Berlin Amsterdam Folded or tilted reality´s

Works by Tjebbe Beekman

Arjan van Helmond

2 new shows at: http://www.ljongma.dds.nl/galerie/current.html
http://www.faprojects.com/artists/

Sebastian Gögel - The new hot thing from Leipzig

In Sebastian Göel´s (*1978 Thuringia, Germany) artworks, the world takes on the appearance of a confusing place full of permanent contradictions and conflicts. His particular artistic approach consists of portraying everywhere in his pictures subterranean traps, hiding-places and secrets, as well as fissures and hidden backgrounds, and of turning all dimensions topsy-turvy. A gloomy world is opened to view and shown to be inhabited by hermaphroditic beings situated somewhere between humans and animals, between both known and unknown stages of an ongoing evolution.

The views presented by Gögel invert reality into its opposite: inner worlds are turned inside out, the skin is stripped away from bodies to reveal their fleshy and formless substance, extremities are twisted and elongated, heads are inflated, eyes shifted and noses stretched excessively. The spaces are confusing pitfalls in which may be found every imaginable fear and tension. Gögel creates an exaggerated pandemonium in which all sorts of inscrutable and incomprehensible fantasies attain their artistic form. He plays a game of distortion and mirroring right up to its very limits: in many of his pictures, the artist continuously multiplies various meanings and statements.

This excessive degree of energy and expressiveness is offset again and again by works whose sobriety and purity stand in contrast to the grand pastose gesture, and in which G�gel depicts a spectrum of strained exertion on both the individual and social level, inasmuch he causes the protagonists to grow rigid within a strict hierarchy and a self-imposed discipline. He repeatedly paints and draws the embittered and contorted physiognomies of various personalities. These figures give expression to a degenerated social world in which everyone attempts to see through, to assess and to deceive everyone else. Beneath the sign of spurious respect and feigned interest, all esteem for others is surreptitiously discarded, and one�s own advantage is single-mindedly sought after.

New Show Ronald de Bloeme

Now in The Hague, The Netherlands!!
http://www.nouvellesimages.nl/

More info about Ronald de Bloeme:http://www.spielhaus-morrison.com/galerie/start.htm

Exhibition Art Amsterdam

‘Berlin – Amsterdam’ of the Rijksakademie
Each year Art Amsterdam makes space for a surprising exposition at the heart of the exhibition.This year the honour goes to the Rijksakademie, which is showing the work of ex-participants who are presently working in Berlin, including Tjebbe Beekman, Mathilde ter Heijne, Alexandra Leykauf, Mathilde Rosier, Bojan Šarčević and Marike Schuurman.The presentation consists of paintings, drawings, installations, video and photographs chosen by the Berlin-based Erika Hoffmann, a top German collector.

New Website Marike Schuurman

http://www.marikeschuurman.com/

Limbus

New Work for Art Amsterdam Tjebbe Beekman

De beangstigende schoonheid van Tuymans

di 24/04/07

- Eigenlijk hoeft Luc Tuymans geen introductie meer. Hij is gewoonweg een van onze beste kunstenaars. Een presentatie van nieuw werk is dan ook een echt evenement. De expo is getitteld "Les revenants", letterlijk vertaald "zij die terugkomen", maar ook "spoken".
"Les revenants" verwijst naar het boek van de Franse historicus Jean Lacouture "Les jésuites".

Het eerste deel heet "Les conquérants" en beschrijft de veroveringen die zij onder het mom van het christendom en de beschaving uitvoerden.

Het tweede deel heet “Les revenants” en wijst op het feit dat de macht en de invloed van de jezuïeten nog altijd aanwezig is, zij zijn terug van nooit weg geweest.

In het woordenboek staat er bij jezuïet ook: sluw. Deze religieuze orde spreekt al jaren tot onze verbeelding door een sfeer van geheimzinnigheid en ambiguïteit.

Boze tongen gewagen zelfs van een soort loge. Het is een orde die zich aan de ene kant als humanistisch voordoet en zich beroept op het concept van de vrije wil, maar aan de andere kant blijft zitten in een star conservatisme.

