outside the ivory tower

videotime!!!

2010-08-13T13:35:00.000+02:00

http://wn.com/Peter_Doig

Schloss Marquardt Rohkunstbau 2010

2010-08-13T13:27:00.003+02:00

http://www.art-magazin.de/kunst/31243/rohkunstbau_2010_schloss_marquardt

Nicolas de Staël

2010-07-29T11:08:00.005+02:00

Nicolas de Staël (January 5, 1914, Saint Petersburg – March 16, 1955, Antibes)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_de_Sta%C3%ABl

I had never heard of this guy, a friend tipped me and i really love his work.
Thought I share it with you.

AutoCenter Berlin Blick Ohne Ende

2010-06-26T09:25:00.004+02:00

Ronald de Bloeme

Maarten Janssen

Tjebbe Beekman

Michael Markwick

Arjan van Helmond

Lidwien van de Ven

curated by Jurriaan Benschop

Berlin gallery walk

2010-06-24T22:34:00.006+02:00

So Finally i´ve had some time to look at a few shows.
The absolute highlght of my day was Tal R. at CFA.
I´ve been thinking a lot about Matisse lately and I guess so did Tal R.
And he found a new way to make damn good paintings that reflect Matisse but are absolute Tal R. paintings!
A go see!
Then i saw the Sasnal show where there was this absolute beauty of a painting featuring a cat.
So well painted as only mr. Sasnal can!
Michael raedecker at Max Hetzler did a good job playing this impossible space!
All in all i had a very good day walking around the city !
It was way too long ago!
Hopefully soon the biennale.

Tjebbe Beekman Fassade project Amsterdam

2010-06-20T22:31:00.003+02:00

Amsterdam-Berlin service garage Amsterdam

2010-05-12T14:53:00.006+02:00

Artists:
Gerwald Rockenschaub, Tjebbe Beekman, Arturo Herrera
Marc Bijl, John von Bergen, Hadassah Emmerich
Gerold Miller, Maarten Janssen, Wafae Ahalouch el Keriasti
Bernd Trasberger, Markus Gutmann, Vincent Vulsma
Veronica Brovall, Sebastian Dacey, Tjorg Douglas Beer

An interesting art world has to be progressive in all areas, from non-profit to commercial and from emerging to established. Missing one of those elements will have consequences on the whole, but
what happens if several parts are missing? How can Dutch art be expected to participate internationally when museums are closed, when international artists are not often represented and energy slowly evaporates? Artists have to function in a situation that is not very inspiring and take the initiative to move to more interesting conditions. Berlin is for many artists a place where the energy is very much present, where opportunities and quality are available but at the same time is a city of freelancers not making a lot of money. The project Amsterdam–Berlin shows Dutch- and international artists who are inspired by and working in the city Berlin. With this project de Service Garage wants to be part of the movement that stands for the development of the art in Amsterdam and The Netherlands.

gallery weekend berlin 2010

2010-05-02T22:00:00.005+02:00

random pics...
i have no time at all lately ...
sorry folks!

Jules de Balinqourt-Premonitions

2010-04-11T09:54:00.003+02:00

Deitch projects
April 01, 2010 — April 24, 2010
18 Wooster Street, New York

Thomas Zipp-(WHITE REFORMATION CO-OP) MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO

2010-04-04T21:31:00.006+02:00

Thomas Zipp (born in Heppenheim in 1966) is one of the most important German artists of our time. Trained as a painter, he brings together individual works – paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and installations – to create an overall concept that completely integrates the spaces of the exhibition venue. By working in this way, Zipp lends his exhibition concepts a unique, unrepeatable existence.
Zipp’s works are marked by an intense engagement with history, science and religion, with politics and society and with art history and philosophy. A central role in this is played by the exploration the self, by antagonism in the sense of diametrically opposed antitheses and by the consequences of historical, scientific and religious successes and events. Good and evil, truth and lie, God and the devil, standard and deviation, body and mind, obsession, ecstasy, borderline experience, blessedness and sexuality provide Zipp with thematic inspiration.
The following quote by Thomas Zipp is taking a firm stand regarding these topics and shows a critical position: ‘1. In view of the existence of indifference and conformist, limited, ecstatic conditions, today, resistance to untruth will no longer interest anyone anymore. 2. The maze of reactionary, heliocentric tendencies, be these pseudo-progressive or stagnative, is governed by lethargy; indeed, lethargy must dominate as it is characterising feature and privilege of one’s contemporaries. 3. The impotence of the lethargy of the scientifising emphasis in all bourgeois actions banishes euphoria to the grey, macabre, and static, to protestant stiffness and pessimism, to the neutral or the soft irresolute – or even to false excesses which are, however, strictly channelled’ (Thomas Zipp in: Achtung! Vision: Samoa & The Family of Pills, 2005)

Thomas Zipp is one of those artists who are able to go beyond simply presenting a solo show at an exhibition venue like the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and instead transform it in its entirety. Under the title (WHITE REFORMATION CO-OP) MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO, Zipp is dedicating his show in Kassel to the question of standard and deviation, social exclusion and the exploration of the self, by turning the spaces of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum into a ‘psychiatric hospital’ depicted with a gloomy aesthetic and satirical exaggeration.With his subtitle MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO, Zipp is alluding to a famous quotation from the Roman poet Juvenal (ca. 60–140 AD), who as a satirist sharply criticised the signs of his time. This idea of bringing together mind, health, and body, which once adorned many buildings and coats-of-arms, equates, in a discrediting way, a healthy body with a healthy mind and was employed frequently over the course of ‘nationalist popular education’ and the creation and evolution of ‘internment homes’, ‘reformatories’ and ‘psychiatric homes’ since the late seventeenth century. Against this backdrop, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum will undergo a complete transformation. Thomas Zipp is replacing the large inscription on its portal with the title of the exhibition, and the foyer will be turned into the lobby of an ‘institution.’ In the spacious main wings of the Fridericianum, the artist is combining powerful installation interventions with a large selection of his sculptural and painted oeuvre. By lowering the overall lighting and employing garish neon lights, Zipp creates the illusion of long, winding corridors whose doors lead to accessible and inaccessible rooms, in which the themes of the exhibition are taken up again and again in paintings and sculptures, such as his Psychonauten (Psychonauts). These corridors connect to the side wings, which house the large installations of a cell, a gymnasium, and a hall of mirrors with concave and convex forms that distort their mirror images.

13 March till 13 june 2010

Luc Tuymans

2010-02-07T13:52:00.003+01:00

Putting the Wrongs of History in Paint

By DOROTHY SPEARS
Published: February 3, 2010

DURING a visit to New York late last fall, the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans sat on a couch in the dimly lighted lounge of the Bowery Hotel and recounted a disturbing childhood memory. One evening when he was 5, he said, his family was gathered around his paternal grandparents’ dinner table. His mother’s brother was leafing through a picture album when a photograph of one of his father’s brothers — his own namesake, Luc — fell to the floor. The photo, Mr. Tuymans said, showed this uncle as an adolescent performing the Hitler salute.

“This was totally unexpected,” said Mr. Tuymans, 51, explaining that his mother’s family had been active in the Dutch resistance and in hiding refugees. For the first time, he said, his father admitted to her that two of his brothers had trained as Hitler Youth in Germany. After that, the artist said, the issue “was always looming” in his parents’ home. The marriage was not a happy one, and with his mother more and more outspoken on the subject and his father increasingly introverted, Mr. Tuymans said, “I learned to eat very fast and get away from the table.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Tuymans — whose first major American retrospective opens this weekend at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, after an initial showing at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio — has become known for examining the visual residue of trauma and the collective desire to forget. Some of his best-known paintings deal with the Holocaust, the post-9/11 social and political climate in the United States and the legacy of the Belgian colonization of Congo — and with the ways such things linger, or don’t, in the collective consciousness.

“Luc’s paintings call us out on our relative amnesia around important issues,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, a co-organizer of “Luc Tuymans,” as the current show of 75 works is called, and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where it is scheduled to arrive in October. “They shame you into looking.”

Mr. Tuymans is particularly interested in how the contemporary experience of history — through Web sites, for example, or the media — often involves bits and pieces of the historical record presented out of context. Even as the widespread availability of information has made this “a time when we’re re-evaluating moments of historical importance,” he said, “I am quite distrustful toward ‘evidence’ as such.” His art, he said, aims to “make people reconsider what they’re seeing.”

One way he tries to do this is by studying his chosen subjects in depth, even as he collects samples of fragmentary evidence in images culled from the Internet, television, films, photographs, old postcards and his own drawings.

“Luc embarks upon these huge, almost archival, research projects,” said Helen Molesworth, the other co-organizer of the exhibition, who was recently named as the next chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. “He knows massive, massive amounts about the subjects he paints.” But once he has digested the research and settled on the assortment of images, she added, he paints each work in a single sitting. Referring to his renowned 1986 painting “Gas Chamber,” based on a watercolor Mr. Tuymans made while visiting the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, she said, “It’s almost as if he’s compelled toward a traumatic site, then just as quickly repelled away from it.”

Mr. Tuymans’s paintings, rendered in a restrained palette with fleet brush strokes of wet paint on wet paint, can sometimes seem almost frustratingly detached from their themes, not only because of the evident speed of their production but also because of their oblique, even cryptic imagery. In 2001, for example, when he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, his installation “Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man)” dealt with the end of the Belgian colonial presence in Congo using paintings of, among other things, Belgium’s former King Baudoin, black cars cruising through thick green foliage and a leopard-skin rug.

To have a sense of Mr. Tuymans’s take on the period — which had to do with Belgium’s presumed complicity in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, independent Congo’s first democratically elected leader — it helps to know that the portrait of King Baudoin, whom the Congolese knew as “beautiful white boy,” was based on footage of the king’s first visit to the colony in 1955; that the mysterious black cars came from a documentary (broadcast on Belgian TV in the 1990s) that traced the hours before Lumumba’s killing; and that the leopard skin referred to a Congolese tribal tradition reserving such rugs for the feet of chiefs, which the Belgians adapted in honor of King Baudoin’s visit.

This mediation through obscure mass-culture imagery may make the work hard to interpret, but it packs a punch precisely “because we have seen the same images and glossed over them or just been indifferent to them,” Ms. Molesworth argued. And in a context like the Biennale, Mr. Tuymans’s coolly elliptical approach can be forceful enough to have an impact. Adding to a book and a movie about Lumumba’s assassination that had both come out shortly before the Biennale, Mr. Tuymans’s paintings helped produce a popular groundswell that led to an official apology from the Belgian government in 2002.

If the art addresses political issues with subtlety and indirection, the same can’t be said of the artist. With his deep-set blue eyes, severely cropped hair and surly, irreverent humor, Mr. Tuymans comes off less as a diplomat and more as a cynic with a bone to pick. A compulsive cigarette smoker, he enjoys his Jack Daniel’s, tossing back three whiskeys at our first interview and tapping his own dedicated bottle under the bar at the Wexner opening. He also loves mouthing off.

During a two-hour interview, the word fascist arose often in reference to President George W. Bush. Citing “homeland security, restrictions on travel, the lack of privacy and pre-emptive strikes” as examples of Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, he pronounced Mr. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice — whose face he immortalized in a scowling portrait from 2005 — “the true American fundamentalists.”

And Mr. Tuymans’s rants are not limited to politics. During the same interview he deemed the exhibition space of the Wexner “horrific,” adding, “I hate the building; I cannot defend it,” on account of a wide ramp running beside the galleries, which impeded the flow of the show. (By the time of a second interview, long after the Wexner show had a positive review in The New Yorker, his opinion had changed. “I was ultimately really happy with the installation,” he said. “I was very afraid initially because of the difficulty of the building, but in retrospect it may end up the most beautiful installation of all.”)

Born in the outskirts of Antwerp in 1958, Mr. Tuymans was “a very quiet kid,” he said, who learned early that making art was “a way to be accepted.” When his childhood propensity for drawing knights evolved into an interest in depicting landmarks like Antwerp’s domed railway station, zoological gardens and port, he also began to think of drawing “as a way of getting out of things.” On trips with his parents, he said: “I’d be drawing the whole time. I didn’t care what was going on around me. I was completely immersed.”

His enjoyment of drawing led to a keen interest in art history and an almost worshipful admiration for the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, whom he still considers “the most important painter ever, period,” and whom he credits with introducing realism — and the outside world — into an art form that was still under “the cloak of religious dogma.”

At 19 Mr. Tuymans encountered a series of El Greco paintings in Budapest while working as a guard for a European railway company. Having “always hated El Greco because I’d only seen him in a book,” he then became fascinated by El Greco’s use of warm and cool tones of color to create depth. He also admired the complexity found in El Greco’s shadows. “A gray tone is never just gray,” he said.

These early lessons, supplemented by an extensive training in art history and fine arts at universities and academies in Brussels and Antwerp — and by five years in the ’80s dedicated to making minimalist films — eventually gave Mr. Tuymans the formal skills and detachment to probe the political concerns that had been simmering in him since childhood.

His first show, in 1985 — a one-day event in the empty swimming pool of a decrepit Ostend spa — failed to attract any visitors. Several years later, he said, after a couple of shows and some networking, he approached Frank Demaegd, owner of a gallery in Antwerp, with 15 snapshots of new paintings and a list of 15 collectors who would buy them. “I told Frank, ‘The show’s going to be sold out,’ ” Mr. Tuymans recalled. “And of course it happened.”

In 1992, when his paintings were included in the prestigious Documenta IX art show in Kassel, Germany, Mr. Tuymans said he was wooed by a host of prominent dealers eager to exhibit his work. In addition to Mr. Demaegd, he agreed to show with the then-fledgling New York dealer David Zwirner. Since his first solo show with Mr. Zwirner, in 1994, his paintings have been granted shows at major institutions like the Tate Modern in London and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. They have also earned him what is arguably the most elusive honor of all: the admiration of fellow artists.

“Luc’s small paintings control big spaces, and his paint strokes all connect,” said the realist painter Alex Katz, a longtime fan. “They relate as much to each other as they do to the subject.”

Yet for Mr. Tuymans, subject is everything. “In my book,” he said, “art is not derived from art. Art is derived from reality.”

