The Art Newspaper April 27, 2023: This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those who control it, and more.
Host Ben Luke talks to Noam Segal—an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, whose focus is on technology-based art—about AI, its history in art, its social and environmental effects, and how artists are using it today. The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist and writer Gretchen Andrew about making art with AI and together they explore its wider application across the art world.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, an image made using AI by the photographer Boris Eldagsen. The piece caused controversy earlier this month when it was awarded a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, which Eldagsen refused to accept. The researcher and photographer Lewis Bush discusses the work, the controversy and wider questions around AI and photography.
François Ghebaly Gallery, New York City (April 27, 2023) – François Ghebaly is proud to present Station by Matt Bollinger. Ithaca-based artist Matt Bollinger works from a complex interdisciplinary base: as painter, draftsman, animator, and elegist, he creates work that straddles the projects of both visual art and narrative fiction.
His stories, by and large, are of America’s rural working class–each is told through a bricolage of memory, family history, direct observation, art-historical research, and literary invention. For his latest exhibition, Bollinger chronicles the semi-fictional inhabitants of a rural central Missourian community, offering in the process ruminative, disillusioned vignettes of the real ‘American Dream.’
Matt Bollinger, Brothers V, 2022.
Spanning the far wall, Uncle Dave (2023) is the most ambitious work in Bollinger’s show–with its impressive vertical dimension, some eight feet-tall, the painting acts as an anchor to the New York gallery space, drawing the eye in and upward. The work depicts three sanitation workers surrounding the bright yellow cab of a dump truck. Framed by wildflowers underfoot and the scintillating glare of another truck’s headlight, the men are shown in progressive life stages.
Matt Bollinger, Cape Hollow II, 2022.
At the far right, the youth holds a rake and stares listlessly out of view. The middle-aged man, partially obscured, gestures forward with a lighter and a yellow traffic flag, while the eldest is positioned above the other men and descends from the cab, directly confronting the viewer’s gaze. The work’s triadic symbol of labor, class, and the passage of time ––alongside compositional affinities, somewhere between Courbet and religious genre painting ––underscores many of the themes latent both in the exhibition title and in the artist’s work at large.
Ashmolean Museum (April 26, 2023): ‘The Arab world’s most influential living artist’, Dia al-Azzawi is best known for monumental and colourful canvasses. His work spans many genres, including a type of artist books known in Arabic as ‘dafatir’.
Here Francesca Leoni, curator of Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry at the Ashmolean, introduces us to the work of this important contemporary artist and takes us through the exhibition currently on display at the Ashmolean Museum.
Dia Al-Azzawi is an Iraqi painter and sculptor, now living and working in London, and one of the pioneers of modern Arab art. He is noted for incorporating Arabic script into his paintings.
Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is open and free to visit until 10 June 2023.
The Local Project – (April 25, 2023) – Overlooking the city of Los Angeles, Sheats-Goldstein Residence by John Lautner and James Goldstein is an iconic and action packed home that ignites the idea that a residence is an expression of its owner.
Video timeline:00:00 – Inside the Iconic and Action Packed Home 00:49 – A Reflection of Mentality and Personality 01:16 – A 1972 Purchase of Amazing Design and Views 02:14 – The First Step in the 45-year long Renovation Process 03:14 – No Separation between Inside and Outside 03:42 – John Lautner’s Dislike of Box-like Forms 04:09 – A Focus on the Natural Elements 04:43 – The Addition of Tropical Vegetation 05:30 – A James Turrell Skyspace 06:05 – The Continuation of John Lautner’s Legacy 06:45 – Two Rebels Working in Cohesion 07:21 – Preserving History and Hard Work
Built and designed to reflect James’s life and experiences, the house asserts a dominance over the landscape with its frameless glass walls, hidden wonders and angled corners and turns. After buying the residence in 1972, James sought the help of John Lautner to re-model the home after observing the previous owner’s undesirable changes to the original design. Part of James’s wish was to return the structure’s lost character through dramatic improvements.
After John’s passing and having resided in the home for 45 years, James has continuously worked on adding to character of the iconic and action packed home, with respect to John’s original vision. Opposed to building anything that resembled a box or came to a 90-degree angle, John Lautner designed the home with angular walls, built-in furniture and open plan floor spaces. Wanting the residence to feel natural, the use of concrete floors is used to help imbue the feeling of openness, while carpets used within the home are designed to look like small stones and deepen the natural impression.
Additionally, the frameless glass wall that occupies the living room continues to unite the indoor and outdoor spaces and enables views of the tropical foliage and vegetation that surround the building. Spanning across over 1.5 hectares of hillside, the home’s landscape is saturated with thick foliage and vegetation that holds hidden walkways, ponds and open grassy areas. Additionally, the unique character of the iconic and action packed home is further emphasised with the James Turrel skyscraper. Tucked into the lower hillside of the home, the building acts as a form of art, allowing for one to sit back and delve into the appreciation of light and shadow.
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.- After a hiatus of more than three years, Myers Fine Art will return to the auction spotlight on April 30 with a 459-lot gallery auction that bears all the hallmarks of their signature style. Bidders can look forward to seeing a high-quality, estate-fresh selection of scrupulously researched artworks with impeccable provenance.
