15/07/2013

Tacita Dean | An Exercise To Slow Down

Today more than ever, we are used to speed up to increase the number of things to do in the shortest time possible, trying avoid stopping in the name of productivity. It seems that going faster – being always active, without resting – is an inestimable source of pride for people. The collective unconsciousness is clearly livened up by the efforts of maximizing performances. Maybe for achieving our goals we run into something very similar to self-mistreatment. Is it really worth it? Who knows? What is certain is that the over-activity is leading us to loose the ability to stare, to take a slow look and extend the observation, turning a glimpse into a close contemplation.

Among the contemporary artists who consider and reflect on the importance of stillness and contemplative immersion, Tacita Dean (b. 1965, Canterbury, England) – who works in a range of media, but primarily with video – is certainly one of the most effective ones. Member of the second wave of the Young British Artists, or YBAs, Dean is mostly recognized for her 16mm analogue films, shot and projected with anamorphic lens, which creates rectangular panels that enhance her meditative and penetrating works. 
From the forty-minute static shot across the restaurant interior of the Fernsehturm (2001), the iconic television tower that dominates Berlin, to the long narrative work Kodak (2006), where Dean showed us the manufacture of the film – providing a rare opportunity to see the machines fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure – using the same medium, just before it went out of production; from the documentary intimate portraits of artists such as Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham to the black and white restitution of Giorgio Morandi’s Bolognese studio in Still Life and Day for night (2009) for the exhibition arranged in Milan by the Trussardi Foundation in 2009; passing through the repertoire of natural landscapes and eclipses shot in real time as in The Green Ray (Il Raggio verde, 2001), the fruition of Tacita Dean’s work ‘imposes’ to slow down.


Her endless pauses on almost still bucolic overviews, atmospheric events, expanses of water and skylines work as a kind of training to get eyes more accustomed to calm and patience: slow and lengthened pedagogical exercises that help us to linger on details, appreciate the time expansion and repossess our contemplative aptitude, because on the contrary of mass belief, “not doing” is an active practice where new ways of thinking and creating actually lie.

Monica Lombardi 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
08/07/2013

The Nocturne Painting By Victor Man

In a period in which art is mainly conceived as three-dimensional sculpture and installation, and painting seems to have lost its appeal, Victor Man (born in Cluj, Romania, 1974) is one of the few contemporary painters, who have been able to stay in the global art loop. ‘Member’ of the so-called Cluj School — a prolific source of up-and-coming artistic experiences that counts artists working with different media such as Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Mureşan, Mircea Cantor, Şerban Savu, among the others —, Man started his career in 2003 exhibiting at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the City Art Museum of Ljubljana and, after several exhibitions around the world, he represented his country at the 52nd Venice Art Biennial.

Victor Man’s work is characterized by the fusion of meditative, mainly nocturnal, small size paintings full of mystery, usually exhibited in site-specific installations, which dialogue with the viewers and the surrounded space. Using references and essential elements taken from history and history of art, literature, cinema and archive photography, mixing past and present, the artist creates unique compositions: narrations made of decontextualized objects that analyze the concept of memory and the impact on the world of the passage of time. Reflecting on tradition, nostalgia, eroticism, gender identity, political and social issues, Man’s poetic is related to personal and collective feelings and explores the uncertainty and the ambiguity of human beings through a learned and versatile use of painting.


For those who want to know something more about this Romanian artist, and have the occasion to end up in Rome by the 3rd September 2013, we strongly suggest his exhibition In un altro aprile at the Académie de France à Rome, which presents a series of recent paintings, along with works created by Man during his two-months residence at Villa Medici.


Monica Lombardi – Thanks to Studio Martinotti 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
03/07/2013

Thomas Hart Benton’s Return to the American Psyche

Thomas Hart Benton may have been the hero painter of his time — he was one of the first artists to grace the cover of Time, in 1934 — but he had become a microcosm on the American scene by the time his old student/friend/enemy Jackson Pollack blew up in the late 1940s. His fame was brief, his legacy faint. “The particular audience he painted for is long gone,” went a recent New York Times review. “The one that has replaced it knows nothing about him.”

