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The Work of Andreas Gursky
The Work of Andreas Gursky
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Andreas Gursky is a German landscape photographer and large format architect. Gursky, an admirer of post-production software usage in photography, talks openly about its benefit. He has used some of the most unconventional photographic techniques to capture images and his techniques have gotten international recognition. He has compared his work to modern trance music for its simplicity and symmetry.
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His most famous landscape photographs include two six series photographs named ‘Rhein’ and ‘Ocean’. ‘Rhein’ is the depiction of the River Rhine and ‘Ocean’ series consists of six large size photographs augmented from satellite photographs of the ocean on internet. The second photograph of his Rhein series named as ‘Rhein II’ has sold for US$ 4.3 million making it the most expensive photograph of all time.
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The Work of William Klein
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An international jury at Photokina 1963 voted William Klein one of the 30 most important photographers in the medium's history. He became famous in Europe immediately upon publication of his strikingly intense book of photographs, Life Is Good for You in New York - William Klein Trance Witness Revels, for which he won the Prix Nadar in 1956. Klein's visual language made an asset out of accident, graininess, blur, and distortion. He has described his work as "a crash course in what was not to be done in photography." Klein employed a wide-angle lens, fast film, and novel framing and printing procedures to make images in a fragmented, anarchic mode that emphasized raw immediacy and highlighted the photographer's presence in the scene.
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Klein revisited New York in 1954 and began his documentation of the city, hurling himself into the urban chaos. He worked in direct opposition to the model of elegance and discretion he saw in the images of Henri Cartier-Bresson. From 1955 to 1965, Klein produced bizarrely original fashion photography for Vogue and other publications. His employer at Vogue, Alexander Liberman, wrote, "In the fashion pictures of the fifties, nothing like Klein had happened before. He went to extremes, which took a combination of great ego and courage. He pioneered the telephoto and wide-angle lenses, giving us a new perspective. He took fashion out of the studio and into the streets.
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Good morning - Ironweed Misty Morning
Ironweed Misty Morning
Photographer : Robert Courtois
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Aliens explain art at The Art Newspaper Russia’s awards ceremony
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The Art Newspaper Russia’s fourth prize-giving ceremony, on 17 March, was held (as in previous years) in the vast Manege next to the Kremlin. It was an artistic spectacle in itself, as well as a discriminating sample of Russia’s art life in 2015. Inna Bazhenova, the owner of The Art Newspaper group, again employed the film director Alexey Agranovich and the pioneer of Russian video art, Kirill Preobrazhensky, to produce it.
Aliens, dressed in fluorescent Avant-Garde costumes by the engineer-artist Roman Ermakov, excitedly chattered about this thing called art, while each prize was followed by a themed turn: saucy, dancing air-stewardesses giving safety instructions for visiting a museum (prize for the best museum—Dasha Zhukova’s Garage) or ravishing early church music (best restoration—a 12th-century icon, the Bogolubskaya Mother of God).
The winner in the best publication category was the Sketches of Visuality series, edited by Galina Elshevskaya (New Literary Observer publishing house, Moscow). The best exhibition was the hugely popular 150th anniversary show at Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery of the painter Valentin Serov, while the prize for personal contribution went to Stella Kesaeva, who is the commissioner for, and backer of, the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
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Artistic censorship is on the rise, advocacy group reports
Attacks on artistic freedom are on the rise globally, according to a report issued by Freemuse, an independent organisation based in Copenhagen that advocates for and defends freedom of expression.A study the group conducted, based on media reports and other sources, found that there were 469 cases of attacks on artistic expression last year, almost double the count in 2014. Most of the cases were issues of censorship (292), though the total also includes incidents of artists being detained (23), prosecuted (42), physically attacked (24), or even killed (3). Among the worst offenders last year were authoritarian governments, with China having registered 20 “serious violations”, followed by Iran (16) and Russia (15). The reasons for and types of restrictions on expression detailed in the study are multifarious—headings include “Turkey: Terror Legislation and a Thin-Skinned President” and “Egypt: Censorship Stifles Artistic Freedom”.
