03/05/2012

MIA -The Ambiguous Nature of Images

MIA -The Ambiguous Nature of Images

Today photography, with its specific and autonomous language and thanks to its constant technical and stylistic developments, is widely recognized as a legitimate art form. Photography dialogues with its artistic way of expressions, and with the wonders about its own nature and future. Collectors, art lovers and professionals are more and more interested in this medium, which seems to have broken the boundaries of fine art, gaining its own status. The international events devoted to the richness of historical and contemporary photographic creations are increasing day by day.

With 268 exhibitors among galleries, independent photographers, publishers and photo printers coming from 16 countries, MIA, Milan Image Art Fair – the most important fair dedicated to photography in Italy – comes back to Milan for its second edition, which promises to be even more successful than the first one.



With an unusual and unique educational approach, the fair presents a full programme of exhibitions, workshops and talks, which aim at furthering the knowledge of the different trends that have characterized the language of photography in the last decades. From the researches on topics connected with sociological and philosophical aspects – mainly focused on investigating the individual and collective identity -, to the visionary approaches that highlight the ambiguous nature of reproduced images, MIA covers the wide spectrum of interpretations from the world that photographers have been creating during the years. A special pavilion, dedicated to fashion photography, displays the works by Albert Watson, Michel Comte, Herb Ritts, Malick Sidibè, Uli Weber, Rodney Smith along with the fashion/cultural phenomenon The Sartorialist (just to mention a few).

The icing on the cake, a myriad of collateral events and special projects as “Elliott Erwitt, Fifty kids” or “Hubertus Hamm and BMW” – a collection of images depicting children shot by Elliott Erwitt, and a solo show by the German photographer Hubertus Hamm, director of the main campaigns of the famous car brand -, accompany the fair, which opens today at Superstudio Più (in Tortona district). MIA is taking stock of the current situation of photography in contemporary art market providing an international overview and trying to transform Milan in a centre of photography. We just hope that the fair will be able to maintain the promises and pay the high expectations back, since the city, after the euphoria of the Salone, seems to be fallen back into a deep cultural sleep and constantly need waves of new and strong incentives.

Milan Image Art Fair, MIA, will run until May 6, 2012

Monica Lombardi

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
01/05/2012

Painting and Jugs

Painting and Jugs

Recently in the contemporary design and applied arts world we have seen quite a few phenomena of massively successful collective productions. By collective in this case we mean a duo, usually a duo of two quite genius people that manage to take photos, design objects or garments, produce books, build stuff with their own hands and much more. On the contrary of the notion of a solitary artist that retreats himself in isolation and self-centered thinking in order to produce art, these new artist/designers/producers, call them as you like, work much better in couples.

So it’s not just a simple coincidence that the Swiss Institute in New York is dedicating an exhibition to two highly productive young artist couples. “Painting and Jugs” is an exhibition that celebrates the potential of collaborative production, although expressed through two different forms: the painting and ceramics production. The painting couple are Linus Bill and Andrien Horni, while the ceramics are from Bastien Aubry and Dimitri Broquard. The first couple met last year while working on a magazine, irregularly published by Horni, while the second one met ten years ago when they started working as graphic designers, commonly known as FLAG.

The latter couple is the one that seems to arise more curiosity. Not because they are better artists, but because they also belong to that new and extremely particular category of graphic designers that are also artist/illustrators/producers. Although the impressive list of their graphic projects include clients like Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Swiss Institute and Institute Mode Design, Aubry and Broquard- like most contemporary graphic designers- find the world of graphics quite limited and look for escape in pottery making and clay. Apparently with a huge success.

Check the exhibition at Swiss Institute by the 3rd of June.

Rujana Rebernjak – Image courtesy of Swiss Institute and Aubry/Broquard

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
30/04/2012

Ryan Mrozowski at Pierogi Gallery

Ryan Mrozowski at Pierogi Gallery

“A Mouth That Might Sing,” Ryan Mrozowski’s third Pierogi exhibit in three years, kicked off at the popular Williamsburg gallery last Friday (April 27th) and runs until the last weekend of May. The title is a fitting one: Quite a bit of Mrozowski’s work features spectators sitting in a theater, waiting in anticipation for some sort of spectacle. Much of the room in his paintings are devoted to the back of people’s heads. Inside they appear to be asking the same question we ask ourselves every day: What is going to happen next?

