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Conservators prove an unlikely gateway to more museum loans

Institutions are lending more works than ever, exploding the myth that preserving art means denying access to it

When a museum rejects a loan request, whatever the reason, the proverbial finger of blame is often pointed at conservators. They are seen as loan naysayers who would rather see the objects entrusted to their care behind a velvet rope and encased in glass—or, better yet, safely packed away in a dark, climate-controlled museum store—than allow them to travel to another institution and risk them sustaining catastrophic damage somewhere along the way. The reality is, however, that when it comes to loans, the buck rarely stops solely with conservators. Decisions to lend are multi-layered and typically involve a small army of experts.

The truth is that the number of works travelling between institutions is, on the whole, on the rise. “Museums are sharing their collections more widely, and with greater frequency than ever before,” says a spokeswoman for the British Museum in London. The institution lent 5,021 works to 335 venues in 2013/14—a 10% increase on the previous financial year—as part of its commitment to being “a museum for the world”. One of its most recent (and somewhat controversial) loans was one of the Parthenon Marbles to the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, in December 2014, in honour of the Russian institution’s 250th anniversary. The latest annual report from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, shows that its number of loans is climbing once again after a dip in 2011. During the 2013 financial year, the museum lent 13% more works than in 2012 and 41% more than in 2011. Its major loans in 2013 included 17 paintings by Rothko to the Museum Narodowe in Warsaw.

Although some institutions, including the British Museum and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), have sent works from their collections to touring exhibitions in far-flung destinations for more than a decade, Stuart Brown, the head of the exhibitions department at the leading fine art shipping and storage company Momart, has noticed that others, including the Tate in the UK, have increased this activity in recent years. The Tate sent a record number of works abroad in 2013/14—24% more than two years ago. According to the institution’s 2013/14 annual report, 676 of the 1,467 works (or 46%) went to international venues in 23 countries, including Brazil, China, South Korea and Qatar. Specialist casing had to be designed to protect Damien Hirst’s cows in formaldehyde (Mother and Child [Divided], 2007 exhibition copy of a 1993 original) from the extreme heat of Doha for the British artist’s major “Relics” retrospective, which opened in October 2013.
Max Hollein, the director of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, says that more objects are travelling because of the increase in the number of museums worldwide. “Germany had slightly more than 1,000 museums in 1975. Today there are well over 7,000,” he says. Another country experiencing a museum boom is China. In 1949, it had just 21 museums; this figure had ballooned to around 3,400 by 2013. Hollein also sees the growing appetite for exhibitions as a contributing factor. “I’m a strong believer that the exhibition is still the best medium to narrate a story or to bring art history alive for the general public,” he says.

If works aren’t on display, why have them?

Contrary to popular belief, conservators are quite keen to show off their museums’ collections. “We know there is this potential tension between wanting to preserve objects and wanting to make them accessible, but if we’re not making them accessible, then why are we preserving them?” asks David Saunders, who retired last month as keeper of the department of conservation and scientific research at the British Museum. “There is no point in putting an object in store where no one can see it so it can be preserved for some indefinite future,” he adds. Cordelia Rogerson, the head of conservation at the British Library, agrees. “My view is that if we don’t have works on display, then why have them?”

Lending between institutions is more straightforward these days, thanks to the efforts of conservators who have helped to develop a revised set of environmental guidelines for collection care in the UK. These demand less stringent parameters for temperature, relative humidity and light levels. The push to re-examine these standards came from the UK’s National Museum Directors’ Council in around 2008 and was soon followed up by a similar call from the Bizot Group, a prestigious international network of museum directors and presidents. The International Institute for Conservation and the International Council of Museums’ Committee for Conservation agreed on the latest set of guidelines in September 2014.
Nancy Bell, the head of collection care at the UK’s National Archives, says that the revised standards show a maturity in the loan decision-making process. “We’ve produced an outstanding document that has been taken up internationally and has provided the framework for greater access to cultural collections,” Bell says. She stresses that “it wasn’t about relaxing standards, but about defining appropriate conditions for specific objects”. For example, most decorative art objects can typically withstand a reasonably broad relative humidity, as opposed to works on vellum, which are more sensitive. “The revised guidelines are based on a decade of scientific research and state that we accept that science has told us that some objects have more sensitivity than others, and that other objects are less sensitive than we originally thought,” Bell says. The old guidelines, designed in the 1960s for library and archival material, were adopted for all collections “because nothing else existed”, she says.