De bekendste en waarschijnlijk meest omstreden activiteit van de jezuïeten is het opzetten van een netwerk van hoog kwaliteitsonderwijs.
De macht van een christelijke orde
Tuymans is geïntrigeerd door de grote impact die een jezuïetenopvoeding op het verdere leven van hun leerlingen heeft en door het feit dat een klein land als België in de greep is van een kleine elite met diezelfde opleiding.

Tuymans wil opnieuw de aandacht vestigen op de machtige jezuïeten, die terug van nooit weggeweest zijn.

“Les revenants” kadert perfect in zijn zoektocht naar het begrip macht: hij schilderde eerder de “heimat” van rechts Vlaanderen, het Belgische koloniale verleden, de terreur van het nazi-regime.

Momenteel werkt Tuymans aan een reeks over “Disneyworld”, waarin hij de macht van publiciteit en de media aan de kaak stelt.
Van miniatuur tot monumentaal werk
De expo begint met kleine, monochrome aquarellen. Het zijn vignetten die zich inspireren op de geestelijke oefeningen van Ignatius van Loyola, de stichter van de orde.

Het zijn meditaties over de zeven hoofdzonden. De schilderijen hebben grote afmetingen, met schaalvergrotingen die een overweldigende indruk maken.

De doeken ogen als een immense overbelichte foto, waarop de kleuren uitgevlakt of verhevigd zijn.

Als Tuymans het barokinterieur van een Italiaanse kerk schildert, beeldt hij die kerk af als een opengeslagen boek: de bladzijden bollen op en de vouw loopt als een barst dwars door het beeld.
"Rome" straks naar Amsterdam
“Rome” is een monumentaal schilderij van 2,3 bij 3,1 meter van het al even monumentale interieur van het Sint-Pietersbasiliek. Het gebouw is verpletterend en de aanwezige gelovige mensenmassa wordt herleid tot kleine, ongedefinieerde vlekjes.

Dit prachtige schilderij werd al aangekocht door het Stedelijke Museum van Amsterdam. Op “The deal” schudden de paus en de generaal-overste van de jezuïeten elkaar de hand na een hevige polemiek over Latijns-Amerika en pedofilie.

De schilderijen van Luc Tuymans zijn van een beangstigende schoonheid, waar er altijd een onderhuidse spanning zindert.

Die “unheimliche” sfeer is de weergave van de stille terreur die de jezuïeten nog altijd uitoefenen. Want Tuymans schildert intelligent, en sluw…als een jezuïet.
Claude Blondeel

Autocenter

We all need an Autocenter
Founded in 2001 by Joep van Liefland and Maik Schierloh, the Autocenter has become, in the last months, one of the most important spaces for contemporary art in Berlin. Of course, the invitation from the last Berlin Biennial to show in their fake Gagosian Gallery has been putting a lot of light on that projektraum (for a serious and complete definition of that word, see the special issue “Berlin” from FGA). But the two founding members were clever enough to produce in that context an event that will not establish or promote Autocenter as a “label”. They simply built up with tires and car parts, light and sexy posters, a proper garage in Berlin-Mitte. The name was the program.

The last time I was in the big white cube located in the surroundings of the S-Station Ostkreuz (one of the most depressing locations I have ever seen...), a commercial gallerist that was visiting the opening carefully looked at the portfolio of the previous exhibitions, writing on a piece of paper the names of artists that could be interesting. And his shopping list became quickly longer than a Xmas wish-list. The Autocenter, with exhibitions lasting only a weekend, is a dynamic and exceptional place with a broad view from contemporary art. Within the last months we have seen there Damien Deroubaix, a french painter that deals with grindcore and trash culture. A large video installation of Markus Draper evoking a haunted house. Some sculptural-paintings from Eva Seufert, Ulrich Emmert and Norbert Witzgall made a picturesque duo, and Marike Schuurman hang her black and white photographs... Etc.