Mrozowski, a Philadelphia native who has been living in Brooklyn since earning his MFA from Pratt in 2005, repeatedly takes familiar objects—baseball cards, book pages, advertisements—and removes the main focal point, leaving a mere shadow of an outline in its place. The viewer can’t help but see themselves somewhere in the void. This makes me anxious for two reasons: (1) Something is happening to me; (2) I don’t know what it is.

Paintings like “Skirmish” and “Enthusiasts” focus on the audience, not the stage, turning the regular paying folks into the real spectacle in the process. (Isn’t the audience always the real spectacle? Experiment: Try going to the movies in Union Square on a Friday night.) Another, “Molecule”, features a dog with no neck, his head floating aimlessly above his body. Part Helmut Koller, part Francis Bacon, “Molecule” manages to be clean and violent (the dog is alive, but he has no neck) without being over the top or kitschy (the dog looks proud). Like most of the work on display here, it’s simultaneously disturbing and familiar, like a herd of cows floating above their grazing grounds.

A notable addition to Mrozowski’s oeuvre is his recent “Book Page” series, in which double-sided found book pages are floated over a single light bulb to create a hybrid image (a third image, to be exact, or as the PR people like to call it, a “hidden collage”) that distorts the viewers’ depth perception. Likewise, the short film “Palimpsest” shows a girl lost wandering an apartment doing ordinary things—going to the fridge, navigating furniture, slamming a door in sheer terror—while falling in and out of her own shadow. We may not physically fall out of our own shadows, per se, but we’ve all been here before: confused, rattled, and in the midst of a late-night existential crisis when all we wanted was a drink of warm milk to help us back to sleep.

Ryan Mrozowski at Pierogi Gallery, 177 N. 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY, April 27th—May 27th.

Lane Koivu – Images courtesy of Pierogi Gallery

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
27/04/2012

Magnum Forma

Magnum Forma

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, a foundation hosted inside a former and completely renovated historical tram depot in the Ticinese district, is without any doubts one of the most important places dedicated to photography in Milan. This art space – focusing on three main themes: History of photography, Masters of photography and Masters of fashion photography and portraits – combines educational purposes with the aim of furthering people’s comprehension of photography through the exhibitions, which shows the works of the leading authors from the past to the present.

Magnum. La scelta della foto (Magnum. The choice of the picture) is a selection of contact sheets displayed along with the final images chosen for the print. The project prints are coming from Magnum Photo, the glorious agency characterized by the freedom of its members shooting according to their ideas and initiative. They are presented as a crucial tool of analysis and an irreplaceable teaching method; a way of laying bare the photographers, providing people the opportunity to see the gap between the act of shooting and the results of the camera shutter timing. As many great artists admit, looking at the contact sheets of other photographers allows us to understand better their working methods; their way of thinking and capturing the moment. Through the selection of these fascinating objects with notes and signs made by the artists while choosing the finals, the exhibition shows the ‘documentaristic’ power of images able to go beyond the reportage.

From the contact sheets by Ferdinando Scianna, which remind his first encounter with fashion photography – depicting the magnetic model Marpessa for a young duo of Italian fashion designers destined for a great future. It was 1987 and the designers were Dolce & Gabbana –, to the hypnotic portraits of the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher and Muhammad Ali by Peter Marlow and Thomas Hoepker, the show let us running down the memory of historical periods, with their atmosphere and icons.

The exhibition will run until June 17 along with the solo shows by the Magnum photographer Alex Webb (b. 1952, San Francisco) and the young Italian photographer Massimo Berruti (b. 1979, Rome), member of the French agency VU’.

Monica Lombardi

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
27/04/2012

Bas Princen at the Architectural Association

Bas Princen at the Architectural Association

This Wednesday, renowned Dutch photographer Bas Princen gave a stirring lecture at London’s Architectural Association, in which he discussed technique, the informal maquettes he uses for visual study and the strange informal relationship growing cities in the developing have to the landscapes they quickly overtake. The image that has perhaps come to embody his work is an iconic shot of a squat office tower in Texas, its garish mirrored gold façade somehow serving to make it entirely invisible within its innocuous American surroundings, and it is in this tenuous play of landscape against/among/without/within the built environment that the magic of Princen’s photos lies.


Unlike most photographers, whose subject focus comes perhaps through long processes of elimination, Princen was first trained as an architect and so has a keen sense for the built environment. That he shoots architecture was written in the stars, it seems. It’s been said that his sweeping, dramatic photographs slice through buildings and somehow omnipotently display and expose them from within. He chalks this up to the all-knowing eyes of the camera and admitted that he often discovers new things about a place he’s been through his images. And also unlike other, perhaps more romantic photographers, he doesn’t place much importance on an interesting story behind a bland image, saying instead that what is most important in a good image is that it be capable in itself of telling a powerful story.

