Category Archives: Art

Art: ‘Must-See Museum Exhibitions’ – April 2023

Sotheby’s (March 29, 2023) – Tim Marlow’s Must See Museum Shows for April 2023. This month, we’re taking a tour of four of the world’s most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions.

First up, the Los Angeles County Museum. This museum has long been a hub for cutting-edge contemporary art, and this month’s exhibition is no exception. Featuring the artwork of women representing the Islamic community, this show promises to be a feast for the senses.

Next, we’re off to London’s Design Museum, where we’ll be exploring the art of famous artist and architect Ai Weiwei. With interactive exhibits and immersive installations, this show is a must-see for anyone interested in the future of architecture as art.

From there, we’ll be making our way to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where we’ll be exploring the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. With works spanning the decades, this exhibition offers a fascinating insight into the ways in which artists have represented themselves and others throughout the story of this unique and popular music genre.

Last but not least, we’ll be heading to the Kunsthaus Zürich, where we’ll be exploring the fascinating intersection of Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí. From the bold, colorful works of the Dalí to the chiseled and lapidarian aesthetic of the Giacometti, this show is a celebration of one of Europe’s most profound and innovative surrealist artists of the 20th century.

Exhibition Tours: ‘Mirror Mirror – Reflections On Design At Chatsworth’

Dezeen (March 30, 2023) – An exhibition at Chatsworth House including designers including Michael Anastassiades, Faye Toogood and Formafantasma, features in this video produced by Dezeen for the stately home.

Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth

18 March 2023–1 October 2023

Called Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth, the exhibition brings together a collection of furniture and objects displayed throughout and responding to Chatsworth House and its gardens. In total, 16 international designers and artists created pieces that respond to the interiors of the building.

Some responded by sourcing materials from the property itself, while others focussed on themes and ideas taken from decorations within the interiors.

Read more on Dezeen

Art Views: ‘Figures’ In Roy Lichtenstein’s Paintings

Sotheby’s (March 29, 2023) – In 1962, the late legendary Italian-American art dealer Leo Castelli hosted Roy Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibition at his eponymous gallery in New York City, and subsequently worked with the artist throughout his life.

In this Expert Voices, art historian and Director of Leo Castelli Gallery, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli shares her interpretation of Figures, recalling her memories working with her husband and Lichtenstein whom she felt was a modest and dedicated artist, and among those that changed the path of American art in the postwar period.

A key figure in the Pop art movement and beyond, Roy Lichtenstein  (1923–1997) grounded his profoundly inventive career in imitation—beginning by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles, and art history itself. Referring to Lichtenstein’s equalizing treatment of the subjects he chose for his art, Richard Hamilton, a fellow Pop artist, wrote in 1968: “Parthenon, Picasso or Polynesian maiden are reduced to the same kind of cliché by the syntax of the print: reproducing a Lichtenstein is like throwing a fish back into water.”

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Views: Inside The Studio Of A Glass-Blower Sculptor

Victoria and Albert Museum (March 28, 2023) – Inspired by traditional oil paintings, sculptor Elliot Walker works with molten glass at exceptionally high temperatures and speed to create unique 3D still life sculptures. Step inside his studio to see each stage of this extremely challenging process, as he creates a new work made up of three-dimensional sliced fish, in response to a tiny fragment of a Middle Eastern glass beaker in our collection.

Video timeline: 00:00 In the studio 01:10 Elliot’s still life series 01:45 Design inspiration from the V&A collection 03:03 Hot workshop: gathering molten glass with a blowpipe 03:30 Building up layers of clear and coloured glass 03:56 Spiralling the coloured glass 04:15 Shaping the glass with different tools 04:50 ‘Swedish’ or bubble overlay technique 05:57 Creating the fish shape 06:41 Adding surface texture, fins and a metallic finish 08:14 Cold workshop: cutting and polishing 09:17 The finished piece

Art: ‘Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism’

gallery view of Near East to Far West with wall text and two paintings
Left to right: Gerald Cassidy, Cui Bono?, about 1911. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art: Gift of Gerald Cassidy, 1915 (282.23P). Gerald Cassidy, Midday Sun, North Africa, 1920s.

Denver Art Museum (March 27, 2023): Artworks in Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism (through May 29) present a range of representations from sympathetic to stereotyped. Indeed, racialized stereotypes such as the “Noble Savage” and odalisque (a woman in a female-only domestic space, or harem, who is often overly sexualized in European art) circulated throughout French Orientalism and western American art.