John von Bergen@Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York

2010-01-25T06:28:00.002+01:00

January 16 - February 21, 2010

John von Bergen
Whip Lash

As I walk through the streets of Dumbo, I am compelled to re-examine my body in relationship to space, and before long my imagination begins to run wild, transforming reality into an apocalyptic situation. Streets that would normally function as stable surfaces underfoot begin to relate more to the surface of a volcanic island than to a twenty-first century metropolis: bricks and gravel merge with streetcar tracks and manholes, which then merge with dirt and vegetation, all bound by rubble and cement and perhaps other substances unknown to me. The walk towards Brooklyn Bridge Park along the river may offer a safe and distant view of Manhattan, yet tranquility is interrupted at unexpected intervals by the deafening sound of trains ripping across the Manhattan Bridge. At this moment I imagine being trapped between the tons of steel produced for these bridges, cars, and trains, and the safe distance to Manhattan from Brooklyn becomes some kind of phenomenal mirage. I turn around to seek refuge in the old Boiler Building now known as Smack Mellon. I feel some safety and security among the pillars and walls of the enormous factory space, triggering memories of churches from my childhood, and this space may serve as temporary protection from the outside world, until paranoia takes over once again.

Quite unique to Smack Mellon is the monstrous white wall that stands directly behind a row of rusted pillars. The ability to view the full scale of the wall is obstructed by these pillars, which are in many ways the true veterans of this building. Whip Lash considers the results of a violent (yet undoubtedly absurd) interaction between the representation of a white-skinned-rusted pillar and the wall itself. As forms and materials shift, an idea of reality may shift. The visitor’s reading of the work is informed by personal history and memory, or more ominously, a premonition of what is waiting around the corner, down the road.

John von Bergen was born in Connecticut in 1971 and received his B.F.A. Degree with Honors at The School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2003, von Bergen moved to Berlin with an invitation from the Berlin Senate for Science, Research, and Culture. Since living in Germany, von Bergen's work has been exhibited in various galleries, museum, and venues, including Halle 14 in Leipzig, Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria, The Brno House of Art in Czech Republic, and The Pera Museum in Istanbul.

In October 2009 von Bergen presented his fourth solo exhibition titled “SOOTO hungry” with Galerie Lena Bruening in Berlin. Upcoming exhibitions include a group show at The Freies Museum in Berlin (March, 2010) and a solo exhibition at the Kjubh Kunstverein in Cologne (May, 2010). John von Bergen is a 2009 - 2010 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grantee.

Tjebbe Beekman @ 4art Dutch television

2009-12-07T12:11:00.002+01:00

Jake & Dinos Chapman @CFA Berlin

2009-11-28T14:46:00.002+01:00

In their recent work Jake & Dinos Chapman replicate the most important sculptures, installations
and occurrences from their joint career - in miniature format in cardboard and poster
paint. From “Fuckfaces” to “Sex”, from “Uebermensch” to “Little Death Machines” they subsequently
deliver the primarily not existing models of their main works. In cardboard they also
reconstruct the warehouse fire of the shipping company Momart, in which the first version of
their installation “Hell” was destroyed. Thus the Chapmans execute a double somersault in
rebuilding inexistent models of former realised sculptures. “Shitrospective” pre-empts the
Museum retrospective in a format reflective of the crisis and production costs.
Interestingly, it becomes apparent to the observer through the sketch-like laconic execution,
the level of iconic quality the most important works by the Chapmans have meanwhile achieved.
Here the absence of the demand for perfection lends the sculptures a particular charm.

Thomas Zip @ Guido W. Baudach

2009-11-21T11:55:00.004+01:00

Boeken die je gelezen moet hebben

2009-11-09T13:40:00.001+01:00

Sorry people this post is in Dutch because i want to promote two Dutch books about Berlin.

Jurriaan Benschop: wonen tussen de anderen

http://www.boox.nl/nl/boek-wonen-tussen-de-anderen-9789025367022
http://www.kunstinberlijn.nl/start.html

Rob Savelberg: Berlijn beweegt.

http://www.uitgeverijboom.nl/catalogus/fondsen/algemeen/berlijn_beweegt_9789085065975.html

Doe jezelf een plezier zou ik zeggen!

John von Bergen @ Lena Brüning Berlin

2009-11-04T10:59:00.004+01:00

In 13th Century Pisa, Count Ugolino Della Gherardesca was thought of as a traitor to Pisa, and sentenced to death through starvation with his children and grandchildren. Years later Dante described in his famous Inferno an Ugolino who was in many ways a caricature of the real man, alluding to his temptation to eat his own children in this seminal line: "Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno" (“Then hunger prevailed over grief”). This has lead to centuries of artists revisiting this cannibalistic mystery, from writers such as Seamus Heaney and Jorge Luis Borges, to sculptors such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Rodin.

But in 2002 a group of scientists in Italy (led by Francesco Mallegni) claimed to have examined the remains of the real Count Ugolino, his two sons, and two grandsons. After conducting DNA testing, they argued no such cannibalistic acts could have occurred (especially as Ugolino had died at an old age, and with teeth in no condition for eating flesh). Yet Mallegni's findings were soon disputed by other scientists as to their authenticity, arguing the remains may NOT have been Ugolino and his kin. So the mystery still remains...

2009 continues with an interest in Dante, where the leading Google result for "Dante's Inferno" brings us to the site for a new video game released this year by Visceral Games (with the tagline: "Go To Hell"). The Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin is hosting a seminar series titled "Metamorphosing Dante". And also in Berlin, John von Bergen will present one sculpture titled "Ugolino" for his third solo show at Galerie Lena Brüning.

For his sculpture, von Bergen replaces the human form with what first appear as strangely twisted and morphed machine parts, which upon closer inspection reveal themselves as transformed casts of a table-saw. First appearing in violent intertwinement, they begin to dilapidate into a larger abstract structure. It has been considered that during the time of Dante's rivaling Italy, the real Ugolino served Inferno as a suggestive metaphor for his treasonable actions in Pisa. And yet when considering other artistic interpretations of this story over time, mythology has weighed in with far greater influence than what was a plausible outcome for him and his family. But the humanistic element in von Bergen's Ugolino has dissolved into a representation of another kind of fiction, where reality does not attempt to replace myth, but rather myth is replaced by a less tangible absurdity.

In "SOOTO hungry" John von Bergen will also present works from a new series of pencil drawings that relate closely to the sculpture as transformative structures torn between the abstract and the representational. They drift towards an ambiguous play between the natural and the imagined, by a process that blends detailed renderings of photographed objects with the process of simple abstract marks and gestures. As with the sculpture, the realization of a drawn image becomes the residue of real, and we are left with an instant memory of an incomplete form. As the art historian Ludwig Seyfarth has noted: "In both his drawings and sculptural work is a recognizable interest in exploring, where the utilization of unusual materials blend in flowing transition from the apparent towards inventive, idiosyncratic worlds."

John von Bergen is an American artist who studied at The School of Visual Arts in New York, and moved to Berlin in 2003. Since this time he has exhibited in various museums, galleries, and art fairs throughout Europe, as well as lecturing in Düsseldorf, Dresden, Berlin, and New York. In March 2009 he was invited to present a project for The Sächsisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Dresden, and is currently participating in the group exhibition "Octet" at The Pera Museum in Istanbul. In January 2010 von Bergen will present a solo exhibition at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. He is a 2009-2010 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient.

http://www.jvonb.com/

Tomasz Kowalski Carlier Gebauer Berlin

2009-10-10T15:28:00.003+02:00

Joep van Liefland : DEADLAND

2009-10-10T15:24:00.000+02:00

Lehmann Berlin

Armen Eloyan, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

2009-10-09T09:08:00.003+02:00

Reviewed by Charles Darwent

As self-portraits go, Armen Eloyan's Untitled (Painter) is a bit of an oddity, surpassed in the weirdness stakes only by Untitled (Painter II).

In the first, the 40-something Armenian depicts himself as a log, sporting natty red shoes and propped up against a wall fast asleep, palette and brushes on the floor beside him. In the second, the alter-log is at work on a canvas, but looks surprised to find that a wedge has been hacked from the back of his head. If Armen is trying to tell us something about life as an artist, his take on the subject does not seem entirely upbeat.

Cartoons have a venerable history in contemporary art – think Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons – but Armen's cast of characters feels different from these. Lichtenstein and the rest were playing high-art-low-art games with their "whams!" and their Mickey Mice. Armen, by contrast, is inventing rather than appropriating, and although his biggest influence is clearly Philip Guston, his logs and potatoes and tomatoes and books smack oddly of Chagall: bit-players from a Mitteleuropa folklore, down-market versions of wolves and pigs and little girls in red capes.

If Armen's characters have one thing in common, it is their air of jaunty cruelty. His Untitled (Potato) wears the stock cartoon-zany expression of crossed eyes and lolling tongue, but has hacked off one of his Mr Potato Head arms with a carving knife and taken a slice, à la Van Gogh, out of his own tuberous bonce. The titular hero of Untitled (Tomato as a Cook) is as cheerily self-destructive as he sounds. Self-abuse of one kind or another is a recurrent theme in Armen's painted fairy tales. Several characters appear to be masturbating, most insistently the case of the log in Untitled (Pink Pinocchio) who is touching a strategically placed twig in what can only be described as an inappropriate manner. Another log, in watercolour this time, has a stick up what would, in other circumstances, be his arse.

And what is this all about? Well, black humour isn't the only thing that Armen's pictures share. The other is the quality of their painting. The palette and brushes in Untitled (Painter) are in deep impasto, standing proud of the canvas so as to be both representations of themselves and demonstrations of what they can do. Like Armen's self-cooking tomatoes and self-slicing potatoes, they elide cause and effect, the maker and the made. In their throwaway way, they are deeply clever and accomplished and they want you to know it. To put it another way, Armen's pictures are Absurd with a capital "A", squandering their talents on what looks like childish nonsense but slyly underlining those talents in the process.

In this, the new work has the feel of a manifesto. His last show here, just over a year ago, was both more painterly and less so. Then, his cartoons felt like German New Painting, expressionistic, harder to read. Now, the potatoes and tomatoes are both simpler and more virtuosic, exasperated but in a good way. What artist hasn't occasionally felt that he was killing himself with work to no end?

At times like this, you go back to the beginning, which is what I'd guess Armen is doing. Personally, I'm intrigued to see where he goes next.

Luc Tuymans @ Wexner Center for the Arts

2009-10-05T15:07:00.003+02:00

Luc Tuymans is the most challenging painter in recent history. A retrospective of the fifty-one-year-old Belgian artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, invites a verdict. Mine is a thumbs-up. Tuymans’s thinly brushed, drab-looking (but sneakily lovely) canvases, usually based on banal photographs with wispy political associations, dramatize the fallen state of painting since the nineteen-sixties. Tuymans also discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a surprising vitality. He does so with audacity, in terms of subject matter. He works in thematic series, whose topics have included the Holocaust, disease, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism, post-9/11 America, and the mystique of Walt Disney. One of Tuymans’s first definitive works is a 1986 painting of the gas chamber at Dachau. The first-person touch of his brush is the work’s sole, and frail, emotional anchor. Tuymans is Flemish, a native and lifelong resident of Antwerp. He quit painting in the early nineteen-eighties to pursue filmmaking, resuming in 1985. Tuymans’s works would rather whisper than shout, though always in a vicinity of raw nerves. He has recently painted both a series touching on Belgian politics and a suite responding to America in the era of George W. Bush. His 2005 painting of Condoleezza Rice both demands and rejects answers. Tuymans articulates a modern tradition that gives equal weight to the dazed German Romanticism of Friedrich and the wide-awake Parisian modernity of Manet. He has compared his method to the self-developing of Polaroids, saying of his process, “It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Tuymans is influential among younger painters, but he is not apt to become popular.

"Diktatur" Ronald de Bloeme @ Hamish Morrison Berlin

2009-10-05T11:36:00.003+02:00

With an army of billboard-sized works of equal dimensions (220 x 350 cm) de Bloeme questions media strategies and the content of the information found in contemporary visual sign systems, as used in advertising and the packaging industry, reflecting on the absolutism of today`s communication processes.

In an era in which imagery is increasingly superseding language, de Bloeme analyses the origin of signals and the components of their persuasiveness. How do producers of visual language manage to manipulate neutral form and colour in a way that they induce a subconscious process of identification for the largest possible number of individuals of a specifically defined target group? To what extent does red next to white evoke a flag or the packaging of a chocolate bar?

Through appropriation, deconstruction and manipulation using a computer Ronald de Bloeme transforms image templates of our consumer society. He censors existing text and eliminates any figurative references, creating a pure geometric language, which he again combines and distorts into arresting compositions. These are then transferred to canvas with competing colourful layers of high-gloss and matt enamel paint. The resultant expansive surfaces capture our attention through the combination of colour and use of various techniques, with a suggestive impact analogous to the original advertising medium's intention.

„The viewer often doesn´t know what is more enjoyable - the mastery with which the artist gives a new unity to a whole range of elements, or the remaining fine imperfections that are a sign of the handiwork."(1)

Through the collaging of everyday consumer goods that we are constantly exposed to, de Bloeme´s body of work creates a heterogeneous field of forces, of tensions and contradictions, certainties and uncertainties. The original context is not maintained as such, rather the work recalls memories of perception or of consensus of knowledge; the information, retained only as codes, has an effect on us but we cannot explain why. Are we not merely carriers of internalised decoding systems, controlled by the ever-extending propagandistic sign-systems of the dictatorship of consumerism?
Whilst de Bloeme´s colour combinations can be identified as codes, at the same time samples of other contextual systems of signs unfold. In doing so the artist brings the relativity of information into an innovative game. In his painting Ironie he mixes a military code system with the aesthetics of a paper napkin; in Extract he replaces in a more radical manner all relevant core information with constantly oxidizing gold pigments.
With his contra-manipulation de Bloeme asks us to determine how complex the structures behind communications strategies for consumer goods really are and how much impact they have on our subconscious and to what extent they control our everyday life.

see also interview: http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/interview-with-ronald-de-bloeme/1951

Mark Bradford & Kara Walker @ Sikkema Jenkins

2009-10-05T11:29:00.003+02:00

Sikkema Jenkins now hosts an exhibition with not one, but two MacArthur Genius grantees. Announced this morning, Los Angeles based artist Mark Bradford now joins the ranks of his show colleague Kara Walker as a grantee. Bradford uses found paper from billboards, posters, and magazines that he finds on the streets to create painterly collages.

530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

TJEBBE BEEKMAN Galerie Diana Stigter

2009-09-30T10:31:00.003+02:00

About Alienation
by Andrea Alessi

TJEBBE BEEKMAN
Galerie Diana Stigter
Elandsstraat 90, NL 1016 SH Amsterdam, Netherlands
05 September 2009 - 10 October 2009

Tjebbe Beekman’s large, tactile paintings, currently showing at Galerie Diana Stigter, exhibit an ambivalent passion for their medium. Shiny, thickly layered paint is contaminated with sand, pieces of yarn, and nails. It is one of the most striking features of his work. In a series of smaller, snapshot sized pieces, acrylic and resin is applied so thickly that it has warped the paper underneath, leaving rectangles resembling melting polaroids or glass. Like most conceptual painters, Beekman makes paintings that are (at least in part) about painting.

