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Don’t Art, Fashion, Music Chicks on Speed, a constantly evolving multi-disciplinary art group originally from Munich, make a brilliant impression in their first major solo exhibition in the UK this summer. In the DCA upstairs exhibition space, the collective sing, dance and entertain through several screens and recordings, with their colourful, playful messages plastered across the walls and tied into the details of the installations.
Picasso: the Mediterranean Years (1945-62) Jane Austen claimed she could never recall if France were in Paris or Paris France, and likewise considering the magnitude of both gallery empire and artist’s reputation, one might make the slip of saying, “Have you seen the Gagosian exhibition at Picasso yet?” Quel awesome combo! The world’s uncontestedly most powerful art dealer with lavish spaces seemingly in every city and the equally uncontested greatest, and most expensive, artist of the 20th century whose auction records just keep inching higher, by an extra million or so, into the stratosphere.
The Often Serendipitous Nature of Museum Collecting Founded in 1903 to link fashion with fine and decorative arts, the Brooklyn Museum's costume collection is, more than 100 years later, 24,000 items strong. While Brooklyn's early curators did not intend to collect and exhibit fashions for their aesthetic value alone, over the years the museum was gifted with some of the best representatives of period dress and particular designers' work.
Rude Britannia: British comic art It is a striking paradox that whereas comedy occupies a central and revered position in our literary tradition, in the plastic arts it has always been treated with unease, suspicion or disdain. The very foundations of our language, through Chaucer and Shakespeare, feature the comedic in all its variants, including the grotesque, the absurd, the satirical, the scatological and the obscene. It is a grand tradition which extends back in time to Aristophanes, and forwards to Dickens, Beckett, Wodehouse and Ayckbourn.
Colour Country: Art from the Roper River Colour Country: art from Roper River is showing in its final venue in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, this month. It is a profound exhibition of beautiful paintings from a small community of distinctive artistic endeavour, the Roper River. The Wagga Wagga City Council put the exhibition together as part of their Mawang (Altogether) Programme to celebrate Indigenous Culture, to showcase the Aboriginal art and to be inclusive in cultural terms. Mawang means “altogether” for the Wiradjuri people who are the traditional custodians of the Wagga Wagga region.
Wolfgang Tillmans: A Photographer at Large Wolfgang Tillmans as photographer/printmaker is the perfect antidote to the framing of the world, to so-called verité as manufactured in contact prints, the staging of every aspect of modern life as if that had been unconsciously set up. However successful Tillmans now is, the artist has not lost his focus or his innocence in exposing through his own production the myths and lies of contemporary media.
Marion Borgelt: Mind and Matter – A 15 Year Survey Marion Borgelt’s spontaneous mark and image making was included in "New Drawing in Australia", in Studio International, No 1015, 1987. The drawings then, had been done when she was a student of Nick Carone and Mercedes Matter at the New York Studio School, where there existed a strong link between Australian artists, through the Peter Brown Memorial Fellowships.
“Picasso?” When Salvador Dalí was asked about his fellow artist he supposedly quipped, “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I!” This anecdote was revealingly chosen by the Spanish Ambassador to commence his speech celebrating the opening of the exhibition Picasso: Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool.
Now in its final year, Jerwood Contemporary Painters opens a window on to the diverse practice of 24 emerging artists. The exhibition brings their vibrant works together under the light of a crisp white gallery. All have graduated from UK art schools since 2000 and each receives an equal share of the £30,000 prize money from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
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Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists In Edinburgh this summer, coinciding with the Fringe Festival at first, and then extending into next year, the Dean Gallery’s exhibition of surrealist art is an appropriately escapist and inventive choice. The show is both comprehensive and accessible, displaying masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. It is also the highlight of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s 50th birthday celebrations, and indeed expresses a mood of wonderment and celebration, featuring works such as Picasso’s Lee Miller (1937), and Edward Wadsworths’ Pendant (1942).
Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries A great deal turns upon the evaluation of the authenticity and provenance of an art work. In today’s inflated art market, it can mean the difference of several millions of pounds, making a highly valued work worthless, or vice-versa. It can have profound consequences for collectors, especially professional gallery and museum staff responsible for institutional purchases. New or rejected attributions can also transform our perception of cultural history.
The idea of the small habitable space has long fascinated architects. As long ago as 1972 Joseph Rykwert had written a scholarly, in-depth historical study of The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. Much later in 1972, Nold Egenter developed a research series on architectural anthropology which drew new paths for architects from his own discipline, but not unaided by Rykwert’s work. Now running through Curator Abraham Thomas’s catalogue Introduction one also finds clear reference to the highly relevant work of Juhani Pallasmaa.
Fiona Banner: Harrier and Jaguar Fiona Banner’s new work brings to mind a certain now legendary but relevant painting. When James Rosenquist exhibited his painting F111 (1965) at the Leo Castelli Gallery that year, and then at the Jewish Museum in New York, it was set to become an iconic piece of the art of the so-called New Realism of that time.
Bones and blood. Feathers and shells. Insects and animals. Plants and flowers. It is not possible to pinpoint precisely when these and other remnants of life first appeared in art. Like the human need to create, it seems that organic materials have always been a source of inspiration and materials for artists, priests, shamans and alchemists. In some cultures, once-living materials are still used as ritual items, talismans, fetishes and conduits for transformation.
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception As curator Mark Godfrey guides us through Francis Alÿs’s exhibition at Tate Modern he tells us, “you have to ask what kind of meaning a poetic act might have in a highly charged political situation”. While taking no moral high ground, without ridicule or malice, Alÿs clears convoluted rhetoric from urgent contemporary concerns, the magic of Alÿs’s work lies in his combining praxis with trickster and in this way his subversive actions dance in the face of governments.
Joseph Beuys 40th anniversary journey “to The Moor of Rannoch and the Road to the Isles” No journey with Richard Demarco would be complete without reference to Joseph Beuys, an artist whose influence on him remains as vital today as his first encounter with Beuys in 1968 at Documenta 4, Kassel, when they did not speak.
ARCHITECTURE + CERAMICS = SCULPTURE Nicholas Rena’s monumental, eloquent ceramics are exhibited alongside the painting of Matthew Smith at Marsden Woo Gallery in London. He is also this year’s winner of the Art Fund Prize, announced at the 2010 Collect Design Fair held at the Saatchi Gallery on 14 May 2010. Marsden Woo Gallery shows innovative work from leading artists in the applied arts, yet Rena’s exhibition of uncompromising and imposing vessels, underpinned by a Modernist rationality, indicates his interdisciplinary approach to process and ideas, which transcend the borders of art and design.
The Gentler Arts of Hearth and Home Like notions of "craft" and "design", perceptions of folk art have dramatically shifted during the past few decades, as museums and galleries in major international cities and more modest venues in suburban and even rural areas exhibit artists whose works challenge conventional definitions and labels. The briefest run-through of the American Folk Art Museum's Approaching Abstraction show (on view through 5 September 2010) provides strong evidence that art made by self-taught artists would fit quite comfortably in museums of modern and contemporary art and in quality collections of abstract paintings and sculpture. |
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