Exhibition: ‘Caravaggio – Bacon’ at Gallery Borghese, Rome

2nd October 2009 – 24th January 2010

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Two of my favourite artists together for the first time!

Individually they are dazzling but the curatorial nous to bring these two great painters together – fantastic.
Imagine going back to the time of Caravaggio – his paintings in the churches of the powerful (not the rich, see, because the rich can never enter the kingdom of heaven) –  lit by candlelight, all huge thrusting buttocks at eye level as you enter, the rich velvety colours, the drama, the dirty feet, the voluptuous forms stretched across the canvas.

Now imagine taking Bacon back to the same period. His sinuous, tortured bodies lit by candlelight – no a single electric light bulb (remember!) – innards spreading effusively, effluently along the floor. Can you imagine the gloomy interiors with Bacon’s figures looming out of the darkness? His ‘Head VI’ screaming in the darkness …

Instinctively, intellectually we know how the paintings of a Baroque artist of the early 17th century affect how we look at the paintings of Bacon. This exhibition offers the reverse, in fact it rewrites how we look at Caravaggio – through the benediction of Bacon. Those rough house homosexuals sure knew a thing or two about painting, flesh, desire and the eroticism of the human body. God bless em!

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PS. I have arranged the paintings below to illustrate some of the confluences and divergences between the two great artists, hopefully much as the actual exhibition will have done.

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
‘The Conversion of Saint Paul’
c.1600/01

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Francis Bacon
‘Study of George Dyer’
1969

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Francis Bacon
Central panel of the ‘Triptych of George Dyer’
1973

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
‘Saint John the Baptist’
1604

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“I have always aspired to express myself in the most direct and crudest way possible, and maybe, if something is transmitted directly, people find it horrifying. Because, if you say something in the most direct way to a person, the latter sometimes takes offence, even if what you said is a fact. Because people tend to take offence at facts, or at what was once called truth.”

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This is how the Irish genius Francis Bacon justified his modus operandi, his propensity for a disquieting and sometimes grotesque distortion of the form. His works, placed next to those of another “damned” painter of the history of art, the great Caravaggio, will be exhibited from 1st October 2009 to 24th January 2010 at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. On the occasion of the fourth centenary of Caravaggio’s death, and of the centenary of Bacon’s birth, the figures of these eccentric artists, who are considered excessive – each one in their own way in their own period – are interweaved and narrated for the first time at the Galleria Borghese, which will also have prestigious loans from the most important museums in the world. By Caravaggio, already familiar with the Galleria Borghese thanks to his relation with cardinal Scipione Borghese, six masterpieces will be on view, synthesising his entire production: Boy with basket of fruit, Sick little Bacchus, Madonna and Child with St. Anne (dei Palafrenieri), David with the head of Goliath, Saint Jerome writing and Saint John the Baptist. Other key works of his artistic career will be added to these pieces of the permanent collection: Peter’s denial (Metropolitan in New York), Saul’s fall (Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome), The Martyrdom of St. Orsola (Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano in Naples) and the Portrait of Antonio Martelli, Knight of Malta (Palazzo Pitti). About twenty works by Bacon, loaned by the most prestigious museums, will be placed next to Caravaggio’s masterpieces.

The exhibition has the objective, with an unusual style and combining for the first time the two authors, not so much to immerse visitors in a historical-critical reconstruction, as much as to suggest an alternative aesthetic experience generated by the confrontation between the two expressive idioms which are so far yet so close. To tell the truth, the comparison between the two artists betrays Bacon’s grammar, as he did not love to be measured against the great masters of the past, even with those he esteemed the most: he ingeniously looked at the great “pillars” of the history of art filtering them through photography, which convulsively stimulated his perception and guided his creativity, until he conceived works that were very far from their original source of inspiration. Yet Caravaggio and Francis Bacon have something in common: in their linguistic, formal and temporal diversity they are both undisputed paladins of the human figure, they were able to seize the arcane undertones of life and art, and translate them into representations of ruthless frankness. Through the truth of flesh, what emerges are existential anxieties and a careful analysis of the human soul. In Caravaggio it happens thanks to his realism taken to obsession, in which the rigorous plasticity of bodies and theatrical illumination do not reveal only pleasant and harmonious shapes, they do not spare the spectators’ eyes from the crudeness of the distressing and deformed aspect of a subject. For Bacon physical deformation is enslaved to the ferocious narration of the human condition. Therefore, the password of this “strange couple” of artists is “truth,” of purposes and/or of means …

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Francis Bacon
‘Triptyph’
August 1972

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Francis Bacon
‘Triptych of George Dyer’
1973

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Francis Bacon
‘Triptych in Memory of George Dyer’
1971

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Therefore, the true stars of the exhibition are the spectators, it is up to them to contemplate the works and find links and discrepancies between the two artists, according to their own sensibility and regardless of the conditions originally foreseen by the painters for their creations. Those pieces live, in the museum context of Villa Borghese, an autonomous existence, free from their first generated status.  The exhibition “Caravaggio – Bacon” is curated by Anna Coliva, Director of the Galleria Borghese, Claudio Strinati, Special Superintendent for the PSAE and for the Museum Pole of the city of Rome and by Michael Peppiatt, biographer and close friend who knew very well Francis Bacon, organised by MondoMostre and made possible thanks to the support of BG Italia, ENEL and Vodafone.”

