Denver Art Museum’s van Gogh exhibit focuses on how artist developed his signature style

DENVER — Before Vincent van Gogh painted “Sunflowers” or “The Starry Night,” he worked as a teacher and hoped to become a minister. After he was told he didn’t have the skills to be a preacher, he turned to art.

The story of how one of the most popular postimpressionist painters developed his signature style is told in an exhibit that the Denver Art Museum assembled using more than 70 van Gogh works from dozens of museums and collections around the world. The exhibit also includes artists who influenced him and from fellow postimpressionists.

“Becoming Van Gogh” opens Sunday and runs through Jan. 20 at the Denver Art Museum.
“We’re showing an earlier part of his career, his mentors,” said Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum painting and sculpture curator who curated the exhibition with Louis van Tilborgh of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
“We’re showing his self-taught moments when he learned how to draw. We’re showing all those phases that people don’t really know about. It’s not just ‘Sunflowers’ and ‘Starry Night.’ It’s a richer, complicated story, and everybody’s going to be thrilled when they leave this exhibition and say, ‘I know this guy much more.’”

The exhibit doesn’t include those two paintings or any versions of “The Bedroom” but does have three of van Gogh’s self-portraits as well as paintings from the last year of his life. It also includes lesser-known early works, from before the Dutch painter joined his brother Theo in Paris.

“We’re telling another component about his career,” Standring said. “I mean, imagine if we had Hemingway and we only had ‘A Movable Feast,’ and we didn’t have ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’”

The museum doesn’t disclose its budget for exhibits, but it decided if it was going to show van Gogh, it was going to go big. General admission prices to the exhibit are even more than tickets earlier this year for “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective,” which also was a U.S. exclusive for Denver.

Standring said he worked about seven years to put together the show. He estimates that work included traveling about 100,000 miles a year for close to four years to see the loaned pieces — and persuade institutions to lend them to better tell van Gogh’s history.

“Well, I can sell sand in the desert and icicles on the North Pole,” Standring quipped. “No, it was the merits of the story that encouraged people to take the risk to loan their works of art to come to Colorado.”
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If You Go...
BECOMING VAN GOGH: At the Denver Art Museum through Jan. 20, 100 W. 14th Ave. Pkwy., Denver, http://www.denverartmuseum.org/ or 720-865-5000. Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and until 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Adults, $25; ages 6-18, $13; seniors, $22; college students, $20; children 5 and under, free.

Christie’s sale of Egypt art piece poised to generate $4.5m

Dubai: A rare masterpiece by the father of modern Egyptian art Mahmoud Saeed is expected to break another record at Christie’s Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art sale that takes place on Monday and Tuesday at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel in Dubai.

Titled Pecheurs a Rashid and depicting a busy river scene showing fishermen unloading their catch on the banks of the river Nile, the art piece carries a pre-sale price tag of between $400,000 (Dh1.46 million) and $600,000.

Egypt’s iconic painter (1897-1964) is known for his works depicting images of dervishes, dancers, nudes and aristocrats. He made headlines in 2010 when one of his masterpieces, The Whirling Dervishes (1929), fetched $2.54 million, a far cry from the pre-sale estimate of $400,000.

Hala Khayat, specialist in Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art, said the artist’s Pecheurs a Rashid is “undeniably the most representative of Saeed’s art because of the beauty of the Egyptian character captured through the artist’s harmonious composition.”

Part 1 of the auction that takes place tonight also showcases another rare painting by Saeed, titled El Zar, with a pre-sale estimate of $150,000 to $200,000, as well as three works by Iranian Farhad Moshiri.

Part 2 of the sale, which kicks off tomorrow, will feature over 100 lots spanning the work of modern and young artists, with lower price points from around $2,000.

Michael Jeha, managing director at Christie’s Middle East, said the sales are expected to generate around $4.5 million and attract not only regular collectors and investors, but first-time buyers as well.

“We have works across the two sales with estimates from as low as $2,000 up to $600,000. With such a range of values, the sales attract a diverse group of buyers. We will see many established collectors who regularly attend the sales but, as in past sale seasons, hope to see and meet a new group of art enthusiasts many of whom have come to look for the first time,” Jeha told Gulf News.

Christie’s is also offering a free public viewing of the art works from Sunday to Wednesday this week. “The viewing is open to everyone and we would encourage anyone interested to come down and enjoy. It really is a mini pop-up museum, for a few day only,” Jeha added.

Art and artists in development: not all exposure is good exposure

Venues and festivals that nurture emerging work must offer artists protection as well as a platform, says Jo Crowley

Exposure is one thing for Mark Wallinger's Diana at the National, quite another for new and emerging artists' work.

 

During the last week of the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe I sat in a respected venue, watching a promising ensemble of emerging artists presenting their new show. The artists were clearly talented and highly skilled. The audience was typical of Edinburgh – peers, punters, critics and programmers, united in their support and curious to see what this talented young company had to offer. Myriad venues, festivals and funders of national and international standing had supported the show.

Expectation was high. However, there was a problem – the show wasn't finished.

Now don't get me wrong. I have repeatedly seen the benefits of developing artistic work in dialogue with audiences. Letting evolving work breathe through work-in-progress and scratch performances can be enormously beneficial to some artists with regards to the quality of the artistic work they create and, ultimately, to the final experience offered to audiences. But is Edinburgh, the biggest arts festival in the world, the largest performance showcase on earth, really the right context to present developing work?

In this instance, the show in question needed substantial dramaturgical attention and technical development. Reading the small print on the programme, you could deduce the show was still in development. However, this was not communicated on venue, company or fringe publicity. I witnessed a series of venue and festival programmers bemused as to why they were watching an unfinished piece, questioning why this hadn't been communicated and, perhaps most disturbingly, rejecting future programming of the show on the basis of a work-in-progress showing.

This prompted me to consider the potential repercussions of exposing developing work too early or in the wrong context. If this emerging work is being supported by established organisations, why is it being exposed so publicly in the wrong context? How supportive are these organisations actually being of the artists, ensembles and companies involved?

Venues, festivals and platforms that support emerging and developing work need to have a thorough and informed awareness that exposing work at the wrong time, in the wrong context, or to the wrong audience can cripple a project and have major repercussions on an artist's future work, as well as inhibiting their ability to grow audiences, attract funding and develop future touring and programming.

Supporting emerging talent and collaboration, particularly in the current climate, must be about more than just providing money, space and resources. Surely it must also encompass a fundamental commitment to nurturing, and to having informed and honest dialogues about appropriate contexts and platforms for presenting evolving work? And surely to be most productive these dialogues should involve a series of perspectives – with contributions from peers and audiences.

If we can ensure this, then perhaps we might just find a way in which emerging artists can grow and survive even in these challenging times. Most importantly, we'll see the work of visionary emerging artists being realised, and the best possible future experiences for audiences achieved.

Hobart art museum helps it make the Lonely Planet's top 10 cities

Attraction ... MONA on the banks of the River Derwent. 

HOBART has been christened a funky cultural hub by travel bible Lonely Planet, which has named the city one of the 10 best in the world to visit in 2013.

The Tasmanian capital's $180 million Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has proved a beacon for international attention and is largely the reason for the listing in seventh place, Lonely Planet's Chris Zeiher said.

''Particularly for international travellers, [the question] is what's the big-hitter thing to come and actually see,'' Mr Zeiher said.

''So for people to be able to experience that massive thing in the first instance, they can then obviously experience all the things that Hobart has to offer.''