But the important fact is that Autocenter has been able to develop some no-profile as a profile. Nowadays many small and young independent art spaces are finding a line that they consciously follow to quickly build up an image and an existence in an over-informed and over-competitive world. One will be dealing with art that thinks about art, another will show figurative-post-expressionist-paintings when the neighbor will focus on scandinavian political art... The Autocenter however, in its large selection and openness, remains a place for surprises and discoveries.

But the point with those spaces is that they can propose things that neither a gallery nor a museum could do. Like the younger place called Homies that was, on sunday november 26th, inviting all the collectors of the artist Tatjana Doll to bring their pieces and leave them there for the duration of the exhibition. The artworks will not be for sale: they are already owned by people. No curator, nothing to buy (except the few beers you might drink during the opening) and a lot of good mood and good food (visitors where invited, on top of bringing their art pieces, to contribute to the buffet). Like the Autocenter, they are building a community of people that share the same hedonistic vision of art. A moment of fun and pleasure, of intellectual quality and unexpected breakthrough.

www.autocenterart.de
www.homie.travelhome.org/body.swf

^Thibaut de Ruyter, curator and editor based in Berlin

David Hockney

Dual exhibitions showcase new work by Hockney, and his choice of Turners.

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Monday April 16, 2007


The greatest ever painter of watercolour landscapes will be joined at Tate Britain this summer by one of the most celebrated modern exponents of the form. An exhibition of JMW Turner's watercolour landscapes will be selected by David Hockney, working with Tate curators. And in a parallel exhibition, Hockney's landscapes of the east Yorkshire countryside will be shown, including recent work never seen in this country.

The five new, hitherto unseen Hockney oil paintings, each about 12ft long, depict the same view in Woldgate Woods in east Yorkshire.

Last year, the artist returned to the same spot five times between March and November. At a forking path in the forest he set up his equipment and made his large, six-panel oil paintings. Each took him a couple of days to complete as he worked in situ.

Each painting is strikingly different. In late March, when the leaves have yet to burst their buds, the view is all rich purple, lime and orange, the trees stark and architectural. In May, the colours have softened to luscious greens, which by July have deepened so that they have an almost luminous quality.

Contrasting versions painted in November show the cool clarity of autumn sun, and the greyish-creamy mistiness of a cold, hazy morning.

The Bradford-born Hockney has become increasingly obsessed by the east Yorkshire landscape. His links to the countryside there began when he worked on the land as a young man; and he has returned regularly over the years to visit family in Bridlington.

The landscape, which he describes as having "the sort of wide vistas you get all the time in the American west", started to become his focus around four years ago, when he started to produce watercolours - which allowed him to capture the changing moods of the weather quickly - in situ. Now he is concentrating on painting in oils. He loads up his pickup truck with his equipment and drives until he finds a spot he wants to paint. Then he absorbs the view, looking intently for a couple of hours before picking up a brush and painting quickly, with enormous concentration.

Hockney, who celebrates his 70th birthday next summer, said he was looking forward to the chance to "study in depth the Tate's extraordinary collection of Turner's watercolours. This is one of the most exciting mediums for an artist to work with." As part of his work on the Turner show, Hockney will present a selection of Turner's exploratory colour studies along with his own commentary on the artist's methods in constructing perspectives and patterns of colour and light.

Turner's watercolours have been in the limelight this year after the Tate managed to raise £4.95m to save the late masterpiece The Blue Rigi for the nation after a five-week public appeal. It will be one of the highlights of the exhibition, which will include 165 works, including Turner's beautiful studies of the Thames, which he made on the spot in notebooks.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said: "This is a rare opportunity for us to mount an exhibition of Turner's greatest watercolours, which due to conservation reasons can only occasionally be exhibited. I am delighted that David Hockney has agreed to work with us on the exhibition. It will show the development of the virtuoso techniques that enabled Turner first to paint watercolours that could compete with oil paintings, and later to transform all aspects of his art by their example."

· Hockney on Turner Watercolours and David Hockney: The East Yorkshire Landscape both open at Tate Britain, London, on June 11

JONATHAN MEESE

Idiot Savant, Genius or Charlatan?

I still don´t know what to think of this guy?

