Beauty and beast in the drawing room

The Economist

His monumental public sculptures have been seen by tens of millions of people from Chicago to Tel Aviv. In London alone, the 4m or so who visited Tate Modern in 2002 could not have missed his dark red, 500-foot-long (152-metre) PVC-covered “Marsyas” which soared across the Turbine Hall. That piece worked so well, the space might have been created especially for it, rather than the other way around. “I like the idea a lot that you go somewhere to see something that has a particular relevance to a particular place,” said Anish Kapoor. But he quickly added: “A good work of art should be able to stand on its own.”

In the exhibition that has just opened at London’s Royal Academy, and runs until December 11th, about half the works, many of them huge, were created with its gracefully proportioned rooms in mind. Are they, in the event, relevant to their setting? Not often. But some, such as the fine mirror sculptures, are certainly enhanced by it: seeing the gallery’s gilding and skylight reflected upside-down in these pieces adds to their enjoyment. Others are splendidly positioned—and one of them, “Hive”, is so powerful that it would be worth the price of admission even if the rest of the gallery were bare.

The first sculpture on view, “Tall Tree and the Eye”, stands in the academy’s courtyard. As our picture shows, this tower, made of 76 highly polished, stainless-steel balls, each a metre across, is like a cloud of silver bubbles racing towards bubble heaven. Walking inside the sculpture at its base, the viewer looks up to see an endless multiplication of reflections—of himself, the handsome buildings framing the courtyard, the bubble-balls and the sky. This fine work of art, or giant-sized perceptual toy, lights up, and lightens up, its venerable surroundings. One small quibble: bigger would have been even better. In December it may be mistaken for an artsy Christmas tree. Of course, the sculptor might not mind.

The glass doors of the academy’s entrance hall allow a sneak preview of “Hive”, a huge rusted-steel sculpture on public view for the first time and actually the last work in the exhibition. Looking through the doors, one sees two colossal shapes like open thighs exposing a dark oval. Even innocents will see a vagina. Approached from the interior, however, “Hive” looks more like a magical tuber. The sculpture, taller than every entrance to the room, elicits the anxious feeling that it will grow even bigger, pushing through walls and ceiling. It is exciting and beautiful. The show couldn’t end on a higher note.

“Snail”, another exhibit, has a fat, coiling fibreglass body which opens out into a lusciously vermilion mouth. It is terrific.

But other installations were considerably less appealing to this reviewer. A cannon blasts gobs of lurid red wax-plus-Vaseline; a wagon-sized contraption made up of similar stuff deposits bits of itself on floors and doors as it slowly trundles through four rooms. Both these works seem unfortunate departures from Mr Kapoor’s admired elegance and refinement (though with talk of “ejaculation”, “war” and “penetration”, appreciation of these sculptures may divide along gender lines).

This is not a retrospective. Most of the sculpture is recent. However, the first room displays work from 1979, six years after Mr Kapoor, who was born in India, arrived in London. These pieces include “1000 Names”, a series of small objects of various shapes—geometric, flowerlike, imaginary—coated with intensely coloured pigments. Whether perceived as religious or as evocations of spice markets, their freshness appealed even to people allergic to conceptual art, and his reputation was launched. Honours followed, including representing Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Now 55, Mr Kapoor is the first living artist to be offered the entire main floor of the Royal Academy, another landmark in an ever more successful career.

His record price at auction is $3.8m; some private sales are rumoured to be far higher. He employs more than 20 skilled staff and can afford to create immense, costly works just for the adventure of it. One of these, “Grayman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked”, is on view. This single work, made up of 53 low-lying pieces, was fashioned by a computer-directed machine extruding coils of cement. Its earlier working title, “Shit and Architecture”, gives an idea of the overall effect. It is one of the pieces in this uneven but enthralling exhibition that seems out of place with its elegant surroundings.

Anish Kapoor talks about his show in this online audio slide show,

Photo: Getty Images

Come and see

Thina Lucy Manebaneba with her son Samuel
Mabolabola and brother Enos Manebaneba

Through the links to the work of various artists and photographers, as well as to museums, organisations, galleries, journals and blogs, we have tried to share the awesome resources the internet offers. We visualise artistic people spending hours exploring these links, and being delighted and uplifted thereby!

The photograph shown above is by photographer Pieter Hugo, whose name features on our list of links. His work can be seen here.

A menacing edge to a rarefied elegance

by Somak Ghoshal
The Telegraph

Around this time last year, the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre had organized an exhibition of Somnath Hore’s prints, which brought together some of his earliest studies from the 1940s and ’50s along with his later pen-and-ink drawings. While that show chronicled the evolution of the young poster-painter for the Communist Party into a sublime genius, this year, Seagull has selected a handful of bronzes, drawings and watercolours that bear the unmistakable mark of the master’s middle-to-late style. Showing till May 20, this beautifully put together exhibition looks beyond the popular perception of Hore as the archivist of hunger and pain. Instead it revives a somewhat less evident aspect of his versatile brilliance: his lifelong absorption in the little dramas of everyday existence.