They include the high-end dining experiences of restaurants like Garagistes, whose Katrina Birchmeier was recently named Australia's best young restaurateur of 2012. Hobart's summer festivals including MONA FOMA, curated by Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie, and its convict-era attractions were also highlighted in the publisher's Best in Travel guide.

With Hobart the only Australian city to make the Lonely Planet list - and one of only three in the southern hemisphere - the attention is expected to give a huge boost to the state's struggling tourism sector.

The high Australian dollar has hit tourism hard, while the cost of air and sea access has been a constant controversy in Tasmania.

More flights from Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin, and the return of Tiger Airways next month, are expected to affect prices.

The Lonely Planet announcement comes just days after MONA's owner, the gambling millionaire David Walsh, settled a dispute with the Australian Tax Office that he claimed could have threatened the museum's future.

MONA announced a new winter festival, Dark MOFO, and Mr Walsh is hoping to build a $25 million hotel near the museum in Hobart's north.

''Everyone acknowledges the fantastic change that MONA has brought, not only to the tourism industry in Tasmania but the way Tasmanians feel about themselves,'' the state Tourism Minister, Scott Bacon, said.

Mr Zeiher said Hobart was emulating the success of destinations like the Spanish city of Bilbao, which has reinvented itself since the construction of a Guggenheim art museum.

He said the listing of New Zealand's capital, Wellington, in 2010 had helped it to attract conference business as well as tourists.

Art history

Katie Hartauer, community relations director at La Salle-Peru Township High School, looks through a portion of the school’s art collection. Following a recent remodeling project at the school, an aesthetics committee was created to catalogue the collection that has long gone undocumented.

The Middle Ages antiphonary, an illuminated manuscript, and a 15th century oil painting, both displayed in McCormack Memorial Library, are some of the best known pieces of L-P’s art collection. Both were donations from some of the school’s early benefactors, the Matthiessen and Blow families.

The recent discovery that the 1929 pipe organ at La Salle-Peru Township High School is a national musical treasure has garnered considerable attention, but it’s far from the only treasure on the L-P campus.

In the wake of a recent remodeling of the school’s administrative hallway, during which pieces of art that have been hanging on the school’s walls for decades were taken down, superintendent Steve Wrobleski has formed an aesthetics committee to catalogue the school’s complete art collection and consider which items should be displayed in the future.

About a dozen L-P staffers along with Kelly Klobucher, executive director of the Hegeler Carus Mansion, make up the aesthetics committee.

“I think we’re all historical enthusiasts,” said Emily Carney, a guidance counselor at the school.

The committee has developed several small projects, including creating a catalogue of the school’s art collection, photographing the collection, creating student galleries and potentially developing an art book and virtual tour for the school’s website.

“All in celebration of our history,” said Katie Hartauer, L-P’s community relations director.

Wrobleski said it’s important to gain a solid understanding of what the school owns so the collection can be better maintained in the future.

Additionally, as an L-P alumnus, Wrobleski said he realizes how easy it is for these beautiful pieces of culture to become background objects in the lives of the students who inhabit the building each year.

“We want to make sure our kids have an appreciation of what we have here and particularly how we obtained them,” he said.

Carney said new staff members spend a small portion of their orientation process wandering through the school in search of some of the school’s historical and artistic oddities and landmarks, such as the three-legged horse in the Canterbury Tales mural along the wall outside the library.

“I became more appreciative, actually, when I became a faculty member,” said Carney, who graduated from L-P not so long ago.

Much of the collection, particularly the “wow stuff,” was donated during the 1920s by the Matthiessen and Blow families, Hartauer said.

For example, the school’s Aeolian organ was donated by the Matthiessen family in 1929 for a cost of $50,000. Today, that would be on par with a $660,000 donation, Wrobleski said. Similarly, the $600,000 cost of building the auditorium, which was gifted by the Matthiessen and Blow families, would equal a $7.9 million donation today, he said.

“It really is remarkable when you look at the local industrialists who really were philanthropists,” Wrobleski said.

Earlier this semester the aesthetics committee explored the school, from the basement tunnels to the top of the clock tower, searching for any artworks that were stored away in odd spots in the past, such as a large painting of an ancient solider found stored face to a wall in downstairs copy room.

“I’ve been here 18 years. I never even knew that was down there,” Hartauer said.

Similarly, the large tapestries of Deer Park and Starved Rock that hang encased in plastic in the old cafeteria were found decades ago rolled up in one of the school’s crannies with no sign of their origins.

“Through the years it was mostly the custodians who would find stuff. Find stuff, store stuff,” she said.

While some of those works have been identified over the years, there are a considerable number of paintings, print reproductions, student creations and other pieces that have piled up without any note of where they came from or who created them.

“It’s hard because it’s so many years ago. Obviously none of us were here or knew of it,” Hartauer said.

Visitors to L-P’s McCormack Memorial Library or the library’s page on the school website can find brief descriptions of some of the school’s collection in the “Catalog of Art Treasures,” a small pamphlet that librarian Dave Kelty believes probably was created decades ago.

The library has long been home to some of the school’s most obvious treasures. Along with various small sculptures and busts, the library contains numerous pieces of art brought to the Illinois Valley from Europe by the Matthiessens and Blows, including original oil on canvas paintings by Baroque artist Francesco Solimena and 19th century French painter Emile Renouf – both less famous than some of their artistic contemporaries but still respected.

“I think Dr. (Craig) Carter once said it was deemed ‘priceless,’” Kelty said of the library collection and referring to the school’s former superintendent.

One of Kelty’s favorite items to discuss with students is the antiphonary, an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages.

“Just look how far we’ve come,” he said. “I’ve actually seen this sitting here — before they invented the printing press, you know, and everything had to be hand written — and then you see a kid sitting over here with a Kindle.”

Hartauer said the committee also is hoping to connect with talented people who may be able to assist in preserving or restoring some of the collection.

“It’s not a committee that’s going to be done anytime soon, but I think there are a lot of near things we can do,” Hartauer said.

National Geographic to auction photos, art at Christie's New York

This 1908 photo made by an unidentified photographer and provided by National Geographic via Christie’s Auction House, is a portrait of Arctic explorer Adm. Robert E. Peary in Cape Sheridan, Canada.

NEW YORK (AP) — National Geographic Society has chronicled scientific expeditions, explorations, archaeology, wildlife and world cultures for more than 100 years, amassing a collection of 11.5 million photos and original illustrations.

A small selection of that massive archive — 240 pieces spanning from the late 1800s to the present — will be sold at Christie's in December at an auction expected to bring about $3 million, the first time any of the institution's collection has been sold.

Among the items are some of National Geographic's most indelible photographs, including that of an Afghan girl during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a portrait of Admiral Robert Peary at his 1908 expedition to the North Pole, a roaring lion in South Africa and the face of a Papua New Guinea aborigine.

Paintings and illustrations include N.C. Wyeth's historical scene of sword-fighting pirates, Charles Bittinger's view of Earth as seen from the moon, and Charles Knight's depictions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
They are being auctioned "to celebrate our legacy .... and to give people a chance to buy a little part of this great institution's history," said Maura Mulvihill, senior vice president of National Geographic's image and video archives.
"We think of ourselves as the unsung fathers of modern photojournalism," she added. "I don't think people are aware of what a massive instructive archive this is."

Huli Tribesman, in Papua New Guinea, in 1998.

Proceeds from the Dec. 6 auction, just weeks before National Geographic's 125th anniversary, will go for the promotion and preservation of the archive and "the nurturing of young photographers, artists and explorers ... who are the future of the organization," Mulvihill said.
 
National Geographic sponsors and funds scientific research and exploration through its official journal, National Geographic Magazine, which reaches 8.8 million people worldwide in 36 countries and in 27 languages. The society reaches millions more through its National Geographic Channel, books and other sources.
 
