Ed van der Elsken @ Rijksmuseum and Nederlands Fotomuseum

Rijksmuseum and Nederlands Fotomuseum acquire artistic estate of Ed van der Elsken

Ed van der Elsken, from the Photo Book Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Prés’ (Love on the Left Bank), before 1956. Gelatin silver print.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum have jointly acquired the artistic estate of the photographer Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990), safeguarding for the nation the largest archive of work by one of the most important Dutch photographers of the 20th century. This acquisition will make it possible, for the first time, to gain a complete understanding of Van der Elsken’s artistic practice over the entire course of his more than 40-year career.

Van der Elsken’s widow Anneke Hilhorst has for 30 years managed her late husband’s artistic legacy, comprising 10,000 objects. The Rijksmuseum is to obtain more than 7,700 prints, while the Nederlands Fotomuseum will add 3,000 contact sheets and 300 photographs to its collection. The Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum are working together to open up the archive and restore, study and digitise his work so it is accessible to all.

This autumn the Rijksmuseum will partner with the Nederlands Fotomuseum to stage an exhibition of Van der Elsken’s work. This exhibition focusing on the photographer’s methodology will show the artist’s hand at work in the designs for two photobooks, proof prints, book cover designs, photographs featuring the artist’s own descriptions and marks, and contact sheets. It is only through the acquisition of Van der Elsken’s entire artistic legacy that we are able to present his work in such an extensive way.

The collection was for a large part donated by Anneke Hilhorst, and partly purchased with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its dedicated Photography and Video Fund and Dura Kunstfonds), BankGiro Lottery players, the Paul Huf Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds and the Marque Joosten en Eduard Planting Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds. The acquisition was made possible thanks to the mediation of Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam.

Anneke Hilhorst, widow of Ed van der Elsken: I have always regarded my ownership of Ed’s work as a great responsibility. I have never considered it to be mine alone; first and foremost, it is historical heritage of the photographic and visual arts in the Netherlands. I have now passed on this responsibility in complete confidence that the work of Ed van der Elsken will be cherished and well looked after by the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Highly specialised people will now escort his work into a long and beautiful future. For this I can feel only gratitude.

Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum: Ed van der Elsken makes the everyday extraordinary. He offers us an intimate glimpse into the changes that took place in the second half of the 20th century, and that are still relevant in our lives today. He is one of the great Dutch masters of the 20th century, and Anneke Hilhorst does us a great honour in entrusting his legacy to us. We and the Nederlands Fotomuseum will together ensure that Van der Elsken’s work is made accessible to all, now and in the future.

Birgit Donker, Director of the Nederlands Fotomuseum: Ed van der Elsken’s photographs and contact prints constitute an exceptional addition to our wonderful collection; we maintain the complete archive of Van der Elsken’s negatives and slides. Until now this collection included only a limited number of prints, on two themes. Through this joint acquisition, the Nederlands Fotomuseum collection will now include early work by this important photographer, who is part of our national DNA.

Ed van der Elsken Contact sheet Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Parijs (Love on the Left Bank), 1950-1954.

Artistic legacy
Van der Elsken’s artistic estate contains many surprises, including more than 2,000 vintage prints, multiple prints from a single negative, cover designs, dummy photo book designs (including one for his 1966 masterpiece Sweet Life) and contact sheets. It is a whole of many parts and a source for further scholarly research. The series and sequences of images on the contact prints offer a comprehensive overview of the photographer’s entire oeuvre, with many of them including the descriptions and markings that reveal what was most important to him. The contact sheets therefore form a vital link between the negatives and his prints. There is also evidence of Van der Elsken’s abiding interest in experimentation in the domain of design, particularly in the form of his book dummies. He designed his own magnum opus Sweet Life,  experimenting with sequence, size, juxtaposition and printing techniques. The Sweet Life dummy will have a prominent place in this autumn’s exhibition. 

 Ed van der Elsken
Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) photographed, amongst others, in the Netherlands, Paris, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico, the United States, and Indonesia, and built a body of work that is extraordinarily wide-ranging and rich. His direct and disarming approach was part of what made him the epitome of the ‘people photographer’ – it was this directness that enabled him to capture the human essence of his subjects. Van der Elsken’s used his uniquely raw and individual style to show that photography is about more than just an image; his photographs express a personal vision. Van der Elsken is acknowledged internationally as a pioneer of the subjective viewpoint; of the photographer’s vision and portrayal of people and the world.

