ANSELM KIEFER
Morgenthau Plan, 2012
Acrylic, emulsion, oil and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas
149 5/8 x 149 5/8 inches (380 x 380 cm)

Beauty requires a counterpart. And in thinking about this flaw, the other flaw occurred to me as well: the Morgenthau Plan. For it too ignored the complexity of things.

—Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, which further explores the historical and formal concerns of “Morgenthau Plan,” his exhibition that inaugurated Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris last October.

Born at the close of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon and critiques the dangerous myths that propelled the Third Reich to power. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, the artist engages German history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos to reinforce lessons of the past.

The exhibition at Le Bourget and the subsequent body of work on view in New York draw upon the Morgenthau Plan as an apt metaphor for a common pitfall of the creative process—namely, works that put forth beauty without any other detectable motive. Kiefer presents the shortsighted, wrong-minded initiative as a representation of ideas—artistic and political—that ignore “the complexity of things.”

Proposed in 1944 by former United States Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the plan was conceived to transform post-war Germany into a pre-industrial, agricultural nation, allegedly in order to limit the country’s ability to wage war. Morgenthau sought to divide Germany into two independent states, annexing or dismantling all German centers of industry in an arrangement that would have led to the death of millions by pestilence and starvation. Although the Morgenthau Plan was never realized in its original and most extreme form, it represented an alternative post-war Germany potentially occupied more by farmland and plant-life than industry. In his latest paintings, Kiefer explores the landscape of this double-sided initiative. Flowers—one of his central leitmotifs—bloom through the devastation.

Revisiting a process used earlier in his career, Kiefer paints directly onto color photographs of fields in bloom that he took near his property in southern France, then printed to fit canvases of various sizes. Der Morgenthau Plan depicts an area overgrown with flowers, rendered in thick impasto that completely obscures the original photograph. From top to bottom, the vast canvas dramatically transitions from light to dark, ending in a carpet of drab, black and green mulch. Morgenthau Plan: Laßt tausend Blumen Blühen / Let a thousand flowers bloom conflates the travesty of the German post-war plan with Mao Zedong’s shrewd co-optation of the idealistic classical Chinese maxim, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend,” designed to expose and flush out anti-Communist dissidents. Kiefer reflects on the misappropriation of this passage for autocratic purposes: amid pastel blossoms, black petals spring up above the rest into a muddled ochre landscape.

O Halme, ihr Halme, O Halme der Nacht, a huge dark canvas that transports the viewer to a desolate world by night, features an airplane wing that Kiefer fabricated from metal, jutting from its upper center. Like chalk on a blackboard, faded German cursive hovers in the night sky: ‘O Halme, ihr Halme, O Halme der Nacht’ (O Stalks, your stalks, O Stalks of the Night). In the barren landscape below, only a few stalks are blooming.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. After studying law, he began his art education in Karlsruhe and then Düsseldorf, where he studied informally under Joseph Beuys. His work has been shown and collected by major museums throughout the world. Recent retrospective surveys include “Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth,” the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (2005, traveled to Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and “Anselm Kiefer,” Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). In 2007, Kiefer inaugurated the “Monumenta” program at the Grand Palais, Paris with a vast site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings. In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) at the Opéra National de Paris.

Kiefer lives and works in France.

For further information please contact the gallery at newyork@gagosian.com or at +1.212.741.1717.

Tracey Emin: I Followed You To The Sun

Published on the occasion of Tracey Emin’s fifth solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Tracey Emin: I Followed You To The Sun features a very personal collection of works entitled the Lonely Chair drawings. In this series of self portraits, Emin depicts a solitary female figure in her signature gestural style. The images are drawn from self-portrait photographs and convey poignant emotions of longing and sadness. Emin’s writing is interspersed throughout the book, further illustrating the subconscious nature of the drawings. A book signing will take place on Wednesday, 1 May from 5 to 7 PM at 201 Chrystie Street. Available for purchase on the gallery’s webstore in conjunction with her solo exhibition.

Tracey Emin: My Photo Album

Published by FUEL, My Photo Album is a photographic journey through the life of Tracey Emin, culled from her personal collection of photo albums that she has kept since childhood. These poignant photographs, accompanied by Tracey’s handwritten notes, reveal the intimate moments that have shaped her life, and influenced her work: from her early family life to the pivotal Young British Artist movement of the 1990s. Virtually all 283 images have never before been published. By turns tender and extrovert, these photos simultaneously document both the blossoming of an artist and a unique period in art history, from Emin’s singular viewpoint. Available for purchase on Lehmann Maupin’s webstore.

Tracey Emin

I Followed You To The Sun

2 May – 22 June 2013

540 West 26th Street & 201 Chrystie Street

New York, 18 April 2013—Lehmann Maupin is honored to present Tracey Emin’s fifth solo show in New York from 2 May to 22 June 2013. Tracey Emin: I Followed You To The Sun is a two-part exhibition featuring over 100 works of art, including a series of new bronze sculptures, paintings and drawings, embroideries, and a short film. Lehmann Maupin has published a special artist monograph on the occasion of the exhibition. The gallery will host a book signing with the artist at 201 Chrystie Street on Wednesday, 1 May from 5 to 7 PM. The following evening, on Thursday, 2 May, Tracey Emin will be present for opening receptions at 540 West 26th Street and 201 Chrystie Street from 6 to 8 PM.

Regarded as one of the world’s most significant contemporary artists, Tracey Emin is internationally recognized for her blunt and revealing style, which elicits a broad range of emotions from shock to empathy to self-reflection. Drawing on personal experiences, Emin often reveals emotional situations with brutal honesty and poetic humor in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, embroidery, neon, installation, sculpture, and film. This sprawling, two-part exhibition covers all aspects of Emin’s creative output and continues to reveal her most intimate internal narratives.

The centerpiece of Emin’s newest exhibition is a series of seven bronze sculptures that she created over the past year at the Long Island foundry used by Louise Bourgeois, with whom Emin had collaborated before her death in 2010. Each bronze is engraved with the artist’s poetic confessions, and like ancient sarcophagi, are adorned with tiny animal figurines and hand-sculpted human figures.

At 201 Chrystie Street the focus is on a very personal collection of gouache on paper drawings entitled Lonely Chair drawings, which are the primary subject of the accompanying exhibition catalogue. In this series of self-portraits, Emin depicts a solitary female figure in her signature gestural style. The images are drawn from photographs Emin took of herself in France and convey poignant emotions of longing and sadness.

The show will also feature a short film entitled “Love Never Wanted Me.” The film follows a wild fox on the grounds of a secluded estate as Emin narrates a haunting account of the pain associated with fleeting love, saying at one point, “The broken heart is a lonely world and this is the love that I know.”