Thankfully, there is more to them than that. The paintings depict complex, yet ultimately false architectural environments created initially as digital composites. There is a giant theatre, a television studio, and multiple museum interiors. Whereas Beekman’s earlier paintings can be characterized by their middle-distance vantage points and empty spaces, the foregrounds of these new interiors are inhabited by non-human objects like TV cameras and skeletons in display cases.

The artist’s previous paintings described a prophylactic existence - the “capsulization” of contemporary society and the experience of isolation within the spaces of modernity. Beekman’s latest environments are sites of presentation and mediation. Theses are the places where our society and our world, past and present, are re-presented back at us. Yet this is not intimate person-to-person communication, and the works still convey a sense of separation and emptiness. Indeed, we watch TV alone at home; we sit in a crowded theatre and do not interact with our neighbors; geography, time, and a physical pane of glass separate us from objects in museums. The architectural convolution and painterly distortion of Beekman’s spaces suggest that maybe what they present to us is not as clear as it might seem.

These new investigations are not so much a deviation from Beekman’s previous body of work, as they are a conceptual evolution and refinement of ideas. If The Image of a Capsular Society explored the symptoms of societal segregation and control, perhaps Beekman’s new paintings have begun to question the cause.

--Andrea Alessi

(Image: Tjebbe Beekman, Tv Studio, 2009, Acrylic , enamel and sand on pael, 200x300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam)

james kalm visits closed up gallery´s in NY

2009-08-12T20:56:00.003+02:00

Michael Raedecker-Gem Museum The Hague

2009-07-21T09:51:00.003+02:00

Michael Raedecker – one of the most successful artists of his generation – presents a broad overview of his latest work at the GEM this summer. His complex, multi-layered paintings, which daringly combine the “high-status” medium of paint with the homelier medium of embroidery, are based on traditional genres like the still life and flower painting. Raedecker has shot to fame since 1999, winning international prizes and seeing his work included in renowned collections like Saatchi and Tate Modern.

Michael Raedecker began his artistic training by studying fashion at the Rietveld Academy. He then attended the Rijksacademie and received his MFA from the prestigious Goldsmith’s College in London. He gradually developed a highly distinctive style, raising eyebrows by his unusual combination of paint and thread. His disturbing pictures are characterised by the complete absence of any human presence and are inspired by the “good life” depicted in the American TV shows of his childhood. They are usually based on a photographic image, which Raedecker reduces to its essence. As he works on it, he reduces the lines and gradually leaves more and more to the viewer’s imagination.

For Raedecker, there is nothing self-evident about working in paint. Time and again he asks himself how, as an artist today, he can add anything to the history of painting or of art in general. His relationship with the contemporary world is also a major issue; how does he relate to society and what rationale is there being an artist in today’s world? The latter question became particularly pressing after 11 September 2001, when he was overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. He felt out of place and decadent in the safety of his studio.

His pictures have gradually become more restrained and his palette subtler. therapy (2005), a still life showing the remains of a breakfast on a table, is typical of a phase in which Raedecker has gone in search of the essence of painting. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, his aim is to impress the viewer with his virtuosity. In his latest work, his paintings are increasingly transparent, making the creative process still more immediately apparent.

Raedecker regards his flower paintings as the height of decadence. Like the still lifes of the Golden Age, they remind the viewer of beauty and transience, of seduction and death. However, the prissiness of flower arrangements and bits of embroidery is offset by confrontational, suggestive titles like pornography (2005) and penetration (2005), which give the paintings an entirely different frame of reference. The ambiguity applies to the handling of the paint as well as the content of the pictures; from a distance, the representation of flowers is clearly visible but closer up it disintegrates into abstract components exhibiting subtle differences of colour and texture.

HURVIN ANDERSON: PETER’S SERIES 2007–2009

2009-07-21T07:44:00.002+02:00

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of the work of London-based artist Hurvin Anderson. Born in 1965 in Birmingham, United Kingdom to parents of Jamaican descent, Anderson engages the formal traditions of landscape painting and abstraction. Through his paintings, he explores his own relationship to the Caribbean through depictions of complex, personal spaces and memory.

Continuing Anderson’s fascination with and exploration of places imbued with social history, meaning and memory, Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009 presents seven paintings and nine works on paper. These works re-imagine spaces created by Caribbean immigrants during the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, barbershops and other places for personal services often were opened in people’s homes and functioned as sites for both social gatherings and economic enterprise. These shop owners and their customers were among a significant wave of immigrants to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean Commonwealth countries after World War II. The barbershop was not only a place to get a haircut, but also a social space in which to meet and talk with one’s friends and neighbors.
For Anderson, the barbershop functions as a personal space loaded with imagery, and also houses intertwined political, economic and social histories. “Peter’s Series” takes as its subject one of the last-known of these spaces—a small attic that was converted into a barbershop where the artist’s father went for haircuts. Finding the space both complex and ambiguous, Anderson explored the technical exercise of recreating it many times. At first intrigued by the physical features of the attic, Anderson focused on the architecture of the room in early paintings, providing multiple perspectives of the space, like a series of portraits. Working from photographs, memory and imagination, Anderson painted and repainted the space, and even repainted a painting of it, continually reducing the interior architecture to its basic colors and simple geometric forms. In later paintings, he centralizes an anonymous figure in the barber’s chair, further negotiating between functional space and shared experience, while also providing a voyeuristic glimpse of a private moment.

Anderson studied at the Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. His first solo gallery show was in 2003 and in 2006 he was the artist in residence at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Earlier this year, Anderson had his first solo museum show at the Tate Britain.

Dash Snow, East Village Artistic Rebel, Dies at 27

2009-07-15T20:22:00.006+02:00

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: July 15, 2009

Dash Snow, who rebelled against his privileged and art-loving family to become a promising young New York artist in his own right, died Monday night at a hotel in the East Village. He was 27 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Lafayette House, on East Fourth Street, was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil. The cause was a drug overdose, she said.

Mr. Snow was known to be a heroin addict, but Ms. de Menil said he had been in rehab in March and had been off drugs until very recently.

Mr. Snow was a rebel as young as 13, when his parents — Taya Thurman, a daughter of Ms. de Menil’s, and Christopher Snow, a musician — sent him to a reformatory-like school in Georgia. He stayed there two years. After his release, he returned to New York and began living on his own. With no more than a ninth-grade education, he was largely self taught. His art would eventually include photography, drawing, collage, installation, zines, film and video. But he began, in his teens, as a graffiti artist known by the tag “Sace.”

Handsome, heavily tattooed, with waist-length blond hair and a full beard, he soon became something of a downtown legend. He began taking Polaroids of the sex- and drug-fueled young bohemian circles in which he moved, recording his life and times in a style similar to that of his close friend Ryan McGinley and older artists like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Several of these images were included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Mr. Snow had his first solo show in 2005, at Rivington Arms, a gallery on the Lower East Side. (His work is now represented by Peres Projects of Los Angeles and Berlin.) By then, Mr. Snow had become close with a group of artists that included Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen and Dan Colen, all of whom were experimenting with appropriation, or found-image, art in various mediums.

He began using newspapers in different ways, drawing in colored pencil, for example, on historic images, like a photograph of the shooting of President John F. Kennedy. He made large collages out of headlines and strange, delicate, sexually suggestive ones that evoked the medium’s Dada origins. He had also started making short Super 8 films and converting them to video.

Sexuality, violence and life’s fragility were frequent themes in Mr. Snow’s work, but there was also an air of exuberant misbehavior. A 2007 article in New York magazine, “Warhol’s Children,” highlighted Mr. Snow’s art, antics and underground stature, bringing his notoriety to a wider audience. It mentioned that he and his friends liked to turn hotel rooms into “hamster nests” by littering them with torn-up telephone books.

That summer, Mr. Snow and Mr. Colen went public with this practice. In their installation “Nest,” they filled Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery, with several feet of shredded phonebooks and invited visitors to hang out, party and add graffiti to the walls. Many cooperated.

Mr. Snow was born in Manhattan in 1981 to a family whose cultural contributions included the Menil Collection in Houston and the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan and Beacon, N.Y. When he was 18, he married Agathe Aparru, now the artist Agathe Snow. The marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to his grandmother and his parents, Mr. Snow is survived by a grandfather, Robert Thurman; his sister, Caroline Snow; his brother, Maxwell Snow; his companion, Jade Berreau, and their daughter, Secret, all of Manhattan.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Dash

On meeting Dash for the first time, you don’t get the impression that he is from our time. Dash, born in 1981, does not seem like a man of the year 2007. With his long hair, his hippie sunglasses and his clothes, his preference for the music of the late 1960s and the whole psychedelic sound, Dash seems someone who was catapulted from the 1960s into our time. And that is of course no coincidence, but rather a conscious revenge against an idiotic time. Or, to be more precise, against two idiotic decades. Dash Snow is a child of the eighties, and they were, despite all the Miami Vice like pastel craziness, at their core a dark and melancholy decade. It was the decade of Reagonomics and Thatcherism, the decade of the insane arms race, people had no social utopias anymore, but instead they were afraid: afraid of losing their work, afraid of the new Batemans who would mercilessly rationalise them away, afraid of nuclear war and forest dieback, and then, in the mid-eighties, the fear of AIDS came on top of it all. Work, love, life: everything was under existential threat. That was the time into which Dash was born; the year he turned twenty was 2001, which was the beginning of a new era of fear and hysteria – the so-called millennium years will be remembered as a decade characterised by the war against terror, fear of Islamism, and a general sense of exhaustion. In the cities, architecture summoned up the good old days; new forms hardly developed. It is clear that you ask yourself in such a time where and how to go on, what to take as your own starting point and it is not surprising – and indeed rather likable – that Dash Snow simply decided to leave his own time temporarily to delve, like an archaeologist, into the depths of the 1960s and 1920s to explore how an era works that believes in experimentation, in the future, and in itself. Dash frequently works with old, yellowed paper that he tears from old books or finds somewhere. On this paper, he glues collages of words and images – and the results look as if the beat poets had collaborated with Max Ernst. Wild physical desires encounter phrases from the press, cut-out word fragments run like worried policemen of meaning across naked bodies. Of course that’s not always original, but it is necessary. By turning himself into Kerouac and Max Ernst, by assuming their role and their aesthetics, he seeks the mechanics of an optimistic awakening, the wild, buoyant, highly energetic anarchy that characterised the eras of Ernst and Kerouac and that is so sadly missing today. Perhaps we get closest to Dash’s method by using the rich German term Verdichtung. Verdichten means on the one hand to condense, to shorten, clarify; on the other hand it means to kidnap objects from the everyday world of prose into the realm of poetry – and poetry is, according to the original Greek meaning of the word poeisis, nothing other than the ‘art of bringing forth’. What is here being brought forth and clarified in Dash’s poetical collages? Dash condenses words and images of our time, the newspaper headlines, the pictures of naked women and of the great criminals into Dadaist formulas which suddenly, almost violently, sum up all the promises and crimes of our day. The word collages are also Verdichtung: they disassemble the headlines into single components and squeeze them together into nonsense messages, – thus bringing hidden truths and desires to light. They are pictures that counter the large political ideologies, the Iraq War, the West’s promises of happiness, wealth, sex, and power, with images of an individual Gegenglueck that cannot be grasped with the images and collective promises of salvation made by politics and advertising. This counter-happiness can also be found in the finesse of the materials – when he glues a word onto a piece of wood, thus underlaying and charging themeaning of the abstract term through the direct sensuousness of the grained material. There are many melancholy gestures in Dash’s works, yellowed paper, a black-and-white aesthetic, as well as vanitas motifs, skulls, death symbols. But Dash does not surrender to this melancholy, he does not celebrate it, he counters it with emanations of a wild vibrancy and of absolute happiness in the here and now: images of kissing nudes, traces of sperm, pictures of wild excess, and this antidote is also an outcry against the time that allowed itself to be completely lulled and now lies exhausted on the ground. How could the energy and verve of Dada, surrealism, and the beat generation, how could the optimistic energy of the twenties and sixties be translated into our time? That is the question that comes to mind when encountering Dash’s work, be it his collages or the Polaroids he made of himself and his friends, an atlas of the great odyssey to adulthood. And the fact that Dash, the archaeologist of happiness and hero of the immediate moment does not always answer these questions doesn’t matter all that much. He's only 26; he still has time to find answers.

Anna T. Berger, Summer 2007

Daniel Richter- CFA Berlin "Oh La La"

2009-07-11T12:51:00.006+02:00

The Ten Commandments Towards A Healthy Art Career

2009-07-11T12:32:00.004+02:00

This was sent to me in an anonymous e-mail:

1. Thou shalt not spend more time at art openings than in one's studio.

2. Thou shalt not produce artwork beyond one's financial means.

3. Thou shalt not make art that is too intelligent without emotion.

4. Thou shalt not make art that is too emotional without intelligence.

5. Thou shalt not act pretentious, especially when most successful
artists do not.

6. Thou shalt not judge another artist by his or her gallerist.

7. Thou shalt not judge another's artwork by his or her CV.

8. Thou shalt not expect others to show your art.

9. Thou shalt not expect others to sell or buy your art.

10. Thou shalt not expect to be paid if others sell or buy your art.

Berend Strik - Thixotropy

2009-07-06T08:28:00.004+02:00

13 Jun 2009 - 18 Jul 2009

Berend Strik appropriates images, ranging from photographs he has made himself or found in family albums to
pages torn from magazines. He adds delicate pieces of material and embroidery to the existing image as part of
his search for meaning. While the original images are characterised by a certain lack, an indefinite quality, the
photographs that have been elaborated in this way are perfected. A context is created and the fruits of the
imagination are made tangible.
Among the images that Strik has used for his solo exhibition Thixotropy in Galerie Fons Welters are photographs
he took during a journey to East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the river Jordan, where he visited a number of
Palestinian and Jewish settlements. The resulting works display everyday images with a subtle subtext of
tensions.
Palestinian House, for instance, shows a close-up of a house. Several elements attract our attention. Pieces of
tulle, in light but vivid colours, cover the branches of the tree in front of the terrace. They look like sheets hung
out to dry.
Tools, a few stray garden chairs, and plastic crates are strewn about at random. Yet the house behind that
spontaneous collection appears to have a clearly defined structure. Although this is a ‘Palestinian House’, its core
structure is based on Israeli examples. Starting from this central design, it has gradually been altered in response
to requirements and new additions to the family, taking on a new, spontaneous form. There is an additional
storey, for instance, and a flight of steps that has been installed outside the house to save space. But the use of
material and embroidery fuse the structural and non-structural elements of the building. Architecture provides
subtle intimations of a situation in which contrasts abound.
The time-consuming and labour-intensive images of Berend Strik call for attentive reading. The original
photograph evokes certain associations, which the additions build on. An intermediate space arises between the
support and the elaborations, in which the photograph’s initial meaning is opened up and given a more specific
content with extra layers of material and embroidery. This manipulates the formal side of the image. In the
intervening space, there is room for associations and memories. Strik’s works constitute a meditation on what a
specific image signifies and could signify.