While National Geographic is known today for its photography, early magazines were filled with artwork.
Among the fine art being offered is an oil painting by Tom Lovell of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Civil War surrender at Appomattox. It's expected to fetch $20,000 to $30,000.

A 1969 illustration entitled, “A Blue Globe Hanging in Space—The Earth As Seen From The Moon,” by Charles Bittinger is shown. The picture is among a small selection of the National Geographic Society's most indelible images that will be sold at Christie’s next month at an auction expected to bring about $3 million.

"The Duel On The Beach," a painting of two pirates by the American artist N.C. Wyeth, is estimated to sell for $800,000 to $1.2 million. Another Wyeth, "James Wolfe at Quebec," was commissioned to accompany a 1949 article on the general taking Quebec from the French general the Marquis de Montcalm. It has a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $50,000.

Steve McCurry's photograph of the Afghan girl carries an $8,000 to $12,000 pre-sale estimate. McCurry has made a special print of the image for the sale, and part of the proceeds from it will be donated to the Afghan Girls' Fund.

There's also Edward Curtis' 40-volume photo portfolio and book, "The North American Indian," believed to have been owned by Alexander Graham Bell. It's estimated at $700,000 to $900,000.

The sale also contains some images that have never been published, including a selection from Herbert Ponting, who produced some of the most enduring images of the Antarctic.

Art Thieves Struggle to Convert Monet, Picasso Into Hard Cash

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The plan may be flawless, the booty priceless and the robbery perfectly executed. Yet art thieves seldom consider how they will get rich from their stolen masterpieces, art-crime experts said.

Seven paintings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Lucian Freud were stolen from the Kunsthal museum in the Dutch city of Rotterdam on Oct. 15. The combined value may be as much as $130 million, yet as long as they are stolen goods, the paintings are effectively valueless, said Olivia Tait, manager of European clients at the Art Loss Register, an online database of lost art.

“On the face of it, art theft seems like an easy way to get money -- after all, you can’t get $5 million by robbing a bank,” Tait said by telephone from London. “Criminals don’t think about the fact that they can’t resell artworks after. Then they realize that they can’t take the paintings across borders because they are listed in all the police databases.”

The Rotterdam burglary ranks among the most spectacular art heists of the last decades. Comparable incidents are the 2010 theft of five paintings -- also including works by Picasso and Matisse -- from the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the 1990 burglary from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of art worth an estimated $500 million.

Hidden, Abandoned

In neither case has the lost art been retrieved. Once thieves wake up to the difficulty of converting stolen masterpieces into hard cash, they often hide or abandon the paintings, which may not resurface for decades -- if ever.

“Forty percent of stolen artworks return within seven years,” said Ton Cremers, who was head of security at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for 14 years and has since advised more than 450 museums on security as an independent consultant. “If they don’t return in 10 years, the chances are very small that they will be recovered.”

Sometimes paintings are even destroyed or damaged by the criminals who took them, said Lynda Albertson, chief executive of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art. The thief who stole Picasso’s “Pigeon With Green Peas” from the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2010 “threw it in a trash container shortly after the theft and the container was emptied before it could be retrieved,” Albertson said.

Even with the difficulty of selling famous stolen masterpieces, Picasso’s works are the victims of theft more often than any other artist’s, according to the Art Loss Register, which lists more than 1,000 missing Picassos.

Pinching Picassos

“Everyone knows who he is, even people with only a couple of years of high-school education,” Cremers said. “These are not specialists in art. It is only in the movies that you get specialist thieves. In real life, it is just ordinary criminals who also steal cars and sell drugs.”

Occasionally “works get traded on the black market, bartered for weapons for example,” Tait said. “But in our 20- year history, we’ve never come across the Hollywood scenario where a passionate art collector commissions thieves to steal specific works of art.”

The paintings stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal were Picasso’s “Tete d’Arlequin;” Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London;” Freud’s “Woman with Eyes Closed;” Matisse’s “la Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune;” Gauguin’s “Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee,” and Meyer de Haan’s “Autoportrait.”

Dutch Collection

They belong to a private collection called the Triton Foundation, started by the Dutch businessman Willem Cordia, who died in 2011, according to Dutch news agency ANP. The collection consists of about 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures from the period 1860 to 1970.

About 150 works were on show in an exhibition called “Avant-Gardes.” The Kunsthal has no permanent collection and is reliant on loans to put on shows.

“What happened is every museum director’s nightmare,” Emily Ansenk, the director of the Kunsthal, said in a statement on the website. “This incident came like a bombshell to the entire art world.”

Police said the theft took place at about 3 a.m. local time and they are now scrutinizing video footage and talking to possible witnesses. Officers arrived at the Kunsthal just five minutes after the alarm was raised. Local press reported that there were tire tracks on the museum’s lawn after the burglary.

Ansenk described the building’s security as “state-of-the- art,” and in accordance with insurer’s requirements. No one has disclosed how the thieves entered the museum.

Night Guards

Many museums don’t have security guards on duty overnight, Albertson said.

“Having staff at night doesn’t necessarily eliminate the risk,” she said in e-mailed answers to questions. In the Paris heist, “the three night guards at that museum all reported that they saw nothing.”

Cremers raised doubts about the suitability of the Kunsthal for art of the caliber of the current show. The building, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, “is like a box, and there are no barriers for thieves,” he said.

“They should have arranged special security before the exhibition,” Cremers said. “They should have built a special vault inside. They will have problems with future loans.”

Cremers said it’s possible the thieves will attempt to demand a ransom from the Triton Foundation for the paintings. Albertson at ARCA cited the recent example of bond fund manager Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital LP, who last month recovered $10 million in art stolen from his home in Santa Monica, California. That was after he offered $1.7 million in rewards.

“The thief or thieves in this Dutch case could see the heirs to the Triton Foundation as a lucrative target,” Albertson said.

Tait said such demands are rarely met.

“Insurance companies discourage it,” she said. “And if you pay some kind of ransom, you identify yourself as someone who is prepared to go along with such demands and open yourself to future attempts.”

Muse highlights include Scott Reyburn on the art market, Jason Harper on cars and Rich Jaroslovsky on technology.

US art dealers make London scene a battleground

New York galleries are moving to the capital to attract business from wealthy 'non-doms' bringing a more corporate edge to the market

  Pace gallery opened a new space in London recently. 

 London's art scene is becoming a "battleground", with major US galleries opening new and bigger spaces in the city as they vie to attract the capital's growing numbers of ultra-rich "non-doms".

Art experts said the arrival and expansion of four New York galleries in London ahead of the Frieze Art Fair, which opens on Thursday, reflects the competition at the top end of the art market, with American dealers needing to move here to gain business from wealthy Russian, Asian and Middle Eastern collectors.

The Manhattan dealer David Zwirner, whose eponymous gallery represents 40 artists, including Dan Flavin and Thomas Ruff, has now opened a 10,000 sq ft gallery in a Georgian townhouse in Grafton Street, Mayfair, its first outside the US.

Pace gallery, which represents 70 artists, including the estate of Mark Rothko, has opened a second, 9,000 sq ft London space in the Royal Academy's 6 Burlington Gardens, in addition to its existing outpost in Soho.
Skarstedt Gallery, which has artists including George Condo and Keith Haring, will open a 2,500 sq ft space on Old Bond Street on Wednesday.

The Michael Werner gallery, which represents artists including Georg Baselitz and Peter Doig, opened last month on two floors of a Mayfair townhouse in Upper Brook Street. Its London director, Kadee Robbins, said the move reflected that the capital has "a very wealthy, very savvy international community" of collectors.