Weighing up the risks

The onus is now on the lending institution to look at its objects, weigh up the risks and make recommendations on display conditions to borrowing institutions. For example, a few years ago, the British Museum was asked to lend a series of late 16th-century watercolours by John White to the US for a four-venue travelling exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Walter Raleigh’s expedition to the East Coast of the US. Watercolours are light-sensitive and the loan meant that the works would be exposed to light for considerably longer than the British Museum would normally allow. “In the end, we took the view that this was a major anniversary and we would probably not get another request for these until the next big anniversary, so it was worth using up ten to 15 years of exhibitions for these works for those four shows,” Saunders says. “It’s the quality of the access that is important.”

When it comes to the safe transportation of objects, whether by land, sea or air, knowing where to focus your energy and resources is key. “What are the danger points? Is temperature the critical thing you need to worry about or is it more important that the object travels upright?” Saunders asks. The V&A now sends pieces from its costume collection already mounted on mannequins to reduce the risk of creases and damage that can result from undressing and redressing mannequins at multiple venues. Micro-climate boxes might be the answer in allowing certain fragile works to travel. Smaller works could be sealed in these boxes at the lending institution and remain sealed throughout the duration of the loan. “It’s not a new idea, but the materials are getting better,” Saunders says. Being able to put an object in a micro-climate box “could tip the balance” for works that are on the cusp of being allowed to travel if a stable climate could be guaranteed.
Vibration is a big concern when it comes to moving objects, and museums have long looked for ways to reduce the amount of shaking to which items are subjected when they travel. Air-ride lorries offer a smoother journey for works sent by land, and air travel causes less vibration than was originally thought. Saunders says that there was one pinch-point closer to home that many institutions often overlooked: the back of the museum. “A lot of these areas are still cobbled, and for years, museum trolleys had hard wheels,” he says. “No one considered this; they were haplessly worrying about the suspension on the lorry that took an object from A to B and didn’t realise that works were getting more vibration by being moved from the gallery to the lorry.”

Saunders says that, in his experience, a loan is rarely turned down purely for conservation reasons. The same is true for the V&A. “More frequently, loans are refused because applications are made too late to be considered, items are already on display [in the museum] and are considered essential to that display or it is felt that the item does not satisfactorily contribute to the show for which it is required,” says a spokeswoman for the V&A.

Granting a loan is a collective decision within a museum involving curators, registrars, technicians and, of course, conservators. Although conservators are viewed as those with the expertise to determine if a work is safe to travel, this is only one part of the process. Many other factors also come into play: insurance, legal issues, security, logistics and administrative costs, to name just a few. And the growth in special exhibitions has led to greater competition for works, making the intellectual motivation for the show, while always an important consideration, crucial.

Conservators, like others in museums, are looking for ways to enable greater access to collections, not to limit it. “We’re part of a team within the museum, not some type of externally run mafia set on closing the doors,” Saunders says.

Rare ticket to travel

Dying Gaul, first or second century AD: This ancient Roman marble copy of a lost Greek original had not left Italy for nearly 200 years before it travelled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2013. The Dying Gaul is a powerful sculpture of a wounded Gallic warrior succumbing to a fatal stab wound. France returned the piece to Italy in 1816 after it was seized by Napoleon’s forces in 1797. The work, which is on loan from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, was part of a year of cultural exchange between the US and Italy in 2013.

Matisse, The Snail, 1953: The Tate sent Matisse’s The Snail, 1953, to New York last year for “Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs” at the Museum of Modern Art (21 October 2014-10 February 2015). This was the first time that the 2.9 sq. m collage had left London for more than 50 years. The risks associated with transporting a delicate work of this size prevented it from travelling to Paris’s Grand Palais for a major retrospective on the French artist in 1970. Before shipping it to the US, conservators cleaned the work’s surface, secured its edges and replaced its 1960s glazing with laminated glass. Although The Snail’s New York sojourn ended last month, Londoners will have to wait a little longer before they can visit it at the Tate. The piece is one of 100 works due to feature in “The Oasis of Matisse” (26 March-16 August), which opens this month at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.

