16/07/2012

Markus Schinwald | Between Past And Future

Markus Schinwald | Between Past And Future

Feverish preparations for holidays are under way, and while most people are getting ready to leave the hot Milan, the ones still in the city could profit these last weeks to visit art exhibitions before their finissage waiting for the next season. Among the shows on view until the end of July, we chose to suggest you Old Wants – Young Desires by Salzburg-born artist Markus Schinwald (b. 1973) at gallery Giò Marconi.

Schinwald’s works rely on a trans-historical approach that mixes contemporary elements and ancient atmospheres leading back into the past, linking different periods to display the constriction of human bodies and their relation with the surrounding space.

Amelie, Grita, Berth, Jasper, Lukas or Pepe are just some of the characters depicted by the Austrian artist in his restored and manipulated paintings and vintage prints: faces of bourgeois ladies and gentlemen from the 19th century, who are being suffocated by curtains and scarves wrapped around their faces, men and women tricked up with chains, metal clamps, stripes and bandages that remind of weird pieces of jewelry and, at the same time, fetish objects and prosthesis.

Markus Schinwald’s small dark portraits are both macabre and freaky, though preserving the elegance, seriousness and above all composure of their hybrid creatures that puzzle and intrigue the viewers. Yes, because even if the weird tools initially cause uneasiness, they actually don’t seem to be hindrances for the perfectly self-controlled figures.

The altered body, its connections with the mind and space; the relation between inner and outer, conscious and unconscious call to mind the study of an artist’s renowned countryman, Sigmund Freud.

Beyond paintings and prints, the exhibition also presents three aquariums that interact with the gallery architecture. For this show, as already did at the 54th Venice Biennale, Markus Schinwald plays once again with the topic of “legs”, displaying sculptures of chair legs that remind dancers’ legs and, as an icing on the cake, a double projection of his famous film Orient.

Spending some time in a chilly and relaxed art gallery visiting a very high quality exhibition is definitely a good way to wait for summer holidays, don’t you think?

Old Wants – Young Desires will run until July 27th 2012.

Monica Lombardi

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09/07/2012

“The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata”

“The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata”

When recently an article published the list of most influential art collectors in the world, unsurprisingly only one name was Italian. Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli have created an empire both in fashion and art industry. So when last year Ca’ Corner della Regina, a historical palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, became a new temporary home for Fondazione Prada, the announcement came almost as a relief.

Fondazione Prada, under the artistic direction of the superstar curator Germano Celant, has successfully opened its second exhibition in the Venetian venue last thursday. Titled “The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata”, the show is one of the most beautiful ones Venice has offered in a long time. The title of the exhibition refers to the idea, born at the beginning of the 20th century and pursued until the 1970s, that art should pervade the society through ‘the multiplication of objects, experimenting with unprecedented aesthetic and social uses for them’.

Thus, the exhibition, spread throughout the 2 floors of the beautiful Venetian palazzo, presented over six hundred editions – objects familiar across cultures – that ideally should have enabled the artist in creating connections with the society through industry, technology and systems of popular distribution. The exhibition traces the transformation of the idea of uniqueness in art starting from the early 20th century Avant-Gardes – Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dutch Neoplasticism and German Bauhaus, through pop and optical art, ending with contemporary ‘dematerialization’ of art in the works by Sol LeWitt, Laurence Weiner, Ed Rucha, Dieter Roth.

This language of art, involving the common, banal and everyday, both as medium as well as way of expression, far from being a small utopia, has surely touched the way we perceive both art as well as our daily routine.

“The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata” runs until the 25th of November at Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Fondazone Prada. 

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05/07/2012

Summer Shop at Karma

Summer Shop at Karma

Karma is a West Village shop founded by Brendan Dugan. If you are not familiar with the name, Brendan runs a graphic design studio and a publishing practice called “An Art Service”. An Art Service creates beautifully designed books and printed matter in collaboration with artists like Dan Colen, Paul McCarthy, Bjarne Melgaard, Ryan McGinley or Rob Pruitt. To take the control of the whole process of the book conception, production and distribution, Brendan has dedicated the storefront of his office/gallery/publishing house space to a bookshop, Karma.


