| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net | | Established in 1996 | Sunday, March 12, 2023 |
| | | Long-lost letters bring word, at last | |
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A note seized from an American tobacco ship in 1778 that reads: This is to certify that Jack Dodge the bearer hereof who was formerly my servant is now a free man & is at liberty to act for himself and also that he is a married man and has one child, at the British National Archives in London, Feb. 27, 2023. Researchers are sorting through a cache of undelivered mail, seized by British warships from merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century, that gives a vivid picture of private lives and international trade in an age of rising empires. (Tom Jamieson/The New York Times)
by Bryn Stole
LONDON.- In a love letter from 1745 decorated with a doodle of a heart shot through with arrows, MarÃa Clara de Aialde wrote to her husband, Sebastian, a Spanish sailor working in the colonial trade with Venezuela, that she could no longer wait to be with him. Later that same year, an amorous French seaman who signed his name M. Lefevre wrote from a French warship to a certain Marie-Anne Hoteé back in Brest: Like a gunner sets fire to his cannon, I want to set fire to your powder. Fifty years later, a missionary in Suriname named Lene Wied, in a lonely letter back to Germany, complained that war on the high seas had choked off any news from home: Two ships which have been taken by the French probably carried letters addressed to me. None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century. While the ships c ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day Anna-Sophie Berger, Mode und Tod, 2023. Installation view. Layr Singerstraße, Vienna.
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| Galerie Templon Brussels opens an exhibition of works by French artist Jean-Michel Alberola | | Gagosian exhibits Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures | | 'Jamie Johnson: Growing Up Travelling' on view at Leica Gallery Los Angeles |
Jean-Michel Alberola, Le roi de rien XXVIII, 2023, oil on canvas, huile sur toile, 130 x 97 cm, 51 x 38 1/4 in.
BRUSSELS.- French artist Jean-Michel Alberola is transforming the Galerie Templon Brussels space with a new protean exhibition focused on the three years he considers pivotal: 1965, 1966 and 1967. Conceived as an installation, the exhibition combines painted walls, canvases, silkscreens and works on paper, offering a fascinating journey through the influences, passions and commitments of the unclassifiable artist. Born in Saida in 1953, Jean-Michel Alberola spent the early 1960s in Algeria, in the midst of the war of independence. This traumatic experience, which led to his exile, caused the young Alberola to develop an obsessive focus on world news, politics, music and film. A focus that has left an enduring mark on his work. "I don't believe in inspiration," he explains, "but rather in a way of reading the surface of the world, of being clearly aware of it and being able to do something with it." From the 1965 Watts riots to the release of Th ... More | |
Albert Oehlen, Omega Man 7, 2021 (detail). Oil on canvas, 230 x 250 cm. © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Simon Vogel.
NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian is presenting the ömen: Albert Oehlen paintings and Paul McCarthy sculptures, an exhibition of recent paintings by Albert Oehlen juxtaposed with large-scale sculptural works by Paul McCarthy. Oehlen uses abstract, figurative, and collaged elementsoften applying self-imposed formal constraintsto disrupt the histories and conventions of modern painting while acknowledging the continuing significance of classical art. Approaching his practice as a perceptual challenge, he moves freely between planned and improvised strategies. And while championing self-consciously bad painting characterized by crude drawing and jarring coloration, he infuses expressive gesture with Surrealist attitude, disparaging the quest for stable form and meaning. McCarthy has been known since the 1970s for performances, videos, sculptures, and installations that confront viewers with a ... More | |
Black Eye, 2018.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA.- I have spent my entire career photographing children all over the world. The last several years I have focused my eyes on the Irish Traveller that live in caravans on the side of the road or in open fields throughout Ireland. The Traveller community are an Irish nomadic indigenous ethnic minority. There is no recorded date as to when Travellers first came to Ireland. This is lost to history but Travellers have been recorded to exist in Ireland as far back as history is recorded. Even with their great history they live as outsiders to society and face unbelievable discrimination growing up. Unlike most children they are unable to refer to a history book to learn about their ancestors, a part of this journey was being able to document an era that is so different to any other I have photographed. It is one that is and will always be rapidly changing, every time I visit it is a whole different world yet with the relationships I have been lucky enough to make, it seems to feel like I ... More |
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| Rago/Wright announces highlights of their Post War & Contemporary Art sale | | Exhibition is dedicated to the work of the Polish pioneer of geometric abstraction Wacław Szpakowski | | Karma exhibits recent sculpture by Thaddeus Mosley |
Arising from the friendship of Josep Llorens Artigas and Joan Miró, Antiplat avec cruche brisée (est. $100,000150,000) was created after the artists reunited towards the end of World War II.
