Mountain dweller
Photo by Phil Johnston
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Printable View
Mountain dweller
Photo by Phil Johnston
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We are not alone
Photo by Zach Allia
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God speaking to the trees
Photo by Kamyar Baghvand
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The meeting with the sun
Photo by George Papapostolou
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The California multi-media and performance artist Betsy Davis was among the first people to end her life last month under the state’s new doctor-assisted dying law. The 41-year-old, who was diagnosed three years ago with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, planned a two-day party on 23-23 July for her friends and family, who gathered at her home in Ojai, California to say goodbye.“You are all very brave for sending me off on my journey,” Davis wrote in an email invite to her guests. “Thank you so much for traveling the physical and emotional distance for me. These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness, and openness. And one rule: No crying.”
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Stuart Semple is giving a helping hand to the organisation The Fertility Partnership next month when six public art pieces by the UK artist will go on show in six cities. Semple’s installations—to be unveiled in Glasgow, London and Nottingham, among other locations *on 1 September—will highlight the work of the partnership (a group of national and international clinics specialising in IVF).
Semple will also give away on the day of the launch 1,000 limited edition screenprints on foil balloons, a gesture “reflective of the generous act of egg donation”, the organisers say.
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The Bauhaus lives on near Boston with the launch of the Harvard University Art Museums’ comprehensive public database dedicated to Germany’s all-encompassing Modern art and design school. The resource includes details on the museums’ collection of more than 32,000 works of art and items related to the Bauhaus, a chronology of the Weimar art school and a map detailing Bauhaus’s lingering presence in the Boston area.Harvard has a long connection with the Bauhaus.
In 1930, Harvard undergraduates organised the first US survey of art from the Bauhaus at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge. The show—which included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, among others—later travelled to New York and Chicago, but was the only such American exhibition held while the Bauhaus was still in existence. In 1933, the German school and design studio was shut down by the Nazis. Walter Gropius, the architect who founded the Bauhaus by merging the state schools of fine and applied arts, moved to Cambridge in 1937 and became chair of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a post he held until his retirement in 1952.
“We wanted to create a central place to organise the Harvard Art Museums’ Bauhaus materials to help students, scholars, and the public find their way through the collections and discover new artists and objects,” said Robert Wiesenberger, a curatorial fellow at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, in a statement.
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This is soo pretty!! nice shot!
Head in the Clouds
Photographer/Artist : Alicia Savage
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Art and creativity from Lisa Ray
Surreal Paintings by Lisa Ray. Talented Russian artist Lisa Ray was born in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, where she lives now. She graduated from Art School, and Alma-Ata University. Lisa Ray is a permanent participant of art exhibitions. She taught painting at the studio of the Union of Architects of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the House of Creativity. Lisa is a member of Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan. Her paintings are in private collections in the United States and Germany. In today’s most important creative ideas she considers the presence of the product, rather than masterful depiction of reality. The purpose of modern art – to convey to the viewer the idea, to surprise with the images, to make to think about something. Her surreal paintings are bright, colorful and positive.
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The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York kicks off programming at its newly-renovated SVA Chelsea Gallery today (20 August) at full volume with The Beat Goes On, (until 17 September), an interactive show of four “listening rooms” given over to the artists Elia Alba, Paul D. Miller (alias DJ Spooky), Kevin Beasley and Tameka Norris that explore the fusion of contemporary art and music.
Alba—whose photography work draws on her experiences in the 1980s New York club scene—has conceived her gallery space as an old-school discotheque, complete with black-and-white checkerboard flooring and a DJ booth, a tribute to the late DJ Larry Levan. Norris’s gallery is “more of an intimate setting”, says Derrick Adams, the New York-based artist and curator who organised the exhibition, and resembles a record label listening room, with beanbag chairs and posters and lyrics from her rap and pop star alter ego Meka Jean.
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Sunflowers at Sunset by SilviaSil
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Grandeur by Hengki Lee
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The cyclist by Lars van de Goor
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Yellow Dory at Low Tide by Steve Morrison
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Matthew Stone's Snapchat filter
Over 40s need not apply but if you’re in London and stuck for something to do this weekend, then why not use Snapchat to be part of an exhibition at Somerset House? The UK artist Matthew Stone, 34, whose show Healing With Wounds—part of the Utopia2016 initiative - closes on 29 August, has created a custom Snapchat filter that will be available at and around the exhibition on its last day. Visitors will be able to capture Stone’s digital work as an overlay to a 10-second photo or video.