As the gallerists feared in 2010, when Pace announced its intention to expand into London and Hauser & Wirth opened a new gallery in Savile Row, the established London galleries selling contemporary art now face a big challenge from foreign rivals on their own doorstep.

Judd Tully, a New York-based writer for Art+Auction magazine, said: "Essentially, what the richer galleries are doing is establishing new beachheads in London to find new collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East who are more comfortable there than in New York."

Nearly a third of London's 5,955 inhabitants who have a net worth of more than $30m (£18.5m) are non-doms, according to Wealth-X, a company that compiles data on the super-rich. Billionaire art collectors with homes in the capital include Lakshmi Mittal (net worth: £9.8bn), Roman Abramovich (£7.5bn) and Victor Pinchuk (£2.6bn).

Tully said the globalisation of the art market meant that New York galleries were no longer as likely to limit their expansion to the west coast of America. Big-name artists now want a global audience for their work and would jump ship to rival galleries to gain it.

She added that major US galleries also hoped to emulate the success of Larry Gagosian, considered the most powerful art dealer in the world, who has 12 galleries worldwide, including two in London. Pace has seven locations worldwide, including a space in Beijing, while Werner also has two galleries in Germany and one in New York.
Tully said: "Dealers don't want to lose artists because another dealer has opened a gallery in London. It's a major threat to Zwirner; he absolutely needs to expand to Europe because of the danger of his artists being poached. He's not lost an artist to another dealer except Franz West to Gagosian. Pace is a much older blue-chip gallery, but they're also forced to open [in London] because Gagosian would eat up a bunch of their artists."

Gagosian's latest addition is a 17,760 sq ft space in a former factory redesigned by French "starchitect" Jean Nouvel in Le Bourget near Paris. It opens this month with an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer – in competition with Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who announced six months earlier that his new gallery would open at the same time with a show by the German painter and sculptor.

Several of the artists whom Zwirner represents, including Marlene Dumas and Chris Ofili, already have London galleries. Its London director, Angela Choon, said they will respect the relationships those artists already have with London galleries and focus on exhibiting other artists. Their opening exhibition is new work by Luc Tuymans, who has not shown in London since 2004.

Michael Werner opens with an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Doig, who is already represented here by Victoria Miro. Kadee Robbins said: "I hope we just leave it to the artists to see the best resolution for them."

New York-based art adviser Wendy Cromwell predicted that some of the larger London galleries may be upgrading their real estate. "The art world has become very event driven. There's a certain class of collector whom these galleries are going after who like to be seen at openings, at the Frieze Art Fair, who think bigger is better and more is more," she said.

Tully added: "It will be good for the London market to wake up, because the Americans are invading."

Several London galleries have recently moved to bigger spaces. Blain Southern is moving this week from Dering Street to a larger Mayfair space on Hanover Square. The not-for-profit David Roberts Art Foundation last month opened its new 12,000 sq ft space in Camden.

However, smaller Modern and impressionist galleries, such as those already under threat from two major property redevelopments on Cork Street, could find themselves squeezed as the competition among contemporary galleries intensifies.
Bernard Jacobson, whose eponymous gallery is one of the 11 under threat on the Mayfair street, said the developers' heads had been turned by the US galleries and that they planned to build fewer but larger art spaces in an attempt to attract big names. "They think they're going to sell 10,000 sq ft units to the likes of the Gagosian."
Cromwell said: "I could see them being forced out. Few if any of those galleries have street-level space in New York and what's happened here is really an indication of what is happening in London."

Harry Blain, co-owner of Blain Southern, who is considered one of Britain's most powerful art dealers, said the New York galleries' London expansion would enhance the city's reputation as a global art destination.

Curator and academic Andrew Renton, the director of Marlborough Contemporary, a new gallery opened on the second floor of long-established Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair, said: "It confirms where we are as the central location in the world for contemporary and modern art. London has had a dynamic art scene for 20 years, but not necessarily a dynamic art market. Now we've got both."

Art Review: Turner Prize @ Tate Britain

Paul Noble, Public Toilet, 1999. Copyright Paul Noble / Gagosian, London 

The Turner Prize is one of art’s most prestigious prizes, with former winners including Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing and Chris Ofili. Yet it almost always sparks controversy with its nominations. This year’s are no exception.

After a brief sojourn in Gateshead, the prize has returned to its regular home at Tate Britain, and visitors can expect much boundary pushing from the four finalists.

First up is the bookies’ favourite Paul Noble, who’s spent the last 16 years creating the fictional town of Nobson. His impressive large scale drawings are immaculately detailed yet are inhabited by what can only be described as anthropomorphised turds. His work is the most accessible of the four artists, engaging visitors through both his sense of humour and attention to detail, though it can lose its lustre with repeat viewing.

Luke Fowler has created a documentary film around the psychiatrist RD Laing who went against the common medical teachings of the time to introduce a radical new way to treat schizophrenics. It’s a fascinating story but at 93 minutes long is unlikely to hold the attention of visitors for its full length.

Elizabeth Price’s video is thankfully shorter at 20 minutes long but starts off with the (to some people) dry subject of interior church design and nomenclature. However, the rapid slide changes accompanied by claps and clicks keep the audience on its toes. This then segues into music clips and finally coverage of a fire in a Manchester Woolworths. The sections link together tenuously and, though we liked the snappy editing, its message felt a little bit garbled.

The final entry is from Spartacus Chetwynd – an artist who changed her name to remind people that they have a choice. Her performance works consist of home-made costumes and props accompanied by a pulsating soundtrack. It involves a bizarre scenario where a puppet in the shape of a mandrake root requires that audience members leave one by one, either directly or after listening to its words of wisdom. Coupled with an air-filled giant sofa, it’s hard not to feel a sense of child-like wonderment and get drawn into Chetwynd’ s nonsensical world.

Some of these works are truly bizarre but we all know that this is to be expected from the Turner Prize. Although this may not be its strongest year, the four artists are so varied that judging an overall winner will be a difficult task. We have a soft spot for Chetwynd’s absurdity but think that Price is the outsider who might just snatch it from Noble.

Sudbury Art Club celebrates the season

Shehnaz Pabani is one of the 50-some artists showing work at the Sudbury Art Club's annual fall show.

The colours, shapes and forms in nature help Shehnaz Pabani keep an even keel in her busy life.
Pabani will be one of more than 50 artists with paintings on display at the Sudbury Art Club Fall Show and Sale, taking place Oct. 19, 20 and 21 at the CNIB auditorium at the corner of York and Regent Streets.
“Before you start a painting, you have to contemplate — make time to calm yourself and really look at your subject,” Pabani said. “I find painting can really be like a meditation.”

Calm, quiet time for herself is what helped her maintain her equilibrium during the years she was raising two children and maintaining her busy medical practice. Her home schedule is a little less demanding now that her children are both in their late 20s, however Pabani still practises family medicine, and teaches clinical skills in her position as assistant professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

“I find painting rejuvenates me,” she said. “I can come home beat from a long day with patients and students but sometimes stay up late into the night painting. When it comes to thinking about doing my art, I often get new energy.”

Pabani said one of her painting goals is to replicate the beauty in nature.

“In Islam, as in other beliefs, nature is revered as Allah or God’s creation,” she said. “When you see the beauty of a sunset, or the amazing form and colour of flowers, every detail  is so fascinating, it’s really humbling.”

Pabani recently completed a watercolour painting of a Cyclamen she pampered for more than a year, and finally coaxed into flowering. It’s no wonder she has titled the painting Harmony. She says it has given her countless hours of beauty, both in the pot and on the canvass.

