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Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews

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

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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’.

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

Arts & Culture: Art Review Magazine – May 2023 Issue

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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

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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

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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.

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

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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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.

Art Galleries, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Reviews, Tours, Videos

Hong Kong Art Exhibits: ‘Zhang Xiaogang – Lost’

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Pace Gallery (May 3, 2023) – In our new film, Zhang Xiaogang discusses his unique approach to representing light in his paintings, as seen in his solo exhibition, “Lost,” on view at our Hong Kong gallery through May 18.

Zhang Xiaogang: Lost

Mar 21 – May 18, 2023

Light No. 9 by Zhang Xiaogang

The artist has been refining his expressive depictions of light for some 30 years, since the 1980s and 1990s. As such, light has become a key subject in its own right in Zhang’s practice.

Zhang Xiaogang, Light No. 9, 2022

Zhang Xiaogang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. Paintings in his Bloodline series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. 

Art, Arts & Literature, History, Profiles, Reviews, Videos

Art: Vincent Became “Van Gogh” With ‘Jardin Devant le Mas Debray’ In 1887

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Sotheby’s (May 3, 2023) – ‘Jardin devant le Mas Debray’ captures this pivotal moment in summer of 1887 where color, subject and paint handling crystallized into Van Gogh’s mature style, one that would flourish in the three years remaining of his life in Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise.

Jardin devant le Mas Debray | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby's
Jardin devant le Mas Debray by Vincent Van Gogh

It was during this period of time, from 1887 to 1890, that Van Gogh’s greatest masterpieces were created, forever changing in the history of modern art. Surrounded by artists, dancers, musicians, actors and writers in Montmartre, Van Gogh abandoned the dark palette that dominated many of his early paintings in Holland and replaced it with a newfound love of color.

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

Fine Art: The Burlington Magazine – May 2023 Issue

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The Burlington Magazine – May 2023: Anxiety about the future of the two great photographic libraries housed in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, can be traced back at least thirty years. In October 1992 we published an Editorial, ‘The Witt and Conway libraries under threat’, which was prompted by a demand from the University of London that the Courtauld – not yet a self-governing and self-financing entity – produce a business plan that would show how the libraries could develop commercial opportunities to offset a threatened reduction in university funding. 

Mey Rahola (1897–1959): The new photographer

Mey Rahola: Desire for Horizons

Although Mey Rahola (1897–1959) was one of the first women to become renowned for art photography in Spain, she remains a little-known figure today. Two linked exhibitions with a single catalogue dedicated to the Catalan photographer set out to rectify this and liberate an overlooked artist from the shadow of anonymity. Working with Rahola’s family, the curators, Lluís Bertran Xirau and Roser Martínez Garcia, have assembled 550 items from her collection, including 250 negatives and a number of photograph albums. That this material had been handed down and divided between the artist’s friends and family is testimony to her interest in her posterity. The fact that, nonetheless, Rahola has remained largely unknown, one is reminded in the exhibition catalogue, is a result partly of her status as a female photographer operating in the early twentieth century and partly of the events of the Spanish Civil War, which ruptured her burgeoning career.

Glass-plate negative of a detail from the Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry photographed

Arts & Literature, Fiction, Magazines, Poetry, Previews, Views

Literary Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Spring 2023

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ZYZZYVA Magazine Spring 2023:

Fiction

  • The Mysteries of the Universe by Anna Badkhen:
    “I see now what this is about. I’m a professor and author in America, she’s in a war zone: to her, I’m rich and happy. How is she supposed to know about the cancer, the medical debt, Ksyusha’s student loans? So, I try to deflect.”
  • Encyclopedia of Botany by Jane Marchant:
    A daughter’s closely observed catalog of the flora around her Bay Area home, and of her family’s complex history of identity.
  • Glint of Sport by Angie Sijun Lou:
    “I don’t know if this story is true. You can’t divide truth from kitsch in this place…”
  • Eulogy by William Hawkins:
    In the wake of a funeral, a dead father’s legacy hangs over his surviving adult sons as they trudge into the lukewarm waters of the lake by the family pier.
  • The Eye by Elodie Saint-Louis:
    “When Theo spoke, she thought, you could see all of these places on his body. Vyros, Hymettus, Loutro, Parnitha. The land was in him. It was the river running out of his mouth. The words that bumped into each other gently but never spilled over, petering out into a gentle sway.”
  • Plus more fiction by Perry Janes, David Hayden (there be strange happenings in a dilapidated insurance building in Chicago), and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace.

Nonfiction

  • Jane Marchant on the flora around her Bay Area home—and her family’s complex history of identity.

Poetry

  • Jason Allen-Paisant, Dan Alter, Allison Benis White, Ricardo Cázares, E.G. Cunningham, Peter LaBerge, Joyce Mansour, Maria Zoccola

Art

  • Sofia Bonati
Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Previews, Reviews

Art Insider: A Review Of ‘Cobbs Barn, South Truro’ By Edward Hopper (1931)

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Sotheby’s (May 1, 2023) – Returning each season to live and paint in Truro elevated Hopper’s art, allowing him to concentrate on the simplification of forms and the depth of both light and color woven into the surrounding landscape.

Expert Voices: Edward Hopper's Cobbs Barn, South Truro and Three Water Colors | The New York Sales | Sotheby's

Both his technical approach to painting and his perception of the world from 1930 onwards are greatly informed by the Cape. Cobb’s Barns, South Truro derives its bright palette and topographical features from Hopper’s immediate environment, and is emblematic of the profound influence that life in South Truro had on his manner of painting.

Group of Houses, dated 1923-24, stems from a pivotal stage in the development of Edward Hopper’s career. Residential homes occupy much of Hopper’s subject matter in these early watercolors, and Group of Houses is no exception. These charming saltbox houses are typical for the Cape Ann region, whose architectural style reflects its coastal New England atmosphere.

The Battery, Charleston, S.C., dated 1929, is the result of Hopper’s three-week stay in the charming southern city, which is renowned for its Georgian-style architecture and cobblestone streets lined with lush palm trees. His Charlestown pictures possess an inherently tropical feeling, which sets them apart from his otherwise New England-focused oeuvre.

Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is among the limited number of watercolors that Hopper completed during the fall of 1927 in Vermont, and embodies the rustic quality of the New England scenery that drew Hopper to this region in the first place. Hopper routinely sketched his surroundings in coastal towns on the Cape or along the Maine shore, but Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is quite unique in that it captures a specific fall moment as the leaves gradually fade from green to burnt orange and red. The present work is emblematic of the simplicity and charm that characterize Hopper’s New England watercolors.