“It’s an exciting and new way to interact with viewers of my art,” says Stone, who is working with the digital creative agency, Slap, on the project.*Snapchat is one of the fastest growing social media platforms, and particularly popular with 18-to-24 year olds. Earlier this year, the company changed its policy to allow third-parties to submit original filters that Snapchat reviews and, if accepted, then charges these new filter pioneers a relatively small fee. Expect more artists to get into the groove (as a 40-something might say).
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With six exhibitions and several new commissions on the way, it is fair to say that Yinka Shonibare is busier than ever. This autumn, the London- and Lagos-based artist has shows at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, the Gemeentemuseum Helmond and the British Council in Lagos—Shonibare’s first solo exhibition in Nigeria.The original scale model of Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, which was unveiled in 2010 for the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square, is among the works to go on display at the Yale Center for British Art on 1 September (until 11 December). The show will focus on Shonibare’s interest in Admiral Lord Nelson. The artist returns to Yale next February, for an exhibition about three Georgian princesses: Charlotte, Caroline and Augusta. The show, called Enlightened Princesses, is due to travel to Kensington Palace in June 2017.
Also opening in September is an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Helmond. Paradise Beyond (20 September-12 February 2017) coincides with a show of Vlisco textiles; the nearby factory produces the Dutch wax batik fabric that Shonibare often uses in his work.
For his show at Stephen Friedman Gallery (28 September-5 November), Shonibare has created sculptural appropriations of Michelangelo’s David, Venus de Milo and Myron’s Discobolus, hand-painted with batik patterns. The new works were inspired by the Cast Courts at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
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Yinka Shonibare, St Peter, 2016. Photo: © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
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Yinka Shonibare, African Joan of Arc, 2016. Photo: © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
A series of prints that fuse drawings of European saints with batik patterns, African ritual masks and extracts of stocks and shares from the Financial Times will also go on show. “First of all [I] think about picture making itself: the history of Modernism and the aesthetic of the mask in Modernist painting. So we are going back to Picasso. And then taking that signifier of religious ritual, which is the mask, and overlapping one religious symbol with another religious symbol,” Shonibare says.Visitors to London’s Royal Academy can also see his bold design wrapped around the façade of the Burlington Gardens building, which is currently under construction.
Meanwhile, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Nigeria will see a Wind Sculpture installed at the Ndubuisi Kanu Park in Lagos from November 2016 until January 2017. Shonibare will also present three of his films.
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Light in Darkness - A touch of magenta aurora, a milky way and a healthy dose of light pollution
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Cécile Bernard
The Old Master specialist Cécile Bernard has been named general manager of Sotheby’s France, the auction house announced on Wednesday 1 September. The country is the auction house’s fourth-largest sales centre measured by annual turnover, and the appointment is intended “to strengthen the development of Paris in liaison with Sotheby's global strategy,” said Mario Tavella, the head of European operations.Bernard has a long track record in the international art market in London and Paris, working at Christie’s for 22 years before joining Drouot in April last year to take charge of the development of the iconic Paris auction rooms.
She started her career as a specialist in Old Master paintings at Christie’s Paris, before promotion to international director of Old Master and 19th-century paintings in Paris and London, and latterly director of overall operations in Paris. At both Christie’s and Drouot she built a reputation as a strong advocate of online business development, and of promoting Paris—often seen as a consignment centre for London and New York—as an international marketplace in its own right.
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Artists planning a big gallery show often try to surprise visitors with work that feels fresh or unfamiliar. The Los Angeles artist-provocateur Parker Ito has taken things one step further: he managed to keep his gallerists at Chateau Shatto in the dark, not letting them see the work in progress in his studio for nearly a year and banishing them from the show’s installation.Ito has clearly enjoyed building the suspense. A letter he wrote in lieu of a press release reads: “Dear chateau shatto, i am having an art show. thank you! or is it art shows? something will happen in your gallery between the dates of sept 1-nov 6, 2016… it has been hard to keep what i am doing hidden from you, but soon you will find out.”
