Category Archives: Art

Art: ‘Bonnard – Designed By India Mahdavi’ (June ’23)

designboom Films (June 8, 2023) – Pierre Bonnard is one of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, celebrated for his use of colour to convey an exquisite sense of emotion. His close friend Henri Matisse declared that Bonnard was ‘a great painter, for today and definitely also for the future’.

Opening in June 2023, the blockbuster Melbourne Winter Masterpieces® exhibition Pierre Bonnard presents the iridescent paintings of Bonnard within immersive scenography by Paris-based designer India Mahdavi

Pierre Bonnard (3 October 1867 – 23 January 1947) was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.

Museum Stories: ‘Japanese Plate With Kintsugi Repair’

Ashmolean Museum (June 7, 2023): Here, animator Charlie Black brings the poetic story behind this beautifully broken 17th-century Japanese plate to life.

JAPAN COLLECTION

Ashmolean Museum – Oxford University

The Japanese collection is now best known for its ceramics, in particular the collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century export porcelain which is one of the most comprehensive collections in the world. Ceramics for the Japanese market are also well represented, including fine examples of Arita, Nabeshima and Hirado porcelain, tea ceremony wares and Kyoto earthenwares.

Design: Sculpted Bronze Art Of Diego Giacometti

Sotheby’s (June 5, 2023) – Trained in the school of Art Deco decorators and sculptors, Diego Giacometti was equally attached to the discipline of pre-WWII production standards as to the classical artistic vocabulary deriving from ancient Greece, Egypt and Etruscan decorative arts .

The eminent history and personal connection of these tables and lamps to the artist and one of his dearest friends echo the oeuvre of Diego Giacometti itself— a sumptuous and timeless universe in bronze filled with the unique character and artistic prolificity of a true poet.

The featured ”Racine” Guéridon in particular figures as one of Diego’s most rare and original creations in bronze. The piece shows the sculptor’s prowess at skillfully adapting an organic motif into a strikingly abstract and perfectly balanced composition, which is simultaneously sculptural in its intent and highly functional.

Toronto Art: ‘Dominic Besner’ – Galerie LeRoyer

Galerie LeRoyer (June 3, 2023) – A corpus called “Migratory Series”. It is an ode to manifest colours, driven by the hot winds of June and the full moon of strawberries. Coming from elsewhere, like the tropical butterfly, their glass hooves fuel the playfulness of our fantasies.

DOMINIC BESNER

“Migratory Series”

JUNE 2023

Dominic Besner’s creative work is based on a mixed technique on canvas. He has a preference for oil sticks and their rich palette of colours as well as acrylic paint, structural mortar, china marker and aerosol paint. In addition to these materials, he uses a technique of application by the fingers and scraping of the canvas.

Exhibits: “Keith Haring- Art Is For Everybody”, Broad Museum In Los Angeles

KCET (June 2, 2023) – Keith Haring’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles debuts at the Broad, featuring over 120 artworks that showcase the artist’s legacy of blending fun street art with activism.

“Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody”

May 27 – Oct 08, 2023

The exhibition features works that span the artist’s career, tackling pertinent social issues of the time like anti-Apartheid movements and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s as well as works that address relevant issues that persist today — from capitalism and environmentalism to race, sexuality and religion. “” at the Broad is on view from May 27 through October 8, 2023.

In his short but prolific career, Keith Haring was known for his fluid, uniform lines, intricate compositions, and repeating imagery such as the barking dog and radiant baby. Since the 1980s, Haring’s art has garnered worldwide recognition, breaking down barriers and spreading joy while shining a bright light on complex issues from capitalism and the proliferation of new technologies to sexuality and race.   

Born in 1958, Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where his father, Allen, taught him to draw cartoons from Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss. He moved to New York City in 1978 to enroll in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, he embraced his homosexuality, which informed his worldview and art practice. The city was pulsing with energy with the emergence of hip-hop, graffiti art, and an active nightclub scene. In alternative spaces such as Club 57 and Paradise Garage, Haring developed his visual style alongside artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, performers Grace Jones and Madonna, and many others.   

Sculpture Exhibitions: ‘Bloomsbury Stud: The Art Of Stephen Tomlin’ (2023)

Philip Mould & Co Films (June 2, 2023) – Starting off at Charleston House, where Stephen Tomlin’s friends, lovers, and sitters came together, this exhibition film traces Tomlin’s life and career, revealing the stories behind the artworks on display in ‘Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin’, on view at the Philip Mould Gallery from 5th June until 11th August 2023.

Bloomsbury Stud The Art of Stephen Tomlin

 

Stephen Tomlin, the Bloomsbury group’s primary sculptor, immortalised the faces of Bloomsbury’s best-known characters, including Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. With inexhaustible charisma, disarming good looks and undeniable talent, Tomlin captivated his contemporaries, and references to Stephen ‘Tommy’ Tomlin pepper countless biographies of 20th century figures.

However, until recently, that was where his story remained. Now, this exhibition aims to return Tomlin to the artistic spotlight where he belongs.

Museum Exhibition Tour: ‘Van Gogh’s Cypresses’

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Join Susan Alyson Stein, Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting, to virtually explore Van Gogh’s Cypresses, the first exhibition to focus on the trees—among the most famous in the history of art—immortalized in signature images by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

Van Gogh’s Cypresses

May 22nd – August 27th, 2023

Such iconic pictures as Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night take their place as the centerpiece in a presentation that affords an unprecedented perspective on a motif virtually synonymous with the Dutch artist’s fiercely original power of expression. Some 40 works illuminate the extent of his fascination with the region’s distinctive flamelike evergreens as they successively sparked, fueled, and stoked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France: from his initial sightings of the “tall and dark” trees in Arles to realizing their full, evocative potential (“as I see them”) at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.

Juxtaposing landmark paintings with precious drawings and illustrated letters—many rarely, if ever, lent or exhibited together—this tightly conceived thematic exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate anew some of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works in a context that reveals the backstory of their invention for the first time.

Art: ‘Angel Otero – The Sea Remembers’ In Hong Kong

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong (June 1, 2023) – Angel Otero is known for his signature approach to visual storytelling, synthesizing magical realism and abstraction, the observed and the imagined, and the past and the present.

ANGEL OTERO – THE SEA REMEMBERS

1 JUN – 29 JUL 2023

Beginning 1 June, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents ‘The Sea Remembers,’ Otero’s first solo exhibition in Asia since he joined the gallery in 2022. Through a labor-intensive process of laying down, scrapping and collaging oil paint, Angel Otero’s works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with the idea of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience.

London Art Gallery Tour: Phillips June 2023 Exhibit

Phillips (May 31, 2023) – A tour of gallery highlights including an important group of fabric works from artists including Grayson Perry, Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin.


Andy Warhol – Alexander the Great (1982)
  
Andy Warhol – Marilyn (1967(

Andy Warhol’s unique trial proof of Alexander the Great and two Marilyn screenprints, along with Pop Art by Keith Haring and Robert Indiana are featured.


Robert IndianaThe Book of Love, 1996
  
Roy Lichtenstein  I Love Liberty, 1982

Further highlights include Contemporary Street Art from the likes of Banksy and an auction debut for Thierry Noir’s East Side Heads, which will be offered alongside significant Pablo Picasso linocuts and lithographs.