LAMBERTVILLE, NJ.- Rago/Wright presents Post War & Contemporary Art on Wednesday, March 15th, 2023. This tightly curated auction is a premier event of the spring auction season, featuring an exemplary selection of paintings, drawings, photography, and sculpture from some of the most sought-after artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. This event will be immediately followed by Artists' Books & Ephemera from an Important Private Collection, offered in conjunction. Highlights include a kinetic sculpture by Alexander Calder, a Fernando Botero bronze, a ceramic collaboration by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas, paintings from Gertrude Abercrombie, Etel Adnan, and Bernard Buffet, an electronic Jenny Holzer installation, textile works from Olga de Amaral, and photography and sculpture by David ... More | |
Works by Wacław Szpakowski (18831973) in the exhibition. Photo: Anna Zagrodzka.
RIGA.- From 4 March to 30 April 2023, the exhibition Wacław Szpakowski. Riga Notebooks. organized by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw and the Muzeum Sztuki in ŁÃ³dź, is presented in the 4th Floor Exhibition Halls of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. The exhibition is dedicated to the work of the Polish pioneer of geometric abstraction, architect and engineer Wacław Szpakowski (18831973) commemorating his 140th anniversary of birth and the 50th anniversary of death. Szpakowski was born in Warsaw, Poland, but he and his family moved to Riga in 1897, where he began studying architecture at the Riga Polytechnic Institute (now Riga Technical University) in 1902. In addition to his studies, the young man was interested in meteorology and researched atmospheric phenomena such as hurricanes, cyclones and storms, writing down fact ... More | |
Thaddeus Mosley, Isotropic Complex, 2022. Walnut, cherry, and locust in 4 parts, 94 x 34 x 29 inches.
NEW YORK, NY.- Karma is presenting Recent Sculpture, a solo exhibition of work by Thaddeus Mosley, running from March 4th through April 22nd, 2023, at 22 East 2nd Street, New York. Recent Sculpture presents new work made by Mosley between 2020 and 2022. In a recent photograph taken in his studio, Thaddeus Mosley peers between the soaring columns of his sculptures. They are gallant constructions of wood, each hand-carved and formed out of unique sections from three to four logs. With his chisel, Mosley exalts the warm tones and woodgrain which lay beneath the outer tree bark. His dimensions vary, ranging from monumental to modest, rounded to angular, vaulted to hovering just above the ground. Their presence is determined by Mosleys negotiation between natural materials and an exploration of weight and space. A feat of balance, his sculptures exist in a constant state of ... More |
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| Reflex Amsterdam presents 'Eveningside' by Gregory Crewdson | | Clars announces highlights of their Spring Design auction | | Diego Rivera's America presents in-depth look at legendary works |
Gregory Crewdson, Madeline's Beauty Salon, 2021-2022 (detail). Courtesy Reflex Amsterdam.
AMSTERDAM.- Reflex Amsterdam announces its first collaboration with the internationally acclaimed American photographer Gregory Crewdson. The focus of the solo exhibition, from 11 March until 6 May, is Crewdsons new series of works Eveningside (2021-2022), but spans both of the gallerys locations, and also features a selection from previous bodies of work, including Beneath the Roses (2003-2008) and Cathedral of the Pines (2013-2014). The visual artist is renowned for his cinematographically staged photographs. In Eveningside (2021-2022), Crewdson explores moments of contemplation within the confines of quotidian life; in places of employment, and in moments just outside of those work structures. The figures populating the pictures are sparse, and are often seen through storefront windows, in mirror reflections, or positioned underneath the mundane proscenium found in the midst of their everyday routines: railroad bridges, do ... More | |
There will be numerous highlights across genres and countries.
OAKLAND, CA.- The Design department presents the Spring Design auction on March 16th. There will be numerous highlights across genres and countries. On offer will be a fine selection of pottery and ceramics including a Stan Bitters medallion, 32dia., estimated at $12,000-15,000. Bitters is renowned for his influence on the California arts and crafts scene since the 1960s. Also featuring prominently in the auction is a large Gertud and Otto Natzler bowl, having a fine blue-grey mat glaze, and measuring 12.75w; the bowl is valued conservatively at $5,000-7,000. Other ceramicists include Toshiko Takaezu, Ka-Kwong Hui, Annabeth Rosen, Richard Hirsch, Brother Thomas Bezanson, etc. There will be numerous furniture highlights in the auction, including a Michel Buffet floor lamp, expected to sell for $7,000-10,000. Also to be offered are several lots by designer Hans J. Wegner, such as a set of eight Heart Chairs estimated at $4,200-5,200, a rare pair of ... More | |
Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, gift of Albert M. Bender. © 2022 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
BENTONVILLE, ARK.- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art presents Diego Riveras America, the first major exhibition focused solely on the Mexican artist in over 20 years, on view March 11 July 31, 2023. One of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, Rivera told the story of everyday experience in epic murals and individual paintings. The exhibition provides a critical and contemporary interpretation of Diego Riveras work, whether done on the wall or the easel. Diego Riveras America examines the artists production through more than 130 works, including his drawings, easel paintings, frescoes, and more. The rare presentation reveals the broad range of Riveras creativity through a series of thematic sections that bring together more works from ... More |
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| Solo exhibition of new video works by peter campus opens at Cristin Tierney Gallery | | Colby Museum of Art brings together two extraordinary artists: Ashley Bryan and Paula Wilson | | Why is a day job seen as the mark of an artist's failure? |
peter campus, squassux puddle, 2023. Videograph, 4:51 minutes. Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof.