The artist did not even give his wife, Liv Barrett, who is one of the gallery’s owners, a sneak peek. “I think she’s really been enjoying this,” Ito told us on Wednesday, the day before the show opened to the public and the gallery staff. Barrett, reached by phone opening day, described the experience of handing over the keys to the space as “suspenseful, yes, but also kind of pleasurable.” She called it a “reprieve from all of the day-to-day details of production, letting me access the exhibition in a very pure way.”
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Life's Foolish Promise
Photo by Timothy Poulton
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Life
Photo by Vincent Favre
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The White Desert, Farafra, Egypt
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The inaugural London Design Biennale opened this week at Somerset House (until 27 September), with installations, prototypes, virtual reality renderings and designs from 37 countries on show. These range from Pakistan and Portugal to Saudi Arabia and Tunisia—the ambitious system of national representation brings to mind the Venice Biennale. Each exhibit examines the theme of Utopia by Design, encompassing issues such as sustainability, migration and pollution. The principal sponsor is Jaguar.
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The Russian stand at London Design Biennial (Photo: Bradley Lloyd Barnes)
RussiaThe Russian presentation throws new light on the workshops and designers behind a state-sanctioned design system that was truly Utopian in its aspirations. The exhibition Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design explores the realised, and unrealised, projects created by the All-Union Soviet Institute of Technical Aesthetics from the 1960s to the 1990s. Light boxes with digitised images display these forgotten projects, from the experimental 1980-E Snowmobile to a Saigak portable tape recorder from 1987.
Alexandra Sankova, the director of the Moscow Design Museum which is overseeing the installation, says: “Soviet designers were idealists who hoped to create perfect material environments. The installation acts as a type of time machine that will transport the visitor into a different graphic, political and economic reality.” The exhibit is supported by The Art Newspaper Russia.
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Soaking in rainbow light, sun and salt water
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Visitors to Frieze New York this year might recall the saturated blue of a calcified American flag displayed on the stand of Emmanuel Perrotin—the first colourful work ever shown by the artist Daniel Arsham, who has a form of colourblindness which leaves him with what he describes as a “drastically reduced” range of colour vision. “For audiences who know my work, it was a bit jarring… they never really considered that the work was lacking colour,” explains the artist, whose characteristic palette of neutrals has largely been dictated by his choice of materials, such as the grey of volcanic ash in cast pieces. Next week, Perrotin’s New York branch is due to open Arsham’s first solo show in the city—where he has lived and worked since 1999—which will also be his first show of works in colour, Daniel Arsham: Circa 2345 (15 September-22 October).This change is due to what Arsham calls a “kind of life-altering experience”: getting to perceive a broader range of colour thanks to glasses by the company EnChroma that resemble “regular sunglasses” but are able to artificially separate the wavelengths of colours in the spectrum that he has trouble seeing. “When can you have a moment in your life when this new thing that’s always been there is revealed to you?” he recalls about the experience, which will be explored in an upcoming documentary by the filmmaker Megan Raney Aarons.
Arsham received a pair of the glasses last autumn, around the time he began working on the foundation for this new exhibition. “Originally the work [in the show] was not going to be in colour,” he says. In the end, “still trying to create a sense of reduction in the work”, Arsham chose only two colours for the show—related, like his previous work, to materials—and separated by floor: blue calcite, for the works on the ground floor of the exhibition, and amethyst, for the basement level.
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Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Bulls Jacket, 2016 (Blue calcite and hydrostone). Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Arsham Studios
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Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Jersey, 2016 (Blue calcite and hydrostone). Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Arsham Studios
All of the works in the show—a continuation of the artist’s “fictional archaeological world”—are of sports-related objects, such as the “Brancusi-esque” columns of basketballs and American footballs and a Miami Heat jacket in blue on the ground level. On the basement level is a large amethyst installation that Arsham calls a “cavern of sorts”, made of thousands of individually cast balls of various sports, including basketball, golf and tennis. He says it looks as if the objects were dumped in a site and calcified over thousands of years, or that an obsessive-compulsive person in the future assembled a cavern out of relics from the past.