Each and every item has been personally curated by Myers’ owners Mike Myers and Mary Dowd, whose combined decades of experience in the fine art sector serve as the basis for auction catalogs whose scholarly descriptions are both lauded and trusted throughout the art world.
The Local Project – (April 21, 2023) – Imbued with a sense of calm and tranquillity, Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects creates a dream home that encourages contemplation. A neutral approach to materiality is complemented by an extensive art collection and sculptural furnishings, inspiring stillness and a sense of wonder for what lies beneath the structure’s outward façade.
Video timeline:00:00 – Introduction to the Art Lovers Dream Home 00:29 – The Location of Almora House 00:44 – The Clients and The Brief 01:15 – The Organisation of the Home 01:55 – A Walkthrough of the Home 02:59 – An Enduring, Timeless and Maintenance Free Home 03:37 – Where The Spatial Richness is Derived From 04:11 – The Most Enjoyable Project for the Architect 04:46 – Favourite Parts of the Home
Located in the coastal refuge of Balmoral Beach in Sydney’s Mosman, Almora House is a collection of unique spaces. The clients have resided in the house for over twenty years and have come forward with the brief to design an enduring, timeless, maintenance-free dream home that would accommodate their extensive art collection. Almora House presents a distinctive shape that encourages a soft contemplation.
The form of the house itself is organised around a spine that runs almost north-south — the structure stretching its way along this spine, with a series of rooms that push out into the garden, creating small courtyards. Various features throughout the home also encourage contemplation, particularly the bookshelf. Housed in the upstairs library, the bookshelf’s rear side is made of slightly frosted glass, becoming an alluring abstract composition seen from the dining room. The spine design of the dream home creates an effortless sense of flow in its layout. Inside the front door, there is a guest bathroom and bedroom that open into a courtyard.
As you walk south along the spine, the first of the living rooms, a dining room with double-height ceilings and a kitchen unfurl to the left. Beyond the kitchen is an informal room with four glass walls that open into the garden. Upstairs are the master bedroom and powder room, a study and a gallery. Thoughtful choices surrounding materiality also create a dream home that embodies a poignant sense of calm and introspection. Glass is used to welcome the serenity of the surrounding greenery into the home.
A concrete frame is used as a neutral material that showcases the art within the home and inspires calm. Almora House reveals itself to incite tranquillity, stillness and retrieve from the constant movement of daily life. Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects perfectly balances an appreciation of practicality, art and craftsmanship to create a dream home that acts as a container of curiosities and a hub for the calm moments integral to being present in our fast-paced, modern world.
The Art Newspaper April 20, 2023: This week features a tour of Tate Modern’s exhibition that brings together the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.
We hear about the two artists’ distinctive contributions to abstraction, their shared interest in esoteric belief systems and their deep engagement with the natural world, from one of the show’s curators, Bryony Fer. Our editor, Americas, Ben Sutton visited the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to talk to the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, as her retrospective opens at the museum.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is a reconstruction of a Roman gateway that has just opened at Richborough Roman Fort in Kent, southern England. Andrew J. Roberts, a properties historian with English Heritage, the charity that looks after the historic site, explains what the gateway tells us about the Romans’ arrival in Britain in 43 CE.Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Modern, London, until 3 September.
Additionally: Kunstmuseum den Haag, The Hague, 7 October-25 February 2024Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 13 August; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 15 October -7 January 2024; Seattle Art Museum, 15 February–12 May next year. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 24 September-15 January 2024; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, 18 April 2024-15 September 2024.The Roman gateway and rampart, Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, Kent, now open.
Villa Medicis, Rome (April 18, 2023) – The piano nobile of Villa Medici consists of the former rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici with three rooms in a row – the Room of the Elements, the Room of the Muses and the Room of the Lovers of Jupiter – with 16th century frescoes by the Mannerist painter Jacopo Zucchi. These rooms, which are open to the public on guided tours throughout the year, are located next to two private rooms from the same period which complete the complex.
As part of the project Reenchanting Villa Medici, the interior refurbishment of these emblematic spaces of Villa Medici has been entrusted to India Mahdavi, an internationally renowned French architect, designer and scenographer, who will be responsible for the artistic direction of the project in association with craftsmen (more information to come). This transformation is being carried out with respect for the period décor and previous architectural interventions, in order to revisit the premises by adding a touch of colour and modernity. The rooms will be equipped by Maison Tréca, a French manufacturer of high quality bedding.
Grace Wright’s atmospheric paintings are all-consuming, inviting the viewer into a baroque world of tangled gestures. Markings on the canvas twist and convulse about themselves to build an anarchic structure before unravelling to moments of repose. While Wright’s gestures may be abstract, she views her paintings as representational narratives, evoking the tempestuous rhythm of the natural world, while alluding to 17th-century religious paintings.
Grace Wright, World Receivers, 2023
Deep Symmetry explores a recent evolution of Wright’s practice as a result of her time in Europe in the latter half of 2022. Its title was inspired by the architectural geometries of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France, and a quote by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Life is irregularity, death is geometry”.
Wright has been long fascinated with the deeper, universal connections that exist beyond our normal comprehension. Marrying alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to monumental standing, Wright’s paintings are a reflection of this deep connectedness; her coiling energetic brush marks echoing the universal ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ forms in our world, to emotion and the force of life itself.
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