Press release from the Gallery Borghese website

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Francis Bacon
‘Head VI’
1949

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
‘Boy with a Basket of Fruit’
c.1593-1594

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
‘Madonna and Child with St. Anne (dei Palafrenieri)’
1606

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Francis Bacon
Central panel of the ‘Triptych in Memory of George Dyer’
1971

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Francis Bacon
Right panel of the ‘Triptych in Memory of George Dyer’
1971

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
‘The portrait of Antonio Martelli, Knight of Malta’
1608-09

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Galleria Borghese
Piazzale Scipione Borghese, 5

Opening hours:
Monday 13:00 – 19:00
from Tuesday to the Saturday 9:00 – 21:00
Sunday 9,00 – 19:00

Caravaggio – Bacon website

Gallery Borghese website

Review: ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: The Person and her Paintings’ at DACOU Aboriginal Art, Port Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 29th October – 6th December 2009

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Thankyou to Leanne Collier and DACOU Aboriginal Art for allowing me to reproduce the three large photographs of two ‘Wildflower’ paintings and one ‘My Country’ painting below.

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“One can theorize about beauty all day, but words are weak and at day’s end one will go out into the blue and golden and multifarious world, and one will know with the responsive heart, before there is time for words, what is and isn’t beautiful.”

Leo Rubinfien 1

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘My Country’
1996

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘Wildflower’
1994

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There are certain existential experiences in art one will always remember:

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The maelstrom of convulsive colours in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner at the Tate in London

Being alone in a gallery at the Louvre with six self-portraits by Rembrandt and embracing their inner humanity

Sitting in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris and being surrounded by the elemental forces of Monet’s panels of Nymphéas

Listening to “Sorrowful Songs” from the Symphony No. 3 by Gorecki

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to name but a few

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Added to this list would be my experience of this exhibition of paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

It was a privilege to spend time alone with the work, just wandering around the gallery that is situated in an industrial estate in Port Melbourne. It is difficult for me to describe the experience such was the connection I had with the work, with the earth. I am emotional even writing about it. Standing in front of these paintings all pretensions of existence, all trappings of society, dissolve in colour, in presence.

I am a naturalised Australian having been born in England; I have never been to the inner desert. This does not matter. What I felt, what I experienced was a connection to the land, to the stories that Emily has told in these paintings. We all come from the earth and return to it.

The paintings were painted horizontally (like the painter Jackson Pollock who intuitively accessed the spiritual realm) and evidence a horizontal consciousness not a hierarchical one. Knowledge is not privileged over wisdom. There is a balance between knowledge and wisdom – the knowledge gained through a life well lived and the wisdom of ancient stories that represent the intimacy of living on this world. The patterns and diversities of life compliment each other, are in balance.

Wisdom comes from the Indo-European root verb weid, “to see,” the same root from which words like vision come.2 In this sense these are “Vedic” paintings in that they are ancient, sacred teachings, Veda meaning literally “I have seen.”

On this day I saw. I felt.

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Rarely do I have such an emotional reaction to art. When it does happen it washes over me, it cleanses my soul and releases pent up emotions – about life, about mortality, about being.

As Cafe del Mar in one of their songs, “The Messenger” sing:

“We,
We got the feeling of Mystery,
We got the touch of humanity,
I know, we can’t live forever.”3

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Go and be touched.

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘My Country’
1996

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘My Country’
1996

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“Emily Kame Kngwarreye is Australia’s most important and famous female artist. Hailed as a modernist ‘genius’, she has been compared to Rothko and de Kooning. An Anmatyerre elder from Utopia in the remote central desert region of the Northern Territory, Emily first took up painting on canvas in her late 70’s. She quickly became one of the leaders in the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, transforming her style several times during her short career of eight years. Today she is known as one of the greatest abstract painters of the 20th century.

This important exhibition of over 80 pieces covering all significant series and periods of Emily Kngwarreye’s artistic career is the first commercial retrospective exhibition to be held since she passed away in 1996. It gives the public an outstanding chance to view and purchase works in each of her styles. DACOU has retained numerous magnificent pieces over the years that will be included in this exhibition, such as rarely seen works from Emily’s Ochre Series, created with ochre and charcoal she collected from her country. On show will be the sister painting to the famous ‘Earth’s Creation’ (also titled ‘Earth’s Creation’, 1994, 4 panels, 211 x 596 cm) and just as splendid in colour and style.”

Text from the DACOU Aboriginal Art website

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘My Country’
1996

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘Wildflower’
1992

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
‘Wildflower’ (detail)
1992

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1. Rubinfien, Leo. “Perfect Uncertainty: Robert Adams and the American West, (2002)” on Americansuburb X: Theory. [Online] Cited 22/11/2009. www.americansuburbx.com/2008/01/theory-perfect-uncertainty-robert-adams.html

2. Doczi, Gyorgy. The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture. Colorado: Shambala Publications, 1981, p.127.