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Artists Space Book & Talks in New York will be “transformed into a self-regulated commons” for Decolonize This Place, an active three-month series of community events, workshops and campaigns due to launch this weekend (17 September-17 December) that aims to “challenge the white supremacy that continues to characterise the economies and institutions of art”, according to a press release.
The project has been organised by the politically-engaged arts collective MTL+ and is based on five central themes: indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. Groups slated to participate include the arts publication Hyperallergic, the Black Poets Speak Out group, the Bronx Not For Sale organisation and the Queens Anti-Gentrification Network.
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Modern art by Arab artists will take over the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) this November. The Sea Suspended: Arab Modernism from the Barjeel Collection (8 November to 23 December) will include around 40 works made between the 1940s and the 1990s from across the Arab world. The works are drawn from the extensive collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, which is based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It will be the first time a show of modern Arab art has taken place in Iran, according to the foundation.Given the political tensions in the region, the exhibition marks a significant moment of cultural diplomacy between Tehran and Sharjah. “Art is important in that it allows experiences to be shared, even across the boundaries of language or culture,” said the director of TMoCA, Majid Mollanorouzi, in a statement. “This is of even more importance when we work together with organisations from the region.”
The title of the show, The Sea Suspended, is taken from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. “The image of a temporarily suspended sea as a way to bridge everyday boundaries that are difficult to cross seemed appropriate,” said Karim Sultan, a curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation. A publication on the exhibition containing discussions on the similarities and distinctions between Arab and Iranian modern art will be released during Art Dubai in March 2017.
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The exhibition is the result of extended negotiations between a small network of individuals and galleries working between Iran and other countries in the region. Discussions began between the Barjeel Art Foundation and Sanaz Askari, the Iranian founder of The Mine Gallery in Dubai. She put the foundation in touch with Ehsan Rasoulof, the founder of Mohsen Gallery, who had recently exhibited contemporary Arab artists in Tehran. Together they helped facilitate the exhibition at TMoCA.
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Royals can be creative—that’s the message behind Convergence, a new show at the Ritz Carlton DIFC in Dubai (29-30 November) which will feature works by 15 of the “world’s sovereign artists” including HE Sheikh Dr Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani of Qatar, HRH Princess Sibylle of Prussia, and HRH The Princess Sophie from Romania (the latter takes photographs of the natural world). The organisation behind the show, Royal Bridges, was founded by Sheikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, a member of the Bahraini royal family. He says (rather regally): “Royal Bridges steps in to fill in the gap and contend the stereotype of royal patronage with the dearth of artistic talent, which is often associated with ruling houses.” Christie’s will auction the works, with proceeds going towards the World Food Programme.
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A Caiman Wearing a Crown of Butterflies Photographed by Mark Cowan
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The playwright Edward Albee, who has died aged 88, was a generous supporter of fellow writers as well as visual artists, particularly those at the start of their career who needed time and space to realise their creative potential. His foundation offers just that every summer through artists' residencies in a former barn among the dunes of Montauk, Long Island. Selection is based "mostly on talent and need", it states on the foundation's website, cautioning in a deadpan way: "If you are a famous sculptor who has a large summer cottage in East Hampton but would love to 'slum it'*in Montauk for a month, you are much less likely to get in than a painter who holds a terrible day job and lives in Brooklyn with [their] three roommates."
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Museums in Berlin are helping to welcome refugees to the city and its culture with the programme Multaka—from the Arabic word for forum or meeting place—in which trained refugees from Syria and Iraq give free guided museum tours in Arabic to other displaced groups. The programme, started by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums), offers visits twice a week in four museums: the Museum of Islamic Art and the Museum of the Ancient Near East, two separate museums housed together in the Pergamon Museum; the Byzantine Art Museum in the Bode Museum; and the German Historical Museum (which is not part of the State Museums).The idea for the programme first came about in autumn 2015 and the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs quickly allocated funding. Work on the project began in November 2015, and the first visits took place five weeks later. To date, more than 4,000 visitors have participated in the programme.