Combined efforts and indispensable support
The collection was for a large part donated by Anneke Hilhorst, and partly purchased with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its dedicated Photography and Video Fund and Dura Kunstfonds), BankGiro Lottery players, the Paul Huf Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds and the Marque Joosten en Eduard Planting Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds.

It is thanks to donations and bequests from private individuals, funds, family and other foundations, government and business that museums such as the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum can continue to exist and to connect people, art and history. 

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Postbus 74888
1070 DN Amsterdam
The Netherlands
E-mail: info@rijksmuseum.nl
Telephone: +31 (0) 20 6747 000
Visiting address
Museumstraat 1
1071 XX Amsterdam

Budapest, The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art will reopen on August 20th.

LUDWIG MUSEUM – MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BUDAPEST IS OPENING WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS


After several months of shutdown due to the COVID-19, the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art will reopen on August 20th.

The first exhibition is a new selection from the museum’s collection entitled Time Machine. The exhibition was created during the short break caused by the pandemic, under extraordinary circumstances, so the organizers could not ignore the lessons of the recent period. This time, works have been selected that reveal different aspects of personal, artistic and historical time to the viewer, and the works themselves can be seen as time machines that allow us to travel mentally.

From September 4, a selection from Art Collection Telekom entitled Keeping The Balance will be on view, which seeks to answer the question how to find and maintain the right balance in a complex, contradictory and often conflict-laden reality. The selection features works by artists with mostly Eastern European roots.

The exhibition BarabásiLab: Hidden Patterns. The Language of Network Thinking will open on 10 October. It presents the last 20 years of research based on the so-called Barabási networks mainly related to the activity of physicist and network researcher Albert-László Barabási. By following the development of network visualization – presenting the main projects of Barabási research lab – the viewer can gain insight into the application of this comprehensive method in art. Using state-of-the-art technology, network diagrams and structures vividly describe the hidden connections and relationships that underlie the studied phenomena.

The Ludwig Museum, including the museum shop, is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 a.m.

The museum does its best to protect the health of the visitors and staff, so we ask you to wear a mask when visiting our exhibitions and keep a distance of one and a half meters in the exhibition spaces.

A 22-metre-high bronze sculpture by Thomas Lerooy in Knokke, Belgium

A 22-metre-high bronze sculpture by the Belgian artist Thomas Lerooy in Knokke

A 22-metre-high bronze sculpture by the Belgian artist Thomas Lerooy will be installed in Knokke on 16 June 2020. The sculpture, entitled Tower, is Lerooy’s first permanent sculpture in the public space.
Tower consists of 49 bronze heads – busts – all facing the sea. The faces have been manipulated and abstracted in such a way that the noses, eyes, ears and chins are all on the same vertical axis, levelling out the differences and making everyone look alike.

As is often the case in Lerooy’s work, Tower, which can be seen as a sequel to Lerooy’s earlier works Obelrisk (2007) and Never Listen to Your Best Friend (2007), refers to the transience, the ephemerality of life and the meaning of existence – or the lack of it. The bronze will patinate and age naturally under the influence of time, the salt from the sea, and the wind.

The title of the work is as simple as it is powerful. Tower refers to today’s society, which is made up of various elements that are more valuable together than separately – a society in which we depend on each other, in which we need to listen to each other and make compromises. Just as a child stacks blocks to make a tower, Lerooy stacks heads to create something meaningful.
But the sculpture is just as much a reference to Brancusi’s Endless Column, a column 30 metres high with an infinitely repeated motif of a diamond-shaped bead that seems to rise to infinity. Just like Brancusi’s column, Tower has a strong verticality. It is as if a line is drawn by hand from the horizon of the sea to the sky. Like a struggle with the infinity of the sea, the sculpture functions as an obelisk, an anchor point, or a cathedral.
Duality and tension are inherent in Lerooy’s work, which provokes, plays and challenges. Lerooy is a master of seduction and deceit. He combines drama and humour, and reconciles the theatrical with the intimate, but he also focuses on the tension between transience and timelessness, between old and new, life and death.
The Belgian public first became acquainted with Thomas Lerooy in 2006 when one of the artist’s first bronze sculptures, Le Petit Jean, was shown on the roof of the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum. The putto – the name for a chubby nude child figure – peed in the direction of the visitors. Fourteen years later, we see Leroy’s first permanent work in the public space, a bronze sculpture 22 metres high.