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DACOU Aboriginal Art
10 B Phillip Court, Port Melbourne, 3207, Melways Ref: 42, H11
Wednesday to Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, 11:00am to 4:00pm

Dacou Aboriginal Art website

Exhibition: ‘The Eventuality of Daybreak’ by Alex Lukas at Glowlab, New York

Exhibition dates: 12th November – 6th December 2009

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These are terrific – I want one!
A big thankx to Alex for allowing me to reproduce the images.

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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“Glowlab is pleased to present ‘The Eventuality of Daybreak’, a solo exhibition by Alex Lukas featuring a new series of post-apocalyptic urban landscapes that blur the visual boundaries of fiction and reality.

Lukas’ work explores the existence of disaster, be it realized or fictitious, in contemporary society. Hyper-realistic motion pictures and unforgiving news footage depict seemingly identical – and equally riveting – facades of tragedy. The artist recognizes that relentless visual bombardment has resulted in society’s desensitization to the aesthetics of destruction.

For ‘The Eventuality of Daybreak’, Lukas has selected photographic spreads of well-known metropolises from vintage publications and uses them dually as canvas and unlikely subject. Through a deft handling of paint and carefully placed screenprinted passages, the artist pushes these aging illustrations in futuristic contexts. Submerging these cities conceptually and physically, Lukas inundates images of American cities with layers of media representing cataclysmic floods and crippling overgrowth.

Also included in the exhibition are works on paper depicting near-future scenes of devastated landscapes – crumbling infrastructure, overturned trucks and telling signs of human despair. As a counterpoint to the underwater cities, these darkly atmospheric and barren vistas signal devastation through an unsettling sense of absence.

Lukas’ intentional use of dated imagery presented in tandem with contemporary situations forces the viewer to reconcile two differing ideologies of urban space. The artist’s work calls into question society’s collective acceptance of the urban environment as an arena of destruction, once thought unthinkable and now seemingly inevitable.

‘The Eventuality of Daybreak’ is Lukas’ first solo exhibition with Glowlab. Lukas’ work has also been exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Stockholm and Copenhagen as well as in the pages of Swindle Quarterly, Proximity Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The Drama and The New York Times Book Review. Lukas is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.”

Press release on the Glowlab website

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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Alex Lukas
‘Untitled’
2009
Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages

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Glowlab
30 Grand Street between Thompson St. and 6th Ave, New York

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 12-6pm

Glowlab website

Alex Lukas website

Review: ‘October 2009′ jewellery by Carlier Makigawa at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: October 6th – October 31st 2009

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Jewellery as art; is art

Brooches, objects

Robust/delicate

Holistic body of work

Affirmation of line and form

Simplicity/complexity of shapes

Span ______  (meta)physical

[Interior] exterior!

elemental | articulation

Volume ((( ))) form

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arch-itecture

SPACE

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beauty

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Brooch’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Brooch’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Brooch’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Brooch’
2009

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“A spiritual and private space. Ritual object, jewellery. Linear structures appear fragile and monumental to cradle the internal spirit. They appear to float in space, hovering, penetrating, a temporary existence. Nature is the reference, and the geometry of nature and architecture inform this world.”

Carlier Makigawa

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Carlier Makigawa explores the parameters of small spaces in her new exhibition October 2009. Her spare, exacting constructions in silver wire have a monumentality that defies their scale and delicacy. Her new work consists of brooches and objects which move beyond the botanical inspiration of her earlier work to engage with more abstract notions of movement, compression and spatial manipulation.

Text from the Gallery Funaki website

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Object’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Object’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Brooch’
2009

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Carlier Makigawa
‘Neckpiece’
2009

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Gallery Funaki
4 Crossley St.,
Melbourne 3000
03 9662 9446

Opening hours: Tues – Friday, 11 – 5pm, Sat 11 – 4pm

Gallery Funaki website

Exhibition: ‘The Abstracted Landscape’ at the Laurence Millery Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 24th September – 14th November 2009

Exhibition artists: Peter Bialobrzeski, Stephane Couturier, DoDo Jin Ming, Toshio Shibata

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DoDo Jin Ming
‘Behind My Eyes 2nd Movement, Plate I’
2002

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DoDo Jin Ming
‘Behind My Eyes 2nd Movement, Plate VIII’
2003

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DoDo Jin Ming
‘Free Element, Plate XXX’
2002

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Stephane Couturier
‘Olympic Parkway No. 1′
2001

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Stephane Couturier
‘Proctor Valley No. 1′
2004

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“Laurence Miller is pleased to present, as its opening show for the fall, The Abstracted Landscape, featuring the work of four midcareer international artists: Peter Bialobrzeski, from Hamburg; Stephane Couturier, from Paris; DoDo Jin Ming from Beijing and New York; and Toshio Shibata, from Tokyo.

These four photographers each translate the landscape into a poetic and abstract vision, utilizing techniques and processes unique to photography to create scenes that remain sufficiently recognizable yet unobtainable through the naked eye. Peter Bialobrzeski, in his series Lost in Transition, photographs rapid urbanization and industrialization by taking very long exposures, which create other-worldly colours and lighting not visible to the naked eye. Stephane Couturier embraces the camera’s monocularity in his series from Havana to flatten our normal reading of space and render totally ambiguous the walls of a decaying interior. DoDo Jin Ming, in her series Behind My Eyes, applies the technique of negative printing to render mysterious and foreboding fields of sunflowers. And Toshio Shibata wields his large view camera, with multiple tilts and swings, to look straight down the side of a dam, creating a vertigo-inducing viewpoint we would be unable (and perhaps unwilling) to see directly with our own eyes.