More:http://www1.janbauer.net/cfa/templates/publish.php?filename=medias-meese

Anselm Kiefer

New works by Anselm Kiefer, also look inside his studio etc.

Soll LeWitt

1928- 2007

new work by Vittorio Roerade

Kimberly Clark

FOOLISHNESS AND PASSION MAKES US LIVE

Kimberly Clark plays with her own emotions…
In a hysterical way the artist’s collective uses
clichés surrounding them: sex, party, booze, violence,
art, mythology, poetry…
Kimberly Clark mixes all these ingredients to slick
installations, in which they express their love-hate
relationship with the world they live in.
It’s 'Art with pleasure' created with passion.

Kimberly Clark is the name of the artist collective
consisting of three female artists: Josepha de Jong,
Ellemieke Schoenmaker and Iris van Dongen. Many of the
sculptures they make are inspired by ‘nocturnal
escapades’ of the women in the streets of Rotterdam,
recorded on photographs. The work they are making
right now for an exhibition in TENT Rotterdam, for
example, with the working title 'crusade, Rotterdam', is
based on two women climbing to the top of a heap of
construction waste lying in the street. One of the
women is carrying a piece of beam, the other one iron
curtain rails. The composition of the women is that of
a crucifix. A combination of trash, abundance and
devotion.

The art works consist mainly of 3 dimensional ‘human
figures’ combined with ready-made objects. Kimberly
Clark wants the works to express rawness through the
mains of humor. In a way you could say the
installations are autobiographical. At least the
artists can identify with the subjects they chose.
That explains why the collective often takes ‘the
woman’ as their point of departure. They contradiction
between the beauty of women and the rawness of the
subject creates vulnerability but at the same time
female heroine and power.

CARPE NOX

Lorna Simpson

Talking Pictures
by Vince Aletti April 2, 2007

Lorna Simpson makes photographs and films that deal with race, gender, and identity, but if that sounds forbiddingly polemical, you’ve got the wrong idea. The work in her elegantly spare mid-career survey at the Whitney never gives off the chill of haute conceptualism. From the beginning, Simpson has tempered formal sophistication (typically, a multipart arrangement of photographs and text panels) with teasing and provocative ambiguity. Her work is poetic, layered, and tantalizingly open-ended; it never tells us what to think (much less what she thinks), but it won’t allow us to slip mindlessly through its grasp. Images of hairpieces, full lips, black glass vessels, and the bodies of black men and women whose faces are turned away or otherwise obscured are fraught but surprisingly playful. If the mysteries hinted at in her films are less immediately intriguing, it’s only because they often flirt with the conventions of romantic or historical melodrama. Always going her own way, Simpson remains a model for artists who want their audience to think as freely as they do.

ARMEN ELOYAN

WIM PEETERS ON ARMEN ELOYAN

Who Killed Bambi?


WHAT is it exactly that turns Armen Eloyan’s matchstick, inflatable figures, smoking cigarette butts, drinking beer or soda from cans, and wandering aimlessly, into such powerful mementos? Is it the emptiness that lurks beneath our corporate values of security, stability and state of mind? Eloyan stands out in creating a cartoonesque vision of a classless, ageless and ‘revolutionless’ society where free will is expressed by means of the remote control. His agitation with the universalising, egalitarian promises of anodyne peace, shows us a post-historic condition that is radically different from the one that was promised to us by postmodern theory.

Armenian painter Armen Eloyan’s star is rising fast. His first gallery solo show at Bob Van Orsouw in Zurich was astounding and at last year’s Frieze Art Fair in London collectors were cursing the waiting lists, desperate to lay their hands on paintings that were already shipping to faraway destinations. Eloyan turned 40, yet only recently has his career taken a definite turn through exposure at the Kunsthalle Bern and at Van Orsouw. Today galleries and museums are standing in line around the block of his Zurich studio.

Eloyan’s paintings draw upon the endless imagination of a fantasy world, yet they are dirty, loud and grotesque in every true sense of the word. If there were to be some kind of Dionysian moment identified in contemporary culture, Eloyan’s work would not be part of it.