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Thomas Lerooy
Thomas Lerooy was born in Roeselare in 1981 and now works in Brussels, producing a coherent oeuvre of drawings, bronze sculptures and paintings. In 2015, Lerooy was the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. In his own country, his shows have included a solo exhibition at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in 2017, a duo presentation with Félicien Rops at the Kasteel Van Gaasbeek in 2018/2019, and a solo exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSK) in Brussels.
Lerooy’s works are included in the collections of important international museums and institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Belfius Art Collection in Brussels.

Ben Sledsens at Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerpen

A solo show by Ben Sledsens at Tim Van Laere Gallery

 From 3 September to 10 October, Tim Van Laere Gallery presents the third solo exhibition of the Belgian artist Ben Sledsens (°1991, lives and works in Antwerp).

In recent years Ben Sledsens has made a blitz career in the visual arts. The young Antwerp artist was picked up by Tim Van Laere Gallery during his studies at the Royal Academy and received his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2016. Since then, he has been embraced by the international art world.

Sledsens is known for his large-scale canvases in which he transforms daily life, literary figures, animal portraits and elements from (art) history into his own personal utopia. Sledsens continually reuses motifs, themes, objects and poses from his works. In this way he creates an intriguing puzzle of references and continues to build on his recognisable, coherent oeuvre.
Sledsens' works bear witness to an in-depth knowledge of art history. His palette of strong, vibrant colors, high technical qualities and simple visual language exist within a long tradition that refers to great masters such as Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Henri Rousseau and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Nature and daily life are also important sources of inspiration for Sledsens. His large-scale canvases seem deceptively simple due to the naive visual language and very recognizable subjects, but behind this lies a strongly thought-out composition in which Sledsens brings a visual storyline into his work.

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Ben Sledsens
3 September - 10 October 2020Tim Van Laere Gallery
Jos Smolderenstraat 50,
2000 Antwerp

#upcoming BRUSSELS : Xavier Noiret-Thomé – Henk Visch. Panorama @ CENTRALE

#upcoming @ BRUSSELS : Xavier Noiret-Thomé – Henk Visch. Panorama @ CENTRALE for contemporary art

23.04 - 23.08.2020 >>> Opening : 22.04.2020 

Xavier Noiret-Thomé and Henk Visch at the CENTRALE for contemporary art

The Xavier Noiret-Thomé – Henk Visch exhibition is an ode to painting and sculpture, poetically questioning the human condition.
CENTRALE for contemporary art constantly strives to include its programming in a resolutely international scope.
Among other projects, it offers a series of duo exhibitions by both Belgian and international artists.
Once again, CENTRALE offers an innovative dialogue between two artists: Xavier Noiret-Thomé and Henk Visch.

Henk Visch, Cosmic Danse, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

A French artist based in Brussels, Xavier Noiret-Thomé creates singularly-varied paintings and collages that feed on knowledge, experience and lived experiences. He has chosen to invite internationally-renowned Dutch sculptor, draughtsman and painter Henk Visch, whose monumental and miniature sculptures , to him, echo the human thought process.
According to Xavier Noiret-Thomé, “one paints what one is”. This existential anchoring perfectly respondsto a humanist reading of art shared by CENTRALE, an institution that combines contemporary art, popularart and outsider art in its thematic exhibitions. Within this framework, the invitation to Henk Visch takes all its sense. Both artists are linked together by a vital energy unfolding in their art – the metaphysical dimension of their oeuvre stemming from life experience, all the while questioning the human condition.
Sometimes tinted with humour, their direct and intense works depict a vision of reality as these artists attempt to define the creative process and its impact on life.

Xavier Noiret-Thomé, La clef, 2019. Courtesy the artist

  

Henk Visch, Das Leben in Simulationsraum, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerpen

CENTRALE for contemporary art
Place Sainte-Catherine 44,
1000 Brussels

https://www.centrale.brussels/

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* via https://clubparadis.prezly.com

Will the Internet end soon? @ Ludwig Museum . Budapest

Will the Internet end soon?
exhibition @ Ludwig Museum . Budapest
24. January, 2020 – 26. April
Address:  Ludwig Museum . Budapest
H-1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell utca 1.