Since the drawings and watercolours have been chosen from a set of Hore’s sketchbooks of the 1990s, they often look like pages from a visual diary of someone who is probably confined indoors, but soaks his eyes in the fleeting beauty of daily life. From the feel of the twilight air to the chromatic rhythms of each season, nothing escapes his ever-alert senses and eternally curious mind. We invariably think of Amal in Tagore’s Daakghar, looking out all day on the life that unfolds just outside his window, ever within his reach but forever unreachable. The men, women and animals that fill up Hore’s sketchbooks are similarly touched by a graceful innocence. It is evident that these figures have been brought to life by hands which once keenly felt the ripples of each unremarkable day, and that aching memory of a deeply sensual past remains still alive in every line that these hands have traced on paper.

From being just another daily record, the sketchbooks start looking like a journal of the mind, a history of inwardness, an internalized document of the vestiges of time. The limpid reds and blues become chaotically interspersed with black and brown, the brushwork becomes frenetic, and the luminous stillness of the mother-and-child series is broken. Hore’s obsession with the twinned oneness of the mother and her child is remarkable. In a series of delicate drawings, he depicts a mother holding her child, each inseparable from the other, fused to resemble an all new creature of love (picture: below, left). Pale shades of orange liven up their faces, while a waning grey hovers like the harbinger of imminent decay.

This paradoxical co-existence of burgeoning life-force and ebbing vitality is most eloquently captured in the bronzes. Hore’s sculptures have shed the trappings of flesh as they stand erect in their rarefied, bony elegance. These hollow men, women and children — drinking thirstily (picture: below, right), lying at ease, seated pensively, at play with one another, or standing shockingly lean in their visceral emptiness — bring to mind Giacometti’s stick people. Yet, if the Italian master’s greatness comes from making what is abstract intensely expressive, Hore’s characters remain unforgettable for the shimmering clarity of their structures. In Hore’s aesthetics, Giacometti’s mystery meets Brancusi’s lucidity to create a mystically ambivalent form.

At times, one feels baffled, even disturbed, by the utterly unpredictable effects of Hore’s art. The charged figures in metal sway the viewer from one emotion to the other, often merging different layers of feelings. Looking at the powerful scene of Shakuni disrobing Draupadi, one is initially startled by the literalism of the composition in which a vulture tears away a haggard woman’s sari (picture: above). Yet even as we take in the ruthless hunger of this carrion-eater, the wasted contours of the woman’s body, and the signs of affliction written all over her face, we also gaze on her parted lips and closed eyes, and are reminded, momentarily, of Bernini’s St Teresa.

As violence gets riddled by eroticism and physical decline becomes intertwined with sensuous longing, moments of pain and pleasure are darkly conflated. The figures, sleeping their troubled sleep, or caught in the throes of a wet dream, take on a menacing edge. Sleep suddenly begins to look like death’s brother.

Kandinsky: A Bright Future, Once

TRUE COLORS: Works such as Blue Mountain
(1908-09) show the influence of folk art.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

by Lucy Fisher
Time

Wassily Kandinsky could have ended up a law professor. Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky studied law and at the age of 30 was offered a professorship at what is now Tartu University in Estonia. Luckily for us, he had been inspired by an exhibition of French Impressionists the year before. He turned down the university job and moved to Germany to study painting full time. "Kandinsky," a major retrospective at Paris' Pompidou Center until Aug. 10 and then at the Guggenheim in New York City from Sept. 18, tracks his journey over the ensuing decades, both geographically and stylistically. Drawn to centers of the avant-garde and occasionally swept off course by the grim events of the early 1900s, we see Kandinsky progress from traditional naturalistic scenes to the stunning abstract canvases that made him one of the great pioneers of 20th century art.

Much of Kandinsky's early work drew on the folk art he encountered in Germany and in Russia. The works depict an ideal premodern Russia full of riders, onion domes and walled towns. But even in these first paintings, bright colors were used for effect, not naturalism — trees could be red, hills and horses blue. Pure color would become the central focus of his best works, a focus he pondered in his 1911 manifesto of abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Art, he wrote in the book, comes from within, from "inner necessity," and colors and shapes speak to people just as musical sounds do: "Color is a power which directly influences the soul." Contemporary Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky had preached that a new, spiritual age was about to dawn, and Kandinsky was convinced. He saw the artist at the apex of a triangle moving into the future, the base representing the mass of humanity who are slower to see the light. The paintings he produced at the time are full of joy and liberation, made with rapid, free gestures. In Improvisation 20 (Two Horses) (1911), animals are sketched with a few black lines, like a half-obliterated prehistoric cave drawing. Elsewhere mountains and buildings are indicated by sooty lines driving through patches of pure rainbow shades. (See pictures from a Cézanne exhibition.)

Kandinsky didn't paint much during the war years, but in 1921 he was asked to join the staff of the forward-looking Bauhaus art school in Germany, and the chance to teach turned his creative light up full again. His theories about pure form and color became student exercises; this was when he started painting his signature hard-edged abstracts: bright, lighthearted, with their own internal logic. Black lines, now severely clear-cut, are a skeleton for vividly colored shapes on a pale background. New motifs appear: jagged saw teeth, rainbows, triangles, circles. Though none of these canvases have subjects, pictograms float through them — sometimes recognizable boats, creating structure with their masts and spars.