In December 2013, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, will present the first solo museum exhibition devoted to Emin’s work in the United States. Curated by Bonnie Clearwater, the Museum’s Executive Director, Angel Without You will focus solely on Emin’s use of neon, a medium that she began utilizing in 1997. Since then, Emin’s illuminated confessions rendered in her personal handwriting have become widely regarded for their poignancy and the universality of her message. This past February, Emin debuted her first public project in New York’s Times Square, as part of Midnight Moment organized by s[edition], the Times Square Advertising Coalition, and Times Square Arts. Each night from 11:57 PM to Midnight, six of her most iconic neon messages were screened on the Times Square Jumbotrons in a silent and moving tribute to love.

Tracey Emin (b. 1963, London) was raised in the seaside town of Margate on the English coast. After leaving school at an early age, Emin enrolled at the Maidstone College of Art, Kent, to study printmaking. She continued her studies at the prestigious Royal College of Arts, London, where she earned a Master’s degree in painting. In 1999, Lehmann Maupin presented Tracey Emin’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Every Part of Me’s Bleeding. Following this critically acclaimed exhibition, Emin exhibited her infamous installation “My Bed” at the Tate Gallery, for which she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. In 2007, she was chosen to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, becoming the second female artist to ever do so. That same year, Emin was made a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and a Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. In January 2013, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Emin a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.

In recent years, Emin has been the subject of a number of retrospective museum exhibitions around the world, including a major solo show at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina, which encompassed a collection of her early films (2012); She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, a solo exhibition at Turner Contemporary in her hometown of Margate (2012); and Tracey Emin: 20 Years, the artist’s first retrospective which originated at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008), before traveling to the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga (2008) and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2009).

Emin’s work can be found in many of the world’s most prestigious public collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; British Museum, London; Camden Arts Center, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Denver Art Museum; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Hara Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Saatchi Collection, London; San Francisco Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.

The artist lives and works in London, England.

IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. Founded by the New Museum in 2011, IDEAS CITY is a major collaborative initiative between hundreds of arts, education, and community organizations. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities.

IDEAS CITY is a biennial Festival in New York City of conferences, workshops, an innovative StreetFest around the Bowery, and more than one hundred independent projects and public events that are forums for exchanging ideas, proposing solutions, and accelerating creativity. Additional Global Conferences are organized annually in key urban centers around the world to identify urgent issues.

“As an institution dedicated to new art and new ideas, the New Museum strongly believes that the cultural community is essential to the vitality of the future city. We also believe that the cultural sphere is still a relatively untapped source of enormously powerful creative capital, especially in its potential to stimulate economic development and foster greater innovation in other fields. The IDEAS CITY initiative is an unprecedented step in expanding both our institution’s mission and its potential as a community hub, drawing the creative population together as agents for change.” —Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum

lá no site newmuseum

Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967–1978

February 8 – May 4, 2013

THE BERTHA AND KARL LEUBSDORF ART GALLERY / CUNY Hunter College

West Building at the southwest corner of 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York, NY

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 1-6pm

212.772.4991 / www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/galleries

Antonio Dias (Brazil, born 1944, lives in Rio de Janeiro, Cologne, and Milan). Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory, 1968. Adhesive vinyl on floor; overall dimensions variable. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich

Eco’s concept of the Open Work—an artwork that could not be completed without the viewer’s participation—was highly useful for Latin American conceptualists from the late 1960s through the 1970s because it named the collaborative and performative emphasis of their artworks. Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967–1978 displays the capacious nature of conceptualism by exhibiting 91 books, video, sound, prints, drawings, installations and photography by 36 artists working in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York, London, Los Angeles, Montevideo and Caracas. Although not a historical survey, the show presents a collective desire to use the body to destabilize systems of representation shared by artists from Latin America working in conceptual modes from 1967 to 1978.

Open Work in Latin America, New York and Beyond includes some ninety works that have been generously lent to Hunter College from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henrique Faria Fine Art, Document Art Gallery, and Alexander Gray Associates.

Hunter College is deeply grateful to the following donors, whose generous support has made this exhibition possible, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and The Bershad Exhibition Fund.

The exhibition features works by:

Diego Barboza / Artur Barrio / Luis Benedit / Mel Bochner / Donald Burgy / Luis Camnitzer / Sigfredo Chacón / Eduardo Costa / Jaime Davidovich / Iole de Freitas / Antonio Dias / Juan Downey / Felipe Ehrenberg / Rafael Ferrer / Anna Bella Geiger / Rubens Gerchman / Víctor Grippo / Leandro Katz / Joseph Kosuth / David Lamelas / Sol LeWitt / Lucy Lippard / Cildo Meireles / Ana Mendieta / Marta Minujín / Hélio Oiticica / Clemente Padín / Claudio Perna / John Perreault / Liliana Porter / Alejandro Puente / Carlos Rojas / Ed Ruscha / Bernardo Salcedo / Lawrence Weiner / Horacio Zabala

tá lá no site deles.

Gilberto Gil est sans doute trop modeste. Plus de quarante-cinq ans après ses débuts, le jeune septuagénaire ne se considère toujours pas comme une star internationale de la musique. Héros national du patrimoine brésilien depuis de longues années – un statut qu’il a acquis bien avant d’occuper des fonctions ministérielles – le chanteur et guitariste était en Égypte pour la première fois en mars. Il a récemment effectué un tour du monde dans le cadre du tournage d’un documentaire (Viramundo) qui sera sur les écrans la semaine prochaine, mais l’homme n’avait jamais encore mis les pieds au Caire. «Il est très intéressant et émouvant pour moi d’être en ces lieux dont j’entends parler depuis que j’ai étudié l’histoire à l’école, expliquait-il. Mais sur le plan professionnel, c’est une autre histoire: je vais considérer le concert de ce soir comme une prestation supplémentaire.»

Méconnu dans le pays, Gilberto Gil s’apprêtait alors à monter sur la scène du Cairo Jazz Festival, une jeune manifestation qui mêle artistes égyptiens et personnalités de la scène internationale.«Je suis inconnu ici, alors qu’on me connaît un peu en Europe et en Amérique du Nord. Mais il est parfois plus confortable de jouer devant un public qui n’est pas familier de votre travail, et, à ce titre, n’a pas d’attentes particulières.»

La raison de la venue de Gilberto Gil en Égypte était la conclusion du programme de parrainage Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Après Brian Eno l’an passé, ­Gilberto Gil a accepté de prendre une jeune musicienne sous son aile, afin de l’accompagner pendant une année. Dina el-Wedidi, 25 ans, est ainsi ­devenue sa filleule. «Gil est un mentor extraordinaire, le meilleur dont j’aurais pu rêver», expliquait-elle émue à ses côtés.».

L’engagement citoyen de la jeune femme, qui a participé au printemps arabe, a été le ciment de la complicité entre les deux artistes. À l’âge de Dina, Gilberto Gil prenait part au mouvement tropicaliste. En pleine répression politique, ce collectif d’artistes offrait une alternative colorée et bruyante au pouvoir en place. Gilberto Gil, comme Caetano Veloso, en paiera le prix fort: prison, puis exil à Londres, où il passera deux années au début de la décennie 1970. «Nous avons beaucoup de points communs, souffle Gilberto Gil. La première chose qui m’a attiré chez Dina, est le fait qu’elle n’est pas juste une artiste mais aussi une personne engagée.»

