Artipedia - Arts News

LABoral

LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries is, first and foremost, a space for artistic exchange. It was set up with the purpose of establishing an effective alliance between art, design, culture, industry and economic progress, and the goal of becoming a space for interaction and dialogue between art and industrial creation.

It is not a museum nor is it just another venue for the exhibition or dissemination of happening trends, because it throws a special spotlight in production, creation and research into art concepts still being defined.

Another major focus will be what we are calling creative industries which is nothing more nor less than a way of transforming creativity into a cultural asset capable of generating economic growth.

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre has set itself the goal of disseminating and promoting among diverse audiences a greater knowledge and appreciation of artistic creations, productions of visual industries and applied art, as crucial stepping stones marking the way forward in these early years of the 21st century.

As an art centre, LABoral is fully committed with the development and experimentation of creative activities by artists exploring expressive concepts and connecting the possibilities offered by modern information and communication technologies with the new technological supports for visual arts, industrial design, fashion or videogames.

The Centre is located in Universidad Laboral of Gijon, a striking architectural complex built in the 1950s to provide vocational training to children of the most disadvantages classes. To host this project, the Government of the Principality of Asturias promoted the refurbishment of some old workshops designed for vocational training, though they were never eventually used for that purpose, with over 12,400 square metres of functional space. This unprecedented initiative, located at the North-East of the Universidad Laboral complex, has been conceived as an intellectual, cultural and regenerating element of the economic structure of a region that wants to make the most of the universal vocation of its people and of its industrial tradition to position itself on a par with other leading regions in the world.

For more information go to: http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org

Bonniers Konsthall

Monica Bonvicini

Bonniers Konsthall
February 15 – April 29, 2007

http://www.bonnierskonsthall.se

This February, Bonniers Konsthall opened the main exhibition for the spring, featuring Italian born/ Berlin based artist Monica Bonvicini. We are very proud to be the first institution in Sweden to present a solo exhibition of this internationally renowned artist.

Since the mid-1990s, Monica Bonvicini has worked on pieces that explore architecture and the built environment from a gender-perspective. Her large-scale installations and sculptures, which often use the art institution’s own architecture, aggressively address the inherent values of the western architectural tradition, revealing the ways that ideas about sexuality and gender infuse every last building block of our constructions.

Monica Bonvicini often uses industrial materials like glass, metal, and chains, and explores and redefines their meanings. A reoccurring theme in her art is the fetishistic value these materials hold, and the way the art object, especially in our culture, functions as a fetish.

The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall features several of Monica Bonvicini’s prominent works, all reference points in the contemporary discourse on art. Her floor-piece Plastered will cover a large part of the konsthall. The ongoing work What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands? is exhibited in its totality, with additional questionnaires filled out in Stockholm. The exhibition also features a series of Monica Bonvicini’s later works, like the text-based large scale sculpture Not For You and one of her double swings.

Monica Bonvicini has had solo-exhibitions at established institutions around the world, like Kunstwerke in Berlin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Wiener Seccesion in Vienna, and recently at the Sculpture Center in New York. She participates frequently in biennials all over the world, and she received the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, one of Europe’s most prestigious art awards, in 2005. Bonvicini is represented by Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan - West of Rome Inc., Los Angeles.

A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Bonniers Konsthall in the centre of Stockholm is a new venue for Swedish and international contemporary art. With exhibitions, seminars, publications, a studio for guest artists and much more, Bonniers Konsthall aims to support the emergence of and to promote encounters with new art. Jeanette Bonnier is the founder of Bonniers Konsthall. Sara Arrhenius has been Director since 2005. The Konsthall is run on a non-profit basis by the Bonnier family under the auspices of The Bonnier Group. The Bonnier Group is one of Scandinavia’s biggest media concerns with operations in the daily press, magazines, books, film and television.

For more information go to: http://www.bonnierskonsthall.se

MoMA

Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making

March 4–June 11, 2007
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street,
New York, NY 10019-5497
Tel: (212) 708-9431
http://www.moma.org

Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making brings together thirteen contemporary artists whose works offer a rich account of the interplay between abstraction and comic models of representation. While many exhibitions have explored the impact of mass culture on contemporary art, they have generally focused on figuration and easily identifiable pop characters and themes. This exhibition approaches the topic from a different angle. It looks at the ways artists—particularly those working in the last fifteen years—have used images culled from slapstick, comic strips, film, caricature, cartoons, and animation as springboards for abstraction, not to withdraw from reality, but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence, and racial stereotyping.

What does it mean to confront political concerns with humor? How can comics serve as a medium for tackling difficult issues? From Julie Mehretu’s intricately layered paintings of cartoon explosions portraying warfare and Arturo Herrera’s psychological collages of children’s coloring books, to Ellen Gallagher’s seductively minimalist paintings permeated by “blackface” signs evocative of minstrel performances and Rivane Neuenschwander’s overpainted comic strips, the works presented here grapple with such questions. The act of abstracting a comic image entails blurring, erasing, and “unpainting” figuration in ways that raise the stakes attached to recognition. Bridging the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful, this exhibition underscores the way popular imagery, which is so deeply imprinted on our collective consciousness, carries an extreme visual potency even when entirely abstracted.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The exhibition is supported in part by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley and by Susan G. Jacoby.

Additional funding is provided by The Friends of Education and The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

The publication is made possible by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro.

For more information go to: http://www.moma.org