You can see Harmony on display at the Sudbury Art Club fall show and sale. The event begins Friday evening with a free wine and cheese reception from 7 to 9 p.m.  Saturday and Sunday the show runs from 10:00 a.m. till 4:00 p.m.

Asian art schools form body

Heads of art schools from 15 countries in Asia on Saturday established a joint educational body to forge their ties and provide art training to students from less-privileged areas.

The Korea National University of Arts announced that its president Park Jong-won was elected the first president of the Asian League of Institutes of the Arts which was established on the day. Members are representatives of art schools or arts scenes from Korea, China, Japan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Singapore, India and Indonesia.

Park Jong-won (sixth from left on the front row), president of Korea National University of Arts, poses with representatives of art schools from 15 Asian countries at the founding of the Asian League of Institutes of the Arts in Seoggwan-dong, Seoul,

The delegations decided to develop a joint-curriculum for arts and hold regular conferences, seminars as well as open debates together. They have also agreed to support art students from less-privileged regions and build up international volunteering programs to enhance cultural exchange among the students and teachers.

At the first meeting of its kind, Ju Tzong-Ching, president of Taipei National University of Arts, and Erdenetsogt Sonintogos, rector of Mogolian State University of Arts and Culture, were elected the vice presidents. Soeprapto Soedjono, rector of Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture, was appointed as an auditor.

The organization will congress biannually and the next meeting will he held in 2014 at the Taiepi National University of Arts.

Shell National Students Art Competition marks 45th year

 MANILA, Philippines - College student artists who stood out through their creative explorations in the visual arts will be honored at the awards ceremony of the 45th Shell National Students Art Competition on Oct. 10 at The Ayala Museum in Makati. The milestone anniversary testifies to the inexhaustible reserve of upcoming talents from across the country, and confirms the program’s commitment to the development of Filipino youth artists.

To be feted are the finalists and major winners in the competition’s five categories: Oil/Acrylic, Watercolor, Sculpture, and Digital Fine Arts, which are all open-themed, and the Calendar category with the theme Buhay Makulay, depicting our people’s customs and traditions, as well as the many natural/man-made wonders of the Philippines. The best calendar entries will be featured in the 2013 corporate calendar of Pilipinas Shell.

The National Students Art Competition is now the country’s longest-running art contest for students. It started as a search for a suitable calendar subject in 1952, and over the years, in a small but memorable way, it has helped jumpstart the careers of many acclaimed figures in the field. Some members of this year’s jury are products of the competition. Judges in the Oil/Acrylic category are Soler Santos, Nestor Vinluan, Lito Carating, Rodel Tapaya, and Rock Drilon. Jury members in Watercolor are Angel Cacnio, Renato Habulan, Elmer Borlongan, Nemi Miranda, and Antipas Delotavo. Sculpture category judges are Ral Arrogante, Michael Cacnio, Ramon Orlina, Reggie Yuson, and Salvador Alonday. Digital Fine Arts judges are Jose Tence Ruiz, Mario Parial, Pablo Biglang-Awa, Dopy Doplon, and Norberto Roldan. Jurors in the Calendar category are Danny Dalena, Raul Isidro, Angelito Antonio, Raul Lebajo, and Edgar Doctor.

Artists of the top-scoring entries will receive cash prizes up to P50,000 each, award plaques, and gifts. Schools of the grand prize winners will be presented a special grant in support of the Faculty Development Program.

The public exhibition showcasing the best 100 works will be unveiled at the ground floor gallery of the Ayala Museum after the awards ceremony. It will run until Oct. 21.

The Kimbell Art Museum Casts Major Shadow

A rendering of an addition by Renzo Piano for the Louis Kahn-designed Kimbell Art Museum.

Eric M. Lee, the director of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum — regarded by some as the country’s finest small museum — had his first day on the job three and a half years ago, but his admiration of the museum dates back to 1987, when he was an art history major at Yale.

It was then that the museum’s building, with its famed vaulted galleries and impressive landscaping, captured Mr. Lee’s imagination, prompting him to write a paper on the architecture and the mastermind behind it, Louis Kahn.

“Already then, I thought the Kimbell was the most exciting museum in the country,” Mr. Lee said.

That same year, during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he was mesmerized by Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps,” a seminal work on loan to the Met that was one of several famous acquisitions by Edmund P. Pillsbury, the former director who added several renowned European pieces to the Kimbell’s permanent collection and put the small museum on the national radar.

Now, Mr. Lee, 46, seems determined to put his own indelible stamp on the museum, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a much-anticipated exhibition: “The Kimbell at 40: An Evolving Masterpiece.”

Featuring more than 220 masterworks, this sprawling retrospective, which opens on Sunday, underscores the museum’s status as one of the country’s most prestigious repositories of some of the world’s greatest art.

Like Mr. Pillsbury, Mr. Lee recently managed to thrust the Kimbell into the center of the art world through his careful engineering of a major purchase, “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” a painting by young Michelangelo. This landmark acquisition emphasized Mr. Lee’s art historian gravitas and his ability to work with the board to keep the museum moving forward.

“I’m honored to help lead the museum into the next chapter,” said Mr. Lee, the fourth director in the Kimbell’s history, whose slightly lilting voice reveals his roots in Clinton, N.C.

To that end, Mr. Lee is working with the architect Renzo Piano on the museum’s first annex expansion.

The new wing, which cost $135 million and is scheduled to open late next year, will appear as a low-slung pavilion of smooth concrete, Douglas-fir beams, and stretched scrims of fabric, crowned by a floating glass roof. The design was several years in the making, and during that time Mr. Lee, with the museum’s board, offered judicious suggestions about the 82,000-square-foot building’s final look.

“For the expansion, I really didn’t want us to lose the original Kimbell’s sense of intimacy,” Mr. Lee said.

After seeing the initial choice of white plasterboard for the gallery walls, he voiced his preference for a material that echoed the warm travertine and concrete walls of the Kimbell’s original building. “Ultimately,” Mr. Lee said, “Piano introduced a light gray concrete.”

During his tenure, Mr. Lee has also spearheaded several key acquisitions. He snapped up Poussin’s “Sacrament of Ordination” for $24.3 million after doggedly pursuing the piece through a labyrinth of negotiations involving the collection of an English duke, a failed sale at Christie’s auction house and an elusive export license.

“We couldn’t let this Poussin, one of the greatest old masterworks to come on the market in years, pass us by,” Mr. Lee said.

But it was clearly the Michelangelo purchase that burnished Mr. Lee’s reputation as a rising star. Learning about the rare work’s availability on his second day at the Kimbell, he argued for its acquisition. But first he had to prove the painting’s authenticity.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s conservation department conducted a thorough examination of the piece and concluded that it was indeed an original Michelangelo.

“When we couldn’t come up with a single argument for not buying it, I became totally convinced it was right,” Mr. Lee said. “But getting to that point was pretty nerve-racking.”

In the end, the Kimbell agreed to pay what was reported to be $6.5 million for the Michelangelo. When it debuted at the museum in September 2009, it was one of only four Michelangelo easel paintings known to exist.

“If one Kimbell painting is mentioned on TripAdvisor, it is this one,” Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Lee faced another challenge two years later when he had to use his skills as an art scholar and marketer for “Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome,” the second-largest Caravaggio exhibition ever staged in the United States.

“Since Caravaggio is not a household name, I wanted to pull out all the marketing stops by making the commercials like movie commercials — eye-catching, melodramatic, even a bit kitschy,” he said.