Part of Benton’s dilemma was his stubborn commitment to American workers and everyday American life, a scene that forever links him to the Great Depression. His best-known work comes from the era, most notably America Today, a nine-wall mural conceived in 1931 that has just been bought by the Met. America Today portrays Americans across the continent doing ordinary things: riding subways, going to the movies, dancing, pounding iron, working the field. The fact that it so distinctly defines American life in the 30s is likely why Benton remains tied to it.


Benton was a product of the dustbowl: his favorite drink was whiskey, his place rural Missouri. He reflected the culture in that he was often blunt, hardworking, outspoken and stubborn. He was an outsider who preferred saloons and rotary clubs to salons and art galleries. He hated critics, which may be one reason he’s been out of view for so long. The Met’s acquisition of America Today — as well as a long-overdue biography by Justin Wolff — will no doubt stir interest in those who have never had the chance to hear about him.


Lane Koivu 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
01/07/2013

Don’t Worry, Let Your Imagination Run Wild

You may think you already know everything about the emblematic work entitled Fountain by the versatile genius Marcel Duchamp (Blainville-Crevon, 1887 – Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1968), who is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Many of you may have studied the artistic path of this extraordinary painter, sculptor, writer and chess player, whose works had and still have an extraordinary impact on the art world. But our play of the weekend was to try to distance ourselves from the common knowledge, listening what a group of neophytes would say about this controversial work. Our “guinea pigs” were children from 3 to 5 years old, but they could as well be 90 to 100, because it’s never too soon, or too late to enjoy art.

Alessia: “Duchamp was a joker, maybe he produces washbowls because he wasn’t able to draw.”

Emma Giulia: “I think this work is for males only. Males always design males’ things.”

Alice: “What’s this big bowl for? Does it serve to wash feet? Is the tube in the front supposed to be connected to anything?”

Tommaso: “No, it isn’t Alice. This is a potty-chair for grown children. It must be comfortable. You can look around while pissing.”

Rodrigo: “Is Mr. Mutt R the name of the owner of this artwork? Yes, because it is an artwork right? It doesn’t seem to me, but it looks like a thing that is worth collecting and keeping at home. I’ve seen so many strange things, that if Mr. Mutt wants to treasure it, I agree.”

Lorenzo: “It is a musical instrument, a strange hydro… How do you say it? Hydrophone? (Ed. Note) Yes, that one. When the drops fall down one after the other they make a concert.”

Emma: “To my mind, it looks like a cradle for a small dog, which rolls into a ball and dreams about a flying meatball.”

Matteo: “I think that it’s a strange armchair. My grandma would say “one invents basically everything”. Anyway, I like it! There is the artist’s signature too. Is he famous?”

Giovanni: ”Sometimes artists are funny! Guys, this is a mini toilet bowl, how can it be considered as an artwork? Our teacher says that we should go beyond and use imagination, so I’m trying to understand how we can turn a toilet bowl into an artwork. I need to think about it, It’s not so easy. I’ll let you know my point tomorrow, ok?”

Michelangelo: “I think that it’s something to produce an echo, like a machine to produce words through the tube”.

Margherita: “I don’t like this work, it looks like a cradle, but it’s white, maybe I would paint it.”

Federico: “How can you pee into an artwork? For sure someone would yell at you!”

Monica Lombardi – Many thanks to Emanuela Torri for her precious support 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
28/06/2013

Mecca for Modern Art

Gazing upon the building of Mumok, the Museum of Modern Art of Vienna, you have the impression of staring at a futuristic prison: a grey monolith with splits as windows, covered of molten rock, erected with cement, glass and marble. Once inside the main hall you’ll discover that there’s no lack of light, even if it is largely just a matter of an optical illusion due to the big, pure white walls. An elevator made of iron and glass, fast and silent, moves from three underground levels to two aboveground ones. Noise, here, doesn’t exists, if you exclude museum staff’s whispering words saying you can’t use flash when taking photos, or some child’s ride on the gangplanks that conduct from the elevators to the exhibition rooms. In Mumok reigns an almost sacred silence. Modern art, maybe more than classic art, requests concentration and introspection. Even devotion. Coming here is like setting your foot on a modern church, with portraits of Mick Jagger instead of saints and white walls instead of tapestries and paintings.