The dramatic interplay of landscape and architecture (both formal and informal) in Princen’s work has culminated in book called Reservoirs which eloquently, forcefully highlights an uncomfortable and tenuous relationship of the built with the natural. From massive public works projects in the desert outside Los Angeles to Chinese landscapes being subsumed by buildings, these images beg massive questions about 21st century urbanism and make reference the terrifying majesty of architecture itself.


Interestingly, although his exhibited images have always been on shot on large format film with stationary view cameras, he has recently made a shift to high-end digital. The choice, he imagines, could change his work tangibly and will almost certainly result in more abstract images. And although we’re never really keen on an artist’s abandonment of analog (and many, including Cindy Sherman, have made sweeping total shifts in the past couple of years), we’re nonetheless interested in seeing his work pushed towards new frontiers.

Princen’s exhibition opens tonight, Friday 27 April, starting at 6:30pm in London’s Bedford Square and will run until the 26th of May.

Tag Christof – Images courtesy Van Kranendonk Gallery and Architectural Association

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
17/04/2012

Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language at MoMA

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA

In our everyday life we never actually ‘think’ about the language. While for most the language is often invisible, some are more attracted to its visible form – the letters.

Significantly, graphic designers sometimes get lost in this tangible form of basic human expression, often considering the visible part as an abstract form, thus ignoring its meaning. But they are not the only ones who work with material qualities of language. Since Apollinaire and concrete poetry movement, artist and poets have been handling language as a physical structure.

It is exactly this kind of approach that MoMA is trying to investigate in its latest exhibition entitled “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language”. The curator Laura Hoptman has decided to take an insight into material qualities of language explored by artist working with a wide range of media.

The exhibition provides both a historical look (even though some of the artist could still be considered contemporary) through the works of Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Chopin, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Giorno, Kitasono Katue, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and others.

While these modernist experiments are being presented through a timeline, in order to get a broader historical view of the phenomenon and tell the story of concrete language in visual art, the contemporary part of the exhibition focuses on the new ways of investigating the concrete language phenomenon. Hence, the ratios has become not only a poet but also writer, graphic designer, performer and publisher working with a contemporary mix of the available media.

Thus, the fact that among the impressive list of contemporary artist we can find designers like Experimental Jetset, isn’t a pure coincidence. Since graphic design has become an evolving collaborative approach, more than a defined discipline, this exhibition sheds some light on these kind of practices, that both open the discipline to contaminations from other fields as well as free it from the duties of (commercial) communication.

The exhibition, opening the 6th of May and running until 27th of August, will be accompanied by a catalogue curated by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister. If you actually manage to miss the exhibition, you must stay tuned for their Bulletins of the Serving Library where concrete language goes digital.

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
29/03/2012

Words of Art by Marcel Broodthaers

Words of Art by Marcel Broodthaers

There is something mysterious, almost magic and charming in the Flemish territory, something that has joined – in a sort of crazy marriage – this small area with art, in all its many forms. Belgium has been for centuries an inexhaustible ground of minds, that gave birth to old masters and well known contemporary artists like Pieter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel, René Magritte, James Ensor, Luc Tuymans, Wim Delvoye and Jan Fabre, just to name a few.

Marcel Broodthaers is among them with his personal, short – he died prematurely for a liver disease on his 52nd birthday in 1976 –, influential and unique experimental research. Broodthaers made his first step into the art world at the age of 40 – after living years in poverty as a poet –, creating an art object (an assemblage) focused on the status of the artwork: a pack in plaster realised with unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête. In 1968 the artist played, in a sarcastic and ‘Duchampian’ way, with the cultural institutions founding the Musèe d’Art Moderne – Département des Aigles di Bruxelles: his private/sham museum where the exhibited works were accompanied by the words‘ this is not an artwork’.

Object, image and word are the ingredients of Marcel Broodthaers’ approach, dressed with a constructive and ironic critic of the art system, which aimed at demonstrating that there is no direct relationship between art and its message. Belgian thigh-bones painted as flags, columns of mussels bursting out from casseroles, visual alphabets and rebus, rooms set up with weapons, everyday life objects and antiques that clash and catch unprepared, are just some examples of the artist’s vivid and smart poetic, created through the interaction among different languages and an introspective eye. Even if Broodthaers is recognized as an international artist of the 60’s and 70’s, he always preserve his status of outsider, rarely mentioned or displayed, whose work is impressively up-to-date.

