Museum of New Art Presents Billy Conklin

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:32

PONTIAC, MICHIGAN.-The Museum of New Art presents Billy Conklin's Centerfolds - New Work from England's Latest Bad Boy. Richard Mann wrote in The Many Faces of Billy Conklin: "Anyone who has encountered the art of Billy Conklin will have had the uncanny impression that there is not one Billy but many. Not only has he adopted several modernist and more recent idioms in quick succession, but he has also invented several contradictory personas. Perpetually shuttling between London and New York, street art and blue chip, Conklin presents himself as artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, pragmatist and dreamer, bully and recluse. Throughout his short career Conklin has fashioned his own identity as one might manipulate an artistic medium, drawing on a fundamental model from his own generation, not so much preoccupied with the issue of identity as suspending it.

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Jensen Exhibits at Muckenthaler Cultural Center

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:37

FULLERTON, CALIFORNIA.An exhibition of 90 works by Robert W. Jensen will ?ll the galleries of Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, California. While acrylic on canvas paintings will dominate, Jensen, who enjoys working in many media, will include a number of drawings, watercolors, and original graphics, i.e. serigraphs, etchings, engravings and giclées, as well as some other experimental digital processes. The exhibition, which is actually two separate themed exhibits, will remain at Muckenthaler. The two themes are Jensen’s interpretations of sports, titled Have You Come to Play? and his reminiscences of world travel, Collected Memories. Another book ?lled with Jensen’s works on sports, titled The Young Athlete will be featured in the exhibition. One of those paintings titled The Diamond Belt Weigh-In which is now in the collection of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, will be represented at Muckenthaler as a giclée image. International columnist and radio personality Bonnie Churchill, provided anecdotal celebrity material for that book, and will be included in the Muckenthaler’s lecture program accompanying the exhibit.

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New Holocaust History Museum in Israel

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:41

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL.- Crowning a multi-year redevelopment plan, Yad Vashem will inaugurated its new Holocaust History Museum . The new Museum, some 10 years in the making, will replace the current historical museum at Yad Vashem. Heads of State and government from at least 15 countries, as well as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and dozens of other nations’ leaders and dignitaries, joined Israeli President Moshe Katzav, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Education Minister Limor Livnat in inaugurating the new Museum and then participated in a special assembly at Yad Vashem the following morning. The New Holocaust History Museum was inaugurated first with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday afternoon, followed by official tours of the Museum and a ceremony that evening, featuring Katsav, Sharon, Livnat, Annan, Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Prof. Shevach Weiss and Nobel Laureate Prof. Elie Wiesel.

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Guggenheim Museum Exhibition of Russian Art

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:44

NEW YORK, NY.–The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents RUSSIA!, the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art ever shown in the United States. With more than 275 objects, this innovative exhibition features the greatest masterworks of Russian art from the thirteenth century to the present, including icons; portraiture in both painting and sculpture from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries; critical realism in the nineteenth century as well as socialist realism of the communist era; landscapes through the centuries; pioneering abstraction; and experimental contemporary art—many of these works will be seen for the first time outside of Russia.

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Between Past & Future: Photography and Video

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:49

LONDON, ENGLAND.- The vivid responses of a new generation of Chinese photographers and video artists to the rapid cultural, political, social and economic changes taking place in China will be on view in a compelling and varied exhibition at the V&A . 'Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China' is the first comprehensive survey of Chinese photography and video from the past decade. As well as introducing an extraordinary body of work to a UK audience, the exhibition will provide remarkable insight into the dynamics of Chinese culture at the start of the 21st century. Featuring 80 works by 40 artists, the exhibition reflects the energy of younger Chinese artists. The works, by both rising stars and established artists, are often monumental in scale and experimental in nature. The exhibition has four thematic sections: History and Memory; Re-imagining the Body; People and Place; Performing the Self.