Une sorte de bossa

De son côté, Dina est sensible à la dimension humaniste de l’ancien ministre de la culture brésilien. «Il transmet des idées, de l’énergie mais aussi la paix , explique-t-elle émerveillée. Ce qu’il m’a appris de plus important, c’est de savoir écouter.» Tous deux se sont rencontrés à Rio il y a un an. Dina a suivi Gil dans ses pérégrinations autour du ­monde. «J’ai proposé à Dina qu’elle m’accompagne pendant ma tournée européenne l’été dernier. Nous sommes allés ensemble au festival de Montreux. Elle a aussi joué avec moi à Londres, une de ses compositions originales.» «Une sorte de bossa à l’égyptienne», ajoute la chanteuse. S’il parle plusieurs langues couramment – portugais, anglais, ­français -, Gilberto Gil ne maîtrise pas l’arabe que chante Dina. «Parfois je me demande ce qu’elle chante, mais souvent je me contente de l’écouter. Ou alors elle me parle de ses textes. Mais pour elle comme pour moi, chanter est un acte politique.»

lá no site FIGARO

Mar 21 – Apr 27, 2013

A catalogue with an essay by Max Kozloff will be available.

www.dcmooregallery.com

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the work of Duane Michals, The Painted Photograph, which focuses on his current series of hand-painted tintypes (2011 – 2013). Using 19th-century collodion prints on brown or black lacquered iron as his surface, Michals enriches the original images with oil paint, altering but not entirely obscuring the sitters’ features. Drawing on the principals of early photography and modern painting, especially Surrealism, Michals unites the two disciplines and explores the uncharted territory he identifies between photography and painting. Each 19th-century image is playfully rejuvenated by the addition of vibrant color and the artist’s witty allusions to visionaries such as Picasso and Picabia. In this way, Michals draws our attention to the discrepancy between a popular medium that required little skill—the tintype—and the work of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

A renowned innovator, Michals pushes the limits of photography. In past bodies of work, he has achieved this first by presenting his images in series, at times narrated with text scrawled directly on the print, and then further by embracing each imperfection. In this new work, Michals modifies the images of amateur journeymen, emphasizing the “found object” quality of these portraits of the working class by floating each tintype in spare frames to expose their irregular edges. Michals questions what he describes as “the museum photograph,” or large-format photography, with his small-scale and intimate images. Combining antique, personal objects with hand-painted abstract elements, Michals examines his favorite themes: memory, mortality, love, and loss. The results are curious, humorous, affectionate, and provocative.

Also included in the exhibition are Michals’ “deconstructed” photographs, in which the artist eludes photography’s single, decisive moment by digitally transforming one image into a series. A selection of Michals’ painted photographs from the late 1970s and early 80s will also be on view. Like Michals’ seminal photo sequences, the works in this exhibition draw on personal memory and evoke a surreal sense of fantasy.

Born and raised in McKeesport, PA, Michals received his undergraduate degree from the University of Denver. He served in the army during the Korean War and in the mid-1960s moved to New York, where he studied graphic design and worked as an art director and designer. By the 1960s, Michals was exhibiting regularly in New York, where he still lives.

Over the past five decades, Michals has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA will host a major retrospective of Michals’ work in the fall of 2014. Michals’ first solo museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1970. His work belongs to numerous permanent collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, among others.

In recognition of his contributions, Michals has been honored with a CAPS Grant (1975), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (1989), and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. In 1993, Michals was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.

Publications include Sequences (Doubleday & Co., 1970), Duane Michals Photographes de 1958 à 1982 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1982), Sleep and Dream (Lustrum Press, 1984), Duane Michals Photographs/Sequences/Texts 1958-1984 (Modern Art Oxford, England, 1984), The Essential Duane Michals (Little, Brown & Company, 1997; received the Ernst Haas Book of the Year award), The House I Once Called Home (Enitharmony Editions, 2003), and The Pittsburgh Poem (High Street House Books, 2013).

Curated by Olivier Berggruen

03 May 2013 -14 June 2013

Dickinson is pleased to announce Paul Klee: The Bauhaus Years, curated by Olivier Berggruen. The exhibition will emphasise Klee’s work, from his army release in 1918 until his return to Switzerland in 1933.

Central to this period are the long and fruitful years spent by Klee at the Bauhaus, from 1921 until 1931. At the cradle of modern design, the Bauhaus strove for a synthesis between the crafts, architecture and the arts; first in Weimar, then in Dessau. During this time Klee taught a number of classes, including bookbinding and painting on glass. The pictures he produced often relate to the subject of his courses, such as the interaction of colour, or graphic expression: the backbone of his art.

These various aspects will be covered by the exhibition at Dickinson through numerous institutional loans, including the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, The Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Denver Art Museum, as well as loans from private collections in Europe and America- including some works never previously exhibited in New York.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Olivier Berggruen and Rémi Labrusse.

Olivier Berggruen is a freelance Writer and Curator. He is a renowned specialist in Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee and has organized numerous exhibitions on both artists. He has also written on artists as diverse as Yves Klein and Ed Ruscha.

This will be Olivier Berggruen’s 5th Paul Klee exhibition and his 2nd exhibition at Dickinson, following 2011’s Playing with Form – Concrete Art from Brazil.

For further information please contact gallery at info@simondickinson.com or 212.772.8083

Gallery hours: Monday thru Friday 10-6 pm; Weekends by appointment

www.simondickinson.com

Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

May 9 through June 22, 2013

Cristin Tierney is pleased to present Concrete Remains: Postwar and Contemporary Art from Brazil, a group exhibition curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and opening to the public on Thursday May 9, 2013. A special talk by the curator and walkthrough of the exhibition will be held on Saturday, May 11 at 3:00 p.m.

Concrete Remains will be on view at Cristin Tierney Gallery through June 22, 2013. Artists included in this exhibition are: Geraldo de Barros, Sergio Camargo, Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Iran do Espirito Santo, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, Hélio Oiticica, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.

Concrete Remains examines different moments of Brazilian art of the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically looking at the lasting legacy of Concrete art and Neoconcretism. Artworks by significant figures such as Amilcar de Castro and Hélio Oiticica will be juxtaposed with pieces by contemporary Brazilian artists, including Iran do Espirito Santo, Fernanda Gomes, and Jac Leirner. This exhibition will demonstrate both formal and conceptual affinities between generations, and the growing importance of these artists’ work within the context of a global art world. A variety of media will be featured, including photographs, works on paper, sculpture and installation.

In 1959 a group of Brazilian artists—including Amilcar de Castro and Lygia Clark—published the Neo-Concrete Manifesto. In this manifesto they argued for a continued preoccupation with abstraction and certain tenets of Concrete Art, but suggested that a greater freedom of expression was needed, emphasizing the subjectivity of both artist and viewer and moving beyond rationalism and formalism.