A current exhibition entitled L’espace de l’écriture is dedicated to the artistic genius Marcel Broodthaers and will run until 6 May 2012 at MAMbo – Museum of modern Art of Bologna.

Monica Lombardi

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
27/03/2012

Uglycute: Questioning Modernism

Uglycute: Questioning Modernism

If somebody mentions Scandinavian design, you’ll surely be picturing its most prominent modernist examples. Born after the second World War and ideologically based on a particular form of social democracy, Scandinavian modernist design stands for simplicity, functionality and equality. If we take these premises into account, modernist design can’t simply be considered as a stylistic etiquette, on pare with other twentieth century -isms. It should actually be thought of as a forma mentis – a way of thinking that goes beyond any stylistic classifications.

Although this approach to design, promoting low cost materials and mass production, characterized by simplicity of form and pursue of functionality, might seem infallible, it did come to a crisis. Without even realizing it, around 1990s, Scandinavian design forgot its forma mentis and got lost in stylistic mannerism, thus openly inviting for criticism.
This apparently invisible call for renewal was caught by a group of four young creatives, that started their career in 1999 with a show mocking Bruno Matthsson‘s design. The group named themselves Uglycute and the creatives are respectively Andreas Nobel, interior designer, Fredrik Stenberg, architect, Markus Degerman and Jonas Nobel, artists.

Even though their different backgrounds may seem a sheer coincidence, Uglycute actually bases its practice on the idea of expanding the concept of design by crossbreeding it with different disciplines. This approach is being manifested through a series of edgy projects that question the common idea of form, beauty, proportions and materials in design. Uglycute tries to put a particular accent on the production process, questing for value in the most common objects and materials. Even though their chunky furniture and exhibition design might seem subversive and postmodernist, if you manage to capture the processes and meaning underlying each of their projects, you should catch more than a glimpse of modernist spirit.

Although it may have started as a young designers’ utopia, Uglycute’s work has through time grown into an impressive list of projects; to name a few: Cheap Monday headquarters’ interior design, exhibition installation for Onomatopee project space in Eindhoven, furniture collection for Kiosk shop in New York and “Sonic House” project for Utopia Station at Venice Biennale in 2003.


If their initial intent might have been shaking things up in the sleepy Sweden, seeing their retrospective at Marabouparken art gallery in Sundbyberg, you can’t but think that things got a bit out of hand. A 500 square meet maze-like exhibition not only shows their highly ironical and almost rebellious way of working, but also offers the opportunity to question the dogmatic separation between art and design and their respective social and political influences.

If Sundbyberg seems out of reach and you can’t make it to the show (running until the 13th of May), you should at least spoil yourself with “Uglycute” catalog, carefully designed by Research and Development and published by Revolver.

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
26/03/2012

Painting Lounge

Painting Lounge

Let’s face it: being an artist can be a bitch, especially if you have to spend 40 hours a week stuck behind a desk or, even worse, flipping burgers just to make ends meet. Materials get expensive, inspiration runs dry and some of us just don’t have the time ―much less the chops― to make a real go at becoming the next Monet. Especially when we’d rather spend our free time at the bar, right? Thank god, then, for the Painting Lounge, a near-nightly paint and drink class that allows people like me and you the opportunity to play dress-up artist while milking a bottle of cheap red wine.

The Painting Lounge is not geared towards serious artists, but the stuff you paint is usually based on works done by artists were very serious. Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Bob Ross, and Salvador Dali are just a few subjects on the bucket list. It’s paint-by-numbers, only the numbers are a real instructor who encourages you to draw outside the lines. Meanwhile, the alcohol provides the courage necessary to push forward. This is particularly helpful when you realize you’ve somehow managed to turn a Van Gogh into a Pollack with one swoop of the brush.

The instructor, artist Kevin Tarasuk, reduces some of the world’s most popular paintings down to a basic science that even a blind baby could comprehend. Upon arrival you are seated in front of a blank canvas with tracing paper and a simple outline clipped over the top. You trace the outline, remove the paper and spend the next two hours painting whatever happens to be on the calendar that day. (Fun fact: “Starry Night” seems to be the most popular painting, which is somewhat surprising.) When I was there the painting was “Boone vs Bear,” an obscure folk-art scene that depicts a hunter about to grapple with a very angry grizzly bear. The bear has been shot, but the hunter is out of bullets and stands ready to strike, his gun hauled over his shoulders like a baseball bat. What happens next is open to artistic interpretation.