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André Kertész at International Center of Photography

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:13

NEW YORK.- The International Center of Photography presents André Kertész, a major retrospective of a photographer who could aptly be described as a "visual poet". In a 70-year career, which spanned much of the 20th century, André Kertész (1894-1985) made some of the most deceptively simple yet compelling and poetic photographs ever created. The exhibition will be the first major Kertész retrospective of vintage photographs held in the New York ; also, the show will present works never before exhibited or reproduced. Including some of the most celebrated works in 20th-century photography--such as Chez Mondrian and Satiric Dancer, both from 1926--120 objects will feature photographs from all periods of Kertész's exceptionally rich and diverse body of work: from his early photographs of his native Budapest made in the 1910s and early 1920s, to his studies of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and the final series of photographs he took of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, shortly before his death.

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James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:17

HOUSTON, TEXAS.-The Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston presents James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 will be the artist's first major scholarly exhibition in over twenty years and offers American audiences a rare opportunity to fully assess the depth and breadth of Surls' important contribution to the field of contemporary sculpture. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 offers a survey of sculpture, wall works, drawings, and prints, focusing on a singular twenty-year period in the career of this remarkable artist. During this period, Surls' artwork and career come together in a compelling story that interweaves the unique aspects of a specific landscape, his personal story, and the tumultuous nature of art practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, into a mélange capable of reconciling counterculture utopianism and the rigor of post-minimalist sculptural approach.

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The Allen Sisters: Photographs of New England

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:25

The Florence Griswold Museum presents today The Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographs of New England, 1885 - 1920. Sisters Frances Stebbins Allen (1854-1941) and Mary Electa Allen (1858-1941) began working as fine art and commercial photographers in the 1880s when they could no longer teach due to progressive deafness. Leaders in the development of photography, they were once praised as being among "The Foremost Women Photographers in America." This exhibition, organized by Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts, is a tribute to the sisters' artistic legacy, lost from view for most of a century. The sisters are best known for their romanticized re-creations of old New England. During the early 1900s these Colonial Revival scenes were in much demand by book and magazine publishers. This exhibition combines these nostalgic images with Pictorialist prints. Pictorialism, popularized by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, is marked by experimental use of light, subtle tonal gradations, and evocative compositions.

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Modernist Photography: Selections at ICP

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:28

NEW YORK.- The International Center of Photography presents Modernist Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection. The years between the World Wars witnessed a burst of extraordinary innovation in visual culture, nowhere more so than in the realm of photography. Enthusiasm for the advent of an urban, technological civilization reached a peak during this period. By the late 1920s, in both Europe and America, a host of inventive young photographers—often allied with such avant-garde movements as Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and the New Objectivity—had created an image of dynamism and glittering prosperity that was widely felt to mirror the new metropolis. By the early 1930s this euphoric image was shattered as an economic crisis of unprecedented scope swept Europe and America. Again, it was photographic images, this time by young documentary photographers and photojournalists such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, which captured the desperate efforts to revive urban and rural communities during the remainder of the decade.

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The 2005 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:57

LYON, FRANCE.-The 2005 Lyon Biennial is an exhibition that takes into consideration the stages of its conception and proposes complementary themes interlinked by the concept of tem-porality, which has provided our common thread. Addressing time was a way for us to draw up an inventory ;of the 1990s, when art began to function as a sort of editing bay on which artists could reconstruct everyday reality. They have tweaked the tempo at which forms change – pausing, looping, delaying, synchronizing, slowing down and speeding up. For the artists of the '90s, time is more a building material than a mere medium, and controlling the duration and the time protocols of exhibition has, like the controlling of space, become a major aesthetic issue.

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Superlative Collection of Impressionist and Modern Art

Monday, 19 September 2005 12:01

NEW YORK.-Christie’s is privileged to offer a superb group of paintings and sculpture from A Private American Collection, during the evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on November 1. Brilliantly chosen over the course of just a few years, from the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, these works of art, each exceptional in its own right, also form part of an unusual harmonious ensemble. The collection is expected to reach in excess of $48 million.

