Fine Arts
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Fast Eddy's Current Top Six London Exhibitions
Another Life Changing Experience
By: - Jan 09th, 2014Our intrepid globe trotting correspondent Edward "Fast Eddy" Rubin slowed down long enough to update friends on his latest Life Changing Experiences in London. He lists with information six best current exhibitions in London as well as Wakefield and Leeds. As always his remarks are tongue in chic but the boy sure gets around.
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Photographer/ Art Historian Carl Chiarenza
Makers and Mentors at Rochester Contemporary Art Center
By: - Jan 09th, 2014Carl Chiarenza is distinguished both as a photographer and a scholar. Rochester Contemporary Arts Center is featuring him in Makers & Mentors new and recent collages, paintings and photographs by: Carl Chiarenza (Rochester), Lisa Bradley (New York), Bruno Chalifour (Rochester), David W. Haas (Rochester) February 6 – March 16, 2014.
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London’s Serpentine Galleries
Arte Povere’s Marisa Merz and Argentine Adrian Villar Rojas
By: - Jan 08th, 2014A bit of a hike from London's Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington is the entrance to Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park. In 1970 a tea pavilion in the park became the renowned Serpentine Gallery. This past year another small building within walking distance became Serpentine Sackler with an attached cafe designed by Zaha Hadid. In November we view exhibitons by the Arte Povere artist Marisa Merz and works in clay be the Argentinian sculptor Adrian Villar Rojas.
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Chelsea Ramble
The Bigger They Art
By: - Jan 01st, 2014In the art world too often bigger is assumed to be better. Or, when the work is small in scale, like a Paul Klee retrospective at Tate Modern, there is a daunting indigestible glut of images. Following a recent tour of Chelsea galleries we came away pondering how much size matters.
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Corpus Americus in NYC at Driscoll Babcock
Reconfiguring American Art
By: - Dec 31st, 2013Founded in 1852 Driscoll Babcock is the oldest gallery in New York City, and the nation's oldest gallery, which from its inception, has focused on American art. Beneath the patchwork of skins stitched loosely into an ungainly whole, there is indeed something alive at the heart of "Corpus Americus."
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Auditioning for Artist Katarzyna Kozyra
Igniting a Force: Impromptu Self on Display
By: - Dec 31st, 2013With the selfie, we deliberately place our bodies and faces in relation to the person scrolling, clicking, and masturbating on the other side of the screen. We make “posts†of ourselves with the recognition of humor and vanity and yet with it, a lack of concern. We consciously build an image, our outstretched hand reaching to curl back around into ourselves.
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Marc Dennis at Hasted Kraeutler
A Curator And A Rabbi Walk Into A Bar...
By: - Dec 30th, 2013The representational paintings of Marc Dennis often entail young people encountering masterpieces of painting in museums. This is the ancient theme of art within art. On a snowy day in Chelsea it was a relief to find a bit of humor.
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Body & Soul at Museum of Arts and Design, NYC
New International Ceramics until March 2nd, 2014
By: - Dec 28th, 2013The current exhibition at MAD, "Body & Soul," presents an international survey of artists, who feel compelled to comment on aspects of our human condition through ceramic sculptures. It is an emotional roller-coaster! - Two other major exhibitions are on view: "Fashion Jewelry, The Collection of Barbara Berger" and most astonishing, "Out of Hand, Materializing the Post Digital."
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Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Through April 6
By: - Dec 28th, 2013Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 6 is the most compelling and insightful contemporary exhibition currently on view in New York museums. Unquestionably some of the most important work of the past few years has been created by Chinese artists. There are 70 works on view by 35 artists in this fascinating exhibition.
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Rethinking Stones an Exhibition and Video Project
Inspired by a 2000 Visit to Neolitihic Avebury in the U.K.
By: - Dec 28th, 2013Inspired by recent visits to neolithic sites in Ireland, and memories of Stonehenge some years ago, we reconnected with the artist Jane Hudson about an exhibition we worked on together. The project Stones in the gallery of the New England School of Art & Design was stunning and deeply complex. This is a dialogue about that work and the ancient sites which inspired the exhibition.
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Robert Indiana: Beyond Love at Whitney Museum
First New York Museum Retrospective for Pop Artist
By: - Dec 20th, 2013Robert Indiana created the "Love" logo that became an icon of American design. But its commerical success made him a pariah in the New York art world. After several years of being snubbed he fled to Vinalhaven, Maine in 1978 where he continues to live. The current Whitney Museum retrospective, his first in New York, is a critical success for the one trick pony of Pop art.