Karma is often hosting pop-up shop and events, and it’s currently the home of a theme project shop named “Summer“. Curated by Aaron Aujla and Dylan Bailey, the shop might make you raise an eyebrow when seen in the New York context of it, if you don’t look into their real intent. Aujla and Bailey, respectively artists and assistants to Nate Lowman and Dan Colen, have collected a series of objects that try to replicate those found from homes along the coast. Hence, the collection of object includes white cotton towels and linens, buckets meticulously hand painted to resemble enameled metal, large dining table made from found drift wood, shell vases, white plates and tanning lotions.

Through this collection of objects, the authors have transformed the West Village book-shop in a place that resembles any kind of beach resort goodie market. By recreating this particular mood and ambient Aujla and Bailey thus reveal ‘the culture of beach side artistry and its inner-workings’.
 Even though the artists have long debated about the concept, completing a thorough analysis of home décor stores, maybe the best thing about the whole operation is that the potential artistic pretension leaves room for an appealing and cosy everyday shop.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Karma

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29/06/2012

Art Edition at Art Basel

Art Edition at Art Basel

Even though it has been almost two weeks since Art Basel has closed its doors, some of the things we have experienced there are still in our minds. Among the big galleries and incredible artworks they presented, a special space was dedicated to printed artworks. This section of Art Basel, named Art Edition, presented the collaborations between renowned publishers and contemporary artists.

Quite distant from the cosy ‘independent publishing’ world, this book-works were breathtaking for the impressive quality of their production and the incredible selection of work by contemporary artists.


Even though this introduction may induce you to think that the works shown at Art Edition are far far away from the whole ‘independent publishing’ ideology, it can make you realize how the whole idea of a book as an object can constantly be rediscussed.


Among exhibitors like Lelong Gallery, Crow Point Press or Gemini G.E.L., we were most impressed by the Parisian Three Star Books . “Three Star Books are artworks”, as they strongly state themselves. This small publishing house produces some extraordinary limited book editions, and their books are highly crafted and produced in a closed editorial collaboration between the author and the publisher. Among artists that work with them, we fell in love with Ryan Gander’s book “I’m Trending” and Lawrence Weiner’s “Suomi Finland Passi Port Passport”.


Next to the Art Edition section, we were also able to see our all time favorites – Parkett, Zurich-based contemporary art magazine, Art Metropole and Printed Matter, two organizations dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of publications made by artists.

As Printed Matter is an institution for all the independent publishing geeks, and they have since long brought us a whole stack of books we have been dying for, we are going to be quite biased this time and claim that this was kind of the best part of Art Basel.

Rujana Rebernjak

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25/06/2012

Gina Pane | The Vulnerability of Human Body

Gina Pane | The Vulnerability of Human Body

From 60’s to 70’s the human body was the core centre of many artists’ research, as both the subject and the object of their work. The body was mainly used as a mean of artistic representation and, simultaneously, as an instrument of inspection of one’s interiority. Through the performance, the Wiener Aktionisten – Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler –, and other artists such as Gustav Metzer, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci and Gina Pane, wanted to break the common taboo and challenged the public policy and morality. Actions were shot and recorded with video, texts and pictures, which served as the evidence of the extreme art experiences.

What was really effective in these artworks is the rituality of each act; performances assumed the form of theaters where artists played a sort of a sacrificial comedy focused on their own body. As mentioned above, Gina Pane (1939 – 1990), a French artist of an Italian origin, was one of the main representatives of what is widely recognised as Body Art, the artistic trend characterised by the practise of self-mutilation and sadomasochism. Working with/on her own flesh and blood as an artistic media, Pane laid bare the human body’s fragilities; undressing, hitting, hurting, dirtying her own body, she was able to show the sense of danger and pain.

