In the Denver Art Museum’s Art of the Ancient Americas galleries, we worked with Mexico City-based animators Hola Combo to create animations to help tell the origin stories that explain the relationship between ancient American communities and the their environment. For the Andes, we chose a story that loosely relates to the works on display. “The Legend of Ñaymlap” is an ancient story from Peru’s northern coastal communities and supposedly records the origins of the Sicán or Lambayeque dynasty (about 750–1375 CE). Within this origin story, there is a moral about the relationship between the deities and the land. As the ruler turns away from the deities, rain and floods devastate the land, starving the community.
Category Archives: Museums
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds?
We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines.
As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw—focusing on the spaces in Poland and Ukraine used by Holocaust survivors to escape Nazi persecution—we talk to the artist behind it, Natalia Romik. Though long planned, the show has gained a troubling topicality as the Russian invasion and destruction of Ukraine continues.
And in this episode’s Work of the Week, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Piet Mondrian’s birth, we discuss his painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44). Caro Verbeek, the co-curator of Mondrian Moves, an exhibition opening this week at the Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Hague, the Netherlands, tells us about the feverish creation and unfinished nature of the Dutch artist’s final work.
Natalia Romik’s exhibition, Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, until 17 July; TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland, 4 August-6 November
Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands, 2 April-25 September. Mondrian Evolution, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 5 June-9 October; K20, Düsseldorf, Germany, 29 October-10 February 2023
Views: ‘Seeing The Samurai’ With Japanese Armour
This fascinating Japanese armour was part of the first diplomatic gift between Japan and Britain. It is over 400 years old and one of the first documented Japanese armours to have been seen on British soil.
Learn more about this amazing object in this short film. See the armour in our exhibition Japan: Courts and Culture at The Queen’s Gallery, London from 8 April 2022 – 26 February 2023.
Tours: ‘Marcel Proust’ – Carnavalet Museum, Paris
The Carnavalet Museum – History of Paris is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Dedicated to the relationship between Marcel Proust and Paris, where he spent most of his life, the exhibition Marcel Proust, a Parisian novel will investigate the city’s place in Proust’s novel.
The first section of the exhibition will explore the world Marcel Proust inhabited in Paris. Having been born and died in Paris, Proust’s life unfurled in the very restricted area encompassed by Parc Monceau, Place de la Concorde, Auteuil, Bois de Boulogne and l’Étoile. Paris was of immense importance in the development of Marcel Proust’s literary vocation, from the time of his earliest writings in the late 1890s with his fellow-pupils at the Lycée Condorcet, to his entry into the city’s high society and encounters with people who would be decisive to his life.
The second part of the exhibition opens on the fictional Paris created by Marcel Proust. Following the architecture of the novel In Search of Lost Time and evoking emblematic places in the city, it offers a journey through the novel and the history of the capital, focusing on the book’s central characters. The city of Paris, represented poetically in the novel, is the setting for the quest of the narrator, the author’s alter ego, until the revelation of his vocation as a writer.
Museum Tour: Pinault Collection In Paris (4K)
A major figure on the contemporary art scene, American sculptor Charles Ray (b. 1953) opens the cultural programme of the 2022, with an exhibition running until the spring.
Artists: Thao Nguyen Phan – ‘My Reflections On The History Of Vietnam’ (Tate)
Step inside the studio of artist Thao Nguyen Phan and discover her mesmerising, poetic work. Through video, paintings and sculpture, Phan explores the historical and ecological issues facing her homeland Vietnam, while speaking to broader ideas around tradition, ideology, ritual and environmental change.
Her recent projects have expanded on ‘the beauty and suffering’ of the Mekong River, which runs through Tibet, China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia before meeting the sea on the coast of Vietnam. Phan’s latest moving image work First Rain, Brise Soleil continues this exploration of the Mekong, proposing a new way of being that draws on indigenous knowledge and respect for the ecosystem.
You can see Phan’s artworks on display at Tate St Ives until 2 May 2022 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate…
Museum Tour: ‘Van Gogh And The Olive Groves’ (4K)
‘Van Gogh and the Olive Groves’ (11 March 2022 – 12 June 2022).
Van Gogh made fifteen paintings of olive groves, constantly experimenting with various approaches. Fascinated by the gnarly shapes of the olive trees and their ever-changing colours, he painted them over and over. He painted at different times of the day and used colours inspired by the season. Vincent himself considered his paintings of olive trees to number amongst the best he had made in the South of France.
This exhibition reunites Van Gogh’s paintings of olive groves and exhibits them together for the first time, thanks to unique loans from museums in Europe and the United States.
Morgan Library: ‘Holbein – Capturing Character’
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) was among the most skilled, versatile, and inventive artists of the early 1500s. He created captivating portraits of courtiers, merchants, scholars, and statesmen in Basel, Switzerland, and later in England, and served as a court painter to Tudor King Henry VIII (1491–1547). Enriched by inscriptions, insignia, and evocative attributes, his portraits comprise eloquent visual statements of personal identity and illuminate the Renaissance culture of erudition, self-fashioning, luxury, and wit. February 11 through May 15, 2022
Museum Exhibit Tours: Jacques Louis David – ‘Radical Draftsman’
Join Perrin Stein, Curator, in the Department of Drawings and Prints, for a virtual tour of Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman, the first exhibition devoted to works on paper by the celebrated French artist.
David navigated vast artistic and political divides throughout his life—from his birth in Paris in 1748 to his death in exile in Brussels in 1825—and his iconic works captured the aspirations and suffering of a nation, while addressing timeless themes that continue to resonate today. Through the lens of his preparatory studies, the exhibition looks beyond his public successes to chart the moments of inspiration and the progress of ideas.
Visitors will follow the artist’s process as he gave form to the neoclassical style and created major canvases that shaped the public’s perceptions of historical events in the years before, during, and after the French Revolution. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will feature more than eighty drawings and oil sketches—including rarely loaned or newly discovered works—drawn from the collections of The Met and dozens of institutional and private lenders.
Learn more about the exhibition: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions…
Museum Design: ‘The Eyes Of Sanxingdui’ In China
Chinese architecture studio MAD has released visuals of The Eyes of Sanxingdui, a scatter of wooden buildings it has designed for the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan City, China. The Eyes of Sanxingdui will contain new exhibition spaces and a visitor centre for the museum, which is known fully as the Sanxingdui Ancient Shu Cultural Heritage Museum. See more on Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/?p=176991
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