Mr. Lee’s gamble paid off. Attendance went from a modest few hundred per day to 5,000 during the show’s last weekends.

This ability to bring fresh curatorial and marketing initiatives to the Kimbell has earned its director praise from his Fort Worth museum peers.

“I so appreciate the ease and youthful spirit that Eric brings to carrying on the awesome tradition of the Kimbell,” said Andrew J. Walker, director of the neighboring Amon Carter Museum of American Art, “while also bringing it forward with the new building.”

Sharjah Ruler opens Islamic Art exhibition

Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah opened on Sunday, an exhibition of Islamic Art at the American University of Sharjah (AUS).Entitled ‘The Beauty of Words’ the exhibition will run for a month at the Rotunda of the AUS Main building.

The exhibition showcases a selection of around 100 distinctive items of Islamic calligraphy from Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum in Doha, Qatar.

Commenting the distinctive organisation of the exhibition, the Ruler thanked Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, collector and owner of Faisal Bin Qassim Museum, for sharing the unique pieces of art with AUS to make the initiative a reality.

Earlier, AUS Chancellor Dr. Peter Heath expressed his gratitude to Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani on supporting this initiative. ‘One significant dimension of the university’s mission consists in cultivating the fine arts, literature, and sciences within the region’, said Dr. Heath.

Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Salem Al Qaseer and Vice Chancellor for Development and Alumni Affairs Nada Mourtada also expressed their appreciation to Shaikh Faisal for his decision in selecting AUS as a venue for this first ‘Voyaging Museum’ exhibition in the Middle East, which is in line with the University’s mission in establishing strong ties with the community.

Sheikha Al Anood Bint Faisal Al Thani, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum said: ‘We are especially proud of this initiative, which demonstrates our mission to encourage cultural exchange and promote heritage’.

The ‘Beauty of Words’ exhibition is curated by Dr. Dieter Marcos, Director of the Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum.

Successful Art in the Park event clears path for October's Featured Artist, Melissa Fults

Despite the brisk winter chill that bit through the damp air on Saturday, Shelbyville's first annual Art in the Park event was clearly a hit with local town folks. Many onlookers were pleasantly surprised to discover so much talent residing right here in their own backyard. This month's Featured Artist for the Bedford Art Gallery--Melissa Fults--is among that vast pool of talent lurking in our midst. Melissa is being honored in a reception on Monday, October 8th at 7:00pm inside the Bedford Art Gallery (located inside The Fly art building). Her work, which is currently on display for a limited time, will hang through the remainder of the month, so please take a few moments to stop in and see the display if you are unable to make an appearance at the reception.

 

Melissa was born and raised in Woodbury, TN and discovered her gift for drawing sometime during the second or third grade. She says she "can remember drawing pictures for [my] classmates." However, it wasn't until high school that her talents truly began to blossom and develop into the talent on display now.

Although she loves to sketch animals and landscapes, Melissa doesn't limit herself to any one subject area. She works mostly with pastels, ink, acrylic and charcoal. To be able to recognize the true beauty of her work you will need to drop by the Bedford Art Gallery sometime this month between the hours of 11:00am-4:00pm on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Or better yet, stop in on Monday night to meet the artist and listen as she talks about here works on display. 

We hope to see you out there on Monday night. But if you can't make it, please try to squeeze a few minutes out of your day sometime during the remainder of this month to drop by and see Melissa's work while it's still on display...along with many work from many other talented residents, such as Kevin Rains, who carves amazing figurines and statues of bears, Indians, etc. with a CHAIN SAW (some of you may have seen his live demonstration this Saturday at Art in the Park)! We have a lot of new art members and a lot of new works on display...Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 11:00-4:00pm, as well as during all special events at the Fly, and on weekends and evenings by appointment.

Art Studio Tour adds artists, consolidates locations

Pat Williams of Luxemburg works in her studio on one of her wildlife paintings in advance of next weekend's Northeastern Wisconsin Art Studio Tour. Williams is chairperson and one of the host artists.

The Northeastern Wisconsin version of the Art Studio Tour returns next weekend with some differences.One change is the availability of more artists.

“Last year, we had 15 artists, and this year we have 18,” said Pat Williams, chairperson.

“The Art Studio Tour is to give the public an opportunity to visit the artists and to see how work is done,” Williams said. “What we want to do is try to help the public understand what it takes to create real good art and how it’s made so that they have a greater appreciation of art.”

All the artists are on hand.

“We open our studios to allow people to come into our spaces to talk to us personally, to watch us work, to see how things are made, to ask questions and, if they desire, to purchase something directly from the artist,” Williams said. “That has a lot more value in the long run.”

The tour is artist-run for the first time. In the past, it was a function of the Northeastern Wisconsin Arts Council.

“This year, we have artists who have been on the tour before hosting either new artists or other artists who have been on before but would rather be at a different space and be at a host artist’s residence,” Williams said.

Some artists “cannot for one reason or another have John Q. Public come into their space or their home,” she said.

The 18 artists are at 10 locations.“I think from everything that we have heard so far that the the public is very excited about the opportunity to visit more than one artist at a stop,” Williams said. “To have several artists at any given location is a draw. It helps them with gas.”

It’s the 11th year for the tour.

China art auctioneers eye slice of Hong Kong market

A leading China auctioneer holds a debut sale in Hong Kong on Sunday, lured by the city's international buyers, low tax regime and stable regulatory framework in a trend that could bring more competition for global firms.

China Guardian's sale of Chinese art and classical furniture in the former British colony follows its rise as the world's third largest auction house on the crest of China's art market boom, with sales of $1.77 billion last year.

"We want to win over more overseas market and buyers," said Wang Yannan, the president of China Guardian and the well-connected daughter of former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang.

The sale, though relatively small, is seen as a symbolic foray by China's top auction firm into the turf of goliaths Christie's and Sotheby's who have long dominated international auction hubs like Hong Kong, New York and London.

China Guardian's key rival, Poly International is also planning an inaugural Hong Kong sale in late November, while A&F Auction and Beijing Rongbao Auction aim to enter Hong Kong in one or two years, according to art market reports.

China's wave of millionaire buyers and investors have helped propel Hong Kong into the world's fourth largest art auction hub, with nearly 7 percent of global art auction revenue in 2011, according to French art database Artprice.com<ARTF.PA >.

"It's great for competition," Francois Curiel, Christie's Asia president, told Reuters. "Whenever I see more auction houses coming into the market, the pie became larger."

Some, however, felt the field was getting crowded.

"It's like separating a bowl of rice into two," said Tim Lin of the Lin & Lin Gallery in Beijing and Taipei, referring to increased competition for Hong Kong's multi-billion dollar art auction market.

"How long will they last? It's everyone's guess."

Art dealers and experts say the Chinese expansion into Hong Kong is also being driven by a tightening regulatory environment in China, that has grappled with widespread art crimes including tax evasion, a proliferation of fakes, money laundering and manipulative bidding practices.

TAX PROBE BLOW TO CHINA ART MARKET
In April, a large-scale Chinese customs probe into tax evasion on art imports delivered a blow to the art market, with at least six prominent art dealers, collectors and artists being investigated, according to art dealers and Chinese media reports.

"The tax probe had a huge impact on the spring auctions in China," said the owner of an art gallery in Taipei who is a frequent buyer in the Chinese art market but who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

"Everyone finds himself in danger so the market is extremely cold."

According to market research firm ArtTactic, total auction sales this spring from the biggest four auction houses in the China market dropped to $1.5 billion, 32 percent lower than the autumn season in 2011 and 43 percent less than a year before.