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The top 10 countries the Freemuse registered as having serious violations of artistic freedom in 2015, including killings, abductions, attacks, threats and imprisonment
The data for the study was largely collected fr om publicly available sources, such as news media, partner organisations and independent reporters. Freemuse therefore say the “disturbing increase” in attacks on expression can be partially explained by improvements in documentation and awareness. But this also means that countries like North Korea, where there is strict state control of the media, have few reported incidents, a flaw Freemuse’s senior programme officer Magnus acknowledged in an interview. “The fact that North Korea is among the most censored and controlled countries in the world is not reflected in our statistics,” Ag says, attributing the lack of evidence “to the fact that it is extremely difficult for any human rights organisation to document and verify information about violations within this repressive regime”. The one case of censorship it registered in North Korean last year was a decree issued by the leader Kim Jong-un, demanding the destruction of tapes and CDs that could threaten the government.The study also classified the November terrorist attacks in Paris, which resulted in the deaths of 89 people, as the single largest attack on artistic freedom. “Without speculating about the motive of the attackers, we see the horrendous attack on the Bataclan as an attack on a music venue wh ere audiences were enjoying the right to participate in cultural life,” Ag says. He adds that an aftereffect was that many people in the city “refrained from visiting museums, attending concerts and theatres in the months following the attacks”.
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Sol LeWitt’s art collection reveals friendships and artistic resonances
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Alighiero Boetti, Per Sol, Carol, Sofia, Eva LeWitt, Oggi il nono giorno nono mese dell'anno mille novecento ottantotto (For Sol, Carol, Sofia, Eva LeWitt, Today the ninth day of the ninth month of the year nineteen hundred and eighty-eight), 1988.
Drawings from the collection of the American Minimalist and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt are at the centre of an exhibition opening at the Drawing Center in New York. The show offers a peak into the more than 4,000 works by around 750 artists LeWitt amassed before his death in 2007.
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Van Gogh’s The Night Café to stay at Yale after US Supreme Court rejects appeal
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Vincent Van Gogh’s $200m painting, The Night Café (1888), is to remain hanging at Yale University after the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal over its ownership. The decision last week ends a lengthy legal battle between the university and Pierre Konowaloff, who first wrote to Yale in 2008, arguing that the work was stolen from his family during the Russian Revolution. Yale then filed a lawsuit against Konowaloff in 2009 pre-emptively, after which Konowaloff filed a response and counterclaim.
Konowaloff’s lawyer, Allan Gerson, accepted there was nothing else he could do. “This is the end of the road,” Gerson told the student paper, Yale Daily News. “There is not much I or anyone can do except respect the rulings of the court, but I do believe there has been a miscarriage of justice.”
Alexander Dreier, the vice president and general counsel at Yale, said the university had been confident that the Supreme Court would not accept the appeal. “We don’t see any opening for a new challenge to Yale’s ownership,” Dreier said.
Konowaloff had argued that his great-grandfather, the industrialist and aristocrat Ivan Morozov, bought The Night Café in 1908. The Bolsheviks seized Morozov’s extensive collection in 1918 and the Russian government later sold the Van Gogh painting, according to court papers. Yale alumni Stephen Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine empire, bought the painting in 1933 and bequeathed it to Yale upon his death in 1960.
Affirming an earlier decision, a federal court of appeals sided with Yale in October, citing the “Act of State” doctrine, which prevents US courts from second-guessing the policies of foreign governments. In 2012, the appeals court ruled against Konowaloff in a similar dispute with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over a painting by Paul Cézanne, which Clark bequeathed to the museum in 1960.
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Robert Motherwell at 100: Gregory Gilbert reflects on the artist’s centenary
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Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943). © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA. New York, NY
Last year marked the centenary of the birth of the Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell, who died in 1991. Over the past several years, a host of publications and exhibitions devoted to the artist have proven to be important and welcome additions to the somewhat sparse field of Motherwell studies, offering new perspectives on his career. Yet, in a more discouraging way, they also largely repackage and recirculate existing perceptions about the artist.There is a lingering and conservative monographic aura around Motherwell scholarship, which has tended to lag behind the more rigorous interdisciplinary research on other Abstract Expressionists. Motherwell was one of the few artists of his generation who received a university education, graduating in the 1930s fr om Stanford University, where he studied American Pragmatist philosophy, Modernist poetry and psychology. He later pursued graduate training in philosophy and art history at Harvard and Columbia universities. The numerous philosophical, political and literary influences on his art and writings have yet to be fully examined. His disparate oeuvre deserves to be analysed within these more complex aesthetic and cultural contexts.