After the Bauhaus school closed in 1933, Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, went to France, settling in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Instead of being surrounded by like-minded colleagues, he was now somewhat isolated. He had been experimenting in new directions before he left the Bauhaus, but his isolation, and freedom from the need to be didactic, may explain the playfulness that breaks out in his work. He carefully mixed colors — sage, sky blue, maroon — and experimented with texture, using controlled paint splatter for a sandy effect. Nothing is still: in Colorful Ensemble (1938) the splatters are a background of dots on which swim strange biomorphs; in Sky Blue (1940) stripy plankton flutter multiple legs while Reciprocal Accord (1942) fizzes and explodes.

By this time, Kandinsky was on his own, artistically. The train of followers that he predicted in his book failed to materialise. And that new age he had been so sure of never did dawn. But after his death in 1944, his spirit lived on in the postwar design explosion that sprayed color onto a grey and battered world. And today, his work perfectly illustrates progress toward an ideal — a rarity in a world consumed with art for art's sake.

Salima Hashmi

Poem for Zainab, 1994, Salima Hashmi

by Laila Kazmi

Jazbah Magazine: Women of Pakistan

“The objective of art is to give life a shape and though artists cannot change the world they can, through their work, give flight to imagination; they can give you the direction”

Salima Hashmi

Pakistan has been blessed with her fair share of talented artists in many different fields including the art of painting. The works of painters like the legendary A. R. Chugtai and Sadequain are among the most respected and recognized around the world. However, historically, as has been the case in the West, there are few women painters who have acquired high acclaim. In the 1996 edition of his book, Painting in Pakistan, Ijaz-ul-Hassan beautifully presents the history of painting in Pakistan starting from the Mughal era and introduces the works of close to 100 painters from the region. Of the 59 artists whose works are discussed in detail dating pre-1980s, only seven are women. In contrast, among the 38 artists each of whom are introduced briefly in the last chapter as emerging artists of the late 70s-80s, there are 12 women. One of these women is Salima Hashmi whom, in the late 80s, Hassan considered a new-comer to the world of serious art.

Today, some fifteen years after Ijaz-ul-Hassan first wrote about her, Salima Hashmi is one of the most well-known artists of Pakistan. Besides being an accomplished painter, she taught at Pakistan's prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) for about thirty years and served as the Principle of NCA for four years. In 1999, Salima Hashmi received Pakistan's Pride of Performance award. Today she is the Dean of School of Visual Arts at the newly established Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and she also runs her own art gallery featuring works of young artists.

Salima Hashmi comes from a socially and politically active family. Her father was the legendary Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and her mother, the British-born Alys Faiz was a respected journalist and peace activist in Pakistan. One of two daughters, Salima was always active in the arts, performing in plays before taking on painting professionally.

Salima was about eight years old when Faiz Ahmed Faiz was imprisoned for his political views. She remembers visiting him in jail. Later, during the repressive years of General Zia-ul-Haq rule, Salima's father had to go into self-exile as a result of the harassment he faced by Zia's government. Therefore, Salima grew up in a politically charged atmosphere. Painting became her outlet.

The Zia period is considered one of Pakistan's most repressive era especially for women, implications of which are still prevalent in society today. Salima's work focuses on the suffering of women in a highly patriarchal society especially under Zia-ul-Haq's. Her paintings usually include abstract figures of women depicting their struggles. They are a reflection of Salima's thoughts and feelings regarding the political and social uncertainties under which people of Pakistan have lived.



Salima deplored the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998. In an interview with Humsafar magazine she talked about her series People Wept at Dawn which she says is in response to the nuclear tests. Salima expressed her frustration at the India and Pakistan nuclear test by saying, "It would be so much more fruitful if these energies could be used in producing food to eat, providing shelter, freedom from disease and education for all."

In 2007, Salima Hashmi published a book titled Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan. The book examines the lives and works of about 50 of Pakistan's women painters since independence. As Murataza Rizvi wrote in his review of Salima's book in Dawn, 09/2202, "She took to writing (the book) only because our writers had failed to document the history of Pakistan's women artists." Salima Hashmi spent a number of years doing research for the book and interviewing women artists.

Salima Hashmi has also been active in the human rights movement since the early 80s when she was one of the founding members Women's Action Forum, an organization dedicated to promoting women's rights though it has been criticized for being limited to the elite class of Pakistan.

These days Salima Hashmi is focused on mentoring and promoting the works of younger artists. She has curated art exhibitions showcasing works of Pakistani artists both in Pakistan and abroad. She has also been traveling internationally to promote the new art school Beaconhouse National University which has already attracted students from abroad.

This article is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

Read Salima Hashmi's essay on the contribution of women artists to modern art in Pakistan here.

About this blog

Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper, 1932, Charles Clyde Ebbets.

The image is a good metaphor for what we are trying to do here, at this blog.

Raise high the roof beam, carpenters!

School of art & aesthetics

One of the gates of Frognerparken, Oslo.