These artists were not dogmatic in their definition of art, and their expansive approach allowed for a completely new kind of art to flourish in Brazil. Often geometric in appearance, these artworks were concerned with the activation of their surrounding space and the conversion of the viewer from passive to active participant in the creation of meaning.

Untitled, by Amilcar de Castro, exemplifies an adherence to these early Neoconcretionist principles: extreme economy of form, elegant lines, and a richness of surface that proves seductive in its simplicity. As the viewer walks around the piece subtle transformations occur: shifts of light and shadow, mass and void. Castro’s engagement of environment through form bears comparison to recent works by Jac Leirner, whose Vagos also have an abstract sensibility but a decisively humorous sense of space and structure. Twist, a work by Iran do Espirito Santo, similarly animates its architectural environs through its austere geometry, its minimal folds echoing those of Geraldo de Barros’ Fotoformas.

About the Curator: Jacopo Crivelli Visconti is a writer and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He holds a degree in Humanities from the University of Naples and a Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP). As curator of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (2007-2009), he was responsible for the Brazilian Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennial, the Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) and the Lulea Biennial (Sweden), among other international exhibitions. His texts and essays have appeared in numerous contemporary art, architecture and design magazines, in addition to exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs.

For more information and images, or to RSVP for the curator talk and walkthrough, please contact Maria Kucinski at 212.594.0550 or maria@cristintierney.com.

www.cristintierney.com

Spring Open Studios
April 26–28, 2013

International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)
1040 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Opening reception: Friday,
April 26, 6–9pm
Hours: Saturday and Sunday,
April 27–28, 1–7pm

www.iscp-nyc.org

The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) Spring Open Studios is a three-day exhibition of international contemporary art. The 27 artists from 20 countries currently in residence present work in their studios. The studio is a generative space—part production site, office, laboratory and situation—and it can be argued that it is more significant today for artistic process than ever before. Open Studios invites the public to 27 “studio visits” to experience art in its place of origin and to share conversations with artists from all over the world.

Participating ISCP artists in Open Studios:

Njideka Akunyili (USA) Simón Edgardo Aragón Díaz (Mexico) Simón Arrebola (Spain) Farah Atassi (France) Anastasia Ax (Sweden) Kevin Beasley (USA) Eunji Cho (South Korea) Paul Dignan (Canada) Tobias Dostal (Germany) Leda Ekimova (Bulgaria) Marco Fusinato (Australia) Mira Gáberová (Slovakia) Isa Ho (Taiwan) Laura Horelli (Finland) Ann Cathrin November Høibo (Norway) Anouk Kruithof (The Netherlands) Mircea Nicolae (Romania) Paulien Oltheten (The Netherlands) Moritz Partenheimer (Germany) Bundith Phunsombatlert (Thailand) Lea Porsager (Denmark) Johannes Rochhausen (Germany) Gamaliel Rodriguez (Puerto Rico) Isa Rosenberger (Austria) Annesofie Sandal (Denmark) Felisia Tandiono (USA) Robert Voerman (The Netherlands)

On Sunday, April 28th, at 4pm, ISCP presents the panel discussion “Art, Wastelands and Ecology: What lies ahead?” in conjunction with ISCP’s Participatory Projects program that commissions and produces the work of ISCP current residents and alumni in the public realm. This panel will reflect on critical issues in urban development with regard to contemporary cultural production. ISCP’s neighborhood of East Williamsburg/Bushwick, Brooklyn is situated at the juncture of residential, industrial and seemingly desolate lands; the socio-political and environmental impacts of its rapid transformation will be discussed alongside panelists’ current projects and research. Panelists: Olivia Georgia, Executive Director, Mary Miss/City as Living Laboratory (CaLL); Jesse Goldstein, Adjunct Professor, Design and Urban Ecologies, The New School; and Jan Mun, Artist in Residence, Newtown Creek Alliance.

Accompanying Open Studios and through May 24th, the exhibition New Eyes for New Spaces, curated by Francesca Sonara and Jess Wilcox, includes works by Patricia Dauder, David Horvitz, Antonio Rovaldi, Austin Shull, and Hong-Kai Wang in collaboration with Anne Callahan, Brendan Dalton and Jordan Paul. The included artists actively investigate, abstract, and fragment representations of place by intervening with information culled from photographs, video or sound recordings, effectively focusing the viewers’ attention on the gap between what is seen and what is imagined. This exhibition unravels how technological advancements of the last ten years have changed not only how we conceive of site, but also how we perceive it.

ISCP thanks the following contributors for their generous support

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; American Australian Association, New York; Australian Consulate General, New York; Austrian Cultural Forum, New York; Brooklyn Brewery, New York; Consulate General of Denmark, New York; Consulate General of the Netherlands, New York; Consulate General of the Slovak Republic, New York; Consulate General of Sweden, New York; Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; The Greenwich Collection, New York; The Mexican Cultural Institute, New York; National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Romanian Cultural Institute, New York; and Royal Norwegian Consulate General, New York.

Richard Serra in his studio, New York, 1968. Art © 2013 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © 2013 Lawrence Fried.

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of early work by the artist Richard Serra. Dating from 1966 to 1971, the works on view, drawn from museum and private collections, represent the beginning of the artist’s innovative, process-oriented experiments with nontraditional materials, such as vulcanized rubber, neon, and lead, in addition to key early examples of his work in steel. Also featured will be a program of the artist’s films from this period.

The interplay of gravity and material that was introduced early in his career set the stage for Serra’s ongoing engagement with the spatial and temporal properties of sculpture. This exhibition aims to reconsider the groundbreaking practices and ideas that so firmly situate Serra in the history of 20th Century art.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery will publish a comprehensive monograph devoted to this early period of the artist’s practice with Steidl, Göttingen; the publication will include new scholarship by Hal Foster, in addition to a selection of archival texts and photographs from the years 1966 to 1972.

Richard Serra’s (born 1938) first solo exhibitions were held at the Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1966, and, in the United States, at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition was held at The Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Serra has since participated in Documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), in Kassel; the Venice Biennales of 1984 and 2001; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1995. He has had solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1977; the Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1978; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1980; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1984; the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1985; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, 1986; the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987; the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1987; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1988; the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1990; the Kunsthaus Zürich, 1990; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1992; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1997; Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, 1997-98; Trajan’s Market, Rome, 2000; The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, 2003; and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004. In 2005 eight large-scale works by Serra were installed permanently at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and in 2007 the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented a retrospective of the artist’s work. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris in 2008 (MONUMENTA 2008: Richard Serra: Promenade); in 2011-12 the exhibition Brancusi-Serra traveled from the Beyeler Foundation, Riehen to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and a traveling survey of Serra’s drawings was on view in 2011-12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Menil Collection, Houston.

Read the press release here (download PDF).

Read the review in The New York Times by Ken Johnson (Friday, April 19).

Read The Wall Street Journal‘s April 12, 2013 interview with Richard Serra here.