Belvedere Torso, first century BC: Although the British Museum is one of the world’s greatest lenders of art, it is also, on many occasions, the recipient of remarkable loans such as the Belvedere Torso, which is due to go on display this month in the exhibition “Defining Beauty: the Body in Ancient Greek Art” (26 March-5 July). A Roman copy of a Greek original, it is thought to depict a Greek hero, either Heracles or Ajax. The piece was the inspiration for Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam, 1511-12, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The sculpture will be displayed with the artist’s only surviving preparatory sketch of Adam for the ceiling. It is on loan from the Vatican, where it has resided since the 16th century.


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Adam Dant's art of electioneering

Adam Dant is to start work shortly as the official 2015 UK Election Artist, commissioned by the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art. His task is to travel the country and document the campaign through art. Dant, who works in the satirical tradition of Hogarth and the 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, describes the 7 May general election as “a drama”, and sees his role as examining “who we are now as political beings”. He normally creates large narrative drawings in ink, full of dense detail. His election creations will go into the Parliamentary Art Collection. But the MPs who commissioned Dant are surely aware that his artistic efforts may end up ruffling a few feathers and be just as unpredictable as the election.

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Tate Britain director heads to Lisbon to run Gulbenkian Museum

Penelope Curtis to put testing time in London behind her

The director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis, is leaving London for Lisbon, to take charge of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. After a week of speculation in the Portuguese media, the Gulbenkian foundation confirmed Curtis's appointment today, 31 March, making her the first foreign director of the small but prestigious museum, which opened in 1969. Housing highlights of the 6,000-strong, collection amassed by the Turkish-born, British-educated and largely Paris-based Armenian oil magnate, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955), works on show range from his antiquities, Islamic art and Old Masters to René Lalique jewellery—purchased so long as they were “only the best” in the collector’s eyes. For example, Rubens’s portrait of his second wife, Helen Fourment, once belonged to Catherine the Great. Gulbenkian bought the painting from the Soviet government in 1930 when it was selling works from the State Hermitage Museum to raise foreign currency.

The Gulbenkian foundation’s trustees were seeking a director of international standing who can "work across the breadth of the collections". The job description also mentions “fostering collaboration with the Centre de Arte Moderna (Cam),” which has its own director, Isabel Carlos. In a statement, Curtis says: "I want to keep all that is good about the museum, which I admire deeply, while developing ways in which it can make more of its context and position, especially in relation to the neighbouring Modern art centre, and more widely.” The foundation's Modern art gallery, which is in the same parkland setting as the Gulbenkian Museum, has a collection of Modern and contemporary Portuguese, British and Armenian art. The Lisbon-based foundation has strong British ties, as well as French ones, with offices in London and Paris.

Curtis, who became director of Tate Britain in 2010, oversaw the £45m refurbishment of the gallery of historic and contemporary British art, which was completed in 2013 and greatly improved circulation routes and created new focal points and vistas. A chronological installation of the collection replaced displays that were often thematic. The combination of long-term chronological hang and smaller, changing displays has given the gallery variety without the jarring juxtapositions of works in different styles and from different eras that were the hallmark of Tate Britain when it was launched in 2000.

A few of Tate Britain’s recent exhibitions have aroused the ire of some critics, including the current show “Sculpture Victorious” (until 25 May) of mid- to late-19th century British sculpture. The criticism has verged on a vendetta, downplaying the merits of the presentation of the permanent collection and well-received temporary exhibitions, such as ones of Turner’s late works, Lowry’s cityscapes, and a survey of British folk art. The gallery’s annual attendance has hovered around the 1.4 million mark, compared with around 5 million who visit Tate Modern.
Curtis has co-organised the exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture, which is due open this summer (24 June-25 October).
She moved to Tate Britain from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, where from 1994 until 2010 she organised a series of historical and contemporary sculpture exhibitions. In 1988, Curtis joined the new Tate Gallery in Liverpool as exhibitions curator.