Abstraction in the landscape has a rich tradition within the history of photography. Felix Teynard’s Egyptian views from the mid-1850’s are wonderfully abstract, as are those of J.B. Greene and August Salzmann. Timothy O’Sullivan, Carlton Watkins and William Henry Jackson each made views of the American west from the 1806’s through the 1880’s, that were equally rich in detail and minimal in composition. In the 20th century there are many examples, from George Seeley to Paul Strand, through Moholy Nagy and the Bauhaus to Edward Weston’s glorious sand dunes.”

Text from the Laurence Millery Gallery website

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Toshio Shibata
‘Kashima Town, Fukushima Prefecture’
1990

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Toshio Shibata
‘Grand Coulee Dam, Douglas County, WA’
1996

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Peter Bialobzeski
‘Transition #33′ from the series ‘Lost in Transition’
2005

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Peter Bialobrzeski
‘Transition #20′ from the series ‘Lost in Transition’
2005

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Peter Bialobrzeski
‘Transition #23′ from the series ‘Lost in Tansition’
2005

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Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Tel: 212.397.3930
Fax: 212.397.3932

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10-5:30, Sat 11 – 5:30

Laurence Millery Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Proud Flesh’ by Sally Mann at Gagosian Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 15th September – 31st October 2009

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There is a great interview with Sally Mann by Jörg Colberg with more photographs from the series on his ‘Conscientious‘ weblog. There is also an interesting review of the book of the series on the ‘5B4: Photography and Books’ blog (from which the quotation is taken below). What photographs, what a ‘body’ of work, what an artist!

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“Proud Flesh is for me an emotionally exhausting work about withering. It has elements of 19th century clinical photography done with absolute loving care for the subject. Its factual surface is quickly replaced by metaphor and the haze of imperfection from the wet-plate collodion negatives she employs. In a few of the images, due to the choice of striped bedding on which the figure lays, we might be looking at a historical photograph take from Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. With Larry’s thin and seemingly weak legs dangling over the edge of a wooden cot, the soiled bedding following the contour of his legs, it is difficult for me to see this image without this harsh historical reference. The following image in the book, he is turned into a martyr – arms out stretched – the sheet underneath him now sharply crinkled like a bed of straw (or an imagined crown of thorns).

The surface texture plays such a strong role in these photos much of the seduction of these photos comes from the beauty of those imperfections. At times they can be nauseating, for their liquid streaks ooze over the images of aged flesh keeping viscera and bodily fluids as a second metaphoric subject. On the cover image, the disturbed collodion emulsion leaves a pattern which seems to be both looking at, and looking inside, the torso standing before the camera. Like Lee Friedlander’s shadow self-portrait (see the cover of Like a One-eyed Cat) where his organs are replaced with a jumble of rocks and his head is filled with straw, Mann’s image turns Larry’s insides into a mix of man and machine – collodion cogs and gears. This is the most wishful, as it portrays the strongest sense of life and the perhaps even the possibility of escaping its mortality. He stands at table’s edge with a steadying hand and a closed fist.”

5B4: Photography and Books blog

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“I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.”

Sally Mann

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Sally Mann
‘Hephaestus’
2008

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Sally Mann
‘Somnambulist’
2009

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Sally Mann
‘Memory’s Truth’
2008

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“Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Proud Flesh”, a series of new photographs by Sally Mann.

Children, landscape, lovers – these iconic subjects are as common to the photographic lexicon as light itself. But Mann’s take on them, rendered through processes both traditional and esoteric, is anything but common. From the outset of her career she has consistently challenged the viewer, rendering everyday experiences at once sublime and deeply disquieting.

In previous projects, Mann has explored the relationships between parent and child, brother and sister, human and nature, site and history. Her latest photographic study of her husband Larry Mann, taken over six years, has resulted in a series of candid nude studies of a mature male body that neither objectifies nor celebrates the focus of its gaze. Rather it suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more. While the relation of artist and model is, traditionally, a male-dominated field that has yielded countless appraisals of the female body and psyche, Mann reverses the role by turning the camera on her husband during some of his most vulnerable moments.

Mann’s technical methods and process further emphasize the emotional and temporal aspects of these fragile life studies. The images are contact prints made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate. Mann exploits the surface aberrations that can result from the unpredictability of the process to produce painterly photographs marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, with areas that resemble scar tissue. In works such as ‘Hephaestus’ and ‘Ponder Heart’, the scratches and marks incurred in the production process become inseparable from the physical reality of Larry’s body.”