Throughout his career, Motherwell experimented with diverse modes and materials. His art lacked the signature style and symbolic conventions of Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, which has hindered the critical and scholarly reception of his work. Although Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster have argued that Motherwell’s “plastic automatism” tamed Surrealism’s anarchic subjectivity into an autographic and marketable serial manner, the opposite is true. Motherwell deviated from Abstract Expressionism’s canonical norms, which makes his oeuvre especially worthy of revisionist consideration. It also reveals that Abstract Expressionism was not the cohesive monolith still promoted in many art history surveys. With his knowledge of Pragmatist fallibilism, the eclecticism of his art may have been a willful effort to challenge overly narrow and prescriptive definitions of the New York School. In the 1950s and 1960s, his art did not fit the predominant formalist criteria and teleological theories promoted by Clement Greenberg. Critical estimations of his art have fared no better during an age of postmodern theory.
The most noteworthy of the museum and gallery exhibitions around Motherwell’s centenary was the Guggenheim’s 2013 show Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, which was organised by Susan Davidson. The once-in-a-lifetime gathering of fragile pieces, a large number of which are still in private collections and rarely on public display, cemented the significance of Motherwell’s early collages. These are some of his most inventive and distinctive works, with their bold easel scale, experimental methods of fabrication, radical disjunctive designs and vibrantly colored papers (many of which have since faded, an important discovery made by conservators in preparing the exhibition).
Despite the virtues of the show, the catalogue presented relatively few new insights on Motherwell’s collages. With the important exception of noting the influence of Joan Miró’s and Jean Arp’s Surrealist collages, the authors explain Motherwell’s technique largely as an isolated practice driven by his own aesthetic interests. His early collages need to be examined in the broader context of collage trends in the 1940s, which has itself been virtually unstudied. Within the New York avant-garde of the time, collage was everywhere: in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and Benjamin Peret, as well as in the work of artists like Gerome Kamrowski, Ad Rinehart and Hananiah Harari. The trend was recognised in the curator Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Collage at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948. This show is now largely forgotten. It has been overshadowed by the museum’s more famous 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which has created the misperception that, after a fallow period, collage was revived in the 1950s as an outgrowth of Neo-Dada.
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Graduated Neutral Density filter - The Work of Galen Rowell
The Work of Galen Rowell
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Galen Rowell ( Aug. 23, 1940 – Aug. 11, 2002) was a wilderness photographer and a mountain climber. He traveled and climbed mountains all around the world and captured some of the unseen landscapes with tantalizing effect of light and color. His ‘dynamic landscapes’ as well as his books on mountaineering had always been very popular among viewers.
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Galen developed a GND (Graduated Neutral Density) filter to help him to cover more dynamic range and the filters have been produced and sold by Singh-Ray since then under Rowell’s name. Galen’s 1986 book ‘Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape’ has been a must read for aspiring landscape photographers.
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He said she said: Grayson Perry’s brush with the ballet
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The gender-bending artist Grayson Perry seems an appropriate choice to create the front cloth for the English National Ballet’s programme She Said, three new pieces choreographed by Aszure Barton, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Yabin Wang, running 13 through 16 April at London’s Sadler’s Wells. The ballet’s artistic director, Tamara Rojo, cited the artist’s “wonderful insight into different forms of identity” in her statement on the commission. The artist, who began the work before the dance trilogy was completed, said in a statement that “a lot was left to my imagination”. His mental wanderings led him to a depiction of a central female character “in a landscape of phalluses. It is quite jolly and there is no rational explanation.”
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Sheffield festival draws on scientific metaphors
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Still from Duvet Brothers's "scratch video", Virgin (1985). Courtesy the artists and LUX
Video, film and sound are the focus of Art Sheffield 2016, and science and technology are behind the show’s title, Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm. These are the six types of quark, which are among the elementary particles that make up every atom. The artistic director of the event, Martin Clark, says: “It’s like a group show that’s exploded across the city. The works all circle around this idea of the material reality of the city, and how communities and cities create and are created by its inhabitants.”One section of the biennial at the Sheffield Institute of Arts is a showreel of rarely seen 1980s “scratch videos”—works made from footage appropriated from mainstream media—by artists including George Barber, Nick Cope and Gorilla Tapes.
The main funders of Art Sheffield are Arts Council England and Sheffield City Council.
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A Horse in The Golden Sunrise
A Horse in The Golden Sunrise
Photo by Marinus Keyzer
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