DUBLIN.- The title for the opening show of the 2012 season at mother’s tankstation, Beautiful Potential, is based upon a corruption of the title from one of the show’s premising installations; Beautiful Expectation, by Shane McCarthy (born Ireland, 1988). McCarthy’s eternally ‘incomplete’ installation (or more exactly; a carefully arranged sculptural installation about the poetry of incompletion or unfinishedness), attempts to deny the permanence of resolution by an apparent perpetuation of the possible. The text, Beautiful Expectation, appears to hover, luminously, somewhere just proud of the surface of a wall. Its intangible promise constituted by nothing (literally) other than pure light, neither the expected neon, paint nor applied vinyl, its diffused, auratic presence is, however surrounded by hard, real things, the objects and events of its creation; a stepladder, various scattered to
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COPENHAGEN.- The National Museum in Copenhagen opened its doors to a new temporary exhibition with the title “Europe meets the World”. This exhibition depicts the interaction – good and bad – between Europe and the rest of the world. "In nomine domini” (in the name of the Lord) is the inscription on the blade of a sword that is one of the items exhibited. The sword was probably made to be used in the Crusades and is a very good illustration of how, for many centuries, Europeans met the surrounding world – not only during the Crusades, but also in the times that followed. The major voyages of discovery from Portugal and Spain in particular put the world at Europe’s feet. When they encountered new, foreign cultures in South America, for example, the Europeans’ unshakeable religious faith, mixed
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LONDON.- The artists participating in ‘Other Surfaces’, a single-projection show-reel of short films and videos, are essentially known for materially hands-on approaches to making. While there are some obvious points of connection -- few appear concerned with the conventions of the medium -- it’s unlikely they would ever be shown together as a group of object and mark makers. Yet, however diverse each individual line of enquiry, all use video as a research tool as much as a recording device: a means of finding other ways around the issues of representing ideas with things. This exhibition, sat somewhere between the screening and the group show, offers a quiet space in which to consider what these artists do, both behind and life-side of the lens. Vanessa Billy pushes the physical and associative limits of the materials and modes of display at her disposal. The poetic relationships that result from the artist’s placement
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LONDON.- Tate and National Galleries of Scotland have appointed Amy Dickson as the new Managing Curator of ARTIST ROOMS. Amy Dickson has been an Assistant Curator at Tate Modern since 2005 and started her new role on 9 January 2012. Amy will be based in London and Edinburgh and will manage ARTIST ROOMS, the inspirational collection of modern and contemporary donated in 2008 by Anthony d’Offay to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Amy has worked on many exhibition projects at Tate Modern including Cildo Meireles, Gauguin: Maker of Myth and most recently, Gerhard Richter: Panorama. She is also writing a book on Richter in the Modern Artists series for Tate Publishing, which will be published next year. She takes over from Lucy Askew who is now a Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Amy Dickson commented: "I am delighted to be taking up the position
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HONG KONG.- Blindspot Gallery presents “Memory and Fiction”, featuring Wong Wo Bik, one of Hong Kong’s most accomplished photographers, as well as one of a small number of female photographers active in the territory. The retrospective exhibition features selected works of Wong dated from the 1980s, including photographs of Hong Kong's historical and notable landmarks, such as Lai Yuen Amusement Park and the Eu family mansions that were now demolished, and the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong. Since the 1980s, Wong took all possibilities to photograph historical architecture threatened by demolition in Hong Kong. “I paid particular attention to landmarks or buildings that were not considered 'built heritage', but carried historical significance or were once frequented by locals. Because their demolition was inevitable, the only thing I could do was to document them photographically. It
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MORRISTOWN, N.J.- More than 35 art quilts from the collection of New Jersey resident John M. Walsh III will be on view at the Morris Museum from January 13 through April 25, 2010. Representing the creative genius of highly skilled and academically trained studio artists, Art Quilts: Contemporary Expressions from the Collection of John M. Walsh III explores the intriguing fusion of materials and techniques that are redefining the contemporary quilt movement. The artists whose work appears in this exhibition have pioneered innovative design and construction techniques, transforming textiles into objects of phenomenal expressive depth. This exhibition celebrates art quilts as compelling works of art. These quilts were created by highly skilled and academically trained studio artists who have pioneered innovative design and construction techniques, transforming textiles into objects of phenomenal expressive
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NEW YORK, NY.- Edwynn Houk Gallery is exhibiting a new group of prints by the renowned Canadian photographer, Robert Bourdeau (b 1931). This will be his second exhibition at the gallery and the first since his election to the prestigious Order of Canada and the publication of his retrospective monograph printed in 2011 by the Magenta Foundation and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, “The Station Point.” The “station point” is a term coined by Bourdeau himself, that fleeting moment when a photograph comes into being, when all the elements align – the light, the subject within the viewfinder, and the photographer himself. Bourdeau’s landscapes and sweeping vistas delicately and intricately focus on a man-made object within nature and nature’s eventual reclamation, be it either an abandoned factory of the Industrial Era, an overgrown and barely visible Buddhist shrine, or dwellings dwarfed by the r
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NEW YORK, NY.- Steven Kasher Gallery presents Weegee: Naked City in conjunction with two major specifically-focused Weegee exhibitions, Weegee: Naked Hollywood at MoCA and Weegee: Murder is My Business at the ICP. With over 125 Weegee prints the gallery explores the full emotional and satirical and aesthetic ranges of Weegee's photographs of New Yorkers and other urbanites. The exhibition features multiple prints from each of Weegee's basic subjects: Song and Dance, Drink, Party, Spectacle, Circus, Love and Sex, Crime and Disaster, Citizens, Celebrity, Art and Weegee Himself. The exhibition also features audio and film recordings of Weegee's voice, one of the great guttural Jewish NewYorkese hybrids of spoken English. The exhibition takes its cues from the title of Weegee's first book, Naked City, which became a bestseller, made Weegee famous, and transformed him from a journalist into
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NEW YORK, NY.- Sperone Westwater presents an exhibition of portrait and self-portrait paintings by notable European and American artists from the sixteenth century to the present. This survey includes Old Master paintings from Italy, France, England, and The Netherlands, as well as works by modern and contemporary artists. The breadth of the works in Portraits/Self-Portraits demonstrates that portraiture has been an on-going and reoccurring theme in art history, especially in Western culture, for centuries. The earliest portraits were created to illustrate physical or material attributes of the sitter, which historically included nobility, family, friends, lovers, and the self. According to Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art – who has written the essay for the Portraits
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NEW YORK, N.Y.- International artist David Lamelas was born in Argentina in 1946, at 21 immigrated to England and then to Los Angeles in the late 1970’s. His works examine the limitations of space, temporality, and the possibilities of creating alternative processes of communication. His 1968 transformation of the Argentinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale spurred his fascination with travel, modes of discourse and singularity. Lamelas exhibits a site-specific installation at Maccarone Gallery-evidence of an evolving process begun in the mid-1960s with his “Corner Pieces.” Ideas collected through an embryonic process of deassociation, objectivity and documentation are put to task in a series of architectural interventions cutting through and around the structure of the gallery. “Corner
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