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130th Anniversary / Art Students League of New York

Tuesday, 20 September 2005 09:59

NEW YORK.-Seventeen New York art galleries will honor the Art Students League of New York by mounting exhibitions celebrating its 130th anniversary. The shows will run for varying periods during September, October and November, presenting work by artists who taught or studied at “the League.” Both instructors and alumni of the League were among the luminaries of 20th-century American art. A young Georgia O’Keeffe studied painting there with William Merritt Chase. Jackson Pollock and Fairfield Porter worked with Thomas Hart Benton, and David Smith and Burgoyne Diller enrolled in a class taught by modernist Jan Matulka. Ira Goldberg, the League’s Executive Director, was moved by the positive response the League received from the community of New York art galleries. He remarked that, “Throughout its history, the League has been associated with some of the greatest names in American art, many of whom have been represented by the finest galleries in the City.

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Stratification: An Installation of Works since 1960

Tuesday, 20 September 2005 10:09

CAMBRIDGE, MA. Borrowing its title from one of the exhibited works, Stratification concentrates on seven key pieces from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection of contemporary art from German-speaking Europe. The installation’s theme, layers, explores relationships among objects that span several decades and incorporate a range of approaches to art making. From smooth, overlaid coats of color to dense accretions of paint to stacked, repeated forms, each work employs a different mode of layering in its structure, application of materials, and overall physical process of formation. The varied uses of stratification in these pieces not only contribute to the overall aesthetic effect of each work but also signal more theoretical issues about surfaces, stability, artistic principles, and the act of creation. The installation features paintings by Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Rudolf de Crignis, and Richard Paul Lohse as well as sculptures by Max Bill and Thomas Lenk. Two sequential selections of drawings, prints, and photographs further develop the overarching theme. Organized by Celka Straughn, 2004–2006 Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Intern.

Marc Quinn's Sculpture Unveiled in London

Tuesday, 20 September 2005 10:23

LONDON, ENGLAND.-Marc Quinn’s marble sculpture "Alison Lapper Pregnant" was unveiled at Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth. The sculpture is 12 feet tall and portrays a naked, pregnant woman that has no arms. The work has already dividing opinion among disability campaigners and art critics. Marc Quinn had said he had sculpted his friend Ms Lapper because disabled people were under-represented in art. Ms. Lappper sat for the artist when she was eight months pregnant. Ms. Lapper called it a "modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood". She added, "It still daunts me now. I'm going to be up in Trafalgar Square. Little me." Marc Quinn said, "I felt the square needed some femininity, linking with Boudicca near the Houses of Parliament. Alison's statue could represent a new model of female heroism."

The Phillips Collection Completes Campaign

Tuesday, 20 September 2005 10:26

WASHINGTON, DC.-The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, has raised $29 million, exceeding the $27-million goal of its Fulfilling the Vision campaign two years ahead of schedule, Director Jay Gates and Board Chairman George Vradenburg announced today. The campaign is the largest in the museum’s 84-year history. . The museum will be able to present more of its outstanding collection in upgraded galleries, better engage its audiences with new amenities and services, and increase its renowned education and public programs, while maintaining its distinctive character as one of the world’s great intimately scaled museums.

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Russian Art in the Second Half of 19th Century

Wednesday, 21 September 2005 10:38

PARIS, FRANCE.-Musée d'Orsay presents Russian Art in the Second Half of the 19th Cetury: I Search of a Identity. This multidisciplinary exhibition is the first in France dedicated to Russian art, from the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century up to the end of the Czars regime in 1917. While the Russian avant-gard artists of the beginning of the 20th century are better known and have been the subject of remarkable exhibitions, this period on the other hand is widely unknown. Through exceptional loans, in particular from the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, the museum in Smolensk and the Lev Tolstoï museum in Moscow, a great number of works are presented for the first time. Through painting, sculpture, decorative arts, graphic arts, architecture and photography, the exhibition does not pretend to draw up an exhaustive panorama, but rather intends to put into perspective the creation of a purely Russian art.The natural habitat, « the Russian soil » have their place here. The return to the national sources, somewhere between myths, history and popular art, is explored in all its diversity, sheding light on the relationship between evolution in the arts and the awareness of a Russian identity. In the second half of the 19th century, certain artists turned away partially or totally from Western models and repertoires, in order to define a national art and style.

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