Walking through the wide, squared chambers of the museum you may feel in awe. Like when you find just in front of you the colorful, above mentioned portrait by Andy Warhol. Not far, you can find a bronze casting with human aspect: The Grande Femme Debout III by Alberto Giacometti. You can pass from one ambiance to another in such a fluid way, that it seems almost like walking without moving your feet. You stop, inevitably, when you find yourself in front of La voix du Sang, the beautiful, enigmatic painting by René Magritte. Staring at it, you could ask yourself: “what are a house and a sphere doing in the log of a tree?” Query to which nobody can answer. “What did the master want to represent with it?” Asking for the meaning of Picasso‘s women, of disquieting Man in Blue IV by Bacon, of Hahns Abendmahl by Daniel Spoerri, a table set up attached to the wall, is the job and the privilege for only a few. Tourists reason with the gut feeling. They love, or they stay emotionless.


Surely one gets alarmed, when a weird steampunk movie machine suddenly becomes alive and starts blowing and squeaking. It’s Jean Tinguely‘s Méta Harmonie, a creative expression of Flexus, an artistic movement that represents transition, the existing flow between art and life. Together with Viennese actionism and Nouveau Réalisme, avantguard movements that use objects taken from everyday human life for creating masterpieces, Flexus is the artistic current that, more than others, gives the imprint to this museum. Visit it, if you are in Vienna and you have a half day free. Entering the monolith covered by lava is an experience you will love to tell forward.


Antonio Leggieri – Image courtesy Mumok and Lorenz Seider 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
24/06/2013

Ana Mendieta | The Violence Of Truth

Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948 –1985), for those who have never heard about her, was a key name of ‘70s art – one of first Latin-American artists able to enter the New Yorker scene of those years –, an iconic and versatile artist with a traumatic past signed by the exile, at the age of 12 along with her sister, to escape from Castro’s regime, and the further wandering around USA, without having the opportunity to join the other members of her family for a long time. An experience that scarred and influenced the artist, who chose during the university years to abandon painting and deal with performance, portrait, body and land art, sculpture and photography, giving to all her works the same expressive strength and intensity.

Mendieta’s research used different languages, which showed her transcultural identity and created narrations, characterized by a socio-political, but also spiritual and intimate view. The artist was close to mother earth, surrounded by nature and exploiting her own body – real or reproduced in silhouettes made with blood, soil, mud, leaves; immersed into the water or burned – as the cornerstone of a flooring poetics that grounded its roots in primitive cultures, taking inspiration from rituals’ system of believes as Santería.



With an autobiographical approach, Ana Mendieta investigated the female figure and the evolution of its condition, analysing issues related to life and death, feminism, discrimination, violence and rape. Untitled (Rape Performance) and Sweating Blood(1973) are both series conceived by the artist after reading about the rape and murder of a student of her campus. 
The emblematic performances, pictures, super 8 short films and video tapes of this great artist, who died at a young age from a fall from her 34th floor apartment in unclear circumstances, keep inspiring and influencing artists worldwide.

She Got The Love, the first huge European retrospective devoted to the Cuban artist, curated by Beatrice Merz and Olga Gambari, has just closed at Castello di Rivoli, while a selection of her early works are currently on view at Raffaella Cortese gallery (via Stradella, 7), along with the ones of the photo- and videographer, performer and art and culture writer Martha Rosler in a duo, all-female show which will run until August 4, 2013.


Monica Lombardi 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
20/06/2013

Open The Gates!

Last April 2013 an unusual newcomer appeared on the stage of the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Not a new design studio nor an exclusive brand, but the prestigious 200-year-old State Museum of the Netherlands. After 10 long years of renovation this museum of art and history finally reopened its doors and, surprisingly, during their persistent period of absence the museum not only rebuilt the brick walls to house their 100.000 objects; they also developed a unique virtual project. The museum presented the “Rijksstudio” project as part of Droog’s 20+ up to a beautiful future exhibition in Milan, to a, for them, new audience: the design world.


