Tag: News

HOUSTON, TX.- The FotoFest 2010 Biennial closed its main events on Sunday, April 25, after a six-week run, which was marked by a formidable number of exhibitions, events, workshops, forums on contemporary curating, the world’s largest portfolio review for artists, an International Fine Print Auction, book signings, and a lot of networking between photographers who came from around the world. FotoFest, the United States’ largest citywide celebration of photography, put its 2010 focus on Contemporary U.S. Photography and invited five curators from different regions of the country to present their visions of the field and what they felt best reflected photography in the U.S. today. The four main U.S. exhibitions were accompanied by a fifth, non-thematic exhibition, Discoveries of the Meeting Place, spotlighting ten artists who had presented work in the previous Biennial’s portfolio review. In addition to FotoFest&#1

TEL AVIV.- Tamar Getter’s comprehensive exhibition, “GO 2”, emphasizes her work’s combined, multi-voiced, exaggerated and grotesque utterance. It includes some 10 new painting units, sprawling over more than 100 meters, alongside canonical works, from the cycles “Tel Hai”, “Landscapes”, “Artificialia Naturalia”, “History Lessons” and “Recruits”. The exhibition seeks to refresh the gaze and accentuate the observation of this body of work that is thin and charged, skeletal and rich, continuous, critical and central. Getter is one of the prominent artists of the Israeli avant-garde that developed and peaked in the 1970s. In addition to being a student of Raffi Lavie, whose influence is evident mostly in her composition, Getter’s studies at the Tel Aviv University Department of Literature during the 1970s have probably been even more constitutive and significant. Getter’s work expands the understanding of the modernist project and refers to the artistic object as one of constant res

LONDON.- Staffing and financial worries are in danger of taking their toll on museums’ ability to build their collections according to the Art Fund’s latest research, the Collecting Challenge 2010. The research, which surveyed 276 UK museums, found that three-quarters of museums say that inadequate funding and spending cuts are the biggest barrier to museums’ collecting activity. This is a trend felt particularly strongly by Local Authority museums, just 14% of which could count adding to their collections as a priority, compared to almost half of National museums, prompting concerns that Local Authority collections will fall behind. At the same time museums fear that staff cutbacks could have serious long term implications for their collections with the threatened loss of curatorial skills. 20% of museums and galleries say that avoiding staff cuts, and therefore loss of expertise is a major obstacle to collecting. Dr Stephen Deuchar, Director of the Art Fund said

BERLIN.- For his first exhibition at Eleven, acclaimed artist and filmmaker Gerry Fox will realise a brand new series of video works based on 19th century paintings. While in Venice making a large-scale installation about this contemporary city last year, Fox came across a series of works by famous painters including Turner, Sargent, Manet, Monet and Renoir all featuring gondolas in the city’s canals. He set out to recreate these paintings on the highest quality 35 mm film, bringing them to life as cinematic tableaux. Each piece was shot at the exact location of the original painting including the Grand Canal, with all traces of the 21st century painstakingly avoided – including the ever-present vaporetti and constant passers-by, no mean feat in this bustling, tourist city. Fox also used the only 19th century gondola left in Venice and colourful replica costumes. He almost literally filmed the past. Once shot, th

ROCHESTER, NY.- Rochester sculptor Albert Paley has earned an international reputation for his ability to manipulate cold, hard metal into organic, seemingly impossible forms. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has completed more than 60 monumental commissions for sites from Washington DC to Houston to Los Angeles. Now he is the subject of Albert Paley in the 21st Century, an exhibition that brings together 37 sculptures and models and 16 drawings produced between 2000 and 2010. Highlights include a 15-foot-long model of the gates Paley designed for the St. Louis Zoo, populated by a steel rhino, giraffe, egrets, fish and a host of other animals; the bright red, 12-foot-tall model for a much larger outdoor sculpture in Charleston, West Virginia; and the magnificent design study for a gate at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Visitors will have the opportunity to watch a video on the making of RIT’s immense Sentinel

TORONTO.- Online social media, photography and their impact on one’s perception of reality come together in the new site-specific video-sculpture Creative Commons, presented by the Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as part of this year’s Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Guillaume Cailleau uses 18 TV monitors to create a kinetic collage of images of the ROM that were drawn from thousands of free-to-use photographs available on the Internet. Creative Commons will be on display free of charge in the ROM’s Spirit House in the Lee-Chin Crystal from May 1 to 31, 2010. The installation is a video-sculpture constructed with approximately 18 television monitors, referencing the shape of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Each monitor shows a different video loop lasting 3 to 5 minutes. Each loop consists of free-to-use photographs of the ROM downl

LONDON.- Frieze, the leading magazine for contemporary art and culture, is inviting entries for the Frieze Writer’s Prize 2010. Frieze Writer’s Prize was established in 2006 and is presented annually. The aim of the prize is to promote and encourage new critics from across the world, and many of the previous winners and commended entrants, including Jessica Lott and Jeffrey Ryan, have gone on to contribute frequently to frieze magazine. The judges for 2010 will be philosopher and critic Boris Groys; the writer and novelist A.M. Homes and Jörg Heiser, co‐editor of frieze magazine. Writers are invited to submit an unpublished 700‐word review in English of a recent contemporary art exhibition. Applicants must be over 18‐years old and must not have had more than three pieces of writing on art published in a newspaper or magazine. The closing date for entries is 25 June 2010 and the winner of the prize will

NEW YORK, NY.- The Jewish Museum presents South African Photographs: David Goldblatt, an exhibition of 150 black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken between 1948 and 2009, from May 2 through September 19, 2010. The photographs on view focus on South Africa’s human landscape in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. South African Photographs: David Goldblatt is the largest New York City exhibition of Goldblatt’s work since 2001. For more than half a century, David Goldblatt has been photographing his native South Africa, documenting the social, cultural and economic divides that characterize the country. Recipient of the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and the prestigious 2006 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, David Goldblatt is his country’s most distinguished

PA:MA DE MALLORCA.- The Es Baluard Museum of Contemporary Art presents an exhibition of new photographs by Lou Reed. The exhibition features stunning black and white and color images of landscapes and architectural motifs, shot on the artist’s travels to Scotland, Denmark, Big Sur and elsewhere. The photographs are taken with a specially altered digital camera, which gives them an aura of strangeness, or otherworldliness. They have a timeless quality but are simultaneously very modern, like Reed himself. They are surprisingly small in scale, making these striking natural images personal, portable, and intimate. First with his group, The Velvet Underground, and then as a solo artist, Lou Reed has been making innovations in music since the 1960s. His name has become synonymous with the New York avant-garde, and with the city itself. With his photography, Reed has been