During the opening of the exhibition a new catalogue on Berend Strik's work will be presented: Thixotropy:
Transfixed, Stitched Photographs. Published by Valiz with Galerie Fons Welters; Stephan Simoens
Contemporary Fine Art, supported by Fonds BKVB

Artwork to Display, or to Enjoy With Eggs

2009-07-04T09:34:00.002+02:00

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: July 3, 2009

The cured-meat item in question is, as you might expect, not an ordinary one. For the 53rd Venice Biennale, which got under way last month and concludes in November, 500 of this particular kind of fat-studded salami were chosen to be more than just cold cuts by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, known for provocatively funny work involving taxidermied animals and comical sculptures. They were elevated to the status of works of art — ready-mades in pig casing — in conjunction with a highly theatrical installation for the Nordic and Danish pavilions created by the artistic team of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.

The pavilion was transformed meticulously by the two artists into what looks like two well-appointed homes of wealthy collectors: one owned by a family that has put its just-so house and all its expensive artworks up for sale, the other owned by a novelist neighbor — apparently, judging from bits of evidence, a gay party boy — who is nowhere to be seen until you walk out the back of the house and see a body, presumably his, floating face-down in the pool.

Called “The Collectors,” the installation became one of the more popular attractions during the Biennale’s opening days, presenting itself as a dark, funny post-mortem on the suffocating world of the international art-collecting class in an economy (once) run amok.

In that spirit, actors posing as well-dressed agents for the fictional Vigilante real estate company handed out goodie bags to people who took a “buyer’s tour” of the family’s house. And unbeknownst to most of those who walked away with the bags, they contained much more than a tchotchke or a catalog. Maybe as a way of implicating the visitors as collectors themselves, the bags contained limited editions of small works by prominent artists like Terence Koh, Hernan Bas, Jonathan Monk — and Mr. Cattelan.

And so began the unlikely questions at the intersection of art and salami.

More than a decade ago the library of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., began to concentrate on collecting rare artists’ books and other, less conventional booklike works produced by artists around the world since the 1960s, and it has since built substantial holdings.

In 2007 the institute decided it would be a good idea to begin gathering such materials at the Biennale; the Clark’s librarian, Susan Roeper, and her colleagues knew that these materials often turn out to be important and are very difficult to obtain from galleries or publishers after Biennales end.

“The only way to get it, really, is to be there,” Ms. Roeper said.

So in 2007 and again this year, the Clark asked Thomas Heneage, a veteran London art-book dealer, to be there in its stead, making his way through the Biennale as its personal catalog and art-book gatherer.

When Mr. Heneage (whose wife, Carol Vogel, is a reporter at The New York Times) returned to his hotel room after a visit to the Nordic Pavilion, he said, he casually upended his goodie bag.

“And suddenly there rolled out onto my hotel room floor this salami,” he said. “And I was a bit thrown because I hadn’t been expecting to see a salami. And I picked it up and said, ‘Well, it looks pretty good, and I think I’ll eat it later.’ So I put it into the hotel minibar fridge.”

But after reading the materials in the bag and examining all the other tiny art objects, he realized he was in possession of a bona fide art salami, with potential historic value — especially because, he surmised, most people who came across their salamis would either eat them or throw them away.

He quickly e-mailed the Clark with one of the strangest bibliographical communiqués he had ever sent. “It’s not every day you get to ask a museum library if they would like a salami,” he said.

Ms. Roeper said her initial reaction was one of giddiness, “like, how cool is that?”

“And then it became a practical one of, ‘Well, how are we going to get this thing here?’ ” she said. “You can’t mail it. You can’t fly with it, or it might get seized.” The museum has yet to work out the particulars fully with customs officials, but she said: “I think we’ll be able to get good guidance on this from other institutions. I’m not worried — we’ll get the salami.” (For now, it is filed in Mr. Heneage’s bookshop refrigerator.)

Asked how the salami would be stored in the library, Ms. Roeper said she hoped her conservation experts “could refer me to a good housing solution,” but added that she did not expect to be able to preserve it for decades, like a book. “Sometimes you just have to accept loss as the natural state of these materials,” she added.

Mr. Cattelan, reached this week by phone in New York and told about the predicament, laughed uproariously and said that as far as he was concerned, somebody should have dined on the salami long ago. Asked why he decided to make an “edition” of store-bought salami, he said simply: “Always, when I am reading an art catalog and it’s not a very good catalog, I wish I had a sandwich to eat. I wanted to do something nice for people.”

He added that if the Clark were unable to import the salami, he would happily go to Little Italy to buy a replacement.

“I will customize the catalog for them, yes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter which salami, really — only that it is a salami that is very, very delicious.”

Studio visit Martha Colburn

2009-06-29T08:26:00.002+02:00

The stop-motion animator takes a brief pause.
By T.J. Carlin

Can you talk about how you make your work, and especially how you come up with your narratives?
I study my topics closely for a year or two, and the scenes take shape. I read historical documents, poetry, watch specific films, talk to people and daydream a lot. In my recent stop-action war film Triumph of the Wild, I take apart 400 years of battles in ten minutes. The film is about lessons not learned and the redemption and regeneration of the human spirit in war. It’s about the invisible line between man and animal. I think it was Hemingway who once said the biggest game is man.

This setup you have here with pieces of glass and cutouts—is that for your films?
Yes, it’s assembled out of found things, mostly, and it’s a 2-and-a-half-D stop-action-animation stand. It’s three layers of auto glass screwed vertically on a table with space between for my hands to reach in and move the artwork, and above it are scrolls and wires hanging for aerial action. Flat paper puppets and other stuff float on the glass and in the air by means of “magic,” and I film it frame by frame on 16mm.

You also make paintings, installations, Polaroids, etc. What’s the relationship, for you, between that approach to working and animation?
All of the work I make gets sucked into or is a result of my stop-action films. My material has a specific order informed by its journey through the films. Some things survive, others not. Sometimes, I’ll make a stunt-double version of a paper puppet (or five) which can suffer any number of mutilations, while leaving the “star” unscathed. Just like in reality, only in paper.

You often incorporate live performance into the screening of your films. When did you start doing this and why?
I’ve been doing live shows with shadows and color filters and multiprojector shows since the mid-’90s. When I’m filming, I’m working at a rate of, like, one second of film per hour. When I finish, I want to create in real time, or even better: double real time, and be my animated “self.” I call together my musician friends who work on my soundtracks, and we play together. When I show in some small town, I’ll invite a high-school band or random people to play.

What do you have upcoming that you are excited about?
I’m excited about my next film, of course! I’ll enjoy my summer inside making art for my next film in wonderful “Asthma Alley,” otherwise known as Long Island City (no thank you, Con Edison).

Colburn’s work is on view in “White Noise” at James Cohan Gallery.

Julika Rudelius

2009-06-01T11:50:00.004+02:00

Go see when in Amsterdam !!!
Absolute brilliant video!!!!
more info http://www.rudelius.org/
may 30 - july 4

Eylem Aladogan wins volkskrant art prize

2009-06-01T09:40:00.004+02:00

this in my opinion completely justified!!
For more info: Gallery Fons Welters amsterdam
The interview is in Dutch, I´m sorry...

Joep Van Liefland at AMP, Greece

2009-05-07T08:41:00.004+02:00

‘Video Palace’ is an open-ended artwork, which the artist has been installing in different locations (art spaces but also the public realm) since 2002 and is based on two activities of the artist: the creation of a massive video collection and the production of his own films, where the protagonist is mostly himself. Van Liefland’s video collection spans from B to Z movies: erotic, horror to promotional tapes for companies, travel, pet movies, propaganda and informational films.

For his own films, Van Liefland uses the iconography of the videos he collects but breaks down their format in order to produce new meaning and reflect thus on the medium. In his own words, his films are ‘poetic de-reconstructions’ of existing media.

His paintings are also referential to the media culture. They deal with serial commodities which were originally produced for media storage and have been transformed. Van Liefland has a has a great interest in media that shift from new to avant-garde commodities and end up being anonymous. His paintings could be seen as mechanically assembled reproductions of serial commodities.

Afterlife is an archaeology, an exploration of the territory of the video medium. Released from any nostalgic concerns, Van Liefland’s work reveals its deep concern in the multifaceted existence of video: its technical development, distribution, content of films, its copy element, its different market segments, the stores and its contextual relation to art.

Crucial to Van Liefland is what the artist calls ‘media-entropy’, a term which refers to the media formats which are in decay. ‘Media-entropy’ refers to the transformations on information, on a cultural level but also to the physicality of the media – video is bound to the body and the changes in infrastructure – video shops and rentals that are gradually disappearing

berlin gallery weekend

2009-05-04T12:07:00.006+02:00

norbert schwontowski, robert rauschenberg, georg herold, Amy Sillman, carsten höller, erik van der weijde, geerten verheus.

Luc Tuymans Wiels gallery Brussels

2009-05-03T10:39:00.005+02:00

The first solo show of Antwerp-born Luc Tuymans in Brussels’ Wiels gallery presents 22 new paintings, created by the artist especially for this show, in world premiere. This show, titled Against the Day, is the third and last part of a triptych that began with the series Les Revenants, which was referring to the power of the Jesuit Order and Forever. The Management of Magic, which was about the Walt Disney phenomenon. The show will be running until August 2, 2009.

In these new paintings, Tuymans continues his research on virtual reality, utopia and visual language and focuses more specifically on virtual images without any sense of reality. The artist thus expands his work on the illusion and the manipulation of images with new painted proposals.

Luc Tuymans is considered one of the most significant and influential contemporary painters working today. He is one of the key figures of a new generation of figurative painters who have continued to paint during a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance. In the context of the new information age, many artists felt that painting was a deeply conservative form of expression which did not match the heterogeneous nature of contemporary experience. Tuymans' work specifically addresses the challenge of the inadequacy and 'belatedness', as he puts it, of painting.

Tuymans was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1958 and began to study fine art in 1976. He concentrated on painting but in the early 1980s he lost faith in the medium and gave up for two years. During this time he worked as a film-maker, and when he returned to painting in the mid-1980s, he introduced new techniques such as cropping, close-ups, framing and sequencing, which remain key elements of his work today.Luc Tuymans.

Tuymans' work is a vast repository of data, drawn from photography, television and film, combining a range of different styles and subject matter. His subjects range from major historical events, such as the Holocaust or the politics of the Belgian Congo, to the inconsequential and banal -wallpaper patterns, Christmas decorations, everyday objects.

Tuymans' range of imagery deliberately resists categorization. Events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details

Michaël Borremans - Kestnergesellschaft Hannover (DE)

2009-04-17T07:36:00.004+02:00

The Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (born 1963) has made a name for himself internationally with his paintings and drawings. In recent years Borremans has increasingly worked with the medium of film. In the framework of his solo exhibition in the kestnergesellschaft, an extensive series of his filmic works will be presented, in addition to new paintings and selected drawings.

Michaël Borremans’ work spans a wide arc through the resonance chamber of art history all the way to the present. His painterly, graphic or filmic works present situations of human alienation and isolation, triggered by visible or imagined influences of power. He works here with the depiction of individual persons or groups which seem to be isolated in certain actions or rituals. Upon close scrutiny or through filmic repetition, the scenes become picture puzzles. Borremans’ works may also be read as possible commentaries on visual phenomena of the present which, in their impulse towards legibility, are increasingly coming to resemble each other and are thereby becoming inscrutable.

The graphic works of Michaël Borremans serve as the formal basis for his films, which may be designated as tableaux vivants because of their stage-like and performative aspects. Through a slowly-scanning camera movement, a concentrated and intense atmosphere is built up. With slow zooms, he directs the attention of the viewer to parts of the setting such as faces, bodies and pieces of clothing. Borremans’ films, just like his paintings and drawings, balance between an everyday reality of the ordinary and unfathomable, parallel worlds. In the kestnergesellschaft, his filmic works from the last three years will be shown as 35mm and 16mm spatial projections as well as screen presentations.

Just like his films, Borremans’ paintings live from a pronounced emphasis on light, color and dimension. This method makes numerous references to the paintings of the old masters. In the kestnergesellschaft, new paintings from 2008 and 2009 will be displayed.

Elspeth Diederix-Museum Jan Cunen 5-4-2009 - 28-6-2009 (NL)

2009-04-17T06:55:00.002+02:00

"In her work, Elspeth strips everyday objects of their logical form or function and introduces them into a new and surreal world. She brings every variety of material and human character into view in such a way that causes them to lose their original meaning and take on a new one. The illusory image becomes stronger because the objects depicted seem to be suspended in an introverted dream world."

Akram Zaatari at Kunstverein München

2009-04-13T09:01:00.003+02:00

In his work the artist Akram Zaatari examines the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon’s postwar society, dedicating parts of his research to the phenomenon of the national resistance movements, as well as underlining the inaccurate representation of territorial conflicts within the media.

As co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, collecting, archiving and analysing the visual history of an uneven modernity in the Middle East forms the basis of Zaatari´s work.

Akram Zaatari´s artistic practice is an ongoing study of historical photographic documents, and their relationship to personal histories - confronting personal with historical political events.

The short film “Saida June 6th 1982” for example, is an animated collage of photos, which Zaartari – when he was just 16 years old – took on the first day of the Israeli invasion from the balcony of his parents’ house. Often his chosen form of presentation can be read as a parable for the political and cultural shifts taking place in Beirut and across the Middle East.

Akram Zaatari (*1966 Saida, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. He has been showing his work in solo exhibitions (2007, Art Basel; 2005, Grey Art Gallery, New York; 2004 Portikus, Frankfurt; 2002, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels) and group exhibitions (2008, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 2007, 52. Biennale, Venice; 2006, Sao Paulo Biennale, Gwangju Biennale,Korea; Sydney Biennale).

Akram Zaatari at Kunstverein München. Munich, Germany, March 27, 2009. Video by Gürsoy Dogtas.