At the launch of the programme, 19 guides from Iraq and Syria were recruited by word of mouth among the migrant community in Berlin, and were given a four-day training session. There are now a total of 25 guides, who come from a variety of professional backgrounds, some related to the arts and heritage, others to disciplines like law and economics. One of the original 19 Multaka guides, Bachar al-Chahin, who started working only two months after arriving in Berlin in September 2015, was a tourism guide in Syria and now gives tours at the Museum of the Ancient Near East.
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Multaka guide Kefah Ali Deeb, 34, leads a group that includes fellow Syrian refugees through Berlin’s Museum of the Ancient Near East (Image: © UNHCR/Daniel Morgan)
Stefan Weber, the director of the Museum of Islamic Art and one of the Multaka’s initiators, says that the guides often choose artefacts that have special meaning for them. “With the help of objects from our past, questions from our present are debated. Museums become spaces of reflection on collective identities,” he told our sister paper Le Journal des Arts. “Several thousand displaced people have visited the museums, to actively discuss their history and German history, which is important.” At the Pergamon Museum, Iraqis and Syrians have a direct relation with the objects on show, while at the German Historical Museum, the visits mostly involve the post-war period.According to statistics on visitors compiled by Bachar al-Chahin, the majority of visitors are young and well-educated, but for a small amount of visitors, these guided tours are their first trips to a museum.
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Jonas Dahlberg’s highly praised memorial for the victims of the 2011 terror attack on the Utøya island in Norway will probably never get built. Jan Tore Sanner, Norway’s minister of local government and modernisation, said that the government is willing to drop Dahlberg’s proposal in order to reach a settlement with a group of people living close to the memorial site who plan to sue the state in order to stop the project. The group is led by the local Fremskrittspartiet politician Jørn Øverby. The right-wing party is in coalition with Sanner’s larger Conservative party.“
I am convinced that the public debate … is an important part of the grieving process necessary for a community,” Dahlberg says in a statement, adding that “the events of 22 July 2011 were an act of political terrorism. It is more important than ever to talk about its causes and context in the current political climate. A memorial that proposes a state of consensus, a form of silence, would also diminish the events and make it easier for the circumstances to be forgotten in time.”
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Mark Wallinger’s Self Reflection show, in which he has installed a mirror across the entire ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s study at the Freud Museum in London’s Hampstead, is one of the most successful of the many artistic interventions that have taken place in this iconic room. As well as its richly chiming references to Freudian notions surrounding the doubled self and self-reflection, it also presents a weirdly disorientating and decidedly unheimlich perspective for anyone entering the room, especially when you notice through the window the looming—and also doubly reflected—presence of the artist’s sculpture Self (2016) outside in the garden. Thanks to the Art Fund, this Wallinger-height bronze columnar letter “I” is to be a permanent al-fresco fixture at the museum.
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Mark Wallinger: Self Reflection at the Freud Museum
All these subjects and much more were given an illuminating airing at the beginning of the week in a sparky conversation between Wallinger and Fiona Bradley, the director of the Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. The packed audience included Elisabeth Murdoch, whose Freelands Foundation has just awarded the Fruitmarket its inaugural £100,000 Freelands Award to mount a major show of Jacqueline Donachie. But—as Dr Freud would certainly agree—it is the nature of live talks that surprises can spontaneously emerge, and this certainly happened when one audience member quizzed Wallinger about the erotic, bordello connotations of the mirrored ceiling, stating that he was speaking as an architect who had become familiar with mirrored ceilings “while working on a suburban brothel”. There were a few ripples of nervous laughter before the interlocutor added that it was his job to convert the building into a new function and remove, rather than install, its reflective surfaces. Ego and id, indeed.
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The Whitney Museum is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the American painter Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) with an evening symposium on his legacy. Among the speakers are the painter Christopher Wool, who studied under Pousette-Dart as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, Jennifer Powell, a senior curator at the museum and Patti Trimble, a former studio assistant of the artist’s. The talk takes places on 29 September.The event will open with a short film that documents the cleaning and conservation of Pousette-Dart’s triptych Presence, Healing Circles (1973-74), which was undertaken by the artist’s foundation this past summer. The painting was originally commissioned for the North Central Bronx Hospital by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates the city’s public medical centres.