Gina Pane, with a distinctive composure and a rational attitude, used the sufferance as a way of representing spirituality, carrying a deep emotional and symbolic charge. In Sentimental action (1973), the proto feminist artist, dressed totally in white, takes a bunch of roses in her hand and hurts herself with their spines. The blood dripping on the bouquet turns the roses from white to red. At that point, the artist cuts herself with a razor blade.


An even higher pathos is represented by Action Psyché (Essai), a performance from 1974 – documented by sketches, photographs, notes – where Gina Pane injures her eyelashes to simulate tears of blood, and then engraves her belly. Some prim viewers could be disarmed and shocked by the narcissism, aggressiveness and exhibitionism displayed in such a rough and direct way.

An anthological exhibition of the great artist entitled Gina Pane – È per amore vostro: l’altro is on view at Mart in Rovereto, retracing Gina Pane’s career, from its beginning, through the Actions, getting to the latest works. The show will run until July 8, 2012.


Monica Lombardi

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20/06/2012

MeMO – Museums and Men’s Fashion

MeMO – Museums and Men’s Fashion

The discussion of what is art and what is fashion is a constantly on-going one. With an opening party and three following Notte Bianca‘s Mondadori presents MeMO – musei e moda uomo. The project aims at taking an inventive angle to the male fashion during Pitti Uomo 82 and is dedicated to merging art and fashion through twelve video collections placed in the five Civic Museums of Florence. “Fashion is art and art is fashionable”, says Angelo Sajeva (president and CEO of Mondadori Pubblicità).


The opening event was held at Palazzo Vecchio on Monday night, the day before the official opening of Pitti Immagine Uomo. From here onwards the five chosen spots will be open for the public to enjoy 19 – 21 of June, between 7PM and midnight each evening. The pieces are produced by video makers specialized in fashion, and will help the companies to create a story and an image outside of their normal habits.

“Art and fashion are generally the fruit of the same input: creativity!” continues Mr Sajeva.

The project adds to the art-fashion discussion and the invited opening crowd were able to take part in an astonishing event and in a great starting point for the upcoming week in Florence and Pitti.


The pieces can be seen at Fondazione Salvatore Romano, Capella Brancacci, Museo Stefano Bardini, Museo de Palazzo Vecchio (Sala d’Arme) and Museo di S. Maria Novella (Cappella degli Spagnoli).

 

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe 

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19/06/2012

Art Basel round 2 – Art Unlimited

Art Basel round 2 – Art Unlimited

Among the numerous sections that composed the format of the 43rd edition of one of the most important and high-level fairs all over the world, we chose to focus on Art Unlimited, a huge group show launched in 2000 and dedicated to super-size artworks. As each year, the fair basement hosted an exhibition displaying monumental works – video projections, large-scale installations, sculptures and performances – selected by the Art Basel Committee. Supported by their galleries, artists created site-specific projects, which seem to be thought for museum spaces without thinking about the rules of the market.

It’s hard not to be attracted by the photo-realist painting by Rudolf Stingel, and not only because of the big size (335.3×475.2 cm). The canvas, impressively similar to a photograph and hung in a suggestively empty room, depicting the New York dealer Paula Cooper smoking a cigarette in a charming and theatrical position.

Another work capturing our attention was the installation entitled In Circles by Alicja Kwade, the Berlin based young Polish artist who explores by using different and often manipulated materials – metal plates, perforated metal, brass rings, euro coins, wood and glass panels, mirrors, neon tubes, bricks and so forth – the issues of authenticity and value of everyday life objects; while Shimabuku’s film, Shimabuku’s Fish & Chips, told the artist’s personal and ironic version of the English ever-present traditional food, showing the slow encounter of a potato swimming to meet a fish.


The photo-installation of 55 coloured pictures by Ryan McGinley closes the roundup of our selection. For this work, the American photographer – close to street artists, skateboarders and musicians – shot adoring and delighted fans during summer music festivals in United States and in Europe. In You and My Friends once again McGinley, was able to capture emotional moments of young people through intense close-ups, artificial colours and flaming lights.