CURATORS
Nathalie Bachand, Kónya Béla Tamás

EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Julien BOILY, BORI Bálint, BEÖTHY Balázs, CSONTÓ Lajos, Romain & Simon de DIESBACH, EIKE, FORGÁCS Péter, GERHES Gábor, KOMORÓCZKY Tamás, Frédérique LALIBERTÉ, NAGY Kriszta, NÉMETH Hajnal, PÁL Zsuzsanna Rebeka, Roman ONDAK, Projet EVA (Etienne GRENIER & Simon LAROCHE), Dominique SIROIS & Baron Lanteigne, Société Réaliste, SUGÁR János, SZARKA Péter, SZEGEDY-MASZÁK Zoltán, Julie TREMBLE, Lukas TRUNIGER & Nicola L. HEIN, VÁRNAI Gyula, VÁRNAGY Tibor, ZICS Brigitta


It all began in May 2015, when an article on lemonde.fr spoke of the possibility of a collapse of the World Wide Web. Although this event is largely hypothetical, several articles have been written on the subject in response to a scientific symposium that the Royal Society of London organized around the Internet Capacity Crunch.
In a context where the network could collapse even before the end of its “adultescence”—in 2023, the Web as we know it will barely be more than 25 years old—we can try to picture the fall of the Web and the after-world that would ensue: Empty server carcasses and a sea of electronic junk? A digital oblivion on all screens? A digital desert to drift in? Machines imitating the Web? A handcrafted Internet? Rumours and testimony about what was the Internet? A desperate search for a disappeared connection?
How will the at once dematerialized and delocalized dynamics of power structures be impacted in both their evident economic and inevitably political manifestations if the network is disconnected? But also, what can still be said or done in the meantime? How does one occupy—or not— what is essentially borrowed time and space, a space-time henceforth to be shared between digital and physical realities.
In the wake of these reflections, the artistic proposals that echo these considerations have here been gathered. Though the exhibition was initially composed of Québec artists, Hungarian artists were subsequently added to it for the occasion ‑ from a call for proposals, as well as from the Ludwig Museum Collection, and of early web-based artworks from the C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation archives; in addition to artworks by Swiss artists which were part of The Dead Web exhibition at the last edition of the Mapping Festival. This approach thus provides a particular perspective in which to build and unpack our idea of the Web, and, at the same time, its absence.
The Ludwig Museum’s collection is comprised of more than 700 artworks. Through a call for proposals, curators Nathalie Bachand and Béla Tamás Kónya, have selected 5 artworks by Hungarian artists. Several works from the marvelous Museum’s collection and the C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation were also added to the exhibition, thus joining the Québec and Swiss selection.
The first iteration of the The Dead Web – The End exhibition was presented in 2017 at Eastern Bloc (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). In 2019, the exhibition produced by Molior was shown at Mirage Festival (Lyon, France) and Mapping Festival (Geneva, Switzerland).
With this premise as a starting point, the works in the exhibition question our relationship to the Internet and, more broadly, the notion of connection as a point of contact with the world. The exhibition is trying to engage the audience in presenting the post-internet world. The cooperative partner of the Ludwig Museum in the utopian endeavour is the Canadian media art organization Molior.

Exhibition coproduced by Ludwig Museum and Molior.

Supported by: EMMI, MÜPA, Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the gouvernement du Québec, ProHelvetia, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Les offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec, Goethe-Institut, Samsung 

The associate partner of Ludwig Museum is C³ – Center for Culture & Communicatio

BRUSSELS: BRAFA 2020 presents James Ensor

BRAFA 2020 BRUSSELS highlight
>>> Solo show of James Ensor presented by Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery

26|01 - 02|2|2020 >> venue: Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 88, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

James Ensor (Ostend, 1860-1949) | La rencontre, 1912 | Oil on canvas

 At the 65th BRAFA Art Fair in 2020, Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery showcases an extraordinary collection of works by James Ensor for the first time. Thirteen paintings (canvases/panels) are shown along some twenty drawings, which are extensively described and studied in a new book/catalogue with more than 100 illustrations, to provide improved insight into the world of James Ensor. This unique exhibition is the fruit of 10 years of collecting and safeguarding drawings and paintings. It aims to bring the artist closer to the general public and, in addition to the paintings and drawings, includes photographs and documents made available by the Ensor archive. The compilation of this show already started in 2010 and finally will be on stage in 2020 (just over 70 years after the artist's death in 1949) during the BRAFA 2020 art fair..  James Ensor (1860-1949) is one of Belgium's most important artists, appearing in all writing on modern art. He was groundbreaking in his manner of painting, paved the way for Belgian Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, while adhering to Symbolism. Already during his lifetime, and to this day, exhibitions of his works continue to be held in the most important museums of the world (including the MOMA, the Getty Museum and the Musée d'Orsay) and research of his oeuvre continues to expand. The BRAFA Art Fair, created in 1956, is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious art fairs, famous for the high quality fine art, antiques, modern and contemporary art and design it offers. The first major art event of the year, it is considered a reliable barometer of the art market. The 65th international BRAFA Art Fair takes place from 26 January through 2 February 2020 at Tour & Taxis Brussels. Video by RGB Media.