In 1997, while working on an environmental planning project for Calcutta, a post-graduate student who was working as an assistant suddenly took off when I was talking about something, and had referred to art.. She said that was just pseudo-intellectual hogwash, modern art is not art at all. Just like Jung's moment of synchronicity with a scarab, right there next to me were envelopes of photos, taken by project assistants, and some by a visiting professional photographer from UK. I kept taking out one of each and compared them for the benefit of the group around me. The latter, while not being of great merit were nonetheless consistently tellingly different in each case, bringing out for instance the eye for light and shade. So I said, now you see, there is something called art, and it is different. She was shamed to silence, and later apologised to me for her imprudence and arrogance.. This blog is also a response to this hateful anti-intellectual and anti-art tendency in many "educated" people.

During that same planning project, I had shown a senior colleague, a govt engineer, a photo-essay in a journal, with pictures by documentary photographer Achinto and accompanying text selected by me. He looked at it. He pointed to a picture and asked how that image illustatrated the accompanying text. I looked blankly at him, in inner disbelief, and then tried to tell him smilingly and patiently that there was no one-is-to-one, uni-directional correspondence between image and text; image was something, text was something else, the image rich and pregnant in so many resonances, the text too possessing deep meaning; and for me there was a kind of link between the two and hence that composition. This artifice was an invitation to engage in that immersion and personal resonance. There may be completely other inferences and associations in the minds of other readers, or none. But this also gave me a direct, insight into the make-up of the person, and of wider social attitudes. All very dismaying and enervating.

Later that year, I developed a photo-text-speech-song presentation, "The Child in the City". This was an hour and a half long meditation on cities and childhood, drawing upon diverse references. There too, the link between image and narrative was only an imagined one. But it worked, with audiences across India and also abroad. Recently, while reading about the exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of phtographer Robert Frank's The Americans at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, I learnt: "...also ground-breaking was the way he tightly sequenced his photographs in The Americans, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically to present a haunting picture of mid-century America." That was similar to what I had done, purely intuitively, in "The Child in the City". I savoured a sense of gladness about some merit in my madness.

Some five years ago, I had gone to see a painting exhibition. Just before that I had picked up a younger associate, a factory engineer, who was visiting Calcutta, to go for dinner with a common friend. We had met in front of the art gallery and I asked him to excuse me and give me a few minutes to quickly take a look at the exhibition. Before he went and waited outside the display area, he too did a quick tour of the exhibition. He looked at a particular painting, stood there a while and stared at it, and then came to me and asked me how that painting was its title. I can't recall what I said to him, I think I said something to the effect that art appreciation was about a personal relationship with the art-work, where one talks to the other, where both respond to one another.

I call this un-comprehending, assumed mechanical notion of art the "this is an ass" school of art and aesthetics. Meaning - people will look at a painting and the title and ask how does this mean that? Or ask, what does this painting mean, or say? I say, why ask me, you figure it out, if you want. It is assumed art means that there should be a picture of a gaping ass, and a title saying "this is an ass", and that will keep teveryone happy and the world going round and round.

But it is also quite insidious. A couple of months ago, at a public event in Bangalore, a minister in the state of Karnataka in the course of his speech said, “modern art has become a medium for pseudo intellectuals to insult ancient Indian culture.” Thankfully a group of artists from Karnataka raised their voices in protest against the comment. “Mr Gowda, you have no right to speak about modern art, you know nothing about it. We object to your remarks,” said M S Murthy, an artist and director of ‘Bhoomi - the centre for artists’ in Bangalore. He was joined by other local artists. When the group of artists continued to object to the remarks, the minister asked the police to throw them out. The artists were then forced out and some sections of the crowd too left the venue, saying, “we are with the artists, there is no need to be fascists.”

You can see, hear and feel all kinds of things and resonances in a painting, if you are are sensitive and discerning and imaginative, like a child. You can make yourself open to a state where you are immersed in the image, nothing else matters, it becomes a powerful means of awareness and consciousness.

Something like that happened to me during an exhibition in December 1997, part of the Calcutta Metropolitan Festival of Art organised by artists from the state of West Bengal to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. I had been involved in conceptualising and organising that festival, at a time when an outpouring of sensitivity, to music, song, mythology, poetry, fine art, performative art and culture was taking place inside me. The "Bengal school of art" and subsequent Modern painters were brought to the public, meticulously and lovingly curated by a senior painter. Perhaps the first time when I was stunningly stirred by art was at the New York Met, where, sadly, I had something like 30 minutes or less to have a quick look during a short visit to that amazing city. But I think the exhibitions at the art festival were when for the first time in my life, images caught hold of me, shook me and a powerful relationship was made with a painting, and meanings, profound wisdom were sensed and a rich train of thought-feeling-imagination flowed. You are a transformed person after that, and see art and artists in a completely different light. The reality, however, is that the domain of art, and the much of the community of "artists" may themselves be very far away from that "different light" in which art and artists were seen following the inner experience of art and aesthetics, value and meaning.