Text from the Gagosian Gallery website

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Sally Mann
‘Kingfisher’s Wing’
2007

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Sally Mann
‘The Quality of the Affection’
2006

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Sally Mann
‘Ponder Heart’
2009

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Sally Mann
‘Was Ever Love’
2009

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Gagosian Gallery – Madison Avenue Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
T. 212.744.2313 F. 212.772.7962

Opening Hours: Tue – Sat 10 – 6

Gagosian Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Vera Lutter’ at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California

Exhibition dates: 24th July – 12th September 2009

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I really like this atmospheric work – the scale, the ‘grandness’ of it, the dismemberment through verticality, the immersion into inky darkness – there is something almost subterranean (man living under-earth, under-evolution) about their vestigial structures.

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Vera Lutter
‘Campo Santa Sofia, Venice, XV: December 12, 2007′
2007

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Vera Lutter
‘Campo Santa Sofia, Venice, XXIII: December 17, 2007′
2007

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Vera Lutter
‘Ca Del Duca Sforza, Venice II: January 13-14, 2008′
2008

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“Instability, uncertainty, suspense, and monumentality are entities that I consider and think about; they inform my work.”

Vera Lutter

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Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-scale unique photographs by Vera Lutter. This is her first exhibition in Los Angeles.

In Lutter’s conceptual approach to the camera obscura, the most rudimentary form of photography, the apparatus records in a very direct and immediate way what exists in the world outside. By choosing to retain the negative image, she transforms the visual facts of her chosen environments into uncanny scenes that reflect on the two principal realities of time and space.

In recent years, Lutter has made the hauntingly romantic city of Venice an object of prolonged study. Building on her previous recordings of industrial landscapes and cities surrounded by water, such as ‘Old Slip, New York’ (1995), and ‘Cleveland’ (1997), the works created in Venice elaborate her intention “to create an image in which the city appears to be suspended above its own reflection, rendering a place that appears to exist outside of gravity.”

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Installation view of Vera Lutter works at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

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During the anticipated high-water season of 2005, Lutter captured mirage-like emanations of San Marco and Piazza Leoni in which the spectral landmarks appear to hover above their own reflected image in the placid water. Lutter returned to Venice the following year to record the area where the Grand Canal flows into the Bacino, which then opens up into the lagoon. This unstable body of water not only gives Venice its special ethereal character; it also threatens the floating city’s very existence.

Lutter revisited Venice in 2007 and 2008 to explore further the physical, technical, and architectural complexities of the city. Works such as ‘San Giorgio’ (2008), ‘Campo Santa Sofia’ (2007) and ‘Calle Vallaresso’ (2008) reveal certain innate qualities and conditions of the city that elude direct observation and can be experienced only through her luminous incarnations, the physical image.”

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Text from the Gagosian Gallery website

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“Vera Lutter uses the camera obscura, the most basic photographic device, to render in massive form images that serve as faithful transcriptions of immense architectural spaces. The camera obscura was originally developed during the Renaissance as an aid in the recording of the visible world.

Vera Lutter is best known for monumental black-and-white photographs of cityscapes. Her unique silver gelatin prints are negatives made by transforming a room into a pinhole camera obscura chamber. Directly exposed, often over many hours, onto photosensitive paper, these vistas appear as solarized images, their ethereal platinum tones imbuing the scenes with a haunting melancholy. From an early concentration on the Manhattan skyline, Lutter has turned lately to more industrial sites, including a dry dock, a zeppelin factory, an airport runway, a marina and a deserted warehouse.”

Vera Lutter Biography

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Vera Lutter
‘San Giorgio, Venice XVIII: January 26, 2008′
2008

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Vera Lutter
‘San Marco, Venice, XIX: December 1, 2005′
2005

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Vera Lutter
‘Ca del Duca, Venice, XA: December 8, 2007′
2007

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Gagosian Gallery
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Tel 310.271.9400 Fax 310.271.9420

Summer Hours: Mon-Fri 10-5:30; Sat 12-5

Gagosian Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Ron Arad: No Discipline’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 2nd August – 19th October, 2009

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One of my favourite designers! Featuring all the works in the exhibition (under Works) and photographs and video of the installation for the works ‘Cages sans Frontieres’ (2009) (under The Show), there is a really amazing interactive website for this exhibition at
www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/ronarad/
and an interesting video of Ron Arad talking about his work at
www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/56/391.

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Ron Arad
‘The Rover Chair’
1981

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Ron Arad
‘Concrete Stereo’
1983

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Ron Arad
‘Sketch for Well Tempered Chair’
1986

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Ron Arad
‘Well Tempered Chair’ Prototype
1986

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Ron Arad
‘Big Easy’
1988

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Ron Arad
‘Big Easy. Volume 2′
1988

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“The Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Ron Arad: No Discipline’, the first major U.S. retrospective of Arad’s work, from August 2 to October 19, 2009. Among the most influential designers of our time, Arad (British, b. Israel 1951) stands out for his adventurous approach to form, structure, technology, and materials in work that spans the disciplines of industrial design, sculpture, architecture, and mixed-medium installation. Arad’s relentless experimentation with materials of all kinds – from steel, aluminum, and bronze to thermoplastics, crystals, fiberoptics, and LEDs – and his radical reinterpretation of some of the most established archetypes in furniture – from armchairs and rocking chairs to desk lamps and chandeliers – have put him at the forefront of contemporary design.