Art Basel 2012 closed its door after 65.000 visitors and a very good (but not quantified) number of sales. The fair sustains its success thanks to the high quality of the galleries and works exhibited, and above all due to its ability to create unique cultural events that accompany and enrich its value year after another. We hope to see you there next year, or better yet, to see you in May 2013 for the first Honk Kong edition of Art Basel.


Monica Lombardi

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18/06/2012

Art Basel Round One

Art Basel Round One

In the last few days Art Basel was maybe the only place in the world where people could have the impression of entering an affluent bubble, where the global economic crisis seems to be just a fake. As each year, 300 among the best art galleries from all over the world were selected and enlisted to take part in the so-called ‘Olympics of the art world’. As each year, flow of art lovers and professionals crowded and enlivened the Swiss city to see the new trends of contemporary art market, while for seller’s happiness, international collectors got there mainly to grab super expensive artworks and fulfil their wishing list. And – thinking critically without being argumentative – it’s hard not to think about the economic mantra frequently used during crisis to critic the free market system “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.

Strolling around the low ground of the fair, the one devoted to historical galleries, it’s easy to gape thanks to the high quality of the artworks exhibited. Mr. Gagosian, owner of the homonymous multinational gallery, presented an exhibition inside the booth with masterpieces by Picasso, Warhol and Damien Hirst, while other important (and perhaps less haughty) names of art market such as Werner, Lelong, Kartsen Greve, Marian Goodman, Sperone Westwater, Tucci Russo, Zwirner, Pace were at Art Basel in full splendour with works by Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Weiner and the Italians Giuseppe Penone, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro and Alighiero Boetti (Arte Povera rocks!). Before going upstairs (HALL 2.1) we cannot avoid mentioning the striking orange-red-yellow piece by Rothko at Malborough for $78 million.


Once again, the first floor strictly dedicated to contemporary didn’t disappoint our expectations. Damien Hirst’s Stripper and Andreas Gursky’s five meters pictures Coocon II dominated at White Cube, while Ryan Gander and Neo Rauch were respectively the stars at Lisson Gallery and Eigen+Art’s booths. Chantal Crousel, Metro Pictures, Nagel and Marconi showed pieces by Anri Sala, Claire Fontaine – Gallery Neu had intriguing works by the collective too – Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, Will Benedict, Markus Schinwald and Rosa Barba – even if the best Barba’s work was at Carlier Gebauer gallery. The stand devoted to Ettore Spalletti (De Alvear) didn’t pass unnoticed as the small size shots by Luigi Ghirri at Massimo Minini gallery. Among the youngest galleries Zero, gb agency and Plan B stood out thanks to the interesting artists proposed: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Neil Beloufa, Roman Ondák, Ryan Gander (the young artist more represented at the fair) and Navid Nuur.

The 43rd edition of Art Basel, once again reinforced the idea that dealing with high art is not for everybody, but fortunately everybody could approach and discover it as a cultural matter – not only financial – since owning art is not the only possible way of enjoying it.

See you tomorrow to find out the most cultural and ‘Unlimited’ section of Art Basel.

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11/06/2012

Gerhard Richter | Panorama

Gerhard Richter | Panorama

Panorama is much more than an exhibition. It is the first chronological and comprehensive retrospective arranged, thanks to the collaboration between three of the main European art institutions, to retrace Gerhard Richter‘s entire career and celebrate his 80th birthday.

After Tate Modern in London and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the traveling show covering fifty years of Richter’s oeuvre – accompanied by an unmissable book with essays and interviews of international critics and curators -, is now on view at Centre Pompidou in Paris and will run until the 24th September.

The versatile artist, born in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1932 and moved to the West during the 60′s, is widely regarded as one of the most important painters at work today. Well known for his ability to reinvent and transform his art, Richter has worked with traditional and new media. With sculptures, drawings, photographs and by painting over photographs, he is still – and unconventionally – remaining loyal to painting as a timeless way of expression: «painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human».