Guido van der Werve-museum de Hallen Haarlem NL

2009-04-05T09:43:00.004+02:00

The Dutch artist Guido van der Werve (Papendrecht, 1977) has built an oeuvre of short films in which Van der Werve himself stars. Some of his films show him performing actions in the tradition of the performance art of the 1970s. For 'Nummer acht' (2007), for example, the artist walked out in front of an icebreaker on a frozen arctic sea, and for 'Nummer negen' (2007), Van der Werve stood for exactly 24 hours on the geographic North Pole. Van der Werve portrays a typical Romantic hero in these works: the solitary figure tempting fate by physically subjecting himself to the whims of Nature, in order to experience an intensification of reality.

In the current exhibition, Van der Werve’s latest, most ambitious film, 'Nummer twaalf' (2009), takes centre stage. This film revolves around three unsolvable ‘infinity questions’, which are dealt with in three separate scenes: the romantic King’s Gambit, a chess opening; tuning a piano; and counting the stars in the night sky. The artist filmed these scenes at three locations which symbolise these ‘grand’ subjects: the legendary Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan (where illustrious players like Bobby Fischer and Marcel Duchamp were once members), the active volcano Mount St. Helens in the north-western US and the San Andreas Fault in California. As in a number of earlier films, the ‘sublime landscape’ once again plays an important role in 'Nummer twaalf'.

While classical music always had an emphatic presence in the earlier films, in 'Nummer twaalf', the artist has found an inventive way to integrate the music with the work itself. Basing himself on a personally developed transcription of chess notation into musical notation, Van der Werve constructed a unique ‘chess piano’. In this chess board on top of a piano mechanism, each of the 64 squares of the game board simultaneously serves as a piano key. The moves made during a game of chess are automatically turned into notes, resulting in a composition. As a result, the game of chess played by Van der Werve and a Grandmaster, which serves as one of the film’s leitmotivs, literally produces its own musical score.

The artist seems to be looking for ways to ‘re-enchant’ the world – to effect minor, personal miracles that allow us to briefly escape our hum-drum everyday life and see the world with a fresh sense of wonder. As such he is a representative of a tendency in contemporary art, in which the artist – after a period of impersonal, analytical deconstruction of reality – once again explicitly becomes ‘author’ and the producer of personal and emotional experiences.

Besides 'Nummer twaalf' and the chess piano, the exhibition includes two other films from the museum collection, 'Nummer vier' (2005) and 'Nummer zes' (2006), which have strong thematic and formal ties with 'Nummer twaalf'. These films also make use of long shots and slow camera movements, for instance, and music plays an important role.

Iris van Dongen stedelijk museum schiedam NL

2009-02-21T14:45:00.004+01:00

Iris van Dongen (Tilburg, 1975, lives and works in Berlin) is a snake-charmer in art. Her work evokes soft sounds, but also a suspicion of furtive danger. She creates painterly drawings that are dominated by women: monumental, multicoloured and mysterious.
With dual layers of pastels and charcoal over one another, Van Dongen evokes gorgeous heroines in a shadowy environment. They could be sisters or, to put it more imaginatively, modern descendants of the goddesses from classical mythology: eternally young, beautiful and strong, and adorned with the allure of a (tragic) princess, even in their sorrow.
Moreover, reflections of the present day and current surroundings converge with memories of romantic or symbolic painting from the nineteenth century, by English Pre-Raphaelites such as John Everett Millais and Viennese Jugendstil artists such as Gustave Klimt. But even with their entire wealth of history, her women are clearly ambassadors of the twenty-first century.
In a period of five years, between 2003 and 2009, they have developed from melancholy girls to emancipated celebrities, who seem to have stepped directly out of a film noir and subsequently perform as pin-ups. Whereas they once let their minds drift away, as endearing figureheads of gothic subculture, clad in black-and-white sweatbands and scarves covered in skulls, they now stand tall and unflinching before the public: as magical creatures with red flash-light eyes, who can indulge in living dragons as amulets and allow a tangle of snakes to twine around their legs.
These femmes fatales are mistress of themselves, nature and the beast in mankind. At the same time, the snake is their weapon, their jewel and their alter ego. The title given by Van Dongen in 2008 to the series of drawings is Suspicious, and it immediately sounds as if the snake himself is speaking. His hissing ensures us that one cannot mock these heroines, alert and self-conscious as they are. They are the high-priestesses of women-power.
Although Van Dongen's work is appealingly well drawn, delicately coloured and richly decorated almost to the point of decadence, that duality of worlds consistently recurs. The seductive and the treacherous are willing bedfellows. Just as the king, queen and jack are duplicated as inverted busts on playing cards, and on tarot cards the fabulous figures lend themselves for an abundance of interpretations, Van Dongen's drawings are replete with contrast: inner and outer, light and dark, life and death, all revelling in a continuous role-play.
Night has Fallen (2005) displays a young girl cloaked by shadow, carrying her heart in her hands, as if she is offering it – perhaps to us, her public, perhaps to a lover who is out of the picture. Elsewhere she advances side by side with death, in works with significant titles such as She is the Night (2004). Here, she emerges from a garden in which a skull can be seen in the leaves of the trees, as in a vision. Her hypnotizing gaze reinforces the feeling that she is situated in a twilight zone, halfway between the present-day and the hereafter, where a skull is more of an object than a symbol; it is more of a creature, like a snake.
The skull, the snake and the devil. In the latest work, Mephisto appears on the scene, sometimes in the background as a sculptural decoration near to a seated woman, but also in person. We see him half dancing with a woman who is hanging in his arms, drowsy with sleep. Their loose embrace is tender, with elegant gestures, and the threat of a cruel twist of fate hangs eternally above them. The drawing entitled Echo (2008) sublimates a moment in time: the indivisible oneness of light and dark. Or, in the words of Van Dongen: ‘It is as if the woman's spirit has become visible next to her body.' With the skull, the snake and the devil, she has life and death walk side by side in all her drawings, as do good and evil. ‘Because that is simply the way we live: with our demons in and around us.'

To accompany the exhibition Iris van Dongen. Suspicious. Drawings 2003 – 2009 a catalogue with a wide selection of the drawings will be published in conjunction with BnM Uitgevers. This book, with an essay by Sacha Bronwasser, will be available in the Museum Shop for € 25.

Quote taken from a conversation between the author and the artist in her studio in Berlin, 13 November 2008

Iris van Dongen. Suspicious
Tekeningen 2003 – 2009
25 januari – 10 mei 2009

Peter Doig at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown

2009-02-21T12:48:00.003+01:00

Peter Schjeldahl February 9, 2009

Frank O’Hara pegged the going look of urbane sex appeal, in 1962, as “a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” He could have been forecasting the dominant fashion in painting almost fifty years later, exemplified in the resonant languors of Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton and positively exalted, to peaks of forthright ambivalence, by Peter Doig. Concurrent shows, at Michael Werner and Gavin Brown, of the Scots-born, Canadian-raised, English-educated Doig, who lives in Trinidad, answer the question “Why paint now?” with eloquent shrugs. His brushy landscapes and dreamlike or, better, half-awake visions of odd personages (notably “Man Dressed as Bat,” in two versions, at Werner) variously recollect Munch, Klimt, Nolde, Matisse, Rothko, and other past masters, in a spirit less of homage than of smart despair. Doig’s is an art up to its nostrils in historical quicksand. His raffish drawing and quite wonderfully seductive color promote this fix as our best available fun: post-everythingness, for the hip heck of it. ♦

Peter Doig at CFA Berlin

2009-01-18T12:16:00.005+01:00

Peter Doig at CFA Berlin with a choice of works that are already sold...
Plus tons of drawings for his movie screening evenings!
A wunderfull show!
Go see....

Tjebbe Beekman-The Capsular Civilization

2008-12-27T09:48:00.004+01:00

THE HAGUE.- The Gemeentemuseum presents the first ever major museum retrospective of work by Berlin-based artist Tjebbe Beekman (b. Leiden, 1972), who is well-known for his supercharged paintings of inner-city architecture. The exhibition covers the period between 2003 and the present, focusing principally on Beekman’s latest cycle of paintings and drawings, entitled The Capsular Civilization

The exhibition shows how earlier work by Tjebbe Beekman – who trained at the KABK in The Hague from 1993 to 1997 – led the way to his latest cycle. A typical example of this earlier work is Palast (2005), a painting based on the well-known Sozialpalast building in Berlin’s western district of Schöneberg. Beekman shows a number of floors of the dilapidated building, its rows of windows only occasionally interrupted by the circular shapes of satellite dishes. The handling of the paint gives the painting a lively, animated look, like big-city life itself.

Tjebbe Beekman employs a highly systematised creative process. First of all he uses photographs to make a collage, which he then uses as the basis on which to sketch out his composition. Next he lays the canvas on the floor and proceeds to apply a variety of gloss paints, gobs of oil paint, sand, string, and other waste materials. Lastly, he reconsiders the painting and paints over sections of it to give them greater emphasis and bring the final composition to life.

Although social criticism is present in his earlier work, it is far more prominent in the cycle of seventy sketches and five paintings entitled The Capsular Civilization. The title refers to that of a book by Lieven DeCauter, subtitled On the City in the Age of Fear. DeCauter’s main thesis is that the speed of contemporary technology and the ever more extreme polarisation of our society are forcing us to withdraw into the safe ‘capsules’ of our vehicles and architectural cocoons like shopping malls, gated communities and amusement parks. The seventy sketches, which can be regarded as illustrations accompanying the five paintings, constitute a picture atlas depicting ‘capsular phenomena’ of this kind and relating them to each other.

One of the most striking paintings in the cycle is Control Room, which shows innumerable blue screens casting their pale light into an otherwise almost entirely darkened room. You have to look carefully to see that there are human figures lurking behind the screens. This control room is keeping the whole outside world under surveillance but is itself entirely divorced from reality. In Beekman’s work, capsularization and control seem to breed a sense of isolation and lack of purpose, rather than the intended feeling of security. In pictures like this, Beekman conveys a not particularly rose-tinted view of the society in which we live.

order the catalogue here
Gemeente museum Gem Website

Gagosian Gallery Cecily Brown

2008-11-29T13:32:00.005+01:00

"I'm more interested in sublimation. I love the way Francis Bacon talked about the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance…I've always wanted to be able to convey figurative imagery in a kind of shorthand, to get it across in as direct a way as possible. I want there to be a human presence without having to depict it in full."

Cecily Brown

coming up!!!

2008-11-29T12:02:00.005+01:00

at the 14th of december my solo show at the GEM museum The Hague.
Also presented then and for sale the new catalogue: Tjebbe Beekman-the image of the capsulated society.

GEM Museum modern art The Hague Holland

tip: print this jpeg and it´s a doorpass to join us at the opening party the 20th.

berlin gallery round

2008-11-29T11:34:00.009+01:00

So finally i´m not so busy anymore and had some time to do a walk around and visit some of the way to many gallery´s here in Berlin.
I haven´t seen much but what i saw was damn good!
For starters go see the new works by David Schnell at Eigen+Art, his work has developed in an amazing way!
With very loose strikes and a very concentrated way of painting his new images are so terrifying good that I was jealous at the spot!

Go see!!!

Further on at the Max Hetzler gallery mister Jeff Koons, although i thought i wasn´t in for a round of kitsch, i must admit these works are great!
And as a surprise we saw a lot of new works by Sigmar Polke at Julius Werner.
Beautifull paintings with a very luxurious trick wich i wont tell you about, just take a look and see how clever made these works are.
At the Carlier/Gebauer there´s a movie by Rosa Barba also go see.

Tip in the middle of this walkabout stop at Sale et Tabaki for some authentic Italian espresso or a good lunch!
ciao

Peter Doig - Frankfurt am Main

2008-10-18T09:15:00.004+02:00

quick round berlin

2008-10-11T11:52:00.005+02:00

i´m very sorry but do not have the time at the moment to publish much on this blog lateley.
I´m prepairing for a show and it just takes up all my time so here a very quick incomplete updat of shows i´ve seen in berlin...

QUO VADIS - AUTOCENTER, Berlin

2008-09-07T19:12:00.003+02:00

Tjebbe Beekman, Marc Bijl, Leif Erich Christensen, Martin Dammann, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Paul Kooiker, Markus Selg, Jannis Varelas

Ritsaert ten Cate 1938-2008

2008-09-07T19:04:00.001+02:00

Rezi van Lankveld - works on paper

2008-08-16T09:31:00.004+02:00

It is now so common for painting to be described as being 'between abstraction and figuration' that this ambiguous space surely deserves a more formal title. So easily is the term used to describe anything lacking concrete definition that very few works categorised as such can actually claim to hold and explore this space in a way that is truly engaging and exciting.

Rezi van Lankveld's work is a welcome exception. The Dutch artist emerged last year as a Future Great in ArtReview magazine for her swirling paintings on wood panels, where the milky paint pooled into intriguing images that seemed half-imagined.

At the Approach's West End space, Lankveld is showing small new works on paper. Despite the shift in surface, the technique and the ambiguity endures, and Lankveld achieves a new plane of intimate intensity. She pours a mixture of watercolour, acrylic and gouache onto the surface and draws into these cloudy, slippery pools of muted colour (usually dark grey) until forms come into being. Suggestions of faces (on the brink of dissolving entirely into the surrounding morass), bodies (many of them nude, some in salacious positions) and animals (there's a duck as clear as day) emerge like apparitions from the murk.

Far from asserting the figurative aspects of the forms that arise, van Lankveld's intuitive process appears to lead the image astray, and any clearly discernable figurative motifs are absorbed into abstraction elsewhere in the canvas. The paintings hardly look dry. Anything could slide out of position and change irrevocably in a moment. The corollary of this feeling is that we have here very carefully selected, delicate and precious freeze frames, where the paint momentarily washed into an image with just enough cohesion.

Daniel Richter stage set

2008-08-15T10:14:00.003+02:00

Daniel Richter created the spectacular stage set for Béla Bartók's opera "Herzog Blaubarts Burg". The premiere took place on Wednesday the 6th of August 2008 at the Salzburger Festival.

landscapes by Egon Schiele

2008-08-15T09:33:00.004+02:00

Echoing claims made for the show of landscapes by Gustav Klimt at the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, the case for the survey of landscapes by Egon Schiele at the same city's Leopold Museum insists on the high proportion of the artist's output falling within this category and on earlier commentators' relative, and paradoxical, indifference to it. Both assertions prove better justified in the case of Schiele. Over sixty per cent of the paintings in Jane Kallir's Schiele catalogue raisonne of 1990/98 are defined as 'landscapes'; yet this contribution to the genre has only recently become the subject of a monograph--Kimberly A. Smith's wide-ranging study Between Ruin and Renewal: Egon Schiele's Landscapes--and is only now the focus of an exhibition.