James Ensor (Ostend, 1860-1949) | La bataille des éperons d'or, 1888
Black crayon on paper

 

 *images by https://www.svhgallery.be

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The Brafa Art Fair, created in 1956, is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious art fairs, famous for the high quality fine art, antiques, modern and contemporary art and design it offers. Brafa stretches on 9 days from the end of January to the beginning of February. The first major art event of the year, it is considered a reliable barometer of the art market. Brafa is located in Tour & Taxis, a magnificent site that is part of Brussels’ industrial heritage. The cosmopolitan capital of Europe is known for its excellent food and dazzling array of museums, monuments and boutique shops.

 >>> more >>> https://www.brafa.art

Jan Fabre@ Galerie Templon , Brussels

Jan Fabre | L'Heure Sauvage

Galerie Templon Brussels 

runs until 22.02.2020

The exhibition title, L’Heure Sauvage, refers to the blue hour defined by entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. It conjures up that brief moment of silence when Nature awaits the dawn with bated breath; a fundamental yet fleeting moment when life is suspended between two worlds, night and day, in an enthralling near darkness echoed in the artist's metallic works with their discreet suggestion of curves.

TEMPLON GALERIE 
Veydstraat 13A |1060 Brussel
OPENING HOURS :
Tuesday till saturday from 11am - 6pm

Jan Fabre – visual artist, author and theatre artist – is back in the capital of his homeland to offer an immersion into the depths of L’Heure Sauvage [The Fierce Hour] and present-day vanities.
Jan Fabre is considered as one of the most important and innovative figures on the international contemporary art scene. A radical artist whose works have often unleashed passionate responses, Jan Fabre had his own “Blue Period” during the 1980’s, centring on the ballpoint pen, his then favourite material, with which he meticulously covered large expanses of paper to create his metaphorical and
tormented drawings. In 1988, at the age of 30, Fabre found himself in Berlin, spending sleepless nights obsessively drawing, colouring and rubbing out an entire cosmogony featuring tornados, cyclones, giant waves and storms. The highly distinctive metallic blue of his disposable pen form mesmerizing landscapes, their details so dense and intense they almost seem to tear the paper. Each drawing thus emerges as the peak of a one-man performance, a powerful act on the verge of
hallucination and exhaustion. The young artist, penniless at the time, sold the whole series to a generous patron.The drawings remained rolled-up, untouched and forgotten for 30 years. Recently unearthed, they are now on public display for the first time, taking the viewer on a disconcerting journey through the genesis of Jan Fabre's imagination. In recent years, Jan Fabre has returned to blue ballpoint ink. Fans of this artistic technique can also see Le regard en dedans (L’Heure Bleue), a permanent installation created in 2011-2013 for the Oldmasters Museum’s royal staircase at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, walking distance from Galerie Templon's Brussels
space.