Acknowledging the ongoing harm of such representations, we knew that we needed to make space for diverse perspectives: essentially, to make room for the voices too often repressed or ignored in the artwork.

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International Art: Apollo Magazine – April 2023

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Apollo Magazine – April 2023 issue:

• The cosmic visions of Hilma af Klint

• Canova comes in from the cold

• Is Vermeer worth queuing for?

In his room – the retiring art of Giorgio Morandi

A show of paintings belonging to his most important patron reflects the artist’s quietly spirited side

Apollo Magazine

31 minutes ago

April 2023 | Apollo Magazine

Photography Exhibitions: ‘Bernd & Hilla Becher’- The Splendor Of The Everyday

CBS Sunday Morning (March 26, 2023) – To photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, the rapidly vanishing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America were works of art. The German couple’s documentary images of transmission towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces and smokestacks – structures that signified the end of an industrial era – are being celebrated in a comprehensive retrospective now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lee Cowan offers us a tour.

Bernd & Hilla Becher

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December 17, 2022–April 2, 2023

The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era.

Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine art photography.

Exhibition Preview

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Framework House, Auf der Hütte 45, Gosenbach, Siegen, Germany, 1961; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer bequest, and Jade Lau gift, 2018 (2018.463); © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Fördertürme, Belgien, Frankreich (Winding Towers, Belgium, France), 1967-1988; The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Estate of Bernd and Hilla Becher; photo: Don Ross

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers (Germany, France, Belgium, United States, and Great Britain), 1963–80; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1980 (1980.1074a–p); © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Zeche Hannover, Bochum-Hordel, Ruhr Region, Germany, 1973; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011 (2011.67); © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher

Exhibitions: Inside ‘After Impressionism’ In London

Christie’s (March 24, 2023) – Curator MaryAnne Stevens explains the inspiration for the National Gallery’s new show, which is sponsored by Christie’s. Dominated by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch, it also includes lesser-known figures such as Isidre Nonell and Max Slevogt.

After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art

25 March – 13 August 2023

Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.

The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.

Exhibition Views: Shirley Jaffe – Form As Experiment

VernissageTV (March 24, 2023) – The exhibition “Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment” at Kunstmuseum Basel is the first retrospective of the American abstract painter in Switzerland. Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) was born in the United States and settled in Paris in the 1950s.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents 113 works, from Shirley Jaffe’s early abstract expressionist works to the geometric paintings that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.

Shirley Jaffe – Form as Experiment

March 25 to July 30, 2023

Atelier de Shirley Jaffe, Paris, 13 octobre 2008, Kunstwerk im Hintergrund : Shirley Jaffe, "Bande Dessinée en Noir et Blanc", 2009, © 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich, © Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Jean-Christophe Mazur
Shirley Jaffe
Manyness by Shirley Jaffe

Born in New Jersey in 1923 as Shirley Sternstein, in 1949, the artist, now Mrs Jaffe, moved to Paris. Following her short-lived her marriage to the journalist Irving Jaffe, the painter decided to remain in France. Having soon established herself in the city, she held regular contact with the American “art expats” Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell, who had relocated to Paris somewhat later.

Her work dating from this period may be attributed to Abstract Expressionism, a form that sought to draw exclusively from its own resources and which consisted primarily of wildly applied fields of colour and gestures. Although, for the art market at the time, this amounted to a success formula Jaffe nevertheless decided to strike out in a different direction.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 24, 2023: This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality.

So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+ museum and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that social media corporations have become self-appointed cultural gatekeepers that decide which works of art can freely circulate, be pushed into the digital margins or even banned.

Our live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist Emma Shapiro and Elizabeth Larison, the Director of the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, about the issue and a project to counter this tendency, called Don’t Delete Art. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), a photographic project by Brenda L. Croft, in which she depicts fellow First Nations women and girls.

The work is part of The National 4: Australian Art Now, a survey across multiple venues in Sydney. One of the show’s curators, Beatrice Gralton, tells us about Croft’s epic series.Art Basel Hong Kong, until 25 March.Visit Don’t Delete Art: dontdelete.artThe National 4: Australian Art Now continues until 23 July.