In Milan, the presentation of Rijksstudio was inspired by the domestic interior scenes of painter Johannes Vermeer and set up in a small room of approximately 30 sq m. Yet, the idea behind the digital project is much bigger than the one room we saw in Milan. The Rijksstudio is namely an online database, a platform packed with ultra high-resolution images of 125.000 collection pieces, from masterpieces to unknown artifacts. All images are free to download, collect and share and moreover of perfect quality to zoom in on details, print on big scale, sample or manipulate and all of this copyright-free.

The museum’s goal with their digitalized collection and big launch during the Milan Design Week is to reinterpret “century old works in contemporary shapes, techniques and materials.” And in order to plug the Rijksstudio project firmly into the international design field, they approached the Dutch design label Droog to set the first examples. One of the most striking outcomes is how Droog turned the classical art painting Still Life With Flowers and Glass Vase of Jan Davidsz de Heem into a body tattoo. Another eye catcher is the lavishly decorated Center Piece by German silversmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1549) that is now re-decorated with 3D-printed magnetic miniatures of the Rijksmuseum collection. Besides 3D-printing and tattooing Droog applied other highly modern techniques combined with material such as rubber, titanium, plastic or glass to create new designs such as distilling the Irmari décor motif of a historical plate onto four glass plates, which recreate the original motif when you stack them.

Of course the Rijksmuseum is not the first museum that shows its face during the Salone, but unlike the others, this time it’s not a one-off museological presentation of limited editions that makes the critics claim that “design is art”. And whereas one usually tends to write about what the eye can perceive, in this case the prototyped outcome displayed by Droog even seems of inferior importance to the story. It is foremost the museum’s initiative that must be noted for its experimental approach and creative usage of the Internet to cross historical art with contemporary design. Hopefully they have fired the starting gun for an equal footing relationship with a benefit for both the disciplines: collection pieces get a new (technical) boost out of the oblivion and designers are allotted the role of the new bearer of our cultural history.

Lisanne Fransen 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
17/06/2013

The States of Matter According To Nicola Martini

Nicola Martini (Florence, 1984) is undoubtedly an intriguing artist. What he usually does, his artistic approach, is set midway between craftsmanship and a distinctive scientific process where different materials (concrete, bitumen, bones, wax, resin, acids…) and their ways of reacting become key elements of his language. Martini’s investigation exploits the numerous potentialities offered by the matter to go beyond the concept of sculpture and installation.

Somehow invading the field of chemistry and through the method of the experimental sciences, he creates his works exploring the limits of the substances he is working with, transforming their states. In a kind of endless research in order to discover what happens to something in particular conditions, the artist puts himself to the test of the unexpected, experiencing a creative and performative art process that combines foreseen and contingent.



For his first show at kaufmann repetto entitled Sippe – German word that stands for tribe -, Nicola Martini chose to paint the walls and the ceiling of the gallery with bitumen of Judea, which is a photosensitive texture, used here to react to the light coming from the huge windows, but also to let out previous signs, as eraser and nails marks (as a sort of reconstruction of the “life” of the walls). Other sculptures – fusions of colophony with microcrystalline wax, and glass with quartz sand – are arranged to interact with the ever-changing space, acting as filters between light and bitumen.


A gallery of portraits by the eminent architect, designer, photographer, motor racing and aeronautical pilot Carlo Mollino (Turin, 1905-1973) accompanied Nicola Martini’s show.

After the ‘fireworks’ of the openings days of the Biennale and the weekend devoted to the main international art fair – see Art Basel in Basel -, here’s our suggestion for all of you who are staying in Milan for a while. 
The exhibition will run until August 2nd, 2013.

