstruct and critique Polish identity. Ziolkowski’s work is less overtly about history – his own as well as that of his troubled homeland – than about escape from a bleak personal and cultural inheritance, and a simultaneous celebration of art and artmaking.

Ziolkowski’s work principally emerges from his fantasies, which are translated into imagery that appears as if in a psychedelic dream – by turns funny and frightening, confounding yet familiar. In the midst of this, Ziolkowski is careful to remind us that he is no naïf, but is tethered to reality and engaged in the centuries of artistic practice and innovation from which he descends. One painting matter-of-factly depicts a whirlpool of feces. Another shows a well-attended surgical procedure with many recognizable public figures. And in another work, the eyes of a Vietnamese man reflect a threatening policeman, presumably a reference to the artist’s travels in Asia in 2009. In all of these, viewers can find references to milestones in the history of art, with Ziolkowski cannily connecting the dots between Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Pablo Picasso and Philip Guston.

Visit Hauser & Wirth New York at : http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Sotheby's Announces Two-Day Exhibit of Ukrainian Art In Kiev

Written by Barry Finsterman Monday, 06 February 2012 21:34

KIEV.- Sotheby's announced that on Wednesday, May 20th and Thursday, May 21st, 2009 it will stage a two-day exhibition in Kiev, in association with Ukrainian House, to showcase 19 works from its first Contemporary Art sale ever to include a major offering of Ukrainian Art. The exhibition at Ukrainian House (2 Kreschatuk Street, 01001, Kyiv, Ukraine) will present highlights by some of Ukraine’s most important contemporary artists from the London Contemporary Art: Russian and Ukrainian auction on Tuesday, June 9, 2009.

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The Tate Liverpool Receives Freedom of the City of Liverpool

Written by Warren Bradley Monday, 06 February 2012 21:33

LIVERPOOL.- The Tate Liverpool was given the Freedom of the City in recognition of its two decades as a major cultural presence in the city. The high-profile art gallery and museum which opened at the Albert Dock in 1988, has given Liverpool people some of the very best displays from the national collection. It is an integral part of the artistic and cultural life of the city - and is the most visited modern and contemporary art gallery outside London. Since it opened it has hosted more than 150 exhibitions, and in 2008 was responsible for one of the highlights of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year when it displayed the work of Gustav Klimt. It is currently showcasing the work of Picasso in Picasso: Peace and Freedom.

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Jim Lambie's Modern Sculpture

Written by Sharron Salaam Monday, 06 February 2012 21:31

Glasgow, Scotland - Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art has acquired a major piece of sculpture, Seven and Seven Is or Sunshine Bathed the Golden Glow by Turner-shortlisted artist Jim Lambie. The purchase of this vibrant and exciting work has been made possible by a £76,700 grant from independent charity The Art Fund. Seven and Seven Is was created for the 2008 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts.

Read more: [Jim Lambie's Modern Sculpture]