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Richard Pousette-Dart’s Presence, Healing Circles (1973-74) at the Gouverneur Health care centre in New York in 2016
Thomas Messer, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, sat on the corporation’s art advisory board and approached Pousette-Dart with the project. The artist originally made two works for the hospital and allowed administrators to choose which they wanted. (The other painting, titled Radiance, is now in a private collection.) Presence, Healing Circles was then on show in the Bronx hospital lobby for more than 40 years, across the way from a work by Helen Frankenthaler. Since the conservation project, it has been installed at the Gouverneur Healthcare centre in lower Manhattan.
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Nina Leen’s photograph of he “Irascibles” for Life magazine, 24 November 1950. Pousette-Dart is in the middle row, at far left, with his hand in his pocket
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Seeing what kind of art curators choose to live with is like finding out where chefs go to dinner. They may not make the obvious or fashionable choice, but they usually have a good reason. Next month, Christie’s is due to sell works from the eclectic collection of Everett Fahy, the former curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the former director of the Frick Collection in New York. The 46 paintings, works on paper and objects will lead Christie’s Old Masters sale on 26 October in New York.
Some of the works, which span the 14th to the 20th centuries, were gifts Fahy received from famous friends. The socialite Brooke Astor gave him a Chinese carved jade disc from the late 19th century (est $1,000-$1,500). The sale’s top lot is a fragment of an early 14th-century panel painting of Saint Peter attributed to the Circle of Duccio Di Buoninsegna (est $150,000-$250,000). The tempera and gold painting was one of several gifts from Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Fahy’s mentor and predecessor as chairman of European paintings at the Met.
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All told, the collection is expected to make $353,800 to $554,400. Some small sculptures and drawings carry estimates as low as $400. Specialists hope that the modest price points and eclectic mix of objects will appeal to collectors in town for the first New York edition of the European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) (22-26 October). Fahy “has listed a significant portion of the collection with no reserve, so it’s an opportunity to have wildly low prices achieved for really amazing things,” says the specialist Emma Kronman.Fahy worked as a consultant to the Christie’s Old Masters department after he left the Met in 2009. He lived with his collection in a Mark Hampton-designed apartment on New York’s Upper West Side until recently, when ill health caused him to downsize and move closer to his family.
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The French artist Pierre Huyghe has won the $100,000 Nasher Prize, the world’s largest award for sculpture, given out by the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas. The jury made up of curators and artists—including Nicholas Serota, Okwui Enwezor, Phyllida Barlow, Huma Bhabba, Pablo León de la Barra—selected Huyghe from a list of 150 nominees.Long recognised as one of the key representatives of “relational aesthetics”, a term coined by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe art that often involves creating a shared social experience, Huyghe’s work encompass disciplines such as cinema, music, theater and sculpture. Many of his best known piece incorporate living elements like bees, crabs, dogs and microorganisms and immaterial elements such as fog, light, and scents.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011-12), living entities and inanimate things, made or not made
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (2014), film, colour, sound
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Pierre Huyghe, A Forest of Lines (July 2008), event, Sydney Opera House, film, colour, sound (Image: Paul Green)
The work of this “very enigmatic” artist, says Okwui Enwezor, “extends far beyond any tidy definition of sculpture”. The Nasher’s director Jeremy Strick agrees: “[Huyghe’s] expansive view of sculpture so wonderfully embodies the goal of the Nasher Prize, which is to champion the greatest artistic minds of our time.”In addition to the prize money, the artist will also receive an award especially designed by Renzo Piano, the architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, during a ceremony in Dallas on 1 April 2017. It does not, however, come with a special commission or exhibition. The prize was launched last year and given to the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. The presenting sponsor is JPMorgan Chase & Co.
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Bedwyr Williams says The Gulch, his first solo show in a London institution, will be full of “theatrical moments” and “little embarrassments”. The Welsh artist has plotted an assault course of six immersive environments to lead visitors through the 90m-long, 6m-high sweep of the Barbican’s Curve gallery.Navigating absurd set pieces including a smugglers’ cove, an intimidating boardroom and a rocky ravine, “the audience will become performers”, Williams says. Contemporary art, he adds, also has a funny side. The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Were you daunted by the Curve as an exhibition space?
