Tag Archives: Museum Exhibitions

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Previews, Reviews, Videos

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

March 30, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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.

Art, Arts & Literature, Design, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews, Views

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

Video March 30, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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.

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

Video March 29, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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.”

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

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

Video March 28, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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.

Art, Exhibitions, Museums, Photography, Reviews, Tours, Videos

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

Video March 26, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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

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

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

Exhibition Views: Shirley Jaffe – Form As Experiment

Video March 24, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

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

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.

**Shirley Jaffe, Form as Experiment – Kunstmuseum Basel**

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.

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

Exhibition Views: Manet/ Degas, Musée d’Orsay Paris

March 23, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Musée d’Orsay (March 23, 2023) – Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) were both key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s. This exhibition, which brings together the two painters in the light of their contrasts, forces us to take a new look at their real complicity.

Edgar Degas’s Édouard Manet et sa femme (around 1868-69). Manet was unhappy with the “deformation” of his wife Suzanne’s features and cut her face out of the painting

Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art — Edgar Degas’s *Édouard Manet et sa femme* (around 1868-69). Manet was unhappy with the “deformation” of his wife Suzanne’s features and cut her face out of the paintingKitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art

It shows what was heterogeneous and conflicting in pictorial modernity, and reveals the value of Degas’s collection, where Manet took a greater place after his death.

A comparison of artists as crucial as Manet and Degas should not be limited to identifying the similarities in their respective bodies of work.

Edouard Manet’s *Madame Manet au piano* (1868)© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Admittedly, there is no lack of analogies among these key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s when it comes to the subjects they imposed (from horse races to café scenes, from prostitution to the tub), the genres they reinvented, the realism they opened to other formal and narrative potentialities, the market and the collectors they managed to tame, and the places (cafés, theaters) and circles, whether comprised of family (Berthe Morisot) or friends, where they crossed paths.

Manet / Degas

From March 28 to July 23, 2023

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

Top New Museum Exhibits: ‘Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence’ At MFA Boston

March 20, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – Thanks to the popularity of works like the instantly recognizable Great Wave—cited everywhere from book covers and Lego sets to anime and emoji—Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) has become one of the most famous and influential artists of all time.

Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence

March 26–July 16, 2023

A bright blue tidal wave crests on choppy waters with a mountainscape in the distance. — Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura), also known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) (detail), about 1830–31
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection.

Taking a new approach to this endlessly inventive and versatile Japanese artist, “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence” explores his impact both during his lifetime and beyond. More than 100 woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books by Hokusai are on view alongside about 200 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers, creating juxtapositions that demonstrate his influence through time and space.

A woodblock print of three boats navigating rough waters with a mountain in the background. — Utagawa Hiroshige, The Sea off Satta in Suruga Province (Suruga Satta kaijō), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji sanjūrokkei), 1858
Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection.

Book cover for Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence›

The great painter, book illustrator, and print designer Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) has become the best known of all Japanese artists and one of…

Members are invited to a special exhibition preview March 22–25 before it opens to the public, and can enjoy members-only hours on Sunday mornings during the run of the show. Join today!

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

Reviews: The Top Museum Exhibitions In March 2023

Video March 18, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Sotheby’s (March 16, 2023) – Tim Marlow is back, and this month he’s taking us from London to Tokyo on a tour of some of the most exciting exhibitions to appear this decade.

It’s the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death and The Musée National in Paris along with The Albertina Museum in Vienna are commemorating the occasion with two outstanding shows centered around the legendary artist’s work.

The new landmark Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam showcases 28 known works by the artist, providing a rare opportunity to see a significant collection of his masterpieces in one place. Learn about these thrilling shows and more in this video.

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

Audio February 17, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

February 17, 2023: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage?

We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with its curator, Eleanor Nairne.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a Germantown “eye-dazzler” blanket, made between 1895 and 1905 by a Diné weaver from the Navajo Nation. It’s part of a new show at the Bard Graduate Center in New York,

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Hadley Jensen, the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake: dec.org.uk; a PDF of Aparna Tandon’s handbook First Aid To Cultural Heritage In Times Of Crisis is available for free at iccrom.org.Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 21 May.

The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Prestel, priced £24.99 or $29.95.Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, New York, until 9 July. An online exhibition featuring an interactive catalogue has approximately 250 items from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Navajo textiles will be available later this month at bgc.bard.edu.