Jorge Nieto will be part of the FIART 2010 exhibition in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico from the 31th of August until the 5th of September.
More information can be found at the FIART website.
The 18th International Congress for Aesthetics (ICA) will be held from Aug. 8 to 13 at Peking University.
Under the theme “Diversity in Aesthetics,” more than 800 scholars from over 60 countries will gather to share views about aesthetics philosophy, Gao Jianping, general secretary of the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA), told a press conference Monday.
The largest art training center for Chinese painting was set up on Sunday in Tianjin, thanks to the joint efforts of The Ministry of Culture, China National Academy of Painting, and the Tianjin Municipal Government. The facility will ultimately become a giant incubator for developing the talent of creative artists.
Art lovers have a rare and limited opportunity to view a scroll considered a seminal work in the history of Chinese painting, Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red cliff Red Cliff. After August 1, the scroll will be taken off view and not available for public viewing for at least five years to protect it from deterioration caused by exposure to even low light levels.
“This remarkable work is almost a thousand years old, and we feel a deep responsibility to preserve it for another millennium,” said Colin Mackenzie, senior curator of Chinese art at the Nelson-Atkins.
Date: Apr 29–Aug 31, 2010
Venue: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan
‘Alternative Humanities’ is a large-scale exhibition devoted to Jan Fabre and Katsura Funakoshi – two of today’s most influential artists.
Born in Belgium, Fabre remains attuned to the religious paintings of 15th and 16th century Flanders, while exposing the contradictions of human existence through pictures drawn with his own blood and sculptures employing stuffed animals, animal bones, and other organic materials.
The figurative sculptures that Funakoshi carves from camphor wood speak eloquently of the interior landscape of people in our times. They also resonate with the complex emotions visible in images of the Kannon Bodhisattva of the late Edo/early Meiji period – a major turning point in Japanese culture.
Gathering some 190 works in a meeting of East and West, past and present, the exhibition will transcend time and place to inquire into state of the human spirit today.
Indigenous peoples, economic migrants, the vanquished, dispossessed and marginalised take centre stage at the latest edition of the Sydney Biennale (until 1 August). “The aim of this biennale…is to bring work from diverse cultures together…on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other,” said artistic director David Elliott at the inauguration of the show.
Elliott has chosen more than 440 works by 166 artists predominantly from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Scandinavia and Britain, many of them newcomers to the international exhibition circuit. Seven African artists have been included thanks to funding from Puma Creative, which runs the cultural programme of the international sportswear brand. “The European Enlightenment is over,” said Elliott. “Now we are entering another political era where power is more equally distributed. This is my end of Enlightenment show.”
Elliott’s biennale, “The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age”, has a number of discernible themes and includes works that relate well to one another—a welcome departure from many biennials that are sprawling and confused and make sense only in the mind of the artistic director. Stories of peoples on the edges of history whose culture, language and customs have been almost obliterated by colonialism and the advance of the white man run throughout the show.
In the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), one of seven biennale venues, a four-screen video installation by Canadian artist Dana Claxton relates the history of her own Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux tribe, who followed their chief Sitting Bull to Canada in search of new land in 1877 after victory against General Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Claxton interviews descendants of the original inhabitants of the encampment they set up when they got there. They recall a time when they could live off the land in communion with nature. “I miss the old days when we could hunt elk and buffalo,” says one. Annie Pootoogook, an Inuit artist from Cape Dorset, Canada, charts the struggles of daily life in her community with cartoon-like watercolours that describe domestic violence and alcoholism, but also capture intimate family moments.
The Last Silent Movie by Susan Hiller, one of only a handful of artists from the US, is a recording of 24 nearly extinct dialects from around the world, including Silbo Gomero, a whistling language once used by shepherds in the Canary Islands to communicate across vast distances. The dialect, today remembered by very few, is also the subject of the video piece La Gomera by British artist Joy Gregory, which has been installed on Cockatoo Island, another major venue.
The problem, of course, is that just because a story is worth telling, it may not necessarily make good art. Some of the biennale works by Australian artists dealing with history are disappointing in their simplicity and execution. The most beautiful Australian work here is the art produced by indigenous artists: a striking installation at the MCA of intricately decorated burial poles by Yolngu artists from North East Arnhem Land. It says much about prevailing hierarchies in the art world that Elliott felt it necessary to justify the inclusion of the burial poles at the biennale press conference. “You can’t help showing indigenous art in Australia,” he said, adding: “It’s good. It measures up.” The poles, once an integral part of Aboriginal funerary rites, are now produced as sculptures; the examples on display at the biennale are on loan from the broadcasting billionaire Kerry Stokes in Perth.
The failure of capitalism is another biennale theme. British artist Isaac Julien takes the deaths of more than 20 Chinese illegal migrants who drowned in England in 2004 while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay as the starting point for Ten Thousand Waves, a nine-screen video installation. Weaving realism with poetic interpretations of the workers’ imaginative lives, Julien examines the motivations that drive people to cross the world in search of a better life.
French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has made Kasbah, an installation of shanty town roofs collected by the artist. The field of corrugated iron, satellite dishes and other scrap material that visitors are encouraged to walk across reflects the condition of how the majority of the world’s population lives. The work is conceptually interesting and crowd pleasing, and is one of the biennale’s runaway successes.