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Balthus at the Met and Magritte at MoMA
Surrealist Holiday in New York
By: - Dec 19th, 2013Dream surrealism has always been accessible to the general public. During the Holiday season in New York, through January 12, there is an intriguing double header. The relatively small but concise "Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations" is on view at the Metropolitan while "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938" is featured at the Museum of Modern Art.
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The Subject-Object Model in Zombie Art
Bottom Feeding on the Undead
By: - Dec 16th, 2013Another take on the new abstraction and it ain't pretty. Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand arcs either ascending or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be we have reached the bottom?
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The Irish Museum of Modern Art
Dublin’s 17th Century Former Royal Hospital Kilmainham
By: - Dec 08th, 2013Relaunching after renovations the Irish Museum of Modern Art presented two special exhiitions- Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (9 August 1878 – 31 October 1976) the Irish born furniture designer, and architect and Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) a British-born–Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. Her mother was Irish.
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Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil
Vast Installation at Mass MoCA on View for a Year
By: - Dec 05th, 2013Building Five of Mass MoCA is one of the largest and most magnificent spaces for contemporary art in North America. It is always fascinating to see how artists respond to the daunting challenge. Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil is now on view for the coming year.
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Laure Prouvost Wins Britain's Turner Prize
Based on Video Installation Wantee
By: - Dec 03rd, 2013Laure Prouvost, winner of the fourth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, has been awarded the prestigious Turner Prize for her video installation Wantee, tribute to a fictional grandfather inspired by Kurt Schwitters.
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Malcolm Morley at Britain's Ashmolean Museum
Beyond Photo Realism
By: - Dec 03rd, 2013Malcolm Morley is not a Photorealist. His painting can convey a Photo-realist quality when reproduced in a publication, but to the eye of the viewer there is a subtle yet conscious energy to the paint. There is covert mark-making in Morley’s Superrealist works. If an “ism†was to be found it was in the artist’s self-categorisation—before discarding the method and the category of Superrealism in order to follow an expressionistic route—a route already alluded to in his noticeably surreptitious energy.
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London's Hot New Tryon St Gallery
Near the Saatchi Museum
By: - Dec 03rd, 2013The new Meridian exhibition at the recently launched Tryon St Gallery, (just a stone’s throw from London’s Saatchi gallery), explores the universal human fascination with finding our place in the world and recording it through maps and mapping.
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Trinity College and the Book of Kells
Viewing Ireland's National Treasures
By: - Dec 03rd, 2013During the 1979 traveling exhibition Treasures of Early Irish Art I first viewed the Book of Kells. Given the long line of visitors it proved to be a brief encounter. That also was the case during a recent visit to the Old Library of Trinty College in Dublin. It was an absorbing and enchanting experience of the essence of Irish heritage.
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New York Bound, Islip Museum, Long Island
International Book Art Biennial, until December 29, 2013
By: - Nov 26th, 2013Artist and curator, Dorothea Fleiss of East-West Artists, Stuttgart/Germany, has brought exceptional and imaginative works by book artists from around the globe to East Islip, Long Island, New York. 100 pieces are on display by more than 70 artists. They will touch visitors in many different ways.
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American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life
At Atlanta's High Museum Through January 12
By: - Nov 21st, 2013The first installation of the collaboration between the musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art explored the birth of American landscape painting through the works of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand. American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the Birth of Landscape Painting in America premiered at the Louvre in January 2012.
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2014 Whitney Biennial
Museum Announces Participating Artists
By: - Nov 20th, 2013Yet again controversy surrounds who's in and who's out with the release of the list of artists selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. To stir the pot this time three outside curators will be given one floor each of the museum. With no compromises that will ensure the individual taste of the designated curators. The museum's curators will advise on the installations.
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Spiraling Downward: From Minimal to Material
Systems of Abstract Art
By: - Nov 20th, 2013Robert Linsley's New Abstraction has an interesting blog post on the notion of symmetry that got me thinking about several of the artists that he mentioned and an earlier blog on Stella who is his “main man†in Modern painting.
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Mira Schendel at Tate Modern
Retrospective of Brazilian Modernist
By: - Nov 20th, 2013While described by critics as the Doyenne of Brazilian modernism the work of Mira Schendel (Zurich, Switzerland, 1919 - São Paulo, 1988) is not well know outside of her adopted country. The Swiss born artist is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London through January 19.
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Ana Mendieta at London's Hayward Gallery
Outstanding Among Feminist Museum Exhibitions
By: - Nov 19th, 2013For a variety of social and political motivations the majority of modern and contemporary museum level exhibitions we viewed recently in Dulin and London featured feminist reclamation projects for women artists of varying degrees of obscurity. Of these the large restrospective of work by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery required no PC underpinnings. Her work clobbered us with its primal power and originality.
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