The exhibition features approximately 140 works, including design objects and architectural models, and 60 videos. Most of the objects featured in the exhibition are displayed in a monumental Corten-and-stainless-steel structure specially designed by the artist called Cage sans Frontières (Cage without Borders). The structure measures 126.5 feet (38.5 meters) long, spanning the entire length of the Museum’s International Council gallery, and over 16 feet (5 meters) tall. The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.

Ms. Antonelli states: “Arad is well known for his iconoclastic disregard for disciplines – and, at least apparently, for discipline. He has defined much of the current panorama of design, inspiring a generation of practitioners who disregard established modes of practice in favor of mutant design careers that are flexible enough to encompass the range of contemporary design applications, from interactions and interfaces to furniture and shoes.”

Arad’s accomplishments over the past three decades have stirred up the design world by repeatedly updating the concept of the architect/designer/artist and repositioning design side by side with art, both in discourse and in the market – all while keeping one foot firmly in industrial production and large-scale distribution. Idiosyncratic and surprising, Arad’s designs communicate the joy of invention, pleasure, humor, and pride in the display of their technical and constructive skills.

This exhibition celebrates Arad’s spirit by combining industrial design, studio pieces, and architecture. It features Arad’s most celebrated historical pieces, including the Rover Chair (1981)[see above], the Concrete Stereo (1983) [see above], and the Bookworm bookshelves (1993) [see below], along with more recent products such as the PizzaKobra lamp (2008) [see below] and the latest reincarnation of his Volumes series (1998), the armchair duo titled Even the Odd Balls? (2009) [see below].

‘Cage sans Frontières’ was specially designed by Arad, developed with Michael Castellana from Ron Arad Associates, and manufactured and installed by Marzorati Ronchetti, Italy, under the direction of Roberto Travaglia. The structure is in the shape of a twisted loop and consists of 240 square cut-outs lined with stainless steel that act as shelves for the objects in the exhibition. The dramatic installation relies on the scale of the structure and on the reflectivity of the inner walls of the cut-outs which creates a ricocheting effect. One side of the structure is continually covered with grey gauze fabric that acts as a translucent, elastic membrane. The fabric was donated by the textile company Maharam and was cut and stitched by the jeans manufacturer Notify, which is also a sponsor of the exhibition. The structure was commissioned and lent to the exhibition by Singapore FreePort Pte Ltd, an arts storage facility.

Monitors installed in the structure and on the walls feature animations of the design and production process of some of the objects on view; animated renderings of architectural projects represented in the exhibition by models; and a video showing time-lapse footage of the construction of Cage sans Frontières. Other objects – including the Bookworm and This Mortal Coil bookshelves (both 1993) and the Shadow of Time clock (1986) – are installed along the perimeter of the gallery. Two of Arad’s sofas, Do-Lo-Res (2008) [see below] and Misfits (1993) [see below], are installed outside the exhibition entrance, and visitors are invited to sit on them …

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Ron Arad
‘Soft Big Easy’
1990

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Ron Arad
‘Large Bookworm’
Tempered sprung steel and patinated steel
1993

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Ron Arad
‘Misfits’
1993

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Ron Arad
‘D-Sofa’ Prototype
Patinated, painted, oxidized stainless steel and mild steel
1994

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Ron Arad
‘Uncut’
1997

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Ron Arad
‘FPE (Fantastic, Plastic, Elastic)’
Aluminum and injection-molded polypropylene plastic sheet
1997

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Ever since he founded his studio, together with long-time business partner Caroline Thorman, in 1981 (first called One Off, and then reestablished in 1989 as Ron Arad Associates), Arad has produced an outstanding array of innovative objects, from limited editions to unlimited series, from carbon fiber armchairs to polyurethane bottle racks. A designer and an architect, trained at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture, he has also designed memorable spaces – some plastic and tactile, others digital and ethereal – such as the lobby of the Tel Aviv Opera House (1994-98), Yohji Yamamoto’s showroom in Tokyo (2003), and the Holon Design Museum, Israel (nearing completion), all of which will be represented in the exhibition with models and videos. In his influential role as Head of the Design Products Masters’ Degree course at the Royal College of Art in London from 1997 until this year, he has nurtured several innovative designers, including Julia Lohmann, Paul Cocksedge, and Martino Gamper.

The 1981 Rover Chairs [see above], which launched Arad’s design career even though at the time he was not seeking any particular professional label, are emblematic of his early readymade creations. The chairs are made of discarded leather seats from the Rover V8 2L, a British car, anchored in tubular-steel frames using Kee Klamps, an inexpensive scaffolding system. Arad stopped making them once he realized that the overwhelming demand for the chairs was transforming his atelier into a dedicated Rover Chair manufacturer. The Italian company Moroso is about to produce an industrial version of the chair under the name Moreover.

The Concrete Stereo (1983) [see above] is another milestone in Arad’s work with readymades. It is very simply a hi-fi system – with turntable, amplifier, and speakers – cast in concrete. The concrete was then partially chipped away, exposing the steel armature, the electronic components, and the pebbles in the cement.

