Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews

Art: ‘Picasso Sculptor – Matter and Body’ In Spain

Leave a comment

Museo Picasso Málaga (May 9, 2023) –  is the first major exhibition in Spain devoted to this facet of Picasso’s work. The selection of pieces is intended to underline the central role played by the representation of the human body, taken as both a whole and as a fragment, in the Málaga-born artist’s œuvre.


Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body

08/05/2023 to 09/09/2023

Picasso’s sculptures were seemingly overshadowed by his paintings and played a secondary role in his prolific artistic career. The first exhibition devoted chiefly to them did not take place until 1967, at the Tate Gallery in London, and until then his three-dimensional work had barely received any critical attention. However, sculpture was not a secondary concern for Picasso but a form of expression on a par with painting. According to Pierre Daix, ‘he was at least as great a sculptor as he was a painter, and for him these two aspects of his work were always complementary, for he had discovered very early on that the switching from one to the other enabled him to determine precisely what painting is and what sculpture is’.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books — May 18, 2023

Leave a comment

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – May 18, 2023 issue: The War in Khartoum, Vermeer’s Waywardness, Palestinians in Paraguay and Claire Hall on Anaximander.

Julian Bell at the Rijksmuseum

In London​, I had taken A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal for a dependable rest point on strolls around the National Gallery. In Amsterdam, relocated to join 27 other Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, its strangeness re-emerged. This canvas, executed towards the end of Vermeer’s relatively brief career (some four years, perhaps, before he died aged 43 in 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms. 

Arts & Literature, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 15, 2023

Leave a comment
Bruce McCalls “Safe Travels”

The New Yorker – May 15, 2023 issue

Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

A portrait of Prince Harry composed of scribbles that evoke writing, on a yellow piece of binder paper.

By J. R. Moehringer

Collaborating on his memoir, “Spare,” meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids.

The Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body

The filming of a human surgery.

By Alexandra Schwartz

For more than a decade, two “recovering” anthropologists have brought documentary closer to the human experience. Now they’ve made the camera part of our flesh and blood.

The Critics

Art, Arts & Literature, Magazines, Photography, Previews, Reviews

Arts & Culture: Art Review Magazine – May 2023 Issue

Leave a comment

Image

ArtReview (May 2023 Issue) – Featuring Frida Orupabo, Isaac Julien, Sarah Pierce, Kahlil Robert Irving and Christina Quarles; columns on faltering art markets and questions of what art should do for a society; and much more

Aki Sasamoto wins Calder Prize 2023

Aki Sasamoto, Yield Point, 2017, installation view. Image: Jason Mandella

The winner receives $50k, a three-month residency at Atelier Calder, and the placement of works in a public collection

Have We Reached the Endpoint of Revivalism?

Cao Fei, MatryoshkaVerse, 2022. Double Channel HD video, 16:4.5, color with sound, 37min 38sec © Cao Fei, 2023. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

Art has long looked to the recent past for inspiration, but might the return of post-Internet art just be too much, too soon?

Frida Orupabo, on the cover of ArtReview May 2023, mines images sourced from colonial archives, film, fashion and family albums to create collages that carve representation and empowerment from stereotype. Her visual references, ranging from clips of singers like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, to the art of Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker, are incorporated into multilayered works, some pinned with metal tacks to look like the kind of vintage paper doll whose appendages are manipulable. The sense of ‘reclaiming the power to choose how a woman’s body, and more specifically Black female sexuality, is presented and received’, writes Fi Churchman, ‘is a central theme of Orupabo’s work’. 

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Previews, Reviews, Views

May 2023 Exhibition Views: ‘Stephan Hostettler Solo’ In Bern, Switzerland

Video Leave a comment

VernissageTV (May 8, 2023) – The opening reception of the Swiss artist Stephan Hostettler. Stephan Hostettler was born in 1988 in Unterseen, Switzerland.

After training as a metalworker, he attended the preliminary design course in Bern and graduated from the specialist class for graphics in Biel. He presented his works for the first time in 2019 at the Jungkunst exhibition in Winterthur. Hostettler lives and works in Bern.

“At its core, my work is about how we humans live or could live in this world. It offers a humorous but critical perspective on our actions as a society and aims to trigger discussions that contribute to a positive development. I wish for a world in which we treat each other with respect, we live with nature, take care of it and in which no one has to live in fear.”

Stephan Hostettler Solo Exhibition in Bern (Switzerland). Vernissage, May 6, 2023.

Art, Arts & Literature, History, Profiles, Videos

Artists: French-American Artist Louise Bourgeois’ Iconic “Spider” Sculpture

Video Leave a comment

Sotheby’s (May 6, 2023) – Fraught with chilling grandeur, Spider from 1996 is the ultimate embodiment of Louise Bourgeois’ singular contribution to the history of Modern Art.

