Author: conte

COLOGNE.- Beginning December 2009 Museum Ludwig will be showing the first major retrospective of Franz West (born 1947 in Vienna) in Europe. The Austrian sculptor is one of the most influential artists of our times. Over 40 works dating from 1972 to the present, which in some cases the artist has grouped together in themed constellations, allow the visitor to experience the sheer complexity and singularity of his oeuvre. The title Auto-Theatre underlines the performative, interactive dimension of his work. According to Franz West his Passstücke (Adaptives) “are sculptures as it were that one can pick up and use to gesticulate however one sees fit”. West has also extended this dialogue with the viewer to include his furniture sculptures, which he has produced since the mid-eighties and

LONDON.- John Martin Gallery announced the upcoming exhibition of new work by Cornwall based sculptor William Peers. Previewed at this year’s Art London in October, 100 Days will be exhibited in its entirety at John Martin Gallery in February 2010. The idea for 100 Days: Sketches in Marble is to make one sculpture every day for one hundred days, using the same material, Portuguese marble. One of the motives of the series is the prospect of exploring 100 ideas in a short period of time. By setting a boundary – restricting the time allowed for each piece, and therefore, the size of the work – there is a strange liberation. The constants of time and material also lend the series a unity: the sculptures are linked by their common constraints. The other motive

CHICAGO, IL.- This winter, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, premieres Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, an exhibition that uniquely examines the artist’s studio as subject. The exhibition presents an illuminating look at how some of the most compelling artists of today have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered art production spaces. Large installations, films, multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios that explore the creative process are on view February 6 through May 30, 2010.

GRONINGER.- The Groninger Museum will present a major solo exhibition of the work of Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus (both, 1972) on the occasion of their tenth working anniversary. In the course of these ten years, Willhelm and Kraus have realized more than 30 collections. The exhibition will offer an extensive selection from these, with both men’s and women’s wear. Willhelm and Kraus’s unconventional fashion is characterized by an outspoken visual language in which they give expression to the grotesque, the childish and the fantastic, which they transform and combine in an unparalleled way with elements from pop culture and haute couture. Willhelm studied at the Royal Academy for Visual Arts in Antwerp and Kraus at the University of

LONDON.- The French/Algerian artist Alice Anderson (b.1976) will fill Riflemaker in Soho with thousands of metres of hair as part of an installation, including film, sculptures and photographs, based on fictional childhood memories from 1 March 2010. Anderson considers time, or more particularly the way that time shapes itself, to be her most significant working material. For her, memories can be described as reconstructions, often distorted to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. She views memory as the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time may lead to a remembrance being more akin to fiction than fact. Anderson uses wax dolls and puppets to reinvent her childhood through the re-imagining of her own memories. The exhibition at Riflemaker takes as its starting point the artist’s nine minute film ‘The Night I Became A Doll’ (2009), in which a young girl stops eating, m

NEW YORK, NY.- “Ted Muehling Selects: Lobmeyr Glass from the Permanent Collection” is the 10th installment in an exhibition series devoted to showing rotations of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition celebrates the museum’s recent acquisition of an extraordinary collection of 162 rare glass works from J. & L. Lobmeyr of Vienna, Austria, which dates from 1835 to 2008 and spans nearly the entire history of the firm. The exhibition will be on view from April 23, 2010, through fall 2010, and will feature more than 100 Lobmeyr pieces selected by designer Ted Muehling, original drawings lent by Lobmeyr, and other related works from the museum’s collection. “Cooper-Hewitt’s mission to explore the continuum of design is further strengthened by the acquisition of this collection, which illustrates Lobmeyr’s evolution and provides a wonderful opportunity

GHENT.- In the context of europalia.china S.M.A.K. will be holding the “Seeing One’s Own Eyes” exhibition by the artists’ collective MadeIn. Although the focus here is on contemporary art in the Middle East, most of all, the exhibition reveals the paradox of ‘looking’ at other cultures. MadeIn was established early in 2009 in Shanghai with the aim of stimulating the creation, support and dissemination of contemporary art. The founder of the collective is Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai), one of the most important conceptual artists who, since the 90s, has been active in a contemporary China that is rapidly evolving. Xu Zhen is dedicated to studying social, public and political processes, which he incorporates into his work in a way that is both theatrical and humoristic. In 8848 – 1.86 (2005) for example, the artist has made a valiant attempt to remove the top of Mount Everest and exhibit it as an archaeolog

MUNICH.- Every day events that have the potential to become part of history take place. But who decides which event fulfils the potential to enter the historical canon? Whose history is told and by whom? In the exhibition “Golden Times” four artists – Steven Claydon, Diango Hernández, Mai-Thu Perret and Sung Hwan Kim – examine the complexity of history in their own ways. As different as their works are, these artists regard history as elastic, nonlinear or fragmentary. Personal experience, narration, authorship, authenticity, time lags, historical facts, references and representation – all these aspects play a central role here. For the artists in this exhibition history is always a question of interpretation, narration and fiction – just as historical golden ages are often idealized and almost mythical in character. The first part of ’Golden Times’ exhibits sculptural works and installations by Steven Claydon, Diango Hernández and Mai-Thu Perret i

BOSTON, MA.- In their search for new modes of expression, avant-garde artists during the early 20th century—such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse—found inspiration in objects from Africa and Oceania. Their “discovery” of these objects from distant places, which had made their way into the marketplace in Paris, New York, and other major cities, elevated these artifacts to much-sought-after works of art. Photography aided this transformation, shifting the perception of pieces previously considered ethnographic or merely utilitarian to works of art and, in the process, created new, appreciative audiences. An exploration of this evolution is presented in Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), that draws from 20 Boston-area collections and the collections of the MFA. On view December 12, 2009, through July 18, 2010, in the Art of Asi