He is able to appropriate and successfully manipulate all the identifications that such a recycling entails: scale, impasto, roughness, even machismo. Eloyan is definitely no Apollo with a brush either. There is an anti-puritan impulse that overthrows the romantic ideals of painting as a politically correct environment.
Canvasses range from small to monumental. One character has a dick-shaped nose and wanders around in a birch tree forest. Two guys in a living room, one wearing a high cap, the other one a cap with a flap sit back in a sofa staring at an empty television screen. Maybe there’s football on. References to television, art history, propaganda, advertising and popular music all have an equally important role in the shaping of his project.

Who Killed Bambi? is the title of a Sex Pistols song that was originally the title of the first ever Sex Pistols film to be directed by the legendary Russ Meyer in 1978. Meyer never completed more than a day and a half of footage, worth only a minute in the 2000 feature The Filth and the Fury. Much like Meyer’s footage, Eloyan’s paintings contain explicitly unseductive, overtly transgressive overtones. His tableaux are constructed in a relentless, grotesque way and they envision the subversion of the banal, founding fantasies that are constructed by mainstream ‘imagineering’. The benign, soporific creatures of animation movies and fairy tales, alongside the rock and roll heroes of juke box bars, conceal the often brutal and violent underpinnings of clichéd role models in society. Eloyan adds an interesting pitch in this relationship between a fantasy world and our own lived experiences. Could it be that he is denying the legitimacy of a fantasy world that is radically different from the one we are inhabiting?

Wim Peeters Is An Independent Curator And Critic Based In Antwerp

Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen's tribute to Britain's war dead features stamps bearing the soldiers' faces. Why wouldn't the MoD help him?

Adrian Searle
Monday March 12, 2007



Going to Iraq was a frustrating business from the start for Steve McQueen. The artist was flown to Basra and then not allowed to go anywhere. "I knew I'd be embedded with the troops, but I didn't imagine that meant I'd virtually have to stay in bed. It was ridiculous. We went to see some schools the army was rebuilding. I could talk to the guys but that was it." McQueen was told that if he wandered off on his own, he'd get no support. "It was too hostile an environment. Obviously for the military you are just a token artist. You're in the way."

Article continues
He was in Iraq for six days as the UK's official war artist, not nearly enough time to get acclimatised, or to begin to know what to do. The plan was that he would present work the following year. The war escalated, and McQueen still had no project, no film, no plans. The US military was approached to see if McQueen could visit Iraq again with them. The plan fell through. "Obviously, it was going to be impossible to make a film. I was living and breathing the fact that I didn't know what to do every day.

"I was thinking of something else, relaxed, sticking a stamp on my tax return in Amsterdam. The stamp had a picture of Vincent van Gogh on it. And then it hit me - a stamp has a beautiful scale, the proportions are right, the image, it is recognisable, and then it goes out into the world, who knows where. Perfect. Wonderful."

The result was For Queen and Country; unveiled in the Great Hall at Central Library, Manchester, it's a co-commission by Manchester International Festival and the Imperial War Museum. McQueen has used a large oak cabinet with sliding vertical drawers to present 98 sheets of postage stamps. Each sheet depicts a different member of the armed services who has died in the conflict, and each sheet tells us who is depicted, and when they died. The sheets are presented in the chronological order of the deaths. "Every time you pull out a sheet of stamps, there is something in the physical contact and intimacy you have with each sheet of images, and the time it takes to look at them, before replacing them and moving on. But the real point is to have the stamps made available for use."

The Royal Mail's director, Allan Leighton, has turned down a request by McQueen to have the work turned into real commemorative stamps. McQueen mixes exasperation with an acknowledgement of the absurd humour of dealing with officialdom.

"The Ministry of Defence were polite about the idea of the stamps. I gave the MoD my idea, and this man asked me, why couldn't I do a landscape? I said, 'Are you telling me you are ashamed of these people? A landscape? Hello?'