In the spring of 2002, I happened to be in Oslo. My host suggested I visit the Vigeland sculpture park (Frognerparken), and so I went there one morning, taking a bus. I did not know anything about what was there, and before and after entry, I saw a whole collection of statues and sculpture. It can feel quite overwhelming, but I was in no hurry, I had as much time as I wanted. I began looking at and taking in each item, beginning at the beginning and working my way through the arrangement. Something started happening to me, I became immersed in another world where the display was telling an ancient, grave tale... A coach brought in a large group of visitors, from India as it turned out. Must be one of those ten-cities in ten-days tours of Europe offered by tour operators, I thought. I observed a couple, they spoke Bengali. Cameras were out, click click all around. They were gone in 15 minutes. Astonishment! Here was I, exulting in timeless immersion, and there they were, coming from the same place, India, Calcutta, that supposedly artistic land, and how different our individual experiences were in the Vigeland park. I spent almost half a day there, finally I was all alone in the place. It had been an awesome personal trip. I had felt that the sculpture park had been waiting for my arrival, I was a key, which unlocked the secret of the display put together by Vigeland! I sat and soaked myself in that mood and feeling. A lovely gentle breeze played, a tree rained tiny red leaves. I wept, in joy, incredulity and humility. How privileged the people of Oslo were, to have this treasure in their city. I did learn from talking to people there that the park was seen as a witness to the life of the city, and its various seasons, in each of which the park assumed a different appearance. Oslo's gift is also a gift to the whole of humanity, and Oslo is its custodian.

Over the years, just like I have been seized and shaken by specific compositions of music, or songs by particular singers, or dance performances and choreography, or films, so have I had intensive personal experiences, around particular art-works or exhibitions or sites or places. Artists, like Abanindranath Tagore, Gagendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, Murillo, Arthur Tress, Rodin, Henry Moore, Kandinsky... Places, like Tawang, Panihati, Belur, Elephanta, Golcunda, Sarnath, Calcutta's Victoria Memorial, Thodupuzha, Nizamuddin, Gomteswara, Guruvayur, Sanchi ... Neighbourhoods in Calcutta, like in Chetla, Wellington, Alimuddin Street, Bow Barracks, north Calcutta... Cities, like Jerusalem and Nablus... Topographies, like the course of the Adi Ganga in Calcutta, the Sundarbans, the path of the river Ganga, Palestine... Countries, like Japan...

One is made larger, enriched and uplifted by art, which is the key to life. It is therefore the supreme duty of governments to ensure that its people have access to the best of art and works and feats of human imagination and highness. Art education, through schooling, is a must. That is nourishment. It is vital for cities to have public museums of art. Thus will refined citizens be made.

Sarbari Roy Choudhury

Self Portrait, Sarbari Roy Choudhury,
10" X 9.5", plaster of Paris.

Sensibility Objectified - The Sculptures of Sarbari Roy Choudhury

A retrospective show of sculpture by Sarbari Roy Choudhury, at Akar Prakar, Calcutta. From 28 April 2009, through May.

Six Story Sculpture

Reece Terris, Ought Apartment [under
construction], 2008-09, Photo: Henri
Robideau, Vancouver Art Gallery

The work of Vancouver-based Reece Terris focuses on the relationship between constructed architectural spaces and our common experiences and encounters within them. Through amplifications or shifts in the function of an initial design, Terris’ work reconsiders utility in both object and place to create environments that highlight the larger cultural contexts implicit in our built environment.

Commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ought Apartment will consist of a tower that rises from the main floor to the full height of the central rotunda, in which sections from six apartments are stacked one on top of another. Each apartment will be furnished with discarded items from the 1950s (on the lowest level) up to the present decade (at the top). Through this process of “making strange,” Terris invites viewers to consider their relationship to the consumption and construction of domestic space and the role this space plays in locating a public as social subjects.

Reece Terris: Ought Apartment, May 6 to September 20, 2009

North Looks South

Gyula Kosice, Argentinean, born 1924. La Ciudad Hidroespacial,
1946-1972. Acrylic, plexiglas, paint and light, variable dimensions.
Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law
Accessions Endowment Fund.

from Art Daily

HOUSTON, TX.- North Looks South: Building the Latin American Art Collection, opening June 7 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), celebrates the museum’s major Latin American art acquisitions since 2001, with more than 80 works in every medium, ranging in date from the 1920s to the present. North Looks South is organized around unexpected juxtapositions between artists and works from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, the United States, and Venezuela.

Rather than a traditional, chronological timeline, North Looks South is instead organized around the Latin American art movements that have come to define the collection, advancing dialogue between varied works from different periods: Constructivism, Kinetic and Op art, Surrealism, Latin Pop, installation art, and contemporary video. The arc of the exhibition moves from ethereal works that play with light and space, to darker works that wrestle with social issues.

Featured artists include Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Roberto Obregón (Venezuela); Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Alfredo Volpi, Franz Weissman, Waldemar Cordeiro and Luis Sacilotto (Brazil); Xul Solar, Antonio Berni, Marta Boto, Carmelo Sobrino, Miguel Angel Ríos and Juan Carlos Distéfano (Argentina); Roberto Matta and Alfredo Jaar (Chile); David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel de la Mora and Teresa Margolles (Mexico); Julio Alpuy, José Gurvich and Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay); and Beatriz González and Oscar Muñoz (Colombia). The exhibition will be on view through September 28, 2009, in the Upper Brown Pavilion of the Caroline Wiess Law Building.

"This exhibition is an extraordinary opportunity for the MFAH to envision how its Latin American collections could be installed in a future, permanent space," commented Dr. Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "As this exhibition has come together, the works that so far comprise this collection have revealed unusual and even unexpected relationships and counterpoints among artists, movements and objects."