Many previous exhibitions have been devoted to the German Master until today with the aim of plumbing the depths of his work and focusing on different aspects of his research, but, as stated by the title in itself, this show wants to go beyond. Including the so-called Photo-paintings, figurative and abstract works, land and seascapes, glass sculptures and mirror works, drawings and photographs, portraits, Greys and Colour Charths, Panorama encompasses the whole archive of Richter’s achievements.

Gerhard Richter’s retrospective helps to underline his artistic transitions: producing paintings through the use of an episcope on the basis of his own photographs, erasing figurative paintings by covering them with a layer of gray paint or using painting as a way of inheriting a tradition and revealing his own intimacy and historical experiences. From the 60’s to today the artist has been placed in the camps of minimalism, conceptual and political art, passing through the emergence of abstraction, always following his idea of letting a thing come, rather than creating it.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Centre Pompidou is curated by Alfred Pacquement, Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesatane, with colleagues in London (Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey from Tate) and Berlin (Udo Kittelmann and Dorothee Brill at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

Monica Lombardi

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06/06/2012

Awakening Of The Rainbow Dragon

Awakening Of The Rainbow Dragon

MAAYA SHO started calligraphy at the age of 6, and has ever since been developing his distinctive approach towards ancient script, originally carved on strange materials such as tortoise shells or a piece of bull scapula as a method of fortune telling more than three thousand and a couple of hundred years ago in China. The unique and beautiful shapes of the script embody the very origin of its meaning, later evolved into Kanji [Chinese character], which inspires us to imagine the ancient people’s way of living and their interpretations of the world.

His works are in Thai Royal Family Collection and his handwriting can also been found as one of the official logos of the Louvre Museum and as collaborations for example with fashion maisons and restaurant designing. His unique style ‘Queen of the art of calligraphy’ was fully demonstrated in his outstanding exhibition and performance in Tokyo last April, in which he showed his latest work Ten-Ryu Ji-Ryu I (Heaven Dragon Earth Dragon I).

The Dragon is revered and considered as the eminent spirit in Oriental culture. In his exhibition, two Dragons – Ji-Ryu is considered as a symbol of anxiety or frustration in the modern society while Ten-Ryu is a symbol of purifying and extrication – inspired us to meditate on ‘liberation of the mind’ in our age, especially after the 3.11 earthquake, which was a critical turning point in his creative life.

“After the earthquake, I couldn’t take up my ink brush for a certain while. An intense feeling was deeply engraved in my mind: ‘Tomorrow is promised to no man, it’s as uncertain as the wind.’ It was then when I decided to change my name from MAAYA to MAAYA SHO. ‘SHO’ is the term placed after your name as your signature in calligraphy. Including it as my name itself meant that I was then determined to live with calligraphy forever.”

Since then, one of his intriguing approaches came to fruition in the form of the opening of his workshop on each new moon and full moon.

“Through my workshop, I would love people to know the power that words and Kanji have, also to feel the joy of the art of calligraphy. The workshop takes place twice a month, on the day of the new moon – a powerful day to make your wishes come true – and on the day of full moon when the creative energy grows highly. In my workshop, I help people to choose one word, which could be their favourite, part of their name or my suggestion based on Kyusei Kigaku (an ancient method of Chinese fortune telling). You write the word in ancient script, which is very graphic, and the word could be seen as your lucky symbol. The process will help you meditate on people’s communication, caring mind and the purposes of life at each stage. The most potent way is to do it with positive affirmation messages. Always, in present tense.”

Every form of life starts from the present. For MAAYA SHO himself, the one word that embodies his feelings now in the Year of Dragon 2012 is ‘明’ which literally means ‘light’. In ancient script, it describes the moonlight coming through the open window.

“You know, I love happy endings.” he smiled.

Ai Mitsuda – Images courtesy of MAAYA SHO

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