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Almost one third of solo shows in US museums go to artists represented by just five galleries

Our visitor figures survey reveals prevalence of Pace, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman and Hauser & Wirth in exhibition programming

The Guggenheim's current solo show, "On Kawara: Silence" (until 3 May), reflects a bias in US museums towards artists represented by five big commercial galleries. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for David Yurman

Nearly one-third of the major solo exhibitions held in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five galleries, according to research conducted by The Art Newspaper. We analysed nearly 600 exhibitions submitted by 68 museums for our annual attendance-figures survey and found that 30% of prominent solo shows featured artists represented by Gagosian Gallery, Pace, Marian Goodman Gallery, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth (for methodology, see below).

The figure raises questions about the growing influence of a small number of galleries in a rapidly consolidating art market—especially when they often offer logistical and financial support for exhibitions. At the same time, some wonder whether museums are doing enough to expose the public to art they would not otherwise see.
Museums “should be looking at a much wider swathe of artists”, says Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art. “Curators are abdicating and delegating their responsibilities… to more adventurous gallerists who, aside from the profit motive and in some respects because of it, seem in many cases to be bolder and more curious than their institutional counterparts,” Storr says.

Close relationship

More than 90% (or 11 out of 12) of the major solo exhibitions at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by the same five galleries. A spokeswoman for the museum says that it selects artists “by the excellence, uniqueness and relevance of their practices, not by which galleries represent them”. She adds that the museum promotes emerging artists through smaller exhibitions and projects like the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. (If these smaller shows are taken into account, around 55% of the museum’s solo exhibitions featured artists from the five galleries.)

The number of big-name artists in museums’ programmes varied widely depending on each institution’s size, mission, audience and budget. Around 15% of the solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, featured artists from the five big galleries. The figure was around 45% for single-artist shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Some say that an overlap between top galleries’ rosters and museums’ exhibition schedules is inevitable. “These galleries take on artists in their mid- to late careers; in other words, at the very stage where their longevity and critical recognition reaches a peak [that means] they are likely to be the subjects of solo exhibitions,” says the museum consultant András Szántó. The dealer Marian Goodman says her gallery chooses to work with artists “who will be recognised not just for a year or two but for a very long time”.

Helen Molesworth, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA MoCA), sees the statistic as “a symptom of how culture works in general, which is towards consolidation”. The museum dedicated more than 40% of its solo shows to artists represented by the five galleries. “What are you going to do? They have amazing groups of artists. You can’t be wilful and say, ‘I’m not going to show this person’,” she says.

Some note that gallery representation does not guarantee exposure to a wider public. The New Museum, which is committed to “bringing New York audiences the art and artists that otherwise would not be shown”, according to Massimiliano Gioni, its artistic director, dedicated around 40% of the major shows submitted for our survey to artists associated with the five galleries. But around 85% of these artists had not previously had a major museum show in New York or the US, according to Gioni. (A spokeswoman for the museum says that less than 25% of its overall programme featured artists represented by these galleries.)

The over-representation of a particular gallery’s roster can also be an unintentional consequence of shared tastes. After the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston held several shows of work by Latin American artists, Molesworth, the museum’s former chief curator, realised that “we ran the risk of being Kurimanzutto north”, referring to the Mexico City-based gallery. “We had to make adjustments. The [aim] has been to avoid even the appearance of that problem, even when it emerges very naturally out of legitimate interests,” she says.

Tunnel vision

Nevertheless, some say that museums are missing out on the opportunity to steer the conversation by focusing disproportionately on an elite group of around 300 international artists and estates. The pressure to draw crowds and keep the budget for every exhibition in the black has made curators less likely to organise “monographic shows that essentially introduce an artist to everybody”, Robert Storr says.
More than 200,000 fine artists live in the US alone, according to a 2011 report from the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 250 international galleries participated in the selective Art Basel in Miami Beach fair last year. “The concern is that art not related to a commercial mechanism of that scale will not get sufficient representation,” says the New York-based dealer Franklin Parrasch.
The data underscore the close ties between museums and top galleries, which regularly exchange loans and collaborate on acquisitions. Museums in New York, where four of the five galleries are based, were 75% more likely than museums in Los Angeles to dedicate a solo show to one of these artists.