Mari Carmen Ramírez, the MFAH’s Wortham Curator of Latin American Art, has built one of the most important Latin American art collections in the United States. For the first time since the critically acclaimed, groundbreaking 2004 exhibition Inverted Utopias Ramírez, along with Gilbert Vicario, Assistant Curator for Latin American Art, will again pull together artwork from a wide array of Latin American countries, this time by exclusively mining the museum’s diverse Latin American art collection (which does not currently have permanent display space at the museum). In North Looks South, Ramírez and Vicario will present a provocative view of the Latin American modern and contemporary art tradition—one that has been shaped as much by technical innovation and utopian concerns as it has by cultural and sociopolitical realities.

"In just eight short years since the Latin American art department was established at the MFAH, we have pursued a collecting mission aimed at identifying, researching and collecting renowned masters of Latin American modern art, as well as those artists who challenge preconceived notions about the region," said Ramírez. "In this exhibition, we will showcase some of the museum’s major acquisitions, including outstanding recent gifts, along with long-term loans and works that the museum hopes to acquire. These acquisitions are a testimony to the MFAH’s and the community’s commitment to Latin American art. The majority of the works acquired since 2001 were purchased with funds from the biannual Latin American Experience Gala and the Latin Maecenas, the department’s extremely dynamic Latin American art collectors support group."

Also featured in the exhibition are masterpieces on long-term loan to the MFAH from the Latin American Art Department’s Partners-in-Art Program. Participants in this program include the Fundación Gego, the Cruz Diez Foundation, Houston, and the Tanya Brillembourg Art Collection.

In addition, the MFAH will showcase a major new acquisition, La Ciudad Hidroespacial, 1946-72 (The Hydrospatial City), by Argentinean artist Gyula Kosice. An ambitious undertaking first begun in 1946, Kosice worked on the project for over 25 years. While components of this artist’s signature piece have been exhibited, the MFAH will be the first museum to display this immense work in its entirety. The installation, to be presented in a 200-square-foot room, demonstrates Kosice’s vision for the future: space architecture for a new, utopian civilization. The centerpiece of the work is 9-by-9-foot installation filled with a ―galaxy‖ of clear plastic mobiles–each a unique habitat—that dangles from the ceiling. The installation also includes a manifesto and fifteen drawings.

Ian Fairweather

Carousel, by Ian Fairweather

Fairweather, by Murray Bail, Murdoch Books.

from The Economist

A STRANGE shy man with a cultured voice but almost penniless stepped ashore in Melbourne in 1934 and unrolled some drawings tied up in a singlet. “I was absolutely staggered,” remembered the first person to view them. “I was dumbfounded at the beauty of those things.”

Ian Fairweather was an artist of exceptional force and originality who, until his death in 1974, produced paintings that merged the diverse influences of cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. An art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that “the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty” of Fairweather’s finest pieces, such as “Epiphany”, surpassed all other Australian paintings.

In this handsome book of biography and colour reproductions (first published in 1981 but now greatly expanded and altered) Murray Bail goes a step further: “There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art—or anywhere else.” Yet who was this pathologically reclusive artist?

Mr Bail, a prize-winning novelist who wrote “Eucalyptus”, is a critic parsimonious with his enthusiasms, but he has devoted many years to beating Fairweather out of the bush that was the artist’s preferred habitat. A self-appointed vagrant who was “much travelled but unworldly”, Fairweather was born in Scotland, the youngest of nine children of a surgeon-general in the Indian army, and spent his first ten years in the care of Scottish aunts. After an adolescence in Jersey, he joined the army but was captured in France at the start of the first world war, passing some of his happiest years as a prisoner-of-war. He then studied at the Slade school of art in London, a favourite pupil of Henry Tonks, an artist who found him “profoundly melancholy”. From then on, “he avoided the art world like a plague”.

Few artists, Mr Bail demonstrates, can have enjoyed such poverty in such inhospitable surroundings. Fairweather worked as a farmhand in Canada, a road-inspector in Shanghai and a bush-cutter in Australia, living variously in a concrete-mixer and an abandoned patrol boat (Darwin), a converted cinema (Brisbane), an empty goat dairy (Cairns) and a tent (Bribie Island).

Patrick White, an Australian writer who once visited him, drew on him for the painter in his novel The Vivisector, but in his dogged modesty and solitariness Fairweather more closely resembled White’s desert explorer in Voss. Whenever he saw anyone approach, he rushed into the bush and hid. “Hell for Fairweather was other people,” writes Mr Bail.

A perfectionist who painted at night by the light of a hurricane lamp, Fairweather destroyed much of his art. The 500 or so paintings and drawings that remain are intensely felt, unsettling and resonate with “a searching necessity”. The act of painting was the thing: “It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.” He didn’t much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of sometimes disowning it, or even not recognising it.

Into the Sunset

Timothy O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840-1882), Ancient
Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle. 1873. Albumen silver print, 10 13/16
x 7 15/16” (27.5 x 20.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West, opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

See images from the MoMA exhibition here.

Eid Milad Laila

From Eid Milad Laila (Laila’s Birthday). 2008. Palestine/Tunisia/
Netherlands. Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi. Pictured:
Nour Zoubi as Laila and Mohamed Bakri as Abu Laila. Image
courtesy of Kino International.