 Bic Ballpoint pen on paper
237 x 164 x 5 cm |1988

The exhibition title, L’Heure Sauvage, refers to The Hour Blue defined by entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. It conjures up that brief moment of silence when Nature awaits the dawn with bated breath; a fundamental yet fleeting moment when life is suspended between two worlds, night and day, in an enthralling near darkness echoed in the artist's metallic works with their subtle suggestion of curves.
The blue ink becomes a skin, which both conceals and reveals, either reflecting the light like a mirror or shrouding the viewpoint. With his new sculptures in Murano glass, Fabre covers human skulls with ink-stained handprints. The skulls act as a mirror, giving us an unsettling vision of our own mortality. Like strange fetishes - vanities or self-portraits? - they are trapped under skeletons of animals: birds,rodents, and an entire fauna we imagine surviving the human race yet already
decimated.
By bringing together these 1988 drawings with his 2018 sculptures, Jan Fabre has created – possibly unintentionally – a troubling collision between his artistic concerns, fascinated as he is by the limits of human nature and catharsis, and our contemporary preoccupations with environmental threats and mass extinction. The Berlin drawings are thus premonitory, giving Jan Fabre's works a yet more
apocalyptical dimension as they explore the animal world – with his beetles and stuffed animals – as well as the human condition.
Born in 1958, Jan Fabre lives and works in Antwerp. He is an inveterate night-time writer and draftsman, creating sculptures and installations that tackle recurring topics, including metamorphosis, the dialogue between art and science, humankind’s relationship to nature, and the artist as a warrior of beauty. Recent notable exhibitions of his work include a retrospective at the Louvre (2008) and solo shows at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Musée d’Art Moderne in St Etienne and the
Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands (2011), MAXXI in Rome, Palazzo Vecchio, Piazza della Signoria, Forte Belvedere in Florence, Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (2016) and Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence (2018). The Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Arras will be presenting an exhibition of his work from 2 March to 4 May 2020. Four of the artist's permanent works will be officially inaugurated at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples on 21 December 2019, and his site-specific work Hommage à un esprit libre will be inaugurated at the Fondation HELENIS GGL
in Montpellier on 13 March 2020.

 https://www.templon.com

LIU YE @ FONDAZIONE PRADA Milano

LIU YE | STORYTELLING 

FONDAZIONE PRADA MILANO

30 Jan – 28 Sep 2020

A solo show by Chinese painter Liu Ye curated by Udo Kittelmann. Following the first iteration held in 2018 at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai, the exhibition travels to Milan for a new presentation, featuring a selection of 35 paintings realized from 1992 onwards.
Liu Ye expresses an intimate and sensual imagination, that feeds on heterogeneous sources related to literature, history of art and popular culture from the Western and Eastern world, giving rise to atmospheres which evoke introspection, purity and suspension. In the artist’s body of works the stylistic features of fairy-tales coexist with a sense of humor and a parodic vein. Referring to his own artistic production, Liu Ye underlined that “every work is my selfportrait”.
In Shanghai Liu Ye’s works related harmoniously with the 1918 historical residence’s original furnishings, decorations and colours, creating a symbiotic relationship with the intimate spaces and small rooms of Prada Rong Zhai. In Milan the paintings will generate a chromatic and material contrast with the concrete walls and the industrial environment of Fondazione Prada’s venue, in order to activate a new narrative sequence and an enigmatic contrast with these large exhibition spaces. The geographical dislocation will contribute to focus on the ability of Liu Ye to create a personal pictorial universe, which does not align with any particular artistic movement.
Combining different elements and sources, his paintings are generated by a plurality of creative forces: memory, observation, imagination and artistic education. All his works are pervaded by a certain ambiguity as they seem suspended between two worlds: reality and invention. During his career he created a personal domain, at the same time accessible and impenetrable to others, which can be described as a subjective reality. He employed his art as a mean of self-exploration and discovery, in a context in which artistic creation and daily life mutually influenced each other. As he specified, “Even though I have never become an abstract artist, I am nonetheless interested in stripping down narrative and simplifying.”
As Udo Kittelmann highlights, “I experienced his paintings as sensitive pictorial messages relayed between two worlds that are often viewed as contradictory: Western cultures versus Asian cultures. Even back then, Liu Ye’s paintings struck me as manifesting a dialectical constellation, for his work is not only interwoven in many ways with China’s manifold cultural developments; it also bears witness to a profound knowledge of the history of European culture and painting.”

 http://www.fondazioneprada.org/

Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner, London

Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner, London
A Line Can Go Anywhere
runs until 22 /02


