Tag: News

DUSSELDORF.- The Swedish installation artist Matts Leiderstam (*1956 in Göteborg) is interested in the portrait and landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries. After intensive art and cultural history research, Leiderstam takes paintings and graphic art out of their original collection and presentation contexts to position them anew within institutional exhibitions. With the aid of slide projections, computer animations, optical instruments (colour filters, magnifying glasses, binoculars, etc.) and his own reproductions of originals, the artist appropriates the material, offering the viewer alternative ways of looking at visual motifs and compositions. Attention thus focuses on incidental details and subtle codes that normally are hardly perceived owing to habitual patterns of seeing and

HONG KONG.- Sotheby’s Hong Kong will hold its Contemporary Asian Art Spring Sale 2010 on 5 April at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. This season’s sale will offer a series of early works by established Chinese artists that are rarely seen on the market, as well as seminal works from prominent Japanese and Korean artists. There will be over 170 extraordinary pieces, with a total estimate in excess of HK$94 million / US$12 million. Evelyn Lin, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Asian Art, said, “Last year, our Contemporary Asian Art Autumn sale in Hong Kong achieved very encouraging results amidst a progressively recovering global market, having reached a sale total almost 80% higher than that of our 2009 Spring sale. Riding on this success, coupled with the robust performance of contemporary Asian art in our sales in New York and London, we are confident that the market is buoyed up once again. In

FRANKFURT.- Through May 1st 2010, Galerie Adler is putting on its first show of works by the Berlin-based artist ANOUK KRUITHOF (*1981, Dordrecht, Netherlands). The exhibition “Becoming Blue” was already shown in 2009 at Het Domein Museum in Sittard, NL, and at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The people in Anouk Kruithof’s photographs have a vulnerable look, perhaps due most to their expressive faces, which tellingly lay bare their emotional state of mind. Dressed in blue and posed before a background of the same colour, they have difficulties asserting themselves, seeming almost to dissolve into the blueness that surrounds them. But what is most disturbing about the images is how Kruithof waits to press the shutter until a moment when her subjects have no conscious control over their facial expression,

NEW YORK, NY.- Luhring Augustine presents an exhibition of new work by the collaborative team Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. This marks Cardiff and Miller’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are internationally recognized for their immersive multimedia works. Incorporating dramatic audio tracks into their visually striking installations, the artists create engaging and transcendent multisensory experiences which draw the viewer into ambiguous and unsettling narratives. Their works address grand themes such as time, voyeurism, dreams, and mystery. Providing only fragments of information, the completion of the storylines, images and thoughts are left to be formed in the minds of the individual viewers. Cardiff and Miller’s new installation, “The Carnie”,

BEIJING.- The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents the exhibition “Feelings are Facts”, from 3 April to 20 June 2010, fruit of the first collaboration between Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist, and Ma Yansong, one of the most prolific Chinese architects. Together the artists have created an installation specially conceived for the of UCCA’s Big Hall, uniting architecture, light and fog. Eliasson is known for his exploration of human perception, and he often works with light, shadows, color, water, wind, or fog to create a specific environment in order to move us to think about our experience of our surroundings – perceptions we usually take to be self-evident. Ma’s architecture stands at the forefront of new experimentation in building structures, refashioning form in bold pursuits of perfection. Their collaboration invites the audience to enter an endless space of fog, with color emanating

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY.- The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is presenting its thirteenth annual Award for Curatorial Excellence to curator, writer, and activist Lucy Lippard. For more than four decades, Lippard’s insightful, timely, and at times radical curatorial and critical endeavors have made a profound and resonant impact on our understanding of the art of our time. From her pioneering early support of conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, and her advocacy of feminist art, to her groundbreaking work as a writer and critic, Lippard’s contributions to the field of contemporary art are countless.
The formal presentation of the award by artist Hans Haacke will be made at a gala dinner on April 7, 2010, at Gotham Hall. Each year the Center for Curatorial Studies celebrates the individual achievements of a leading curator or curators whose lasting contributions have s

SYDNEY.- It is fast becoming your last chance to see images that are literally out of this world. The exhibition From Earth to the Universe at the Powerhouse Museum – where visitors can take a breathtaking journey through our galaxy and beyond – will close on May 30. Through photos and objects the exhibition showcases the beauty and mysteries of the universe. It reveals how the telescope has expanded our knowledge and vision since Italian scientist Galileo Galilei first looked through one 400 years ago. The spectacular recent images of the sky have been collected by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, complemented by a range of Australian images emphasising our Southern Hemisphere location sourced by renowned astrophotographer Dr David Malin. Modern observations have led to exciting new concepts such as black holes, dark matter and mysterious dark energy. The eye-catching images di

VALENCIA.- IVAM launched an exhibition that comprises 35 works, pictures and robots dated between 2001 and 2009 made by Ximo Lizana. The images have been included in a catalog together with the texts written by the curator of the exhibition, Ángel Kalenberg, the director of the IVAM, Consuelo Ciscar, María García-Abadillo and Natalia Gómez. Ximo Lizana studied in the School of Applied Arts of Huesca and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Valencia. He felt soon interested in the relation between robotics, engineering and art and became part of a global interlinked counterculture based on new technologies potential. His artistic work is inserted in a transitional period between the representation and the simulation of art. Through these conceptions, an increasingly complex world can be represented. The artist creates new conceptual approaches by using new technology tools. He takes advantage of the new formats stemming from

AMSTERDAM.- A shimmer of possibility is the latest project by influential British photographer Paul Graham. This work was created during Graham’s many travels through the United States since 2002. a shimmer of possibility consists of twelve sequences varying in number: from just a few images to more than ten. Each sequence offers an informal look at the life of ordinary, individual Americans – from a woman eating to a man waiting for the bus. The sequences focus attention on very ordinary things, which Graham has photographed with affection and curiosity. Each sequence is a short, casual encounter, where we consider for a moment something that attracts our attention. Then life goes on, full of new possibilities. The way Graham presents the diverse sequences in the exhibition is crucial. Instead of being shown in a linear fashion, a sequence fans out over the wall like a cloud. Due to the carefully considered and inventive structure, no viewing direction or predominant

NEW YORK, NY (AP).- New York City’s billionaire mayor has tapped former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former U.S. Department of the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and 16 others to serve on the board of his philanthropic foundation. Mayor Michael Bloomberg got his start on Wall Street and founded the financial information company Bloomberg LP. His fortune is estimated at $18 billion by Forbes magazine. The three-term mayor recently began shaping a foundation to concentrate full time on his giving. He gave $254 million to 1,300 charities last year. He was ranked No. 4 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of 50 Americans who gave the most. The board also includes his two daughters, former Miami Mayor Manny Diaz and artist Maya Lin.