Financial support

In the run-up to a major solo show, galleries often provide curators with access to archival images, pay shipping costs, pre-order hundreds of catalogues and help to finance the opening reception, according to sources. “If a major museum is flirting with a show, we’ll play ball as much as we have to,” says one director of a medium-sized US gallery.
“Museums are very important to us,” says Marian Goodman. “We’re not trying to buy the museums. We are interested in making it easy for them to do their research by giving them access to our archive or any information that we have.” (The four other galleries mentioned declined to comment or were unable to respond.)

More controversially, dealers sometimes finance shows directly. Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin and Blum & Poe each contributed a six-figure sum to a Takashi Murakami solo show at LA MoCA in 2007, according to the New York Times. Notably, exhibitions dedicated to big-gallery artists were over 40% more common between 2007 and June 2009, when the recession caused corporate sponsorship to plummet, than in the ensuing years.

“To ask any of these galleries for a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a show is nothing. It’s like asking them to pick up a lunch tab, especially when you consider the sales that might result,” says one New York-based gallerist. “Asking a trustee to do that is a favour, and you don’t necessarily want to call that one in.” Marian Goodman says she has “not been asked very often” to fund exhibitions directly. “I think the larger museums tend not to ask, and we’re mostly dealing with larger museums.”

The Association of Art Museum Directors does not have a specific policy on the kind of support that institutions can accept from galleries. Nor do most museums. (There are exceptions: MoMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, for example, say that they do not accept direct financial support for shows.) Furthermore, “gallery affiliations do not play a role in which artists have solo shows at MoMA”, a statement from the museum says.

Beyond statistics, the extent of commercial influence on museums is difficult to discern. “You’d have to have more information about who is making decisions, why they are making them and where the money is coming from,” says Sally Yerkovich, the director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. She likens the dynamic to one of self-censorship, where decision-makers are often loath to acknowledge that they have taken the path of least resistance. “Only the person censoring themselves can really answer,” she says.

Methodology

We examined 590 solo exhibitions of contemporary artists that were submitted by 68 museums for our annual attendance-figures survey between 2007 and 2013. Our data do not include every solo exhibition the museums staged during this period; some institutions did not submit data about their smaller shows and projects. We defined “contemporary artist” as an artist active after 1950 working in any medium except fashion, architecture and design. Representation was determined by the list of artists published on each gallery’s website, excluding those who had not had an exhibition at the gallery in the past ten years. The five galleries—Pace, Gagosian Gallery, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman Gallery and Hauser & Wirth—were selected based on size (number of locations, artists and staff members) as well as published estimates of annual turnover. The exhibition data and attendance figures from 2014, including exhibitions that opened in 2013 but closed last year, were not finalised in time to be included. J.H.

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Curators choose their favourite pieces in the Whitney's inaugural exhibition in its new space

Carol Bove, Adventures in Poetry, 2002. Maccarone, New York and David Zwirner, New York/London

Scott Rothkopf, curator and associate director for programmes
When I arrived at the Whitney in 2009, I dreamed of acquiring our first work by Carol Bove—not just any Bove but Adventures in Poetry, perhaps her most important early sculpture. Unfortunately a private collector already owned the work, and I chased it for what seemed like ages until it ended up in the collection of David and Monica Zwirner, who generously donated it to the Whitney last year for our inaugural show. Through a constellation of books and images, the piece conjures the sexual, political, and aesthetic ideals of the 1960s and 70s. In Bove’s hands that era feels both real and imagined, lovingly, longingly, mysteriously.

Richmond Barthé, African Dancer, 1933

Carter E. Foster, curator of drawings
It was fascinating to come to terms with this statue of a dancing female figure by Richmond Barthé, one of the most celebrated artists of the Harlem Renaissance. At first, the piece seemed somewhat backward-looking and academic in purely formal terms. As I learned more, I realised Barthé, who was fully steeped in and deeply admiring of the traditions of Western sculpture, was using that tradition to create and celebrate a beautiful black female body. He did this partially through the lens of Renaissance art, particularly that of Michelangelo, in which female figures often have male musculature. Barthé’s combination of Africa, Europe, male and female, created a gesture that was, in fact, quite radical and forward-looking: combining genders in a single figure and fusing ideas from multiple cultures, he made a statement about race and beauty.