Objects in the exhibition are grouped as families whose common thread is the exploration, sometimes over years, of a form, a material, a technique, or a structural idea. An example is the investigation of elasticity and surprise that began with the Well Tempered Chair (1986) [see above] - a chair made of four sprung sheets of steel held together by wing nuts that come together to suggest the archetypical shape of an armchair. Another example is the Volumes series (1988), which comprises, among others, his renowned Big Easy (1988) [see above] and its various iterations, among them the Soft Big Easy (1990) [see above] and the painted-fiberglass New Orleans (1999) [see below].

Not Made by Hand, Not Made in China, another important family and a milestone in Arad’s career and in the history of design, is a series of limited-edition objects – vases, sculptures, lamps, and bowls – that Arad presented in 2000 at the annual Milan Furniture Fair. All the objects in the series were made using 3-D printing, which at that time was almost exclusively used to create one-off models for objects that would later be produced in series using traditional manufacturing processes. Treating rapid prototypes as final products rather than templates, Arad turned the new process into an advanced production method, a path that was subsequently followed by several designers.

A more recent family is the Bodyguards (2008) [see below], in which the same initial shape in blown aluminum is differently intersected by imaginary planes and cut to reveal ever-changing personalities, from a rocking chair to a stern bodyguard-like sculpture.

To give life to his ideas, Arad relies on the latitude provided by computers as much as on his own exquisite drafting skills, and he uses both the most advanced automated manufacturing techniques and the simple welding apparatuses in his collaborators’ metal workshops. Often, his work is a combination of high and low technologies, such as his Lolita chandelier (2004) [see below] for Swarovski. Made with 2,100 crystals and 1,050 white LEDs, the Lolita takes the shape of a flat ribbon wound into a corkscrew shape. The ribbon contains 31 processors that enable the display of text messages sent to the Lolita’s mobile phone number. For this exhibition, visitors can send texts to (917) 774-6264. The messages appear at the top of the chandelier and slowly wind down the ribbon’s curves, creating the impression that the chandelier is spinning ever so slightly.”

Press release from the MOMA website

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Ron Arad
‘New Orleans’
1999

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Ron Arad
‘Lolita Chandelier’
2004

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Ron Arad
‘Oh Void 2′ armchair
2004

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Ron Arad
‘Table Paved With Good Intentions’
2005

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Ron Arad
‘MT Rocker Chair’
2005

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Ron Arad
‘Southern Hemisphere’
Patinated aluminum
2007

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Ron Arad
‘Do-Lo-Res’
2008

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Ron Arad
‘PizzaKobra’ lamp
2008

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Ron Arad
‘Bodyguard’
2008

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Installation Photographs of the Exhibition

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Installation view of ‘Cage sans Frontières’ with ‘Even the Odd Balls?’ chairs (2009) and ‘Lolita Chandelier’ (2004)

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Ron Arad’s ‘Cage sans Frontières’ with two ‘Rolling Volume’ chairs (1989 and 1991), left, and two ‘Bodyguard’ chairs (2007)

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The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
11, West Fifty-Third Street, New York

Opening hours:
Sunday, Tuesday – Thursday 10.30 – 5.30pm
Friday 10.30 – 8pm
Saturday 10.30 – 5.30pm
Closed Tuesday

MOMA website

Exhibition: ‘Pierre et Gilles. Retrospective’ at the C/O Berlin Gallery, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 25th July – 4th October, 2009

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Mercury’
2001

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Pierre et Gilles
‘La Madone au coeur blessé’
1991

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Le Petit Communiste Christophe’
1990

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Le Grand Amour’ (Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese)
2004

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Extase’ (Arielle Dombasle)
2002

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Legend’ (Madonna)
1990

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“It’s hard to think of contemporary culture without the influence of Pierre et Gilles, from advertising to fashion photography, music video, and film. This is truly global art.”

Jeff Koons.

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The cosmos of the worldwide renowned French artist duo is a vivid, colorful world poised between baroque sumptuousness and earthly limbo. Pierre et Gilles create unique hand-painted photographic portraits of film icons, sailors and princes, saints and sinners, of mythological figures and unknowns alike. Pierre et Gilles pursue their own, stunningly unique vision of an enchanted world spanning fairytale paradises and abyssal depths, quoting from popular visual languages and history of art. Again and again, they re-envision their personal dream of reality anew in consummate aesthetic perfection.

Pierre et Gilles are among the most influential artists of our time. In their complex, multilayered images, they quote from art history, transgress traditional moral codes, and experiment adeptly with social clichés. Their painterly photographic masterpieces exert an intense visual power that leaves the viewer spellbound.

Over the last thirty years, Pierre et Gilles have created photographic portraits of numerous celebrities including Marc Almond, Mirelle Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, Serge Gainsbourg, Iggy Pop, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Nina Hagen, Madonna, and Paloma Picasso. They work almost exclusively in an opulently furnished studio, where their subjects are costumed lavishly and placed before three-dimensional backgrounds. Pierre photographs the model, and Gilles retouches and hand-colors the print. The reproducible portrait is rendered unique through painting, which highlights each detail with carefully selected materials and accessories.

As only venue in Germany, C/O Berlin presents the exhibition as the first of Pierre et Gilles in fifteen years. The show comprised a total of 80 unique large-format works – from their early photographies of the 1970s to the brand new pictures that were never shown in public before.”