"The tax investigation has cast a shadow on the Chinese art market," said David Lin of Taipei's Lin & Lin Art Gallery.

"It has a psychological effect on buyers and sellers in China ... The chain reaction is going to last for a while."
China Guardian's 2012 auction sales tally dropped 46 percent to 2.14 billion yuan this spring season, from 3.98 billion yuan in the 2011 autumn auction, but Wang attributed this largely to a stuttering Chinese economy.

"It also has something to do with the slowdown in the economy, but it has nothing to do with the tax investigation," Wang of China Guardian, told Reuters.

Art market experts, however, say Hong Kong's laissez-faire economy, solid regulatary framework and zero-tariffs on art imports, make it a secure and stable alternative for China's auction firms.

Although Beijing has lowered its import duties on arts to 6 percent from 12 percent since the beginning of 2012, another 17 percent of value-added tax still poses a huge burden to Chinese auction houses.

"Hong Kong is a more liberal tax region," said Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong.

"One would have wondered why they didn't move sooner." (Editing by James Pomfret and Sanjeev Miglani)

Women on art: What does 'woman artist' mean?

"Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou," opening at Seattle Art Museum on Oct. 11, 2012, features renowned artists from around the world. The Seattle Times talks with a trio of local artists about their work and how, or whether, being female has an influence on their work.

"I'm a little frustrated by all the frenzy around being a woman artist," says Seattle artist Amanda Manitach.

 

" ... Because there are places in the world where women still can't be seen, there is still a need to show women's work," says artist Sherry Markovitz.

 

Maria Blanchard's "Sois Sage or Jeanne d'Arc," 1917, is one of the works in "Elles," opening at SAM on Thursday. 

 

"The Blue Room (La chambre bleu)," one of the works in "Elles" at SAM, is by Suzanne Valadon, who, tired of the passive life of a model, became an artist. 

Banners at Seattle Art Museum announce that "women are taking over," getting us primed for the big exhibition titled "Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou," which debuts Thursday.
In some ways that is true. One hundred and thirty significant works of art by 75 female artists have arrived from Paris to take over the special exhibition galleries.
And, in a bold move inspired by the Pompidou show, SAM is radically changing its own installation of modern and contemporary art, a display that's been in place since the big remodel in 2007.
The third-floor galleries have been emptied of works by men, and through Feb. 17, 2013, they will be filled with work from SAM's permanent collection, local private collections and a solo show with new work by Victoria Haven.
We'll get to see art by such heavy hitters as Louise Bourgeois, Imogen Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama and Georgia O'Keeffe.
On the other hand, women artists aren't just arriving. They're already here. Seattle is home to an extraordinary number of successful, interesting female artists. I invited three of them, each at a different career stage, to talk about whether being a woman affects their work, and the significance of major museum exhibitions of art made exclusively by women.

SHERRY MARKOVITZ
Media: Painting, mixed-media sculpture
Education: Master of fine arts, printmaking, University of Washington
Last show: "Provenance: In Honor of Arlene Schnitzer," Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
Q: You were in graduate school in the early 1970s, during a time when feminism and civil-rights efforts were breaking down barriers within art and in society at large. Did any of that impact your emergence as an artist?
A: It really informed a lot of what I was already inclined to do. It gave me freedom to explore subjects that were close to me, especially familial relationships.
After grad school, I worked in the Women's Studies department and I was very influenced by that extant of that world. My first piece out of grad school was funded by a grant that I'd gotten — (art critic and curator) Lucy Lippard was one of the jurors — and I did a piece called "Women, Body and Space, A Personal Ritual." It opened up too much emotional territory for me and I decided that it was not a direction I wanted to go.
Q: After turning to figurative painting, you then focused on beading and embellishing, craft methods that might be considered "feminine." You have used these methods to transform trophy heads, markers of masculinity. Is this a deliberate juxtaposition?
A: I think it comes out in the hunting trophies. The classic emblems of a hunter, which is something that is as far away from my upbringing as you could get.
And then the embroidery, beading and sewing feminizes them. But that's just a beginning. I knew what I was doing, but I didn't have an agenda. There was just a foreignness to hunting that I was interested in.
At the same time, I was interested in Native American culture and indigenous ways of survival. It wasn't just contemporary maleness, it was cultural history, going all the way back to the cave paintings.
I'm still interested in that in some of my new paintings. I'm interested not only in male/female contrasts but cultural contrasts, the dynamics of misunderstanding, in how we see the other culture and how the other culture sees us.
Q: What do you think about a major art exhibition in 2012 comprised entirely of artists who are women?
A: People have told me that my career or my subject matter have suffered because I'm a woman, making comments like, "Men won't buy dolls." I don't pay attention to that, but I do think women still need to be shown — separately and together. Because, historically, women have been treated the way they have — which was not to be seen — and because there are places in the world where women still can't be seen, there is still a need to show women's work.
VICTORIA HAVEN
Media: Mixed media including painting, drawing, sculpture
Education: MFA, Goldsmiths College/University of London
Last solo exhibit: "Hit the North" at Greg Kucera Gallery
Q: Catharina Manchanda (curator of modern and contemporary art, who organized "Elles: SAM" along with Patricia Junker) asked you to create new work for "Elles: SAM." How did you respond to being positioned among these well-known artists who are all women?
A: The way Catharina described it made me feel like a kid in a candy store. We walked through the galleries and she said, "And the Joan Mitchells would be here, and then Agnes Martin and Jo Baer, and then the Frankenthalers will be in this room. And then Sherrie Levine and Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper." And everyone that she said, they were all artists that I look to.
Q: You've created a new body of work for this show. What are we going to see?
A: The only piece that's not brand-new is "Mix Tape" (a large-scale wall painting of the label for a mix tape). It was carved out of the wall of my old studio and it has been transformed into a manifestation of what the whole show has been conceived as: a series of portable monuments that address ideas of progression and belonging and permanence.
They're about a very specific relation to studio spaces I've had — a progression across Seattle — I'm in my 11th studio! But the title "Proposed Land Use Action" has a double meaning. It refers to my geographical position in my urban landscape, but also my position in the landscape of art making.
Q: Your work is often formal and minimal; gender issues don't seem to be overtly present. Can you point to ways that being a woman affects your work?
A: With "Mix Tape," all of my relationships around this tape happened to be relationships with guys — friends who made the tape for me in 1986 — and at the time most of those bands were four or five guys.
They're sort of my muses. I've thought about it as a kind of role reversal. But also that wondering about how you belong, or fit into a landscape of relationships, is embedded in that piece. For me it (gender) is overt in that piece but it may not be as overt in other pieces.
Being given this position in this continuum, this art-making legacy, has brought up questions about how I fit in with the other women in this show. But, also, I'm always butting heads and overlapping and configuring my relationship with the forefathers of modernism. Maybe my job is just to make my work the best way that I can and add to the conversation in that way.
AMANDA MANITACH
Media: Paintings, drawings, video
Education: Bachelor of arts, literature, Oral Roberts University
Last exhibition: "Can't Get There From Here" at Lawrimore Project
Q: As an emerging artist, what are your thoughts on being a woman in the art world today? Is it something you think about?
A: I honestly don't think about it at all. I'm a little frustrated by all the frenzy around being a woman artist. It feels like it's ghettoizing women all over again. People ask me if I'm a feminist — I don't consider myself a feminist artist but anyone who has common sense these days is a feminist. It's about human decency.
Q: But you do seem to be interested in issues related to being a woman, mother-daughter images, motifs about the female body.
A: It's a paradox for me. I'm not setting out to do anything for my gender as an artist. I'm just compelled to make art. But my work does have something to do with gender, these pictures of vaginas and women. The female body comes up a lot in my work. I'm a pastor's kid and I grew up really wanting to be a boy.
When I first menstruated, it was a heartbreak. If I had grown up in a liberal environment, who knows, it might have been different, but I didn't know how to deal with those feelings of being a girl.
I still have an uneasy relationship with my body. I had an eating disorder for 10 years. A lot of what I do is trying to reconcile having this body; it's painful and a struggle.
Q: One of the ideas that "Elles" explores is how traditional ways of approaching art history can be disrupted. Does that relate to your own work?
A: I have an adaptive approach and I recycle history all the time. I start from literature or art or performances. Earlier this year, I was obsessed with the Vienna Actionists and I wanted to do my own adaptations of their performances that involved a female but I wanted to be in the active role. In almost all of their performances, the female was the object, being penetrated, and acted upon. I wanted to be the protagonist.