Eight woodblock prints by Chiura Obata from the “World Landscape” series America, 1928-30

Dana Miller, curator of the permanent collection
I can’t wait to see a stunning suite of woodblock prints by the Japanese-born Chiura Obata on display for the first time. The prints are based on watercolours that Obata painted in 1927 while on a camping trip in California’s Yosemite Valley and High Sierra regions. Obata worked with master craftsmen in Tokyo over an 18-month period and each finished work required more than 100 hand-coloured woodblock impressions; in some cases dozens of woodblocks were carved to recreate a single brushstroke. The works defy all expectations of what a woodblock print should look like and provide a view of the American landscape that uniquely synthesises Eastern and Western traditions and techniques.

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Foundation Custodia aims to be the place to see drawings in Paris

New exhibition programme is helping to put the institution on the cultural map

Tintoretto’s Study of the Head of Michelangelo's Giuliano de’Medici, around 1545/60. © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Grotesques by Michelangelo, studies by Tintoretto of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Giuliano de’ Medici, preparatory sketches for Raphael’s Vatican frescoes, studies of mummified body parts and a drawing of an unrealised tomb for Cardinal Francesco Armellini—the loathsome administrator of papal finances who was so detested by the Roman people that one historian blamed him for the city’s sacking in 1527: just a sampling of the 90 Old Master drawings on display in the exhibition “Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo: Italian Drawings from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (1430-1600)” at the Fondation Custodia in Paris (until 21 June).

It is the third Old Master show to be staged by the 68-year-old French foundation since the launch of its exhibition programme last year. The initiative is part of the institution’s plan to extend its reach to become the place to see drawings in Paris, says the foundation’s director Ger Luijten—the former head of the Rijksmuseum’s department of prints and drawings. “We have one of the world’s greatest collections of drawings next to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Devonshire,” he says.

Indeed, the Fondation Custodia has more than 7,000 drawings, 30,000 prints and 220 paintings from the 15th to the mid-19th century, with a heavy concentration of works by 16th and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters, as well as ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian artefacts, fine Chinese porcelain and Indian miniatures. The collection was amassed by the Dutchman Frits Lugt (1884-1970) who Luijten describes as a self-taught, “restrained collector” who preferred depictions of everyday life to allegorical scenes. The collection also includes 55,000 artists’ letters, including two of the seven extant letters written by Rembrandt, one of which offers advice on how to hang one of his paintings.
Luijten is actively adding to the foundation’s collection, buying works directly from other private collections or at art fairs, including The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht. Its assemblage of letters is the area experiencing the most growth, with one or two being acquired every week.

The foundation is a study collection and while Luijten stresses that it is “open to absolutely anyone with an interest in the collection”, it was off many cultural seekers’ radar until it launched its exhibition programme in a neighbouring building formerly occupied by the Dutch Institute, which was forced to close in 2013 because of budget cuts. The hope is that the current 100 visitors a day will grow to around 200.


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Stay-at-home mom Ali Jardine has amassed a huge following on Instagram, 511,000 followers, by consistently creating surreal photos on her iPhone. Originally a painter, Jardine found her true calling as an artist when she started playing with Instagram and all the other photo apps on her mobile device.

Martin Stranka is a professional photographer from the Czech Republic, born in April 13, 1984. He is self taught with a distinct vision of photography, self- described as being “where impossible becomes evident, and the perception of reality is shifted to its next level. I perceive photography as an unique space located in a balance and serenity. My work exists in that narrow space of few seconds between dreaming and awaking.”

The past three years, he has distinguished himself winning 40 major international awards from various photography competitions, which among others include Professional Photographer of the Year, Emerging Talent Award (in the Nikon International Photo Contest), Sony World Photography Awards, EISA Photo Maestro and International Photo Awards two years in a row.

Stranka’s solo as well as group exhibitions have been seen in the U.S., South America, Europe and Asia. His works have been shown next to creative giants like Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Banksy, Damien Hirst, Helmut Newton, Albert Watson and Roxanne Lowit.

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Good morning - photo by P Laura

Bonzai Art Photography by Adam Levine Guero