Text from the C/O Berlin website

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Saint Rose De Lima’
1989

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Pierre et Gilles
‘Neptune’
1988

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Pierre et Gilles
‘St. Sebastian’
1987

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Pierre et Gilles
‘St. Sebastian of the Sea’
1994

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Pierre et Gilles
‘The Matrydom of St Sebastian’
1996

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Interesting text at Art Knowledge News website

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C/O Berlin
Postfuhramt
Oranienburger Straße 35/36
10117 Berlin

Opening hours: daily 11 am to 8 pm

C/O Berlin website

Notes from a Conversation with Mari Funaki. Exhibition: ‘Mari Funaki, Works 1992-2009′ at Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

Exhibition dates: 27th June – 18th October, 2009

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 1′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 2′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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“Mari Funaki is one of Australia’s leading jewellers. This exhibition celebrates her considerable achievements between 1992 and the present day. Her first major show in a state gallery, it includes nearly fifty works and will be the first time Perth audiences have seen her work in such depth. Many of these are new works produced especially for this show.

The exhibition will focus on rings, containers and bracelets. These forms have been the core of her practice, the foundation of her intricate material experimentations. Her sheer intensity of focus has seen her hone these forms into objects of extreme power and beauty. Funaki’s is no simple beauty, however. It is sharp, complicated. There is always a sense of danger in her work, as the spindly legs of her insect-like containers support unlikely, unwieldy torsos, and as her rings and bracelets cultivate miniature monoliths that play with scale and weight in fascinating ways.

This exhibition will frame these unique objects in such a way as to acknowledge Funaki’s ability to work with space and matter to form entrancing works that adorn the imagination in the same they adorn the body.”

Text from the Art Gallery of Western Australia website

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 3′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 4′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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Notes from a Conversation with Mari Funaki, July 2006

Mari Funaki’s initial response comes from the environment – the response is part random, part constructed idea.

Funaki likes the ‘animated’ response from the viewer – allowing them to make their own associations with the work and their own meaning. The making of the work doesn’t emerge out of nothing but through the development of ideas over a long period of time.

Mari starts with a flat drawing – this approach comes from an Eastern perspective in the history of art making i.e. screens, woodcuts and scrolls. Initially when starting with the idea Mari is mentally thinking in two dimensions – then drawing out onto paper in two dimensions the ideas.

When actually making the work Mari then starts working and thinking in three dimensions – starting with a base piece of metal and working physically and intuitively around the object, to form a construction that evidences her feelings about what she wants to create. She likes the aesthetic beauty but uneasy aspect of a dead insect for example (like the Louise Bourgeois ‘Maman‘ spider outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao).

Now collaborating with architect Nonda Kotsalidis, Mari is working to produce her sculptural objects on a larger scale, up to 6 metres high. She needs the objects to have an emotional and physical impact on the viewer – both beautiful and threatening at one and the same time. How will her objects translate to a larger scale? Very well I think.

Funaki likes the physical distortion of space – and she likes telling a story to the viewer. She is working on a building where the facade is really strongly geometric and then she is embedding an emotion into the front of the building – constructing a narrative – constructing an emotional response with the viewer and establishing a relationship with the building. Here she is working from photographs of the space, her own recognition and remembrance of that space. She is having to work physically in 3D from the beginning for the first time, but still uses drawings to sketch out her ideas.

Several of Funaki’s pieces in the Cecily and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award (2006) at the NGV Federation Square were inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their photographs of factories and gasworks, specifically the facades of such buildings (see images below), were the jumping off point for the development of the objects (the bracelets). Funaki takes the front of these buildings, a 3D structure ‘in reality’ but pictorially imaged on a 2D plane, and then twists and distorts their structure back into a 3D environment. The facades move up and around, as though a body is twisting around its own axis, pirouetting around an invisible central spine.

Each piece is created and then the next one is created in relation to the previous, or to each other. Each individual piece has its own character and relation to each other. They are never variations of the same piece with small differences – each is a separate but fully (in)formed entity.

Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Bernd and Hiller Becher
‘Water Towers’
1980

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Bernd and Hiller Becher
‘Winding Towers’
1967

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“Black. Sharp, shifting contours. Familiar and alien. Confident, expressive and agile, it is easy to take the existence of these works for granted – and it is hard enough to trace in one’s mind the physical evolution back through heat colouring, sandblasting, soldering, assembling and cutting, to unremarkable, thin sheets of mild steel – let alone comprehend their conception and resolution.

They inhabit space in a way that is difficult to describe – the edge between each object and the space that encloses it is shockingly sudden.

How can something human-made be so insanely artificial and natural at the same time? It must be no accident that I described them as articulate – ambiguous and wide ranging in the breadth of associations and allusions, they can tell you everything and nothing at the same time.”

Sally Marsland, 2006

Text from the Gallery Funaki website

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 5′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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Mari Funaki
‘Bracelet 6′ from ‘Space between’
heat-coloured mild steel
2005-06

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Art Gallery of Western Australia
Perth Cultural Centre
Perth WA 6000

Opening hours are 10am-5pm. Closed Tuesdays.

Art Gallery of Western Australia website

Gallery Funaki website