Another is the inflatable red lotus blossom by the Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa which floats in a pond in the city’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The artist uses a hydraulic system to create the illusion that the giant flower is breathing, inflating and deflating with each breath, emphasising the fragility of the natural world which surrounds us. The theme continues in the gardens with Australian artist Janet Laurence’s sickbed for fragile plants, a white mesh tent inside which visitors can glimpse a laboratory fully equipped to resuscitate sick flora. At the MCA Chinese artist Shen Shaomin takes the theme of man’s despoliation of nature one step further. He is displaying a group of Bonsai trees, each one manipulated into contorted positions by metal instruments of torture.
| Art lovers in Shanghai are encouraged to take a stroll along the “World Art Gallery” during the city’s annual Spring Art Salon. The concept of internationalization is projected as this year’s theme. The event’s highlight is two conceptual oil paintings to remember the late King of Pop Michael Jackson.
More than one hundred prestigious art galleries from different continents around the globe will take part in this year’s event. Various art schools and genres including abstract and realism will give visitors and buyers a huge pool of choices. The two conceptual oil paintings by American Chinese artist Zhou Chi are drawing huge attention. They were created to commemorate the one year anniversary of the death of American pop singer Michael Jackson. The curly hair of young Michael is turned into the eleven black phonograph albums he released during his lifetime. |
On 26th April 2010, Museo Picasso Malaga presents a new approach to the artworks by Pablo Picasso that belong to its permanent collection, highlighting the wide range of themes the artist tackled during his prolific artistic career.
As from tomorrow, Tuesday 27th April, and again, with a second instalment, as from Tuesday 20th July, visitors will be able to discover the MPM collection’s new layout. Until October of this year, the public will be able to view all 233 works that make up the museum’s entire art holdings following its recent expansion, in two separate instalments.
A New Approach is the follow-up to the project for the expansion and consolidation of the MPM’s art holdings, after the creation of the Fundación Museo Picasso Malaga. Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. This process will culminate in October, when the collection will once again be shown alongside the works on free loan from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte ( FABA).
This presentation coincides with the publication of a guidebook which contains information and a number of brief essays on the MPM, as well as the full catalogue of the MPM permanent collection’s art holdings, and ten academic studies on its ten most representative artworks.
“Among the various sins of which I am accused, none is as false as the one that which states my work is fundamentally driven by a spirit of research. My objective when I paint is to show what I have found, not what I am looking for. In art, intentions are not enough and, as we say in Spanish: obras son amores y no buenas razones (actions speak louder than words). What matters is what one does, not what one intended to do”. This was how Pablo Picasso defined the purpose of his art. He tackled his work with talent, hard work, precise technique and, above all, indomitable creative freedom.
By presenting its permanent collection in this way, the museum is providing a storyline to the artist’s work; a fresh approach to the discoveries that led Picasso to be considered the most important artist of the 20th century. With this in mind, Museo Picasso Malaga is inviting visitors to examine ten key features of Picasso’s aesthetic legacy.
LONDON. Christie’s sale of International Modern and Contemporary Art held in Dubai on 27 April proved a success, leapfrogging three times over its low estimate to total over $15m (presale $4.8m-$6.6m). This was a sharply improved result compared to last year’s sale, which made just $4.8m.
The strongest bidding in this year’s sale was for 25 modern Egyptian artworks consigned by a respected Saudi collector, Dr Mohammed Farsi. This was expected to make $1.2m-$1.7m, but racked up $8.7m, with all the lots sold.
The collection was said by trade sources to have been offered to Qatar—whose Museum of Modern Arab Art is due to be inaugurated in a temporary space this December—but finally went to auction at Christie’s.
Prominent among Christie’s staffers taking telephone bids at the sale was Isabelle de la Bruyère, glamorous director for the Middle East, who was previously Dr Farsi’s daughter-in-law. She snaffled a number of lots including the evening’s prize, the Egyptian artist Mahmoud Said’s “Les Chadoufs”, 1934, which sold for a startling $2.4m, almost ten times its high estimate (est $150,000-$200,000). Trade sources said that it was destined for Qatar.
A mammoth new exhibition of 291 Chinese artists, Reshaping History, currently on display at three venues across Beijing, is hoping to cast a light on the growth and maturity of the entire nation, as the exhibition’s subtitle, “Chinart from 2000 to 2009,” indicates.
Often we look to art to illuminate something deeply personal, something lurking under the surface of artists’ imaginations that reflects their view of themselves, their surroundings and the world at large. Art too can serve as a proxy for far larger, more expansive arenas: a community, a people, a race.
Indeed, if there is one buzzword that encapsulates the Chinese experience over the past 10 years, it is “growth,” a concept toward which the artistic luminaries of Reshaping History have no shortage of opinions.
“Like every aspect of the Chinese economy, Chinese art is developing immensely,” said exhibition founder Lü Peng. “So much talent has emerged over the past 10 years, so many contrasting styles and worldviews and I really wanted a venue where we could put them all next to each other and let the viewer take it all in.
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