Watch the video of the artist’s press preview here.

Watch Richard Serra on The Charlie Rose Show from 2011.

Richard Serra: Early Work, at David Zwirner

Resenha do Ken Johnson no site do New York Times.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Richard Serra’s “prop” sculptures, like “V + 5: To Michael Heizer,” are held together only by friction and their weight.

Say what you will about the rise of the intercontinental mega-gallery, it’s hard not to feel grateful for what it has given the art-loving public. Any art museum in the world would be proud to offer — and unashamed to charge visitors to see — “Richard Serra: Early Work,” a near-perfect, admission-free exhibition in the for-profit art dealer David Zwirner’s gorgeous new building on West 20th Street in Chelsea.

The exhibition consists entirely of sculptures borrowed from institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim and from private collections. In two spacious, sky-lit rooms it reveals with wonderful economy five formative years in the career of the man who has come to be the world’s most admired living sculptor. The first room is filled with an array of single and grouped objects that might collectively be titled “Back to Basics.” Each piece is the result of some sort of physical procedure, often involving lead. “Folded, Unfolded” is a sheet of lead flat on the floor that was folded into quarters and then unfolded. “Tearing Lead” is a sheet of lead accompanied by crumpled ribbons of metal evidently torn from its edges. “Three Lead Coils” consists of lengths of coiled lead tubing hanging from the wall and falling to the floor. Four works consist of sheets of lead rolled like carpets; one, called “Bullet,” resembles a large-caliber cannon shell.

Most complicated is “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure,” a floor display of steel plates, pieces of pipe and large blocks of wood. Mr. Serra created it by arranging those materials on a steel base plate, then running them through an industrial saw with two parallel blades, dividing the whole into three parts. It’s like a salesman’s demonstration of his product’s capability.

Hardly anything here would be recognizable as art were it encountered at a construction site or junkyard. A viewer could suppose that Mr. Serra was engaging in the philosophical game of importing nonart objects into the gallery and in that way turning them into artworks, as Duchamp did when he presented a urinal as a sculpture.

But Mr. Serra’s intentions were otherwise, as he made clear in “Verb List,” two pages of handwritten phrases, including “to fold,” “to impress,” “to flood,” “to grasp,” “to bundle” and many more. The list also includes nouns, as in “of gravity,” “of entropy” and “of nature.” What all these have in common is that they have to do with being and acting physically in the material world.

Missing from the list are more cerebral activities, like representing, imagining and symbolizing, as well as concepts associated with artistic creativity, like aesthetics, metaphor and transcendence. “Verb List” is a manifesto declaring Mr. Serra’s commitment to an anti-idealistic program grounded in the phenomenological experience of time and space.

Some short films by Mr. Serra on view in a smaller room also insist on material conditions. “Hand Catching Lead” shows his hand trying and mostly failing to catch falling pieces of metal. In “Color Aid,” the longest at 36 minutes, his dirty fingertips repeatedly drag colored sheets of paper out of the frame to uncover other sheets, differently colored.

While various works in the first room call to mind other artists operating in what would come to be called the Post Minimalist genre — Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman — the works in the second room, dating from 1969 to 1971, are unlike anyone else’s.

The first four consist of lead plates, four feet square and an inch thick, standing on edge, all propped up without welds, screws or glue. In “One Ton Prop (House of Cards),” four slabs lean against one another to form a square enclosure. In both “V + 5: To Michael Heizer” and “5:30” a single long lead pole is laid across groupings of the slabs, touching a corner of each to keep them in place. In “Equal (Corner Prop Piece),” one standing plate, bisecting but not touching a corner of the gallery, is held up by a horizontal four-foot pole touching one of the plate’s corners and both of the gallery’s adjacent walls.

Because nothing but friction and gravity holds these arrangements in place, there is a sense of danger about them — that they could come crashing down. A sign in the gallery warns viewers to keep their distance.

The exhibition’s grand finale is “Strike: To Roberta and Rudy” (1969-1971), a single slab of hot-rolled steel, 8 foot 1 inches tall, 24 feet long and an inch and a half thick, wedged into a gallery corner at one end and jutting into the room at 45 degrees. To progress from the multiplicity and fragmentation of the works in the first room to the simpler and clearer prop works to this utterly unified condensation is to take an exhilarating intellectual journey.

A historically minded viewer might wonder about a young artist doing such seemingly insular, self-reflexive things during the peak years of war in Southeast Asia and sociopolitical turmoil at home. In its own way, however, Mr. Serra’s art was vehemently ideological. If you consider how much trouble can be caused by idealistic convictions — religious and nationalistic zealotry, for example — then you understand his insistence on the experience of material states.

You still might be concerned about Mr. Serra’s participation in today’s high-end art system, epitomized by Zwirner’s fabulous new pleasure palace. To achieve his ambitions, Mr. Serra has had to collaborate not only with the architecture of the white cube but also with museum and gallery administrators, wealthy patrons and, in the giant steel spiral enclosures of his recent decades, with big-scale fabricators.

It’s perplexing. Isn’t modern art supposed to challenge hegemonic power? Or is the idealistic dream of art’s radical independence a distracting delusion? There’s no pat answer. Reality, after all, is nothing if not paradoxical. That is one of the deeper lessons of Mr. Serra’s titanic career.

“Richard Serra: Early Work” runs through June 15 at David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, Chelsea; (212) 517-8677, www.davidzwirner.com.

Tá lá no site do NUBLU.

LAWRENCE D.”BUTCH” MORRIS. THE MAN WHO CHANGED US ALL HERE AT NUBLU . WITHOUT BUTCH BEING AROUND, NUBLU WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN THE SAME. SO MUCH INSPIRATION AND SO MANY KIND WORDS AND HARD WORDS ABOUT WHAT MUSIC MEANS AND ITS RELATION WITH LIFE. OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS WE PROBABLY PERFORMED MORE THAN 100 CONCERTS AT NUBLU AS “NUBLU ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY BUTCH MORRIS”. BEFORE EACH AND EVERY CONCERT WE HAD MEETINGS IN THE BASEMENT PRIOR TO THE SHOW WHERE BUTCH LAID OUT THE FORMULA OF LIFE….HOW TO LISTEN, HOW TO BE COMFORTABLE IN THE MOMENT, HOW TO REACT AND EXECUTE YOUR RESPONSE IN THE MOST CLEAR AND PERSONAL WAY. HE WAS TEACHING US HOW TO READ HIS SIGNS, BUT IN THE END IT WAS REALLY ABOUT HOW TO SEE LIFE AND MAKE THE PERSONAL CHOICES THAT WILL ADD TO AND RAISE THE MEANINGFUL COMPOSITION OF THE ENSEMBLE. HOW TO RELATE YOUR VOICE IN A GROUP WHEN EVEN IN YOUR SOLOIST MOMENTS YOU ARE BEING INDIVIDUAL AND ONE TOGETHER.