From Art Daily

NEW YORK, NY.- Laila’s Birthday (2008), the latest feature by director Rashid Masharawi (b.1962, Gaza Strip), will have a weeklong run in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from May 27 through June 1, 2009.

Laila’s Birthday is set in the filmmaker’s chaotic hometown of Ramallah. The film follows a Palestinian judge turned taxi driver who is trying to arrange a birthday cake and gift for his young daughter’s birthday. It turns out to be an epic task as he navigates the corruption, hassles, constantly changing political winds, and Israeli checkpoints around the city, all in the space of one single day. Masharawi provides a lively and revealing portrait of both a city and decent man at the breaking point.

Masharawi’s feature debut, Ticket to Jerusalem (2003), was featured in MoMA’s 2003 New Directors/New Films. It followed his 2002 documentary Live from Palestine, which chronicled the editorial and production process of journalists working for the famed Voice of Palestine radio station. Masharawi founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Center, a film initiative that promotes local productions and organizes a mobile film-screening program aimed at bringing high-quality cinema to Palestinian refugee camps.

Laila’s Birthday will open theatrically in select US markets this summer and fall, and will be released on DVD before the end of 2009.

MoMA Presents: Laila’s Birthday is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Eid Milad Laila (Laila’s Birthday). 2008. Palestine/Tunisia/ Netherlands. Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi. With Mohammed Bakri, Areen Omari, Nour Zoubi. In Arabic; English subtitles. Print courtesy of Kino International, New York. 71 min.

The Lost Skyline

56 Leonard Street, Herzog & de Meuron for the Alexico Group. ANNOUNCED: September 2008. PLAN: A 56-story residential tower comprising 145 luxury residences, with occupancy originally expected in late 2010. STATUS: Louise Sunshine, a real-estate consultant working with Alexico, says the project “is awaiting the completion of its financing.” Meanwhile, construction is stalled and the developer admits the timeline has been changed. Photo: Connie Zhou for New York Magazine

by Daniel B. Smith
New York Real Estate

An entire counterfactual history of New York could be written simply from the stories of buildings that never got built. Even in flush times, ambitious projects are hard to incubate; they struggle to maturity against a tide of red tape, cost overruns, warring egos, and community sensitivities. In difficult times, when the market goes suddenly from strong to weak, the survival rate drops with the Dow. Plans are left out in the cold.

Only nine months ago, each of the buildings on the following pages stood a fighting chance of making the jump from architect’s drawings to glass, steel, concrete, and brick. Today, all are on indefinite, very costly hold. That doesn’t necessarily mean death; developers, with all they’ve invested monetarily and emotionally, routinely maintain that construction is poised to continue as soon as financing gets back on track. But as often as not, time passes them by, and the lots sit unchanged, waiting for new architects and developers to reimagine their future for a different, more modest world. In the meantime, we are left not with towers or spires or bold cantilevers, but snapshots, renderings. A portrait of a city that never was.

See a slide-show of "Ghost Buildings" here.

Diane Arbus exhibition

Diane Arbus, Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. 1970 1970.
© 1971 The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC.

from Art Daily

CARDIFF.- One of the main art exhibitions in 2009 at the National Museum, Wales, in Cardiff will reveal the work of legendary New York photographer Diane Arbus (1923 -1971), who transformed the art of photography.

Diane Arbus, which comprises 69 black and white photographs including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: "Box of Ten, 1971", is one of the best collections of Arbus's work in existence and will be on display at the Museum from 9 May until 31 August 2009.

Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 "Artist Rooms" from the collection created by the dealer and collector Anthony d'Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. Diane Arbus will be one of the first exhibitions on a tour of this collection.

Anthony d'Offay's guiding principle for the creation of "Artist Rooms" was the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists, Diane Arbus being one of them.


Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle ,
N.J. 1967. © 1971 The Estate of Diane
Arbus, LLC.

Capturing 1950s and 1960s America, Arbus is renowned for portraits of people who were then classed on the outskirts of society nudists, transvestites, circus performers and zealots. In one of her most famous works, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ of 1967, the twins are photographed as if joined at the shoulder and hip with only three arms between them.

Her powerful, sometimes controversial, images often frame the familiar as strange and the strange or exotic as familiar. This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.

It is a privilege to be part of the Artist Rooms Tour an initiative that brings together high quality art with top establishments across the country, said Nicholas Thornton, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art at Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales.

The name Diane Arbus might not be familiar to everyone, but her portraits will be! As Arbus's pioneering approach to the art has greatly influenced photographers across the world, we hope this exceptional exhibition of her work will have a positive impact on new and existing visitors to the Museum.

Improving art displays, creating new galleries and radical changes to the way in which works are shown all form a part of Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Waless current drive to enhance the presentation of Wales's art collection. Within this project, the Museum is developing new spaces for modern and contemporary art in order to create new opportunities for the display of its important and growing collection of post-1950 art and temporary exhibitions such as Diane Arbus.

This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.

"Artist Rooms on Tour with The Art Fund" has been devised to take those displays beyond the collections owners, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.

"Artist Rooms" is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation. It has materially strengthened Tate's ability to represent some of the most important art of the latter half of the twentieth century, and helps establish Scotland as a world-class destination for contemporary art.