Among the earliest monumental iterations of Bourgeois’ Spiders, the present work represents the absolute zenith of her artistic practice and the most ambitious embodiment of her signature motif; decades later, her towering Spiders stand among the most iconic sculptures of the twentieth century.

In its elegant yet otherworldly presence, Bourgeois’ spellbinding Spider speaks to the conceptual concerns at the very heart of her oeuvre: an unflinching confrontation of her own emotions and psyche, translated into sculptural form.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review- Sunday May 7, 2023

Leave a comment

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – MAY 7, 2023

Face to Face With Culture’s ‘Monsters’

An illustration of a grid of different faces of monsters, with the labels “polymath,” “genius,” “Nobel laureate,” “virtuoso,” “Pulitzer Prize winner,” “artist’s artist,” “best painter ever,” “visionary” and “comedy legend.”

Claire Dederer’s deft and searching book surfaces a “fan’s dilemma” over such figures as Vladimir Nabokov, Woody Allen, Willa Cather and Roman Polanski.


By Alexandra Jacobs

Expanding on a popular essay published in The Paris Review a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, “Monsters” sustains an essayistic, sometimes aphoristic tone throughout 250-odd pages.

Dark Shadows, Dark Times

Welcome to three novels set in locales where life is exceedingly difficult.

This is an illustration in shades of red, white and blue, of two women pressing their hands against a wall and peering at each other as if through a mirror.

By Alida Becker

AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF by Tara Ison

The title comes from a French expression for twilight. Sure enough, her novel sends us to the dusk that borders the familiar and the wild, the known and the unknown. It’s where our beliefs and suspicions can cast dark shadows over our lives. And, of course, the lives of others.

One Man’s Foray Into the Heartland of the Far Right

Alarmed by the country’s political divisions, Jeff Sharlet embarked on an anguished quest to understand the rise of antidemocratic extremism. In “The Undertow,” he documents his findings.

In this color photo, a group of men and women, including a man holding a baby, an older woman in glasses, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, stand alongside what appears to be the wall of a red barn, pledging allegiance to the American flag. Several people in the group hold their right hands over their hearts as they make the pledge.

By Joseph O’Neill

THE UNDERTOW: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, by Jeff Sharlet

The premise of “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet’s anguished new book of reportage, is that the United States is “coming apart.” The disintegration is political. It involves the rise of the autocratically inclined Donald Trump; the attempt by members of the Republican Party to overthrow the election of Joe Biden in January 2021; and, during the Biden presidency, the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v Wade.

Arts & Literature, Classical Music, Concerts, Performing Arts, Videos

Music: Delirium Musicum & Etienne Gara Play Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons – Summer 1’

Video Leave a comment

Warner Classics (May 5, 2023) – Delirium Musicum and the ensemble’s artistic director Etienne Gara play a fiery movement from Max Richter’s thrilling reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

Etienne Gara & Delirium Musicum

Seasons Etienne Gara Delirium Musicum

Antonio Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Max Richter

“In a world where climate change is at the heart of our attention, these eight delightfully unhinged seasons are scattered across a wildly singular time. They cast an artistic blur on our perception of what has always seemed taken for granted, unshakeable: the seasons with their established climates, our perception of time and space, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons…”

Discover the complete work and more on their SEASONS album: https://w.lnk.to/seasonsLY

Arts & Literature, Museums, Short Films, Videos, Views

Arts Insider: Masterpieces That Have Inspired ‘AI Art’

Video Leave a comment

Vienna Channel (May 5, 2023) – Art expert Markus Hübl takes you to the Upper Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Leopold Museum. He analyzes some of the world’s most famous artworks as well as AI pictures with cats that clearly were inspired by those masterpieces.

Video timeline: 00:16 Upper Belvedere: The Kiss (Lovers) by Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908 01:33 Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna: Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, 1563 02:33 Leopold Museum: Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant by Egon Schiele, 1912

Welcome to Vienna - vienna.info

See the art behind AI art on https://www.wien.info/en/unartificialart

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Podcasts, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

Audio Leave a comment

The Art Newspaper May 4, 2023: Featuring the coronation in the UK. As Charles III is crowned at Westminster Abbey this weekend, Anna Somers Cocks, founder of The Art Newspaper and a former assistant keeper of metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, tells us about the objects involved in the coronation and the monarchical history they convey.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week opens Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, the latest in the hugely successful Costume Institute exhibitions. The German designer, who died in 2019, was also the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala, the museum’s star-studded fundraiser.

We talk to Stephanie Sporn, a fashion historian and arts and culture writer, about the exhibition, the gala and the controversy around Lagerfeld’s offensive comments about a range of issues. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Good Housekeeping III (1985/2023) by the British artist Marlene Smith. She was part of the Blk Art Group, a collective of young Black British artists active in the late 1970s and 1980s, which is the subject of The more things change…, an exhibition at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in the UK.

Smith has re-created the work, first made in 1985, for the show, and tells us more about its making, its context, and the history of the Blk Art Group. Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 July.The more things change…, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK, until 9 July.