I BELIEVE BUTCH’S “CONDUCTION” (AS HE CALLED IT) WAS ABOUT ELEVATING YOUR MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS TO A POINT WHERE YOUR THOUGHTS START BEING CHANGED TO A POSITIVE AND HIGHER LEVEL OF THINKING (OR NO THINKING), AND WITHIN THAT, ART IS BEING PRODUCED. THAT IS THE EXPERIENCE ALL GREAT MUSICIANS IN THE NUBLU ORCHESTRA SHARED. BESIDES PLAYING IN NYC FOR THE LAST 7 YEARS OR SO, WE ALSO HAD MANY GREAT SHOWS IN BRAZIL, FRANCE , TURKEY ,AUSTRIA, ITALY , MACEDONIA, POLAND AND HOLLAND. ALL BEING EXECUTED FROM BUTCH’S BATON AND FROM THE HAND SIGNS WITHIN HIS “CONDUCTION” CONCEPT THAT ELEVATED THE AUDIENCES ALL AROUND THE WORLD.

OF COURSE, THE ONES WHO WERE CLOSE TO HIM ALSO KNEW THAT HIS ART AND MUSIC LIFE STARTED WAY BEFORE SHOWTIME . IN MANY HIGH-SPIRITED DINNERS AND LONG NIGHTS AT THE BAR, WE DISCUSSED LIFE AND HOW TO RELATE IT INTO MUSIC, INTO OUR MUSIC! NUBLU ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY BUTCH MORRIS WAS CREATED WITH THE THOUGHT OF ADDING THE “NUBLU SOUND”, ITS NIGHT LIFE/ CLUB- FEEL TO BUTCH’S EXISTING MUSIC CONCEPT, BY BRINGING PSYCHEDELIA, BEATS AND BIG STAGE FEEL TO THE PERFORMANCES.

WE RELEASED 2 CD’S AS THE “NUBLU ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY BUTCH MORRIS”, 1 STUDIO ALBUM AND 1 LIVE ALBUM AT SAALFELDEN JAZZ FESTIVAL. WE ALSO RELEASED 3 12″ VINYLS WITH REMIXES OF SOME OF THE TRACKS AS WELL.

BUTCH!…… IT WAS A PLEASURE TO HAVE MET YOU! LOVE AND THANKS FROM ALL OF US. YOU WILL BE WITH US ALWAYS…WATCH OVER US!

Martin Boyce

18 Apr 2013 – 25 May 2013

“But this passage has neither entrance nor exit…”

-Haruki Murakami, Wind Up Bird Chronicle

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is delighted to present

It’s Over

and Over

an exhibition of new work by Martin Boyce and the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Through a series of architectural interventions — free-standing windows and hanging lanterns — Boyce transforms the ground-floor space into an immersive and dream-like landscape. Populated by sculptures that simultaneously reference and redefine the legacy of modernist forms, the eerie environment that Boyce creates collapses the distinctions between past, present, and future. Like Murakami’s paradoxical passageway, with neither entry nor exit, Boyce’s works seem to exist in their own autonomous world, untethered to any fixed time or place.

At the entry to the gallery, Boyce presents a series of photos, titled Projectile Sun. The five images that compose the work track an orb of light defined by the circular window of an airplane as it moves across the bulkhead. The abstract photos resemble the sun itself as it rises and falls in the sky, but are disorienting — the sun in these images does not establish a sense of location, but instead conveys a feeling of “placeless-ness” that continues in the main gallery.

Just beyond the photos, a doorway leads into a darkened space that houses Boyce’s imagined terrain. Suspended from various heights on a single chain, a constellation of colorful lanterns made from perforated steel glows warmly in the otherwise un-illuminated space. The material and form of the lamps conjure up the outdoor space of an illuminated terrace or courtyard, and as sculptures they point away from themselves to activate the floor below.

Much of Boyce’s work engages with thresholds and transformation. With the sculpture Against the Night, which takes a 1951 Jean Prouvé library table as its form, the distinction between interior and exterior dissolves. The table appears to have been abandoned and battered by the elements; its tabletop is now a broken piece of shuttering ply and steel lanterns like those hanging from the ceiling replace the original built-in light fixture. In another table work, a grill is set into the concrete surface acting somewhere between a drain and a window. Above the table a mobile is suspended. Constructed from brass L-section and chain, the sculpture collapses the distance between the natural form of a weeping willow branch and the constructed world of its constituent parts. Both sculptures recombine references to modernist forms in unexpected ways to create a poetic synthesis.

The lyrical and poetic nature of Boyce’s work is apparent throughout the exhibition, but especially clear in a single wall-work. A large panel that appears to be a boarded up window set into a section of cast concrete contains the word “Eclipse” spelled out in the artists own tumbling typography. The letters that appear in the work get their angular shapes from the silhouette of a concrete tree designed in the 1920s by Jan and Joel Martel that has been of central importance to Boyce’s practice for the past eight years.

Winner of the Tate’s 2011 Turner Prize, Martin Boyce (b. 1967) lives and works in Glasgow. Boyce completed a commission as part of the List Visual Art Center’s permanent sculpture program on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, MA in 2011 and in 2009, the artist represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, among others.

“It’s all about the immaterial… The paradox is that the immaterial must be created from material, it must materialize, which is what really counts: the autonomy of the thing itself.”

Fernanda Gomes, 2013

Alison Jacques Gallery is delighted to present Brazilian artist Fernanda Gomes’ first exhibition at the gallery. This marks Gomes’ first show in the UK since her solo exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1997 and comes a year before her forthcoming museum solo show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Employing the same premise as she chose for her recent São Paulo Biennial presentation, Gomes is spending the weeks prior to the opening of her exhibition, making work and editing her practice in the gallery spaces. Building her work in situ, Gomes’s solo show will appropriate the exhibition spaces as an extension of her studio.

Gomes’ work exists between painting and sculpture, avoiding categorization and blurring the boundaries between object and space, light and shadow, composition and dispersion. If the essential geometries of Fernanda Gomes’ installations formally recall an earlier generation of Brazilian art – the modulated space works and matchbox structures of Lygia Clark or the Metaesquemas of Helio Oiticica – they also embody Alberto Burri’s philosophy of ‘truth to materials’ exemplified in the Arte Povera movement. Through Gomes’ choice of materials, be they found objects, pieces of wood or natural materials such as gold and water, she references the poetics of the immaterial and the relationship of form to a whole. Like the Russian Constructivist Kazimir Malevich, Gomes addresses the dissolution of planes in space and her use of white as the only artificial colour in her practice in part references the history of the monochrome. Employing only the organic palette of the colours of existing objects, or smearing white across their surfaces, Gomes highlights the tangible properties of her objects while simultaneously making parts of them disappear.

Fernanda Gomes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) recently participated in the São Paulo Biennial curated by Luis Perez-Oramas (2012) and the Rennes Biennial (2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Museu de Cidade, Lisbon (2012) and MAM, Rio de Janeiro (2011). Previous museum shows include Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2006) and The Chisenhale Gallery (1997). Gomes’ work has been acquired by many museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro; and Tate Modern, London.