Although this is also the first show to be devoted to Schiele at the Leopold Museum, the private collection of Rudolf Leopold on which this institution is based has long been known for its extensive Schiele holdings. As underlined by the high proportion of items from that collection to be found within the current temporary display--eighteen out of fifty-one paintings on canvas, wood or cardboard and thirteen out of twenty-nine works on paper--varieties of landscape constitute one of its great strengths, with the most outstanding pictures clearly able to hold their own with its major figure paintings by Schiele, such as Hermits of 1912, the large allegorical self-portrait with Klimt. Leopold has, of course, done rather more than 'merely' acquire a good many Schiele landscapes. Of around fifty works newly identified in the catalogue of paintings incorporated within his Schiele monograph of 1972 (not included, that is to say, in the 1930 and 1966 catalogues published by Otto Kallir-Nirenstein) most are classifiable as landscapes, notably of the early years (1906-10).

That monograph may also be said to have pioneered the topographical approach to the study of Schiele's many paintings of his mother's birthplace, the small southern Bohemian town of Krumau (now Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic). And the fruits of this research are now made more vividly accessible to a new generation through the design and layout of the opening section of the exhibition, which seems in part to reflect the clearer topographical exposition of Franz Wischin's 1994 volume on Schiele and Krumau. The conclusions reached in 1972 regarding Schiele's other landscapes, notably his remarkable trees, gathered in the second section of the show, are likewise assumed to have stood the test of time, being restated, sometimes word for word, in the relevant entries in the catalogue.

One of the earliest forerunners of Rudolf Leopold as a keen collector of landscapes by Schiele--the Viennese critic Arthur Roessler, who served as the artist's early champion, tireless mentor, informal 'agent' and influential biographer (the relationship was recently the subject of a path-breaking exhibition at the Wien Museum)--was also one of the first to explain his attraction to this aspect of the oeuvre. Roessler's misgivings about Schiele as a figure painter partially adumbrate those often implicit in the now familiar observations of scholars on the self-consciously 'performative', rather than directly revelatory, character of so many of the figural works. Reviewing the Schiele exhibition held at the Galerie Arnot in the winter of 1914-15, Roessler wrote that 'landscapes such as the one entitled Setting sun' (a complex, lyrical 'treescape', acquired by him in 1913 and sold on to Leopold forty years later) 'and some of the pictures of "old towns" evince such purity and tenderness of emotion and are so melodious in their appeal that one readily prefers them to the ecstatic figural images, which seem to have issued from the painful shuddering of a soul racked by convulsions.' And it was, he implied, precisely because the landscape subjects were essentially 'found', rather than 'staged', that Schiele was able to reveal more of himself through them.

In the largely thematic grouping of the current display (which also informs the internal arrangement of section three, reserved for works on paper) it is as much the reiteration as the development of the favoured motifs that hints at their depth of meaning for Schiele. Autumn tree in turbulent air of 1912, reproduced on the previous page, mediates between the earlier single subjects--the gaunt Sunflower of 1909-10 or the 'dancing' Small tree in late Autumn of 1911--and the subsequent group compositions that culminate in the Four trees of 1917, stiffly aligned against a striated reddish sky. As has frequently been remarked, the picture of 1912 tends to strike the modernist eye as almost 'abstract', and then to suggest an allegory of spiritual torment. But it is informed, if not entirely explained, by a blend of alert observation and affectionate regard for popular tradition. The flailing branches seem at first as if torn free on account of the quasi-invisibility of a trunk coated in lime; the bright patches around several of the few remaining leaves acknowledge the phenomenon known in meteorological lore as a sign of imminent snow and the undulations of the dark ribbon of distant hills is easily read as code for the environs of Vienna.

The 1915 painting of Krumau, by contrast, represents one of the last stages in Schiele's evolving response to this locality, which the exhibition traces from the haunting, nocturnal 'snapshots' of the shabbily venerable facade of its town hall and the first bird's-eye views of the huddled dwellings of the 'Town on the Blue River' series (all of 1910-11) to the more expansive vistas with stately rows of buildings fronting the Moldau (1912-14). Compositionally exuberant and chromatically exquisite, the three 'Crescent of Houses' paintings, above all that illustrated here, are an affirmation of Schiele's vision of the urban reconciled with the rural, of the man-made as a manifestation of the organic. More specifically (as argued by Smith in the strongest chapter of her volume), the mottled, wayward roofs and walls of this concentrate of Krumau attest to Schiele's faith in what he and many Austro-German contemporaries identified as its enduringly 'Gothic' character.

Hamburger Kunsthalle presents Mark Rothko.

2008-08-15T09:27:00.002+02:00

The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism. Twenty years after the last retrospective in a German museum this show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle offers a unique opportunity to discover his outstanding oeuvre anew. In the face of the most recent developments on the art market, where prices for Rothko’s paintings have skyrocketed and considering the high sensitivity of the colour surface of his pictures and the challenging issues of conservation, the realisation of this exhibition marks a very special effort and a great responsibility to both the lenders and their works.

A comparable opportunity to see Rothko’s oeuvre in this concentration and quality will not arise in Europe for a long time to come. The exhibition comprises more than 110 works including more than 70 oil paintings on canvas and more than 40 works on paper. It presents works from all phases of Rothko’s career and allows the immediate experience of their intriguing and mysterious aura which no reproduction is able to capture. More than two thirds of the paintings come from the USA and the majority of these have never before been shown in Germany.

After his early interest in Surrealism, Rothko completely turned towards abstraction around 1946. In his multiforms, multiply-layered, freely composed, varying shapes of colour, he devoted all attention to the interaction of colour and shape in both the contrasts and harmonies resulting from their combination. In the later phase for which he is best known, Rothko most often arranged three horizontal, coloured rectangles with slightly blurring edges above one another. Like no artist before him did he foreground the expressive potential of colour alone – liberated from all narrative or figural elements – and in this way created paintings of high emotional intensity. Rothko himself said that his work was about the expression of the most fundamental human emotions with the means of colour.

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on … The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions … the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them.”

Seen in a surrounding of dimmed lighting and viewed from a close distance, these paintings unfold their overwhelming power and their capacity to dissolve all borders. As the exhibition reveals, the glowing, intensely coloured and highly emotional paintings have lost nothing of their fascination and immense power of attraction.

The Retrospective presents the paintings of the American painter within an unusual context. Two historical precursors mark the poles between which Rothko struggles for his abstract visual language: On one side there is the Romantic European legacy of Caspar David Friedrich. In his landscapes the viewers (their place in the paintings taken over by the figures shown from the back) are drawn into the revelation of a space of personal emotion and reflection very much comparable to Rothko’s paintings.
On the other side there is painting as practiced by Pierre Bonnard, the famous modern French painter of the Nabis School, whose works are flooded by the sensuous colours and bright light of the Mediterranean and who took part in modernity’s effort to liberate colour from its representational function and to foreground, instead, its presence and radiance within the artwork. The paintings by Bonnard selected for this exhibition clearly show how Rothko, who had seen Bonnard’s pictures in New York, picked up the special quality of Mediterranean painting in his colour field painting.

The exhibition closes with a perspective on the traditions relevant for contemporary American art and shows the late Black and Gray paintings which give an idea of the bewilderment and despair that Rothko sensed late in his life.

Wolfgang Tillmans

2008-08-04T09:25:00.001+02:00

Wolfgang Tillmans has scoured his archive to prepare his retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain. Jeremy Millar surveys the photoscape of this Turner Prizewinning artist.

The sun is bright in Wolfgang Tillmans' studio, warming and expansive. Outside, a commuter train sends arcs of light across the roofs of the sur rounding industrial landscape as it shakes its way on to the City of London. I am here to look through the artist's working copy of his new book, if one thing matters, everything matters, which will be published this summer to coincide with his exhibition at Tate Britain.

In making this book, Tillmans has revisited every film he has ever exposed, every work he has ever made, compiling more tha 2,300 pictures and placing them into a strict grid. Their ordering is ostensibly chronological, but based upon two systems: the year in which the photograph was taken, and then, within each year, the order in which the photographs became 'works'. Some pictures took time to be accepted by Tillmans in this way and thus occur out of the sequence of their taking. There is a general sense of an historical flow, but readers are likely to swirl through eddies of time and find themselves moving back upstream on occasion. Each image is held within a six-centimetre square; each matters as much as any other, no more, no less. The uniformity of the layout emphasises the extraordinary diversity of the pictures: portraits of friends and intimate revelations of great tenderness to experiments with abstract forms, tendrils of light curling around the blank paper or across empty landscapes.

There is so much here in this book, and so much that is different, that it might be difficult, at first, to see how it all comes together, how to make sense of it. I look up and around Tillmans' studio. Exotic flowers are casually arranged in mineral water bottles, although the water they stand in came from the tap. There is something appropriate about them here, something recognisable from the photographs in front of me - the beautiful found within the make-piece and sustained by the most ordinary.

THIS PHOTOGRAPH HAS THE CASUAL BEAUTY OF MUCH OF TILLMANS' WORK. INDEED, BEAUTY IS SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT SEEM TO TROUBLE HIM, AND CONSEQUENTLY HE HAS LITTLE TROUBLE FINDING IT

All photographs are of light, are made by light, although not all are about light. Not all of Tillmans' photographs are about light either, or about it solely, but looking at a collection of them one gains a sense of its immense importance for him. It is not simply a technical necessity, or a formal device, but rather suggests a transformative process that is fundamental to photography, where the world around us seems to glow with meaning. Indeed, while looking at a photograph such as Shaker Rainbow (1998) one might ask whether light has meaning of itself. Here we see a beautiful white timber-clad house, caught in the thickened late-afternoon haze. Its symmetrical faade is mottled by the shadows of trees that stretch into the frame on the right. Two overhead cables slice acutely through the picture while, arching from the top-left corner towards the bottom-right, is a rainbow, its graceful curve ar rested by its meeting the gable of the building just behind. The sky is darker above the rainbow, as though the building is caught within a bubble of light.

The photograph was taken by Tillmans at a Shaker community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, during an artist's residency in 1998. It has the casual beauty of much of his work - indeed, beauty is something that does not seem to trouble him and consequently he has little trouble finding it - and might in some way be seen as emblematic of his relationship to the world, the miracle in the backyard, the everyday sublime. Tillmans has photographed the Shaker community several times now, returning to them as he has with other forms of community. Indeed, it is a community that - for all their differences - shares a great deal with those whom we might more readily associate Tillmans with, the groups of musicians and clubbers who come together in New York, London or Berlin. As Dan Graham relates in his classic video work, Rock my Religion (1984-85), the Shakers were founded by Ann Lee, an illiterate blacksmith's daughter from Manchester, following a revelation that she had experienced in a trance 'produced by the rhythmic recitation of biblical phrases'. Believing herself to be the female incarnation of God - Christ having been the male incarnation - she decided to create a utopian commune in America, leaving for the country in 1774. Here, the familiar nuclear family was replaced by one of co-equal Brothers and Sisters as the 'Bible showed heterosexual marriage to be the unnatural result of Adam's sin'. Each Sunday, the Shakers would meet to perform the Circle Dance, in which lines of men and women would form four concentric, moving circles. They marched, chanting, stomping their feet, shaking their bodies, clapping, jumping. Some removed their clothes. They would reel as a group together, each individual freed from their own sin within a form of collective redemption.

Although the Shaker movement is close to disappearing, its rituals continue within our contemporary societies, albeit in new forms Just as within the groups of chanting Shakers the saved would 'reel and rock' so, more than a century and a half later, the crowd would lose itself in 'rock 'n' roll', a form of self-empowerment generated by the individual's subsumption within a group. This is obviously of great interest for Tillmans; not simply the representation of shared experience, important though this is, but the forms of individual transcendence that only become possible through the experience of ecstasy.

'It can be spiritual,' he explains. 'That's one of the strongest points of it: this idea of melting into one. Paradise is maybe when you dissolve your ego - a loss of self, being in a bundle of other bodies. It's really the most regressive state you can be in on Earth. The other way to it is sex. Neither of the two is ideal as a permanent model for living. Clubbing and sex have great potential to go stale and become boring and repetitive.'

ONE SEES THROUGHOUT TILLMANS' WORK A CERTAIN LONGING THAT MOVES BETWEEN ENGAGEMENT AND RETREAT, A FASCINATION FOR THE CROWD AND ALL THAT COMES FROM A SHARED EXPERIENCE

One sees throughout Tillmans' work a longing that moves between engagement and retreat, a fascination for the crowd and all that comes from a shared experience, the 'sensuous community', but also those things which reveal themselves only when we find ourselves alone. These are the moments of reflection upon what has come before, an attempt, perhaps, to re-establish the sense of self that had previously been dissolved.

During the summer of 1997, the late American filmmaker Stan Brakhage bought a Bolex camera to replace the one he had worn out. It was not long after this that, passing Boulder Creek near his home in Colorado, he decided to test out the camera and, attaching some extension tubes he had been carrying since his father had bought him his first camera over 30 years previously, he began to film the stream. He did not film the surface of the water, however, but rather below it, that which bubbled underneath, not immediately apparent but important and real nonetheless. He had just discovered that he may have developed bladder cancer. The film which followed, Commingled Containers, featuring these underwater shots with sequences of bluepainted celluloid, was completed between his learning that the growth was cancerous and the removal of the bladder and subsequent chemotherapy treatment. The critic Scott MacDonald has written of Brakhage's film: 'The imagery of the bubbles is both ineffably beautiful and suggestive of the spiritual dimension of human life that lies just under the surface of everyday experience.' One might say much the same about Tillmans' work. Coincidentally, 1997 was marked by illness for Tillmans also. The day after the opening of his solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in London, entitled 'I didn't inhale', his partner, the artist Jochen Klein, fell ill with Aids-related pneumonia and did not recover. He died a month later. These events are, of course, unrelated, but they do share that sense of tragedy that trickles and stains the everyday.

Perhaps it is this spiritual dimension lying just beneath the surface which brings together the many diverse elements of Tillmans' work, and which can be seen in his most recent ieces, such as Icestorm (2001), which contain abstract shapes floating within a representational landscape. In another recent work, Quarry II (2001), a faint red trickle seems to run down in front of trees that stand before the rock face, a distinct artistic intervention upon an otherwise realistic scene. Yet, as the artist pointed out, one does not interpret the light green forms at the top of the picture abstractly, but rather as leaves which have fallen out of focus. In this context, perhaps we might see Shaker Rainbow as a precursor to these later works, where dramatic optical effects transform their surroundings, although in ways that might not be so easily understood. Light has a meaning here, certainly, as its absence does elsewhere in numerous photographs taken during a solar eclipse. It suggests a way of looking at the world, a way of looking that Tillmans has developed with remarkable sensitivity, and an awareness that the most powerful abstractions - life, death, love, fear, despair and happiness - are the most real of all, and can only be found within our own everyday.