It could be even longer or even taller, I’d be happy with that. Anything that allows me to make installations that are theatrical in terms of scale. For making a quest-type exhibition or a little journey, it was perfect. It’s about the same height as a theatre set.
The exhibition has a series of tricks in store for visitors.
It’s that kind of space because when you enter you can’t see the end of it. It makes you think about missing out on things. It’s not a shared experience kind of room. If a man has a heart attack halfway along it, the people at the beginning don’t know. They see the paramedics running and they don’t see him collapse. It’s a good space to goof around with a linear narrative.
What does the title mean?
A gulch is a dried-out crevasse or ravine. In the Beano there used to be a character called Baby Face Finlayson and he lived in Vulture Gulch, so it’s more of an American or an Australian term. For me the Curve, because it’s high-sided, is a kind of ravine. I like the sound of it.
You’re also writing and performing an audio walk for the Barbican centre outside the gallery.
There’s going to be dummy replicas of laptops and smartphones attached to the tables, maybe 100 of them, and you’ll be able to plug your headphones in. It will be a mix of field recordings using the format of a conventional audioguide and filling it with nonsense. It’ll be something to do with the people who hot-desk here, imagining what the water cooler conversations between them would be. I’ve always been fascinated with the Barbican. When I was a kid in the 80s all art centres looked like this—low lighting, people padding around in a very serious manner. It’s pregnant with potential.
Why did you become an artist?
Being an artist and working across media, you can pretty much have a stab at anything. I write, I take photographs, I draw and perform and I collaborate with people who do all those things. But even though you can do anything, artists still follow a lot of conventions. Young artists still make little shows with plinths and there’s a way of looking at these things. I’m not interested in doing that and that’s why I like working with theatre makers. I like the artifice of the theatre. People still ask me to make more of these immersive things, but I’m not doing it for any academic reason. I liked model trains as a kid and I like making miniature landscapes.
Was it always your intention to introduce comedy to contemporary art?
Even when I was 18 doing a foundation course in north Wales I remember thinking it was daft that it’s all so serious. How come art is allowed to be sad but not funny? You do a performance and in an art situation as opposed to a comedy club people would put up with anything. I can’t help but mock that freedom. The art world is very pompous, so it’s completely ripe for it.
How do you define the British sense of humour?
I think the British sense of humour is very special. When I’ve spent extended times overseas it’s the thing I miss the most. It’s fatalistic and self-deprecating, a little bit pompous but able to laugh at itself. There’s a kind of disquiet in Britain all the time, like a really rowdy pub just waiting to boil over.
You represented Wales at the Venice Biennale. What does Welshness mean to you?
I don’t reference it in my work to make any political point but I love having that take on being British. I learnt English when I was five and think it’s amazing how much you can do with it as a language. I can’t imagine making work without using language.
Has Brexit had any impact on your work?
Maybe. I’m making a new work for Artes Mundi in Cardiff about a fictional city built in the mountains in mid-Wales. It’s hard not to think about what’s happening. I think it’s actually quite an exciting time to be an artist, also because I don’t live in London. Apocalyptic films always start in the city and then flee to the countryside. It’s when you get into the ‘burbs that you get the true horror of it. Observing Brexit from north Wales has been quite weird. It would have been depressing in London as well but at least you can go for tapas or something.
Do you prefer to work away from London?
Yes, it suits me. Also as I’ve got older, I think I’ve found a way of working that gets all my little interests together. That’s satisfying because then I can concentrate on making [video installations] as good as I can, instead of agonising about the form of it.
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Londoners and art world professionals gave the thumbs up for David Shrigley’s new public art commission standing on the Fourth Plinth, which was unveiled today in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London (29 September). The seven-metre-high piece, entitled Really Good, is an outlandishly long thumb cast in bronze with the same dark patina as the other classic statues in the square.Shrigley, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013, hopes that the gesture will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things considered “bad, such as the economy, the weather and society will benefit from a change of consensus towards positivity”, he says.
Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, welcomed the new addition. “It’s very impressive, I can see it from my office window,” he says. Earlier this year, he told The Art Newspaper that “the Fourth Plinth is a brilliant way to make art connect with contemporary people.”
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Sunset at Playas Avellanas, Costa Rica
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