NEW YORK, NY.- Cristin Tierney Gallery presents meditations, a solo exhibition of new video works by peter campus. meditations opened on Friday, March 10th. Over the last two decades, campus's work has been devoted to capturing the natural beauty of Long Island's south shore. All of the works in meditations were made around Bellport, where campus set up his 4K camera in carefully selected places along the coastline and recorded hundreds of hours of dunes, marine flora, duck blinds, and fishing boats. As time passes in campus's videos, changing light and moving air subtly transform the image. There is never a sudden reveal or dramatic climax; rather, small shifts over time gradually build and coalesce into something different. Like an image that comes slowly into focus, the longer one looks at campus's video works, the more one sees. In describing this new body of work, campus cites the art philosophy adopted by Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy, a Ce ... More | |
Ashley Bryan, Dahlias, c. 2000. Acrylic on canvas. 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm). Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of the Ashley Bryan Center, 2022.006
WATERVILLE, ME.- The Colby College Museum of Art announced the recent opening of Ashley Bryan / Paula Wilson: Take the World into Your Arms. The exhibit, which will be on view through July 31, 2023, is the second show in the museums new Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center in downtown Waterville. The exhibition brings together two extraordinary artists, Ashley Bryan (19232022) and Paula Wilson (born 1975), whose passionate and open embrace of the world unites their multifaceted creative endeavors. This important show offers a new perspective on Bryan, an artist who was beloved for his childrens books but is insufficiently recognized for his contributions as a contemporary artist, and also introduces Wilson to New England audiences. Through their art, Bryan and Wilson channel the beauty and spirituality to be found in humanity and nature, using texture, color, ... More | |
Sara Bennett, "LINDA, 70, in the rec room for the medically unemployed at Taconic Correctional Facility," 2019. Archival pigment print, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.
NEW YORK, NY.- Theres a scene in the 1996 movie Basquiat where the incandescent young painter (played by Jeffrey Wright) has a handyman gig at a gallery. Willem Dafoe, making a cameo as an electrician, climbs down a ladder and delivers the immortal line: You know, Im an artist too. Here are the two sides of the myth: the obscure martyr unsoiled by commercial success; and the unbridled genius who cant help but have it all. In reality, most artists, even most great ones, also have day jobs. During the late 1950s and early 60s, the staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City harbored grand ambitions. Painters Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold were guards, curator and critic Lucy Lippard was a page in the museum library, minimalist Sol LeWitt worked the desk and sculptor Dan Flavin ran the elevator. (Miriam Takaezu, an employee in Personnel and sister to ... More |
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Chris Vena Artist Interview | 2021 Lehman Emerging Artist Award Recipient
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| More News |
Nan Goldin is ready for Oscar night
NEW YORK, NY.- In the late 1970s, photographer Nan Goldin began documenting hedonism and bohemia in New York City, chronicling the downtown lives of her friends and lovers with raw intimacy. Those images became a time capsule of a grittier city and established Goldins place as one of Americas most important photographers. On Sunday, she is heading to the Oscars, where shell be surrounded by red carpet crowds and flashing camera lights. Goldin, 69, is the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film directed by Laura Poitras that has been nominated for best documentary feature. It follows Goldins efforts to raise awareness about the opioid crisis and her mission to remove the name of the wealthy and philanthropic Sackler family, who owned the pharmaceutical company that developed OxyContin, from the walls ... More
Michael Tilson Thomas revels in the present with the New York Phil
NEW YORK, NY.- The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic a lovely, affirming surprise. Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present. There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomass Meditations on Rilke, which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schuberts Great Symphony. Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday ... More
Review: In 'Misty,' a restless artist grapples with a gentrifying city
NEW YORK, NY.- There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in Misty, which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer Arinzé Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching. The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kenes opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a generic angry young Black man? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but its also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist. In the show that Kene ... More
A Tolstoy Adaptation Has New Relevance
MUNICH.- Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Josef Stalin: March 5, 1953. Its a coincidence youre more likely to come across in the composers biography than in Stalins. Because while Prokofiev barely figures in Stalins life, his own was profoundly, inalterably changed by Soviet rule. Among the many documents of that is his War and Peace, a work contorted through forced revision into strident propaganda. Rarely performed, it opened this week on the anniversary of their deaths at the Bavarian State Opera here in a darkly urgent and sensitively executed new production haunted by the war in Ukraine. Prokofiev began to adapt Tolstoys novel an expansive portrait of Moscow society around Napoleons 1812 invasion of Russia, and a study in the scattered forces that shape history in the early years of World War II, as the capital ... More
Review: In this dance, even the nose scratches are choreographed
NEW YORK, NY.- Two men in lavender puffer vests and jean shorts strike a pose. Together, they scratch their noses. And then they go right back to the pose. This happens in the opening duet of Jordan Demetrius Lloyds Blackbare in the Basement, which had its debut at Danspace Project on Thursday. Lloyd is a young choreographer who made a splash last year staging a performance in a schoolyard near his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Blackbare, his first evening-length commission, extends the impression of a distinct voice still developing. All three shows are sold out. That moment in the duet is indicative of the 50-minute works attention to detail and destabilizing use of form. The nose scratching is casual, seemingly a break in form, but since the two men do it in unison, the doubled gesture is as choreographed, ... More
For rare book librarians, it's gloves off. Seriously.