“After Nature” -the New Museum NYC

2008-07-28T13:10:00.003+02:00

“After Nature” is an important group show of twenty-six international artists, past and present, at the New Museum, which proposes a saturnine new direction in art. The catalogue is a foldout slipcover around a paperback of “After Nature,” a book-length poem in three parts by W. G. Sebald. It’s an arresting gesture. The rapturously depressive German writer, who died in 2001, would seem an unlikely hero for contemporary avant-gardists, who have been more easily imagined reading comic books. The first two sections of the dauntingly erudite work—on the Northern Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and on the German naturalist Georg Steller, a participant in a disastrous Arctic expedition led by Vitus Bering in 1741—exude Old World gravitas, laced with obsessive descriptions of material ruin, physical disease, and mental suffering. The third, which is roughly autobiographical, quotes “King Lear” and expresses anguish directly: “Oh, / you are men of stones. . . . Water? Fire? Good? / Evil? Life? Death?” But Sebald’s signature tone is dead calm. His conjurings of historical and personal loss, which in his novels and memoirs are usually keyed to the calamities of the Second World War, happen to you slowly, as you read, like the onset of a cold. (I’m an admirer but not a fan.) What young artist would want to get mixed up with such connoisseurship of remote sorrows?

The museum’s director of special exhibitions, Massimiliano Gioni, who curated the show, is confident of Sebald’s Pied Piper appeal, as he is of Werner Herzog’s—the director’s gorgeous and dire film on the aftermath of the Gulf War, “Lessons of Darkness” (1992), excerpts of which are loop-projected on the first of the show’s three floors, is another touchstone. Gioni also cites Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, “The Road” (2006), writing of a rising sensibility haunted by “the destabilizing sensation of having come upon the remains of our own civilization after its extinction,” transfixed by “offended sceneries and scorched earth,” and hankering for qualities of the “pure, distant, and extreme” in “a sphere that is, if not religious, at least sacred or obscure, like a mystery cult.” Remarkably, the visual goods on display endorse Gioni’s rhetoric. Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit. (In fact, the underappreciated recent Whitney Biennial hinted at the mutation.) It’s a fashion auditioning as a sea change.

The selections of unfamiliar past art in “After Nature” nonplus the viewer, by evident design. There are cameraless photographs, called “Celestographs,” made in 1894 by August Strindberg, the playwright, who exposed film to the night sky in hopes of capturing starscapes; he decided that the results had metaphysical import, despite comprising only traces of dust and chemical discoloration. Hand-lettered, delirious sermons by the Reverend Howard Finster (1916-2001), a Georgian bricoleur, and surreal abstractions by Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910-83), a working-class Milwaukee-an, admit outsiders to the collegial mix. And little-known films by the late sculptor and painter Nancy Graves—obsessive studies, from the early nineteen-seventies, of camels, frigate birds, and the moon—contribute a note of, in Gioni’s words, “cosmic stupor.” These things share a driven sincerity; they couldn’t be made by anyone who didn’t mean them. One work jars, instructively: a dangling, taxidermied horse, its head (if it has one) buried high up in a wall, by the internationally celebrated, zingy satirist Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan’s horse comes off as gaudy and smug—emblematic of a cul de sac (art as engineered sensation, more or less) that most of the artists in the show strive to escape.

The major surprise is the sculpture of Pawel Althamer, a forty-one-year-old artist based in Warsaw, whose animal-intestine-skinned, straw-stuffed, naked people, among other works, give an old-fashioned humanism the burning presence of an angry revenant. Althamer’s art discounts considerations of style to insist on realities of life and (chiefly) death, as does a bolted-together and propped (and perhaps needlessly large) reconstruction of a dead tree, by the American Zoe Leonard. Other artists pile on raw-nerved provocations: the Italian Diego Perrone, with photographs of maw-like holes in arid ground, some with a naked man who seems to contemplate a suicidal plunge; the New Yorker Dana Schutz, with an Expressionist painting called “Man Eating His Chest”; the Pole Artur Zmijewski, with a video in which naked able-bodied people become living prostheses for naked victims of maiming, helping a one-legged man walk and a man without fingers shampoo his hair; and the Pakistani-born American Huma Bhabha, with “legs, and arms, and heads” (2008), a big, truly scary skull in several mediums.

If the common run of contemporary art risks triviality in the pursuit of seduction, the new kind incurs hysteria as a toll of earnest intensity. Emotional reach exceeds formal grasp throughout the show, and certain melodramatic lurches fail entirely. (I don’t care what Robert Kusmirowski intends by his painstaking reconstruction of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin; it’s dumb.) But the futility of artistic technique in the face of world conditions may constitute a subject for art as substantial as any other, and rather more compelling than today’s stacked-deck models of success. Bhabha’s gruesome death’s-head neatly—that is to say, messily—critiques Damien Hirst’s famous diamond-encrusted skull, which sold last year for a reported hundred million dollars. Work like Bhabha’s tacitly cancels the credit of artists who allude to terror and horror without personal investment. Existentialist standards of authenticity may be back in force, however fleetingly. How much can we bear of art that, like Sebald’s writing, glories in bottomless malaise? I expect we’ll find out.

Banksy's cover has been blown?

2008-07-15T09:18:00.002+02:00

Gasp, horror! Banksy isn't a fictional character. His cover has been blown. He's an actual person who makes art. Worse than that, according to the Mail on Sunday, he went to public school. He's middle class! He lived in suburbia! What did people expect? That just because he started with graffiti and grew into street art that he was some council estate hoodie with a knife?

The Mail on Sunday allegedly spent a year tracking him down - discovering the earth-shattering news that Banksy is a bloke called Robert Gunningham (who went to the same school as Sophie Anderton - though at different times). Spiced up with old interviews, the life the Mail describes is pretty dull. Bloke has middle management parents, goes to school, likes graffiti, makes some art, lives with some mates, moves to London from Bristol. Not exactly headline worthy.

The question of the artist's anonymity seized the public - and more importantly the media - since he first started making serious money. And that's the main issue. The secrecy of Banksy's identity seems to be much more about the public's fascination with celebrity and money than anything to do with art. Who is this invisible person raking in the cash and why isn't he in the pages of Heat magazine or sleazing it up at the back of Art Review? It's a good piece of marketing spin that the artist himself has played up by keeping quiet. If Banksy is a brand, will it be damaged by his outing?

But from an artistic point of view, will Banksy's exposure make his work better or worse now people know who he is? It may make his ability to make a street piece a little more difficult if coppers can follow him home afterwards. (That is assuming the police waste as much time and money as the Mail has on tracking him down.)

Perhaps in some way it's a good shift in people's perceptions of street artists and graffiti writers. They are not all naughty teenagers. Considering that scrawling on streets became popular in the UK in the 1980s, its not surprising that many street artists are closer to 40 than 15. They come from varied backgrounds and they make varied work. The question isn't who is Banksy. The question is who cares?

CFA Berlin

2008-06-29T20:39:00.007+02:00

Guido w. Baudach

2008-06-29T20:28:00.002+02:00

Some images of the opening of the summer show at Guido w. Baudach in Berlin.
Strange enough for a show including all artists of the gallery it was boring.
It looked like almost everybody contributed with leftovers.
Personal highlight: Thomas Helbig who showed again some good drawings, a sculpture and a painting in his usual high quality!

MARCIN MACIEJOWSKI

2008-06-21T22:01:00.003+02:00

KRAKÓW-BASED ARTIST Marcin Maciejowski is a man of few words.

It’s no surprise then that his paintings have an economy of style and trenchant powers of observation. The photographic tropes in his catalogue of images are a mirror of digitalage speed with a nod to analogue slowness. Scenarios of the everyday, snippets of the unspectacular, jocular asides and sweetly ironic moments are portrayed. His brevity of pictorial style is akin to the short story and often de-mythologizes the precocity of the avant-garde.
Commentaries include local/geo-politics, military subjects, stereotypical clichés of male posturing, long forgotten, dead Communist-era artists, noir femme fatales from
Hollywood movies, or strong female characters who are usually artists themselves.
Also (Picasso’s Boy with A Pipe, Cezanne’s Still Life, 2004), by honing in on the mainstream glamorization of art and money he has deftly pointed out the ironies
of the contemporary art market itself. He seems to ask: What’s of more value, the
price of fame or the fame itself? In so doing it’s a double entendre at play, one
in which Maciejowski slyly superimposes his own paintings’ commodity status as
object of appreciation within the paintings’ formal content. While erudite in art history
and the contextual bait-and-switch strategies in the present day contemporary fold,
Maciejowski’s laconic narratives offer us an antidote to information overload. A distillation of descriptive specifics rather than extraneous details, the graphic flatness and spare brushwork allows space for plenty of subjective interpretation. Devoid of plot
development, they are open-ended selective memories via his interpretation of
events as they could’ve happened — real, imagined or overheard.
In our age of deception, here is a man coolly detached from the world’s ideological

hysteria and social alienation. He is a smart editor of his own archival images, cropped and framed to suit his needs in the composition. With this sleight of hand, current events and lost cultural memory run parallel to his peripatetic life. More truth is revealed with less, the paintings’ pared down aesthetic get the point across while keeping a sense of mystery. Maciejowski is a part of the post-solidarity generation that comprises Poland’s youthful EU member status. Neither sage nor philosopher to the burgeoning art scene, he is a man of the people engaged with crystal-clear eyes.

Max Henry: Marcin, in this age of collaborations and collectives can you look back
and comment on the work of Grupa Ladnie a decade plus after its actions in and around Kraków?

Marcin Maciejowski: I met my Grupa Ladnie friends at the Technical University in Kraków in 1994–95. The three of us (Wilhelm Sasnal, Rafal Bujnowski and me) were studying at the Architecture Department and became friends in our drawing classes. There we also met Marek Firek, who was our teacher, and our model (Josef Tomczyk “Kurosawa”). These 5 persons later formed the Grupa Ladnie. Later, when Wilhelm and I moved to the Academy of Fine Arts, we were still friends with Firek and Kurosawa (the latter was also sitting for students at the Academy). We used to meet at school, in the students’ dorm and in the Rentgen Pub. It was in Rentgen that we came across the idea of doing something together. We felt we needed to act here and now. We stimulated each other. Like youngsters setting up a rock band, we invented a name (Grupa Ladnie) that would make our group stand out and have an identity.The name of the group was not pretentious and sounded funny. The first artistic actions

were not ‘stiff’ exhibitions of ‘oil on canvas’ but they were ‘live’ music sessions, painting on the walls, Xerox copied publications. Now, people associate Grupa Ladnie with oil paintings, but we did not show any paintings then, nor did we paint together. Each of us painted individually at home and we only got together as Grupa Ladnie at crazy parties for friends and fun lovers.

I remember when I moved to the Academy: I was not in the least interested in painting still lifes and old models, so I started to bring magazines to school and paint the things I found there. This was what turned me on, because I felt I was painting a theme and that I was able to comment on something rather than do silly still lifes.

So later I stopped painting at school and started to paint for myself rather than for school grades. I painted at home with no easel (I put canvas on cardboard boxes) and did Grupa Ladnie happenings, much more attractive. What I appreciate about the Grupa Ladnie period is that I was not thinking seriously of art at the time. I did not expect to become an artist once I graduated, and thanks to Grupa Ladnie I could distance myself from academic art. We found genuine art in a friendly talk with a girl on a tram, in the news on TV and in color magazines. Our professor used to say that our painting wasn’t art at all, that it was not serious. Unlike him, I felt that it was the real thing, that it came out of me and was honest. All in all, the things we did as a group were not complete nonsense, but used joking, triviality, instead of imitating pompous school teaching. Immodestly, I would say that people liked our paintings. It stimulated arts throughout Poland. This is what I heard.

MH: Since you’ve often invoked the work and life of forgotten Communist-era artists in your pictures, do you consider any of them role models, or are the pictures a critique/reminder of the coerced subordination of art to the state?

MM: True, I have painted a few pieces which present artists of the Communist era, but not to criticize them or Communism itself. I liked the pictures I used to come across, some old blurred photos presenting sculptures, with their textures, and I simply wanted to copy them on canvas. Anyway, the artists I painted (Kobro, Szapocznikow, Kantor) had little to do with Communism. I think you mean the ‘Xawery Dunikowski painting,’ where the artist is standing next to a great worker’s head. I painted it after I came across an album with the artist’s work from his socialist realism period. We had socialism and the West had capitalist realism, which was called Pop art. Perhaps Pop art was in fact socialist realism, but it had a different name? Following this train of thought, perhaps Xawery Dunikowsk is a Pop artist?

MH: Being that so many images get circulated on a daily basis, what is your process
that leads to a finished painting?

MM: I simply see something and it makes me stop for a moment; all of a sudden I
KNOW that the thing will make a good painting. The choice is intuitive, but I am confident of my choice. No one can make me paint something that I have not chosen
myself. I do not seek any particular topics either, I just come across them, I read
something, I watch TV, surf the Internet, something catches my eye and I know that it
will be my painting. Sometimes it is the contents, the arrangement of things and
sometimes the graphics. For example, when a picture is blurred, not sharp (pixelated), I think what it would be like to paint it, which paint to use, etc. I do not choose topics beforehand, telling myself: “Now I will paint religion.” Themes come to me themselves. I put them down and produce a painting. If I feel that I have not exhausted a topic, I paint another one. Thus I produce series or repetitions.
I combine paintings in my head: “If I paint this, it will match the painting I made then.”
I followed this train of thought when I was doing the “Youths” series. I assumed that I would look for portraits of famous artists when they were young, that the portraits
would not be associated with the images that everybody knows, but that their heads would look as if they belonged to accidental men. I also thought that I would mix known artists with less successful ones. That everybody would be given equal treatment, as they all dealt with art and should not be classified according to the arbitrary category of success. This was my concept for those paintings. I have a great number of ideas, and there is a queue of them waiting. Some topics come up just like this and they do not have to queue. I use photos, the Internet, magazine pictures or film screenshots. Not everything is suitable for a painting. I hardly ever use photos which are works of arts in themselves, I prefer ‘bad’ photos, as if uninteresting, which will gain importance only once painted. If I browse for example 100 party pictures on a digital camera I will find one that I want to paint. Besides, I often skip details, recompose them. I may watch a film on my PC and spot a trivial scene, rewind the movie, pause it, print the screen and paint it. It is hard for me to say how I make the choice. I could explain it in an easier way if you asked me about concrete works. I agree, reality and the media overwhelm you with messages and news, but as a painter I do not find it problematic. I simply know what I want to choose. At least, I have known so far.