Monica Lombardi 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
10/06/2013

When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013

Flashback to Switzerland, 1969: the Swiss art historian and curator Harald Szeemann is curating the exhibition Live in Your Head. When Attitude Becomes Form with a group of young, revolutionary artists in Bern Kunsthalle, a moment that went down in history for Szeemann’s new and radical approach to the exhibition practice as a linguistic medium. Fast forward to Venice and the crowded preview days of the Biennale: Fondazione Prada’s Ca Corner della Regina is presenting When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, an exhibition curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas, as an reconstruction of the original show.


Revisiting the Post-pop and Post-minimal art of the time; from Conceptual art to Arte Povera and Land art, the show at Fondazione Prada is bringing together the original works presented at the Kunsthalle by artist legends such as Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Walter De Maria, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. Despite (or perhaps because of) the two-hour-long queue to enter the Fondazione, the show turned out to be one of the absolute must-sees during the preview week.

Similar to how a generation of young artist occupied the Bern Kunsthalle, the richly ornamented Venetian palazzo and head quarter of Fondazione Prada has in turn been invaded by the Kunsthalle’s 20th century modernist rooms. White plaster walls have been installed inside the 18th century building, and the works have been placed in the exact same order as in the original exhibition. The project is based on Fondazione Prada’s and the Getty Research Institute’s research and study of documents, letters and photographs related to Szeemann and the 1969 show, and an analysis of over 1000 photographs made it possible to identify the works of the exhibition, and to make a precise mapping of what happened in Bern. The result is pretty breathtaking.

Thanks to plenty of archive material and study centers, visitors can experience and analyze the show from the 1969 version until its transformed, present state. A program including meetings, lectures, live concerts and performances will also be accompanying the exhibition during its five-month run. When in Venice, don’t miss out on this gem.


When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 is on view at Fondazione Prada between 1 June and 3 November 2013.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
03/06/2013

The 55th Venice Biennale 2013 | The Encyclopedic Palace

There were high expectations for the 55th edition of the Venice Art Biennial. And this was not only because it is still one of the most important main art events worldwide, but also and above all, because this year the rudder is in the hands of the artstar Massimiliano Gioni, the youngest curator ever called to guide the Biennial. The Encyclopedic Palace is the name chosen to identify the exhibition, which takes inspiration from the building – the scale model is placed at the beginning of the path – projected by Marino Auriti (1891-1980) to contain the utopian digest of the universal knowledge. According to the curator’s point of view, art, in all its forms, is not just for entertainment, but represents a way to understand the world. Thus this show, through its anthropological approach, reflects on the creative boosts of the last two centuries to set people’s imagination free.



Articulated between the “Giardini” and the “Arsenale” this exhibition is a sort of Cabinet de Curiosités, which combines the work of different past and present artists – 150 from 37 countries -, whose interest was/is related to the role of images in sharing and structuring the knowledge. From the displayed pieces we chose the striking video devoted to robotic surgery entitled Da Vinci by Yuri Ancarani (b. 1972, Ravenna, Italy), the room split between the masters Bruce Nauman and Dieter Roth, and the one celebrating the Golden Lionesses Maria Lassnig and Marisa Merz, the works by the new generation of young bigs such as Ed Atkins (b. 1982, Oxford, UK), Neïl Beloufa (b. 1985, Paris, france), Camille Henrot (1978, Paris, France) – Silver Lion for the best promising artist 2013 -, the shocking videos about the teen-aged neurosis by Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981, Webster, texas), the timeless sculptures by the Japanese Shinichi Sawada and the ones by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the impressive reconstruction of a Vietnamese church by Danh Vo (b.1975, Vietnam), and the showcase containing the delicate and poetic work by Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (b. 1923, Zéprégueé), even if the list is undoubtedly lacking numerous of the other names that would deserve to be mentioned.



Mixing painting, photography, installation, sculpture and video along with writing, architecture, psychology, magic and spirituality, Mr. Gioni, who never misses a shot, in a clever and proficient way, put together a show that looks at the history of image all-round, from a collective and individual perspective. So, among the guests of his ‘palace’, even the unconscious and the occultism find their place with the Red Book by C. G. Jung and the tarots by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris.



The 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will run until 24th November 2013.

Monica Lombardi 
Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
Next Page » « Previous Page