West Michigan Glass Art Center to get fired up for 10th anniversary with big party

Glass Art Center will be looking to celebrate, show off its new furnace and have a little fun on Wednesday.

The WMGAC will hold a party from 6-10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10 at the studio space on the first floor of the Park Trades Center, 326 W. Kalamazoo Ave., Suite 100, to toast its 10th year anniversary.

The event will feature live glassblowing, food, drinks, a silent auction and the classic rock band, Bambi & the Matrix.

"We wanted to celebrate ... We are a thriving non-profit. We've grown a lot since the economy fell. We've gotten so much community support from foundations and guests. We've been growing and moved down to this bigger space," executive director Rebecca Boase said.

In 2010, the WMGAC went from four studios in the Park Trades Center to one massive studio space on the first floor that houses several furnaces, studio space and rooms for the variety of classes it offers.

The new furnace, installed in July, holds 385 pounds of molten glass. It more than doubles the capacity of the furnace it replaced (175 pounds).

The new furnace, made possible by a pair of grants, allows the WMGAC to offer more classes and requires far less maintenance from studio manager Mike Fortin. Boase said the interest in glassblowing -- either taking classes or observing demonstrations -- makes up about 50 percent of what the WMGAC does.

Part of Wednesday's event will be a fundraiser to help to repay remaining costs of installing the furnace, Boase said.
 
People who attend Wednesday's event will be able to see the new furnace in action, as there will be a live-action glassblowing auction, where people can bid on objects as they're being formed from a "glob o' glass" to a bowl or vase, said Sherry Trautman, marketing coordinator for the WMGAC. She said the artists will create works based on audience reaction, feedback. If someone yells out they want a glass goblet, chances are the glassblowers will cater to the request, Trautman said.

"I think that's going to be a lot of fun," she said.

Trautman said she expects seven pieces to be created for the live auction. There will also be a silent auction of pieces made by the WMGAC instructors during previous demonstrations. Trautman said there will be "quite a few" items in a variety of forms.

The WMGAC will utilize the space behind the building for food and beverages. The back door will be open, so people can easily move between the two spaces, Trautman said.

Visitor creates art with local influences

International artist makes foray into local art

Dubai: An artist who has never visited the UAE until this week or known much about its architecture and culture has created 30 large-scale canvases delineating the country, using 24-carat gold leaf, minerals, precious stones and natural pigments, among others, for an exhibition that opened at the Funoon Rotating Gallery, Dubai Ladies Club on October 1, 2012.

Titled Arabian Nights, Eastern Lights, the exhibition is a result of an invitation extended to the Swiss-Irish painter Claudio Viscardi, who lives and works on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, by a client in the UAE. He told Gulf News that though he hadn’t seen the country for himself, he has been fascinated with the Middle East and its influences. As a young boy, he conjured images of the region’s many facets while reading Arabian fables from One Thousand and One Nights.

He said, “Many visitors were surprised how my works reflect the architecture and culture of this place… Some of the visitors couldn’t understand how I have been able to capture even the ambience without being here. While these paintings do not reflect reality, they are my artistic interpretation,” he said.

He described his style as one that uses the old masters’ techniques and elements of the Renaissance period that have been developed in a contemporary context. He experiments with landscape, architecture and geometry, juxtaposing light and shade in his 3D canvases.

The uniqueness of his works he said was in the way the beauty of the natural pigments - Lapis Lazuli, Carrara marble, Malachite, Pompei Red, Chinese Vermillion, etc - are showcased, without gloss finish.

Muna Bin Kalli, executive director of the Dubai Ladies Club said, “We are delighted to host this solo exhibition for Claudio Viscardi, which also marks his introduction to the local art community. The exhibition reflects our mission for the Gallery as a tool to forge a dynamic exchange of art and ideals through linkages with artists and art institutions, locally and abroad.”

Walsall's New Art Gallery hosting Damien Hirst exhibition

It’s his most iconic work. And now Damien Hirst’s infamous lamb suspended in formaldehyde has arrived in the Black Country.

The controversial artwork is one of 13 pieces in an exhibition expected to bring record crowds to The New Art Gallery Walsall.

The collection goes on show tomorrow – the first year-long display of work by Hirst outside of London.
Gallery bosses today said it was “a very big deal” for the venue.

Director Stephen Snoddy said: “Damien Hirst is one of the best living artists in the world, he is a brand name. He’s the David Beckham of the art world.

“It is brilliant for us to have this and it was a competitive bid to the Tate to get it.

“Hirst is such a brand name and a big name and we know our attendance figures are going to go up.”

The Hirst collection, part of the Artist Rooms tour, is at the Gallery Square venue until October 27, 2013 with 11 artworks by the artist and two special wallpapers.

Mr Snoddy said: “I think what will happen is there will be a lot of people from a 40-mile radius of Walsall and beyond who will come here.

“For many, if will be their first visit and we know there’s a good chance if they come a first time, they’ll come back.

“We normally get an average of 3,300 visitors here a week. It will be interesting to see what the figure is for the first full week.
“We’re expecting the footfall to be very good so it will be good for the gallery and good for the town.”
It has taken 18 months of planning to bring the artwork to the £21 million gallery, starting with a competitive bidding process to bosses at the Tate Modern in London.

Now, after the logistics of getting the art in place, building new walls and incorporating it with the existing artwork, the wraps are poised to come off.

Away from the Flock, Hirst’s 1994 work of a sheep suspended in formaldehyde, is centrepiece of the display on floor one.

One of Hirst’s most recognisable and influential works, it is expected to be the one people come and stand and look at the most.

For Mr Snoddy, the more people that come, the better. “Away From the Flock will probably be on the one people will stand and look at the most,” he said. “But I think everyone needs to come and see them in real life before giving their opinion on them.

“People will really begin to see the beauty in the work. For example, Damien Hirst’s butterflies paintings are so amazingly beautiful. When these pieces are reproduced in magazines and books and catalogues there can be critics but it doesn’t really look as it does in the flesh.

“Many people will be seeing the work for the first time in the flesh and I think they’ll be surprised at how real and beautiful it all is.” Hirst’s work has been interwoven with that of Jacob Epstein, whose work the gallery holds a large collection of.

Both artists share similar themes of religion, science, love and death.

London’s Tate Modern recently hosted Hirst’s work and had their most visited solo show – attracting 3,000 visitors a day.

Walsall Council leisure chief Anthony Harris said: “It really is an opportunity to put the New Art Gallery and Walsall on the map- both nationally and internationally.

“We expect art enthusiasts from across the globe to visit the exhibition here in Walsall but it also presents a chance for local people here in Walsall to view art which is normally only on display in London.

“We want local residents to come and take a look for themselves and to see what else the Art Gallery has to offer.”