MH: Do your pictures exist in a timebased analogue vacuum or are they a

product of the virtual 21st century?

MM: You tell me which answer is correct. For the time being I am a product of
1996–2007. I find it hard to assess my paintings. I try to make them universal. I named my first exhibition “Paintings about the good, love and culture,” so they
concerned values that cannot be closed within specific timeframes. On the other hand, in my work I am rooted in here and now, i.e., I comment on our times,
customs, values and the culture of the 20th and 21st century.

Max Henry is a critic and curator based in New York.

Marcin Maciejowski was born in Babice, Poland, in 1974. He lives and works in Kraków.

Absence

2008-06-21T21:18:00.001+02:00

Dear Readers,

sorry this blog was quiet for such a long time.
From today on there will be frequent updates again!
Thank you for your support and interest!

best regards

David Altmejd

2008-05-31T09:35:00.002+02:00

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
May 3–June 14

Reportedly, American men are on average three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier today than they were one hundred years ago. In roughly the same amount of time, the average Dutchman has grown seven inches. Our anthropometric history might not have been on David Altmejd’s mind when he assembled the nine splendid colossi that make up his second exhibition at this gallery (he was probably thinking Goya and Rodin), but standing amid his forest of giants, one can’t help but imagine them as heirs to our strengths and follies, strange emissaries from a future race raised on steroids.

Altmejd’s 2004 debut at the gallery was a dark, lubricious labyrinth filled with decapitated werewolves and allusions to Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt; while many of the themes (vulnerable, fractured figuration) and materials (broken mirrors, twine, sundry bibelots) are present in his current exhibition, he now works vertically rather than laterally, making statues using the same surreal architectural habits that informed his prior, installation-like work. The variation between each piece is astounding. From the look of it, Altmejd works heuristically, deciding on the shape and form of each being intuitively as he builds. (A rejoinder, perhaps, to the polished, overspecified, and overproduced statements of other contemporary sculptors.) As if to hammer home the point, the artist’s hand is evident everywhere. Literally. Plaster casts of hands peek out from anuses (The Spiderman [all works 2008]), grasp throats and fondle testicles (The Center), or cluster along the entire surface like some sort of florid, Freddy Krueger nightmare (YOU). Sometimes his beings don’t resemble beings at all, as in The Cave, an awesome, mirrored obelisk, or another boxy, reflective figure, The Quail. (“The Balzac piece,” as a friend put it.) Then, to throw you off again, there’s Love, a hollow, spindly, barely there bit of agita. Circling the sculptures, the viewer is repeatedly frustrated by the impossibility of a full view. One imagines secrets in every piece; they resist, and thus incite, scopophilia.

—David Velasco

Steve McQueen opening Cannes Film Festival arthouse Movies

2008-05-15T07:10:00.001+02:00

Steve McQueen

"When I was in art school, I wanted to be in film school. When I was in film school I wanted to be in art school," says Steve McQueen, who now comes full circle - an artist taking his film to the world's biggest film festival. As we speak, French subtitles are being hurriedly added to Hunger, his drama set in the Maze prison during the weeks Bobby Sands and nine other republican prisoners went on hunger strike. Of course, McQueen has made films before. He won the Turner prize in 1999, in part for his video Deadpan, in which he recreated a legendary Buster Keaton stunt, standing still in front of a building as it collapsed around him. He has filmed New York from inside barrels (Drumroll), ventured two miles inside a South African goldmine (Western Deep), and far into the Democratic Republic of Congo (Gravesend). None of them count as features though, which means that Hunger will be in the running for the best first film award.

McQueen explains that, when he was 11, he had something like a coming-of-age moment watching the news in spring 1981. There were the hunger strikers and, closer to his home in Ealing, the Brixton riots. A picture of Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers to die, has stuck with him ever since: "It was always in my head, that image." Hunger will now join an ever-growing canon of films about the Troubles, which have, in recent years, tended towards docu-drama - the urge to lay down history or, in some instances, to correct it. That, McQueen says, is not what he was going for. "I just want to examine what is at stake here. Why would you put yourself on the line in such a way - in the most painful way - for your beliefs? Where have you got to?" He was struck by the idea of the unshakeable convictions of young men (Sands was 27 when he died): "That feeling of youth and the feeling of being right, the feeling of that kind of passion, really."

Does he think the film will be controversial? "It's called the Troubles for a reason. It's troubling - it continues to be troubling," McQueen says. He's more interested in his audience than the press, and talks with a total and sincere respect about the people who watch his work. For him, films - art or movies, what's the difference? - act as a mirror. "What gets projected on to the surface of the screen is the audience's reflection. Do you agree with what Bobby Sands did? If you do, there is always doubt. If you don't, there is doubt. It's a difficult thing to think about. And that's why film-makers should be making films."

Others in the McQueen camp seem more jittery about the film's likely reception. Ken Loach took a lot of criticism when The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d'Or in 2006, but Steve McQueen OBE may prove a trickier target. He was the UK's official war artist in Iraq. (He is still furious that his stamps featuring British soldiers killed in action have not gone into production: "The Royal Mail still haven't come back to me with a definite answer.") His films are reflective and resist simplification. The rights and wrongs of the hunger strikers are thrashed out in a moral argument between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham); McQueen likens it to a philosophical game of chess, or a McEnroe/Connors Wimbledon final.

Working on Hunger was the first time McQueen had been on a film set, or worked with a crew and actors: was it a difficult leap to make? Last year, he went to the Congo to make a film, he says. "Fifty kilometres into the bush with armed guards." Hunger was a breeze by comparison. "If you want a cup of tea, some geezer gives you one. Before you finish it, another guy takes it away. What's there to complain about?"
Cath Clarke

i.m. Robert Rauschenberg

2008-05-13T21:15:00.002+02:00

The US pop art pioneer Robert Rauschenberg has died at the age of 82, his gallery said today.

Rauschenberg - described as a "titan" of American art by the New York Times - died on Tuesday, Jennifer Joy, of the Pace Wildenstein gallery, in New York, said. He had been ill for some time.

The artist was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925, and spearheaded a style called the Combines in the 1950s.

The style incorporated aspects of painting and sculpture, and Rauschenberg eventually moved on to include objects such as a stuffed eagle or goat and street signs. He became one of the most influential artists reacting against abstract expressionism.

In the 1960s, he responded to the work of his pop art contemporaries - including Andy Warhol - by incorporating up to the minute photographed images in his works, including pictures of John F Kennedy.

Rauschenberg began silk-screen painting and embarked on a period of more collaborative projects including performance art, choreography, set design and art and technology combinations.

Among his most famous works was Bed, created after he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish.

In 1970, he established a permanent studio on Captiva island, off Florida's Gulf coast, where he made his home.

He demonstrated the diversity of his work when he won a Grammy Award in 1984 for best album package for the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues.

"I'm curious," he said in 1997, in one of the few interviews he granted in his later years. "It's very rewarding. I'm still discovering things every day."

Rauschenberg's more than 50 years in art produced a varied and prolific collection that that filled both Manhattan locations of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum during a 1998 retrospective.

The Time magazine art critic, Robert Hughes, called Rauschenberg "a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art ... he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman".

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/arts/design/14rauschenberg.html?hp

From Nazi Bunker to Artistic Haven

2008-04-24T19:52:00.004+02:00

BERLIN'S BOROS COLLECTION

By R. Jay Magill, Jr. in Berlin

At first it stood as a defense against Allied bombs. In the 1950s it was used to store imported fruit from Cuba, and in the 1990s it became the location for the hottest techno-parties around. On Thursday an old Berlin bunker revealed its latest transformation: It now houses a private collection of contemporary art.

Walking through the massive five-storey concrete bunker that houses the Boros Collection on Reinhardstrasse in Berlin, you wouldn't guess that it had a far more sinister past. Back in 1942 Nazi architect Albert Speer built the place to help the city sustain what he believed would be the final blowout battle leading to a German victory. It was part of his and Adolf Hitler's grand "Germania" vision, whereby Berlin would be entirely renewed -- fully devoid of degenerate art, of course after the Germans had triumphed.

But today the old pock-marked fortress belongs to Polish-born collector and advertising entrepreneur Christian Boros and his wife Karen. And it was here on Thursday that they unveiled their impressive art collection that they've amassed over nearly two decades. Now the spiciest of international contemporary art sits in a cavernous piece of Berlin's architectural past. "This building is a landmark, a part of German history," Boros says. "It's not the Brandenburg Gate, but it has seen Berlin change a lot over the last half century."

After the end of World War II the bunker ended up in the Soviet sector of the city and the Russian army used it as a prison for captured German soldiers. Then, as something resembling normalcy returned to Berlin, the building was used to store bananas, oranges, and other fruits imported from Cuba by East Germany. After the fall of the Wall, East Berlin became the center of the city's party scene and "The Bunker," or "Banana Bunker," was the hottest place for wild techno raves and gay sadomasochism parties in Germany. The last one was held in 1996. Since then, the bunker has stood empty.

The 3,000-square-meter interior space, which once sheltered 2,000 people from flying bombs, now holds 80 contemporary works by artists such as Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson, Elizabeth Payton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anselm Reyle, and Tobias Rehberger, all spread over five floors. While there are several series of photographs, most of the works on display reveal a fascination with sculpture: a giant copper bell by Kris Martin that precariously swings over the lobby; an Olafur Eliasson swinging fan that threatens onlookers with its pendular gyrations; a fluorescent-yellow, black-lit wooden cart sitting in a dark room; bales of silver-painted hay, and, perhaps most eerily, an hyperrealist rubber sculpture of a middle-aged man lying in a hospital bed, dressed in baby blue pyjamas, hands wrapped in gauze, staring lifelessly at the heavy concrete ceiling. "I collect art that I don't understand," Boros says.

The entire building 38 meters (125 feet) long and 16 meters (52 feet) high, with two-meter-thick concrete-and-rebar walls was particularly difficult to restructure. But starting in 2004 the architects Jens Casper, Petra Petersson, and Andrew Strickland from the Berlin-based firm Realarchitektur managed to make it happen. "We had to talk a lot about what we would do here," Casper says, "A lot."

They sat down with Boros and rethought the entire internal structure before removing 40 of the 120 rooms. Now some of them thrust 13 meters upwards over several stories, freeing up the otherwise cramped quarters originally all of the rooms were just 2.3 meters high. And where there were no windows, there is now a wall of them in the back stairwell. While there is no daylight in the exhibition space, the architects put the windows across from an exposed, ripped-up concrete-and-rebar wall so visitors can see just how reinforced a bunker really is. The project has been such a success the firm was recently awarded the 2008 Beton Architectural Prize for its work on the building.

Most impressive perhaps is the 1,000-square-meter penthouse that sits atop the old bunker, covered by a hulking 3-meter-thick concrete-and-steel roof. Surrounded in glass and leading out onto a sprawling tree-covered terrace, it's where the couple live, overlooking the middle of Berlin, sitting on top of their art. Standing on the sidewalk outside after leading journalists through his fortress, Boros was approached by an elderly man. "Does someone live up on top of this old thing?" he asked the mild-mannered collector. "I think someone does," Boros said. "I've heard it's nice."

The public can see for itself soon enough if that's true at least the part of the bunker that contains the impressive art collection. Starting at the beginning of June, it will be possible to request an appointment to visit on Saturday mornings through the Boros Collection Web site. "You have to remember that this is a private collection, not a museum," Boros says. "It's an incredibly subjective endeavour. It's something very much a part of our lives. Art, like history, is something to be talked about."

Daan van Golden

2008-04-06T13:56:00.001+02:00

GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY
508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor
March 20–April 19

Art historian Svetlana Alpers’s observation about golden-age painters, that “it is hard to trace stylistic development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists,” applies to reclusive septuagenarian artist Daan van Golden. This exhibition, his first US solo presentation despite his being greatly esteemed in Europe, surveys canvases made in the last fifteen years but is representative of an extremely focused practice that has lasted over four decades. In 1963, while in Japan, the artist abandoned Abstract Expressionist painting in favor of the meticulous rendition of patterns found in the world, such as on textiles or wrapping paper. Like his late-seventeenth-century forebears, his worshipful fidelity to observed reality admits little mechanical innovation. But the spoils he translates to canvas have expanded to include other artworks, a decision that adds a complex metaphysical dimension to his single-color silhouettes crisply outlined against white grounds. The paintings, tantalizingly aloof, hover between acknowledged artistic strategies. They are committed to neither Pop art nor appropriation nor Conceptual art, but rather only to mirroring fragments of the world.

One must calibrate minute variations across multiple works, and this elegantly installed show, organized by Anne Pontégnie, generously facilitates that process. On a long wall opposite the gallery’s entrance, four cadmium-red-on-white depictions of a berries-and-leaves pattern vary not only in size but also in perspectival distance, such that the images range from an allover field emphasizing the pattern’s repetition to a zoomed-in, nearly abstract accretion of organic shapes. Like rotating the lenses on a microscope, glancing from work to work discloses new information about van Golden’s source material. In a side room, Study H. M., 2004, isolates a bird from a canvas by Henri Matisse. On returning to the gallery’s main room, one is immediately confronted by the same image on a negligibly larger canvas, this time a white silhouette isolated against baby blue. (The artist allows himself to paint up to four iterations of the exact same painting, further complicating the already blurry distinction between real and copy hinted at here.) Other works depict a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti and details of Jackson Pollock paintings, and two photographs hint at a parallel practice that has commanded van Golden’s attention equally, sometimes to the exclusion of his superb, already unhurried painting output.

—Brian Sholis

Berlin Biennale II

2008-04-06T11:39:00.007+02:00

Okay, I wasn´t planning on it but after seeing parts of this 5th Berlin Biennial I have to draw a conclusion:
This must be the worst edition of all!
Basically it looks like a graduation show of an art Academy in some province town.
Of course if you search carefully you´ll find one or two rough diamonds but the overall conclusion is far from positive, sadly.
Looks like there´s a downward spiral to be seen in art land, after a disappointing Dokumenta, a non thrilling Venice biennial, a not so exciting Munster sculpture expo, my hopes concentrate now on a hopefully very spectacular Sonsbeek in June!

MARK HANDFORTH - Gavin Brown's enterprise

2008-04-05T11:10:00.003+02:00

Daniel Richter Die Idealisten - Zwirner NY

2008-04-05T10:52:00.005+02:00

Autocenter kicks off Berlin biennale weekend

2008-04-04T11:38:00.002+02:00