NEW YORK, NY.- Last month, The New York Times reported on an ultrarare medieval Hebrew Bible that was headed to auction with a record-smashing estimate of up to $50 million. The reaction was swift. Why are they handling this without cotton gloves? Shame on them, one reader wrote in the comments section, referring to photographs showing someone touching the worn pages. This photo is disturbing, wrote another. Why is this person touching such an old book with ungloved hands? The alarmed tweets and emails kept rolling in. At the same time, a silent scream of exasperation arose at rare book libraries around the world. People who handle rare books for a living are used to doing battle with a range of dastardly scourges, including red rot, beetles and thieves. But there is one foe that drives many of them particularly crazy: the general ... More
Suzy McKee Charnas, writer of feminist science fiction, dies at 83
NEW YORK, NY.- Suzy McKee Charnas, an award-winning feminist science fiction writer who in a four-novel series created a post-holocaust, male-dominated society called the Holdfast that is liberated by an army of women, died Jan. 2 at her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was 83. David Szanton, a cousin, said the cause was a heart attack. Her death was not widely reported at the time. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement. In an epic that began with Walk to the End of the World (1974) and concluded 25 years later with The ... More
Greig Burgoyne presents exhibition of newly commissioned work at The Lowry
SALFORD.- Presented as part of The Lowrys Edit Series the one who was standing apart from me is an exhibition of newly commissioned work by Scottish artist Greig Burgoyne, complemented and informed by several works on paper selected by the artist from the LS Lowry Collection. Burgoyne spent several visits over a period of six months exploring the collection, as well as the galleries themselves, when empty. His focus was not on what we see, but what was absent and sensed. Based on self-imposed rules and processes, Burgoynes work embraces seemingly contradictory ideas, such as using drawing to visualise the invisible. Rather than a literal interpretation, Burgoyne considers the invisible as the broader absences all around us. In this exhibition, these absences are explored through a series of videos and performances, ... More
Wilding Cran Gallery presents a selection of new paintings by Robert Gunderman
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Wilding Cran Gallery is presenting Place Like You, a selection of new paintings by Robert Gunderman, inspired by the emotive relationships between organisms and the subjectivity of the natural world. Through an exploration of the microscopic and macrocosmic biomes of our universe, the exhibition of Place Like You grounds Robert Gundermans artistic practice in his native landscape of Southern California. Holding the belief that everything is connected on a molecular level, Gundermans oil paintings of landscapes, weather systems, flora, and fauna, embrace duality, bifurcation, and paradox in order to capture the infinity of relationships held within a moment of time. In an effort to depict intricate networks of cells through the lens of human experience and tenets of theoretical physics, Place Like You is deeply ... More
Spot, record producer who captured the fury of 1980s punk, dies at 71
NEW YORK, NY.- Glen Lockett, an influential record producer who, working under the name Spot, helped define the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock in the 1980s, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and many others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was 71. His death, in a nursing home, was announced in a Facebook post by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Records, the iconoclastic Hermosa Beach, California, label where Lockett made his name. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent years after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent most of the past three months in a hospital after a stroke. As in-house producer for SST from 1979-85, Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages ... More
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PhotoGalleries
Gabriele Münter
TARWUK
Awol Erizku
Leo Villareal
Flashback On a day like today, Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Burri was born March 12, 1915. Alberto Burri (12 March 1915 - 13 February 1995) was an Italian painter and sculptor considered a key figure in Post-War art and such artistic movements as Neo-Dada, Nouveau réalisme, postminimalism and Arte Povera. In this image: Alberto Burri, Multiplex 8, 1981. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, Italy, and Luxembourg & Dayan.
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