In addition to her solo show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014), Gomes will have a solo show at the Centre International de l’art et du Paysage, Vassivière (2013).

Fernanda Gomes is represented by Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

A  exposição Travessias 2 – Arte Contemporânea na Maré começou sábado com muita festa, gente e chuva. A curadoria é minha e do Felipe Scovino e os artistas são: Arjan Martins, Cadu, Carlos Vergara, Daniel Senise, Ernesto Neto, Lucas Bambozzi, Luiza Baldan, Marcelo Silveira, Ratão Diniz e Vik Muniz. O site está no ar cheio de fotos, videos, textos e informações. E tem também Instagram, Blog, Twitter, Facebook e Youtube. Visitem, apareçam, divulguem. A exposição fica em cartaz até 23 de junho. Abaixo segue o texto q escrevi com Scovino.

Eduardo Magalhães/14

Travessias-Arte-Maré

O Rio de Janeiro passa hoje por grandes mudanças urbanísticas, arquitetônicas, políticas, econômicas e culturais. Na verdade, toda grande cidade do mundo está sempre em permanente transformação, redefinindo suas fronteiras, reinventando-se a cada dia. Mas há uma singularidade na transformação que o Rio vive nesse momento, ela se dá em sintonia e simultaneidade com outras duas grandes mudanças planetárias: o surgimento de uma nova sensibilidade humana decorrente das recentes formas de comunicação e vida digital; e um novo desenho mundial com as nações emergentes mais fortalecidas.

O Rio hoje cresce dentro do seu próprio tamanho, sem empurrar suas fronteiras, apenas reinventando o próprio território, cresce na cabeça e na estima do cidadão. Um dos traços importantes dessa transformação é o movimento da cidade caminhando definitivamente para além da zona sul. O carioca pouco a pouco abandona o velho clichê tacanho e começa a perceber que a cidade é muito maior do que os bairros que beiram a praia. Novas regiões renascem e passam a ser compartilhadas pela população local e pelos visitantes. E é nesse momento de concílio com a cidade, de diálogo entre distintas formações sociais e econômicas, de conviver e entender as diferenças do outro, que a exposição Travessias 2 – Arte Contemporânea na Maré se coloca.

As perguntas que pairam no ar são: como viver em um mundo regido por diferenças, e qual o papel do artista nessa cidade que muda vertiginosamente?

Um ponto fundamental da exposição Travessias 2 é o seu caráter educativo, pois acreditamos que a aliança entre educação e cultura são pontos-chaves para a mudança social e política de qualquer sociedade.

A reunião dos artistas se dá pela qualidade de suas obras, pelo impacto visual e, mais do que isso, pelo poder de transformação do olhar que elas revelam. Estão reunidas as novas pesquisas sobre a ampliação da pintura (nas obras de Daniel Senise e Carlos Vergara) ou como este suporte se alia a um lirismo que revela a precisão dos gestos do artista e de seu olhar poético sobre cenas fotográficas colecionadas ao acaso (como nas obras de Arjan Martins). Há ainda a escultura que se lança ao espaço com um sentido de experimentação (nas obras de Cadu e Ernesto Neto), a apropriação e desconstrução da fotografia (Vik Muniz) e o modo como o uso documental dela é explorado pelos artistas visuais (nas obras de Luiza Baldan e Ratão Diniz) ou como ela se relaciona com a escultura (no caso de Marcelo Silveira), ou ainda a apropriação poética e política (nos vídeos de Lucas Bambozzi).

Essas obras se encontram aqui em torno da ideia de transformação, de uma cidade em trânsito. Sejam nas pequenas caixas/maquetes que ampliam a dimensão de salas e obras de importantes museus realizadas por Senise; nos aeromodelos de montar que Cadu subverte em sua prática escultórica; na obra mole de Neto que cria uma relação entre corpo, ritmo e música, alargando o conceito de escultura e criando um ambiente que é regido pela “pele” e pelo som; ou nas colagens em formato lambe-lambe na obra de Silveira, compondo uma paisagem ou relevo de um território e memórias fictícias. A exuberância visual das obras de Vik Muniz atraem o espectador como num jogo de erros, há um embaralhamento e sobreposição de recortes de revistas formando uma segunda imagem que se constrói e desconstrói à medida que nos aproximamos ou afastamos das obras. Vergara decalca a cidade e faz dela um signo de sua própria história. Suas monotipias asseguram a permanência daquele lugar através do tempo, nos fazem perceber não apenas a ampliação o que pode ser chamado de pintura, mas aliam esse suporte a uma investigação sobre a própria memória do lugar. Baldan, Bambozzi e Ratão documentam, cada um a seu modo e por meio de distintos suportes, os indícios de uma cidade e de seus personagens que se reconstroem a cada instante. Nas obras desses três artistas, há uma proximidade entre o que está sendo visto e quem o vê, sem uma apelação ao clichê. É uma aproximação que se dá pelo afeto, pelo reconhecimento – em especial nas fotos de Baldan e de Multidão, de Bambozzi –, e não porque ambos estão em um estado de carência ou abandono (imagem e visitante). São obras celebratórias, definitivamente.

Dialogar e compreender o desconhecido ou o diferente na arte (as primeiras perguntas que fazemos quando estamos diante de uma obra de arte geralmente são: o que é isto? Para que serve?) é deslocar essa mesma relação para a nossa vida e, mais do que isso, compreender que aquele diálogo com o diferente pode moldar o nosso olhar e a nossa alma. Uma condição, por sua vez, que pode ser levada para qualquer relação interpessoal. Mais uma vez se coloca a questão: como compreender ou dialogar com aquilo que – aparentemente – é tão diferente de nós? Respondemos a esta pergunta com outra: mas não é exatamente isso o que passamos em todos os momentos da nossa vida? A arte quer preencher esse intervalo, possibilitar ao espectador uma visão ampla e democrática sobre o mundo, e fundamentalmente deixar claro que a diferença não é ruim, pelo contrário, é ela que possibilita a riqueza e a diversidade da nossa cultura e cidadania.

Travessias 2 – Arte Contemporânea na Maré é uma exposição que cria, desta forma, uma correspondência com novos sentimentos que atravessam a cidade: reinvenção, recuperação e transformação. As obras de arte aqui reunidas atuam na formação de um novo cidadão/espectador conectado com a descoberta das fronteiras móveis da cidade. O papel dos artistas hoje é tornar aparente a escala do mundo e seus fluxos que crescem sem parar.

Felipe Scovino e Raul Mourão

Últimos dias para conferir a exposição Assembleia, de Paul Ramirez Jonas na Galeria Nara Roesler, SP. Segue o texto do Pablo Helguera que eu peguei lá no site da Nara.