"Then they tried to stop me getting in touch with the families. So we hired a researcher. Of the 115 families we tried to contact, we got 102 responses. Four said no, and 98 said yes. We had a sort of cut-off point. We didn't want to ask people who had suffered their losses too recently. You need to give people time to grieve. And I know it is one thing to show your son or daughter in a cabinet in a library, another to put them on a stamp that you can buy and stick on a letter. But I think the majority do want it. When the families came to the unveiling, it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. People were very moved.

"This is the hardest thing I ever did," says McQueen, who was first invited to be the war artist by the Imperial War Museum's Art Commissions Committee in 2003. "Even after four years, we are not there yet. The problem is that you think people are supporting you, then you discover they're not." Resistance to McQueen's project has taken the form of delay, back-tracking and obfuscation. As soon as one obstacle disappears, another is invented. The artist went to see Leighton to discuss having the stamps used for real. "The temperature dropped as soon as we walked into the room. The next thing you know, you're on the street."

What isn't obvious is where McQueen stands in relation to the war. "Like everyone else in the country, I have my feelings about the war. But the project is the project. Strangely, it seems that for those who are against the war, my project is regarded as a good thing. For people who support the war, it is regarded as a good thing too. It is not pro or anti-war. This work is like a sphere - roll it this way, roll it that way. In the end, it is an art work.

"When we hear about all the men, women and children killed in Iraq, we are numbed to it. I'm pointing out that these people are all victims, too. What happened to them all was a consequence of their participation. The MoD try to say that such and such many soldiers died in action - they don't include or count all the people who died in friendly fire, in traffic accidents and so on. Some were suicides. They chopped them all out. They deleted them. They're all part of this war.

"Nor do I think that soldiers have to have been manning a gun emplacement with one arm tied behind their back and doing a double somersault in order to be remembered or to get a medal. An 18-year-old kid gets killed by a landmine or catches a bullet. He has contributed his life."

Logistically, how many different stamps can there be? "Why not use all of them? What's the problem? All first class. The Royal Mail will make money. Give some to the families."

A recent McQueen exhibition in Paris included an installation, Pursuit. In a dark basement, the walls were lined with mirrored plastic sheeting, and a screen in the middle of the room was lit by odd flickers that bounced off the walls. You lost yourself in the occasional reflections that come at you from all sides. There were sounds, as if someone were fighting their way through tangled undergrowth. It was utterly disorientating. McQueen has never said what he was filming. As with Queen and Country, he makes us do the work, provokes us into deciding where we stand. It is a complicated business.

But it remains difficult to fit Queen and Country into the larger context of McQueen's art. "Maybe it doesn't fit. But I have never wanted anyone tripping over my tail. If people anticipate my next move, thinking I'll turn right, I'll go left. I have never been interested in an easy narrative. I don't want to make things easy, either for the audience, or for myself"

Olaf Holzapfel

Neue Sprachen, zweites Leben

27 March - 28 April
Galerie Gebr. Lehmann
Gorlitzer strasse 16 01099 Dresden

A n a n t J o s h i

N A V E L

One and the Many




By






A n a n t J o s h i






Preview : Tuesday 13 March 2007 6:30 - 8:30pm

Exhibition will continue until 4 April 2007 11:00am � 7:30 pm (Sunday closed)




Chemould Prescott Road

CONTEMPERORY ART GALLERY
Queens Mansion, 3rd floor
G.Talwatkar Marg (Above Yantra)
Fort, Mumbai - 400 001
Ph: 2200 0211/12
www.gallerychemould.com
gallerychemould@gmail.com

Douglas Peres Castro

Atelier als Supermedium # 14

------------------------------------------
Atelier als Supermedium # 14 samengesteld door gerlach en koop

donderdag 15 maart 2007 vanaf 20.00 uur

Keiko Sato
Daniel Eatock
Jeroen Jongeleen
Michel François
Johannes Schwartz
Ian Kiaer
Lara Almarcegui
Ryan Gander
gerlach en koop

Atelier als Supermedium, Artists Space for Contemporary Art
Sammersweg 2, 2285 SB Den Haag, Rijswijk (eindpunt tram 16 richting Moerwijk)
Ton Schuttelaar, Machiel van Soest

Armory show NY