David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by American artist Ruth Asawa at the gallery’s London location. This will be the first major presentation of her work outside the United States and will include a number of key forms spanning more than five decades of the artist’s career, focusing in particular on the relationship between Asawa’s wire sculptures and her wide-ranging body of works on paper.
An influential artist, devoted activist, and tireless advocate for arts education, Asawa is best known for her extensive body of hanging wire sculptures. These intricate, dynamic, and sinuous works, begun in the late 1940s, continue to challenge conventional notions of sculpture through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Relentlessly experimental across a range of mediums, Asawa also produced numerous drawings and prints that, like her wire sculptures, are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Although she moved between abstract and figurative registers in her sculptures and drawings, respectively, viewed together, the works in this exhibition nevertheless incite a rich dialogue and find commonality in their sustained emphasis on the natural world and its forms, as well as in their deft use of the basic aesthetic concept of the line. As she noted, “I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”¹
The works on view include examples of Asawa’s well-known looped-wire sculptures, which she began while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by Asawa's 1947 trip to Mexico, during which a local craftsman taught her how to create baskets out of wire. Suspended within the gallery space both in clusters and individually, these works range from elaborate multi-lobed compositions to nested shapes made from a single continuous length of wire, miniature spheres, and open-window forms that require extreme technical dexterity to achieve.
Presented alongside these will be Asawa’s tied-wire sculptures, a body of work begun in 1962. After having been gifted a desert plant whose branches split exponentially as they grew, Asawa quickly became frustrated by her attempts to draw its structure. Instead, she utilised industrial wire as a means of sculpting its form and, in doing so, was able to create her signature abstractions.
Additional highlights include a rare work on paper inspired by Asawa’s time at Black Mountain in which she used the ‘BMC’ laundry stamp to create  intricate and undulating compositions that derive from a series of exercises assigned by Josef Albers in his Basic Design class. Rather than emphasising technique, Albers pushed his students to focus on—as he did in his own work—the articulation of form through colour by asking them to limit themselves to a small number of basic shapes and motifs. Likewise, Asawa’s spare but elegant drawings of plants and flowers, made over the course of her life, echo this idea.
Also featured will be a group of vintage photographs of Asawa and her work by noted photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), her close friend and ardent supporter for more than two decades.

Born in rural California, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was first exposed to professional artists while her family and other Japanese Americans were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, eighteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa’s time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesises a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of twentieth-century abstraction.
Asawa’s work has been exhibited widely since the early 1950s, including in early solo exhibitions at Peridot Gallery, New York in 1954, 1956, and 1958. In 1965, Walter Hopps organized a solo exhibition of the artist’s sculptures and drawings at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum) in California, where she completed a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop the same year. Other solo presentations include those held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973); Fresno Art Museum, California (traveled to Oakland Museum of California; 2001–2002); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2006); Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2012); and Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California (2014).
In 2018–2019, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis presented Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work in more than a decade. An accompanying catalogue published by Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Yale University Press includes essays by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg. In May 2020, Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universewill open at Modern Art Oxford, England, and will subsequently travel to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway, the following October.
The artist’s works have also been included in significant group exhibitions, including Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015; traveled to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio); America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2107); Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles; Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2017); The Pencil is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists, The Drawing Center, New York; and In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, Art Institute of Chicago (both 2019).
In addition to her wire sculptures, Asawa is well known for her public commissions, particularly in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. These include the much beloved fountains in Ghirardelli Square (1968) and outside the Grand Hyatt San Francisco (1973), the latter of which includes hundreds of baker’s clay images molded by local schoolchildren, friends, and other artists cast in bronze. Upon moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa, a firm believer in the radical potential of arts education from her time at Black Mountain College, devoted herself to expanding access to art-focused educational programs. She co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop in 1968 and was instrumental in the opening of the first public arts high school in San Francisco in 1982, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010.
The artist’s work is represented in prominent museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Asawa has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards.
The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017. The gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition of the artist’s work took place that same year in New York, and was accompanied by an extensive publication that includes texts by Tiffany Bell and Robert Storr and features an illustrated chronology.



Ruth Asawa
David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, W1S 4EZ London, England
Jan 10 - Feb 22, 2020
24 Grafton Street, W1S 4EZ London, England
Jan 10 - Feb 22, 2020

Olafur Eliasson @ Kunsthaus Zurich

 

Olafur Eliasson | Weather orb, 2020
solo exhibition 
'Symbiotic seeing' 
at Kunsthaus Zurich 
runs until 22.03.2020

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is one of the most important artists of our time. A major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus presents many of his new works.

At its centre is a large scale installation created exclusively for Zurich that addresses a key issue of our age: the relationship and interplay between human and non-human actors on Earth.
In ‘Symbiotic seeing’, Eliasson tackles themes such as coexistence and symbiosis and aims to bring about a fundamental shift of perspective. The exhibition invites us not only to reflect on climate change – as a consequence of human action – but also to comprehend the human being as part of a larger system. The socially and environmentally committed artist, who was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals by the UN in September 2019, proposes an idea of the world based on coexistence and collaboration rather than competition.
Eliasson’s art translates complex theoretical deliberations into spatial works that not only appeal to people rationally but also touch them emotionally and move them physically.

 https://www.kunsthaus.ch/