Assembleia

O conjunto da obra de Paul Ramirez Jonas – cujo reconhecimento internacional já lhe rendeu participações nas bienais de Veneza e São Paulo, entre outras – é frequentemente marcado pela consciência do coletivo. Isso é, no entanto, tão enraizado em seu pensamento artístico que suas estratégias fogem aos procedimentos colaborativos usuais da arte contemporânea; o artista não apenas confere ao público o papel ativo na construção do sentido dos trabalhos, mas verdadeiramente reflete as complexidades da esfera coletiva e faz delas premissa de suas criações.

Um aspecto dessa preocupação, que se apresenta discreta graças ao caráter irônico de sua poética, foi bem comentado por Pablo Helguera, artista mexicano e diretor acadêmico do MoMA (NY), convidado a assinar o texto crítico da exposição: “…este interesse não contém apenas a dicotomia entre pessoal e público; parece desejar um certo anonimato que, embora pessoal, é conferido pela presença da mensagem em público.” Como caso exemplar, o autor cita os monumentos feitos de cortiça, representados na mostra da Galeria Nara Roesler por um busto – tanto o uso do material prosaico para uma forma geralmente feita em metal ou pedra quanto a presença de um corte que impossibilita a identificação do retratado, subvertem o caráter sempre cerimonioso, afirmativo e simbolicamente inerte do busto. A peça de Ramirez Jonas, não por acaso chamada Ventriloquist, é quase uma transfiguração do mural de recados em cortiça. Um “monumento” parecido, um cavalo em cortiça, foi apresentado na Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo em 2011.

Em outras peças, é o caráter coletivamente constituído da cultura que entra em questão, como em Assembly (Ghazi Stadium), uma série de painéis que compõem a imagem aérea de um estádio de futebol a partir da justaposição de milhares de ingressos de diferentes cores. Cada individualidade ali representada por um ticket sugere distintos potenciais de participação social (fato especialmente eloquente por se tratar de um estádio afegão, palco de esportes mas também de manifestações políticas).

No caminho oposto, mas igualmente crítico, está Registered, obra em que etiquetas, como aquelas usadas para exibir os nomes de pessoas em eventos empresariais, lembram o anonimato que emerge das formas padronizadas de identificação pessoal. Nas duas obras, é possível notar sugestões de respostas abertas a perguntas que menciona Pablo Helguera, “tal como definir o que é uma democracia funcional nos dias de hoje. Como podemos nos unir por um propósito comum sem nos perder nesse processo? Como a arte pode nos ajudar nesse processo?”

Um exemplo mais sutil (e talvez por isso ainda mais rico em interpretações) de indagação inconclusiva é Declaration, trabalho que o artista provocativamente afirma se constituir da única nota e da única palavra de uma nova canção. Um assertivo trompete e uma veemente bandeira são destituídos de suas naturezas usualmente assertiva e veemente: o trompete é suporte para a palavra open – o instrumento não emite som, serve apenas de mastro, e a palavra grafada não se afirma em nenhum sentido determinado. Fica a dúvida se se trata de um manifesto por abertura espiritual, ou mesmo se estamos diante do anúncio de um empreendimento comercial recém-inaugurado.

Estas são apenas alguma das instigantes ausências de respostas conclusivas que essa obra possibilita. No texto curatorial, escrito em forma de carta ao artista, Helguera analisa: “Não existem fórmulas, nem deveriam existir; não existe permanência ou estabilidade nessas respostas, assim como o tamanho, peso e indestrutibilidade de um monumento não garantem sua importância. O que devemos fazer é buscar aqueles momentos de clareza que se alcançam assim como você o faz, ao complicar nossa relação com o público, com o passado, com aquilo que julgávamos ter sido completamente compreendido.”

Sobre o artista

Paul Ramirez Jonas nasceu em 1965, em Honduras. Vive e trabalha em Nova York, Estados Unidos. Participou da 53ª Bienal de Veneza, Itália (2009); da 6ª Bienal de Xangai, China (2006); da 28ª Bienal de São Paulo (2008) e da 7ª Bienal do Mercosul, em Porto Alegre (2009), ambas no Brasil. Exposições coletivas recentes de que participou incluem: Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, em El Museo del Barrio (2012) e An Exchange with Sol LeWitt, Cabinet (2011), ambas em Nova York, Estados Unidos; Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound, no Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, em Gateshead, Reino Unido (2010); e The Quick and the Dead, no Walker Art Center, em Minneapolis, Estados Unidos (2009). Suas mais recentes mostras individuais são: Publicar, na Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brasil (2011); Key to the City, Creative Time (2010) e Alexander Gray Associates (2009), ambas em Nova York, Estados Unidos. Suas obras fazem parte de coleções como as de: Blanton Museum, em Austin; Bronx Museum, New Museum e Albright-Knox Art Gallery, todos em Nova York, Estados Unidos; Malmö Konstmuseum, em Malmö, Suécia; e Itaú Cultural, em São Paulo, Brasil.

Sobre o autor do texto crítico

Pablo Helguera nasceu em 1971 na Cidade do Mexico. Estudou na School of Arts Visual, University of Mexico e na Faculty of Fine Arts, University Barcelona e na School of Arts, Instituto of Arts, Chicago. Trabalha com desenhos, colagens, instalações, filmes, e performance, além de utilizar palestras e conferências como parte de sua obra. Seus temas são história, pedagogia, sóciolinguista, etnografia e memória, tecendo relações entre história cultural e linguagem. Helguera vive e trabalha em Nova York e é diretor acadêmico do MoMA. Como artista, participou das Bienais do Mercosul e de Havana, e foi bolsista da Guggenheim Foundation.

Serviço:

Assembleia | Paul Ramirez Jonas

Abertura: dia 21.2, às 19h

Exposição: de 22.2 a 24.3.2013

De segunda a sexta, das 10 às 19h – sábado, das 11 às 15h

Galeria Nara Roesler: Av. Europa, 655 – Jardim Europa

Tel 11 3063.2344

In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—presented the first abstract pictures to the public. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork, tracing the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

Organized by Leah Dickerman, Curator, with Masha Chlenova, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

lá no www do MoMA tem um site sobre a exposição cheio de videos etc, confere lá.

Em janeiro de 2011 eu descobri os desenhos de Gervasio Troche e publiquei aqui no b®og um pequenino post. Hoje recebi um email de Troche anunciando seu novo livro chamado Dibujos invisibles editado pela Sudamericana.

Troche dibuja a mano, artesanalmente.

Pocos elementos: un tarrito de tinta, un pincelito y agua.

Eso es todo. No necesita más para hipnotizarnos.

Como a los buenos cantautores, le basta un instrumento para poblar de magia las horas.

Equilibristas, violinistas, árboles y pájaros, linternas, lluvias y estrellas, sombras, hombres y mujeres, son algunos de los actores de sus páginas.

Nos interrogan sin querer. En silencio.

Tute

O grande Carlito Carvalhosa me mandou agora fotos da sua exposição Sala de Espera no novo Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP no parque Ibirapuera. Tá grande, tá bonito. Quero ver de perto.