The Art Fund is giving £250,000 per year to "Artist Rooms on Tour" with The Art Fund. The Scottish Government are giving £175,000 over three years.

Pioneers of Contemporary Glass

Marvin Lipofsky, American, born 1938,
Kentucky Series #8, 2000-2001, blown
glass, © Marvin Lipofsky, Barbara and
Dennis DuBois Collection, Photo: M. Lee
Fatherree

This exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, explores the origins of the studio glass movement through works by its innovators, including Harvey Littleton, known as the "father of studio glass" because of his role in moving the production of glass from a factory to a studio environment, and Dale Chihuly, one of the early champions of art glass through his foundation of the Pilchuck Glass School, and his success as an artist. Other major figures represented in the exhibition include husband and wife team Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova, credited with introducing conceptual ideas into the movement by working with shape, thickness and depth to create art that utilizes "the light inside" and delivers an experience rich with emotion; Erwin Eisch, whose early and radical rejection of traditional glass vessels in favor of an expressive, sculptural form allowed for political or narrative content within glass; and Toots Zynsky, whose delicate creations are singular in their thread-like construction, prompting her to name the technique that she developed "filet-de-verre", or "fused and thermo formed glass threads."

Featuring works by artists from the United States, the Czech Republic, Germany, Australia, Italy, Finland, and Sweden, the exhibition will be concentrated in the Alice Pratt Brown Gallery of the MFAH, and will reinforce the idea of international artistic collaboration and community, as well as educate viewers about the diversity that is possible with this unconventional medium. In addition, select pieces from the DuBois collection will be displayed in other areas of the museum alongside various examples from the MFAH´s permanent collection, underscoring the relationship between glass and other media and guiding visitors toward an appreciation of the works as part of a larger tradition of world art.

Visual arts opera

Olafur Eliasson, "Echo House", "Il Tempo del Postino",
Manchester Theater Festival in 2007. Photo Joel Fildes.

from Art Daily

BASEL.- One of the most spectacular events at this year’s Art Basel will be the presentation of “Il Tempo del Postino” at Theater Basel. The Independent called this unique show “The world's first visual arts opera” after its first and only presentation at the Manchester International Festival in 2007. A group of the world’s leading visual artists created a major experimental presentation.

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno as a group exhibition that would occupy time rather than space, “Il Tempo del Postino” (Postman time) is presenting a sequential display of time based art on the theatre stage. Each of the over fifteen artists is creating an act of different length. In Basel “Il Tempo del Postino” will be directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

In addition to the artists who participated in Manchester in 2007, Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Il Tempo del Postino” in Basel will include a new contribution by Thomas Demand. The graphic design for Manchester was created by Peter Saville, for Basel it was created by Ludovic Balland.

By focusing on time-based work, this unique group show aims to redefine how the visual arts can be experienced. Set in a classic theater architecture, it transforms the established exhibition model into an exhilarating, shared audience experience. “Il Tempo del Postino” is organized by Art Basel, Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel and was originally co-commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris for the World Premiere in Manchester in July 2007.

After its first celebrated presentation, Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph wrote: “At the end of ‘Il Tempo del Postino’ I felt I’d been present at a historic occasion when the ambitions of the curators were perfectly matched by the quality of the art.” This elaborate and ambitious exhibition is now touring to Basel.

The question that was originally posed by the curators was: “What happens if having an exhibition is not a way to occupy space, but a way to occupy time?” For “Il Tempo del Postino” each artist creates their own piece, including the presentation of installations, and inviting performing artists, singers, actors, dancers and a full orchestra playing specially commissioned music. “Il Tempo del Postino” is delivered to the audience in its own presentation time, rather than the audience walking through it in their own time; the final production was created collaboratively with all participating artists feeding into the overall structure, assisted by a creative team of experienced theatre practitioners and technicians.

There will be three presentations of “Il Tempo del Postino”, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, June 10 – 12, 2009 at 8.30 pm at Theater Basel.

Democratic Design

Tumblers "Kalas“, 2000. Designer: Monika Mulder.

Democratic Design: IKEA opens at the International Design Museum in Munich.

See images from the Munnich exhibition here.

Remembering a collector

Amy Blakemore, American, born 1958, Girl & Game,
1990, Gift of Will Michels in memory of John Cleary
and his lifelong love of photographs

"To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else´s collection rather than one´s own," wrote Susan Sontag. Cleary was a rescuer. He rescued things for himself and for others. Many collectors of photographs owe a debt of gratitude for Cleary´s aid in starting, expanding, or enhancing their collections.

Cleary was a dedicated supporter of the museum´s photography collections. He made images from both his personal collection and the gallery inventory available for various exhibition projects, helped the museum find and acquire significant images to add to the permanent collection, and donated numerous photographs to the museum.

Cleary´s legacy has prompted both photographers and photography dealers to make generous donations to the museum in his memory, selections from which are shown in this exhibition.

Remembering John Cleary is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sunday, May 3, 2009.

Florescence

Florescence 1

Florescence, one of the largest competitive national flower shows sanctioned by the Garden Club of America in the United States, is presented by The Garden Club of Houston, River Oaks Garden Club, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During this biennial event, fabulous floral arrangements complement the artworks in the museum´s galleries.