Thankfully, the Painting Lounge eschews pretentiousness and skill-level for a hands-on approach that allows everyone in the room to make something worth hanging on their wall. Interested? Here’s how it works: look at their calendar, pick a painting you want to replicate, and reserve your spot ($50 for two hour sessions, $65 for three). They provide the necessities: canvas, brush, easel, paint, apron, cups and instruction. All you need is the booze and a friend or two and you’re good to go. And hey, it’s the most practical way to get a Van Gogh into your living room.


Lane Koivu

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
23/03/2012

Walking With Fire

Walking With Fire

It was Jack Fisk who once said, “Luckily, David Lynch is able to vent everything through his art… because otherwise somebody might be dead.” This thought weighed heavily on my mind as I waited my turn to shake hands with the man behind existential nightmares like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. After all, David Lynch hasn’t made a full-length movie since 2006’s Inland Empire, and he seems to be spending a lot of time sponsoring nightclubs and jamming with Moby these days. I couldn’t help but wonder: has David Lynch been venting enough?

Anyone brave enough to sit through Crazy Clown Time, Lynch’s recent excursion into pop music territory, has every right to be worried. This is, after all, the man who made a hit soap opera about incest. Then again, Lynch rarely leaves home, preferring instead to stay in and paint, make nonsensical cartoons, and follow his mind to the depths of hell and back. This is his first solo New York exhibition since 1989. It’s hard to catch him, but I’ve done enough homework over the years to know that the flesh-and-blood Lynch is far removed from the horror he projects onto film. A proud Eagle Scout, he’s been wearing his own vanilla uniform since the late 70s: black shoes, khaki trousers and a white dress shirt buttoned to the neck, with a mop of brilliant white hair that looks like it got a little to close to the electrical outlet. His neighborly demeanor couldn’t be more at odds with the inner workings of his mind. This is a good thing. He is very polite. He smiles at people and shakes their hands and nods politely when they ask silly questions. At the same time, no one on this side knows the real David Lynch. Mel Brooks famously described him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”, and that’s about as close as we’re going to get.


David Lynch is in good shape, but his characters never are. They haunt his black canvases without form, only problems. Lots of problems. They’re “fucking broke,” as one goes, or dismembered, and usually on fire, their faces hanging out of the canvas like a grapefruit tumor swaying on a cow’s udder. Everything rots, no one is safe. One, “Fisherman’s Dream w/ Steam Iron”, features a fisherman’s hand bursting through a beached salmon, one of his fingers growing towards a mermaid lounging at the water’s edge. Somehow, the fisherman’s hand seems happy.

The paintings sit on the wall like boxes, wonderfully framed in thick gold frames and heavy glass. What’s inside makes Rene Magritte look like a journalist. David Foster Wallace gave the best definition of the man’s cinematic style―a style so singular it’s simply called “Lynchian”―when he said the term refers to “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Lynch is innately fixated with childhood dreams gone awry up against a paranoid, corrupt adult-dominated world (Blue Velvet, for starters). One painting, “No Santa Clause,” features a boy without a face watching Santa and his gang fly out of sight. It could be taken as a metaphor for how the acquisition knowledge ultimately crushes fantasy, or it could be about an evil Santa who eats the flesh off of little boys’ faces. It all depends on whether or not David Lynch believes in Santa.


David Foster Wallace also unfairly/hilariously described Lynch’s paintings as looking like “stuff you could imagine Francis Bacon doing in junior high.” The “Distorted Nudes” here are an obvious ode to Bacon’s triptychs of deformed freaks, but they’re more tip-of-the-hat than pale imitation, and even these have the unmistakable imprint of the man who built them. They are, to use the term, Lynchian.

Seeing someone in pictures is very different from seeing them in person, and it’s particularly weird when the two seamlessly match up. They do here. David Lynch looks like David Lynch, alright. “Please remember you are dealing with the human form,” we were warned back in 1968’s “The Alphabet.” I tried my best to keep that in mind when my turn to shake his hand finally came.

David Lynch at Jack Tilton Gallery, March 6th–April 14th, 2012

Lane Koivu – Images courtesy of David Lynch and Emily Paup

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
Next Page » « Previous Page