Artipedia - Arts News

Kulczyk Foundation

GK COLLECTION #1
The Exhibition of art from Grazyna Kulczyk Collection

18th March – 17th June 2007
Opened daily 12:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Stary Browar The Centre for Art and Business in Poznan, Poland
http://www.grazynakulczyk.com

Senses and ideas beauty and darkness erotic and religion, aesthetic and provocation, entertainment and reflection – all these are interwined in GK’s collection. GK is one of the most important art collectors in Poland and Mid – Eastern Europe. In her collection one can find centuries old and modern works of art with strong emphasis however; put on contemporary art. As a collector GK appreciates experimentation, depth and bravery in art.

The collection includes works of outstanding Polish and foreign contemporary artists. The first display of this multifaceted collection consist of works of such artists as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Miroslaw Balka, Jan Berdyszak, Vanessa Beecroft, Thomas Demand, Izabela Gustowska, Candida Hofer, Zhang Huan, Tadeusz Kantor, Katarzyna Kozyra, Jacek Malczewski, Mariko Mori, Dorota Nieznalska, Roman Opalka, Thomas Ruff, Bruno Schulz, Alina Szapocznikow, Andy Warhol, Andrzej Wróblewski.

Apart the contemporary classics in the collection one can find works of many noteworthy young Polish artists, both male and female. The first exhibition of the collection attempts at creating and placing it in an international context.

The exhibition is derided thematically into rooms dealing with different problems of art and society. It leads through the following room’s themes: the Nude, the Perversion, the Religion, the Library, the Fashion, Body Sculpture, the object and the Museum. Over a hundred exhibits representing different techniques and media touch upon the issues of identity sexuality religion and the status of a work of art in present times. GK Collection # is the first collection of art from GK’s collection foreshadows the creation of a private art contemporary museum planned by the collector.

Curator of the exhibition is Pawel Leszkowicz. The author of the arrangement is Raman Tratsiuk. The designer of the album accompanying GK Collection #1 is Lech Majewski.

For additional information please contact the organizer:

Kulczyk Foundation
ul. Pólwiejska 42
61-888 Poznan
tel.+48 61 859 61 22
fax +48 61 859 61 21
office@kulczykfoundation.pl
http://www.kulczykfoundation.pl

For more information go to: http://www.grazynakulczyk.com

Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture

“RAW, Among the Ruins”
From March 11th 2007 until May 20th 2007

Curated by Lisette Smits and Alexis Vaillant: “Did you ever feel like an old bag in front of a work of art?”

Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture
Maastricht, Netherlands
http://www.marres.org/

A ruin is defined as the disjunctive product of the intrusion of nature into an edifice without loss of the unity produced by the human builders. Time, proposed as the principal cause of ruin, serves also to unify the ruin. In a ruin the edifice, the man-made part, and nature are one and inseparable; an edifice separated from its natural setting is no longer part of a ruin since it has lost its time, space and place. A ruin has a signification different from something merely man-made. It is like no other work of art, and its time is unlike any other time.

A ruin is always ‘over’, in spite of the fact that it necessarily holds fragments of history. Moreover, a ruin is not in front of us. Decay evolves next to us, not to say with us. That’s the reason why we can say that at the beginning, there is the ruin.

Modern times have transformed the way ruins and monuments are approached and considered to the point where ruins became "contemporary ruins", closer to present than to past. "Contemporary ruins" are produced both by the acceleration of time and the growing fascination with deterioration. They test the very idea of a ruin within a system of objects structured by the invention of permanency. Good ruins do not illustrate or morally demonstrate this, but are able to re-reverse logics of time from science fiction to archaeology, from peplum to I-pod. Ruin lets off the very idea of theme because the ruin uses up any theme.

As soon as you start looking around, you see ruins everywhere.

Did you ever feel like an old bag in front of a work of art?

This show offers you a group of hopeful ruins, displayed in a classical nineteenth century aristocratic Dutch house. Here you will come face to face with the Nelly faggot, the spunky Nordic suitcase, the marble hand tapping his way through a fantastic water colour bleached world, a booty of damaged artworks, a mountain of freshly white sprayed earphones, the Jason mask without a face, the black plexiglass mandala, the silver animated survival cover, the suspended up bird, the celebration-church-bordello, and many more. Once in The Corridor of Who Knows When, some are arriving, others are leaving. If you expect nostalgia, be assured that nostalgic images just reiterate an inherited set of cultural expectations. These hopeful ruins might not fulfil that promise.

A ruin definitely alludes to the dissociation of ubiquitous artworks, lost in their photographic "entombed" time. Hopeful ruins resist their representation by being fragmented and, like raw material, ever again available. They point out the fragility of images, which are just thin illusions, doomed to fail our expectations, doomed eventually to crumble.

Artists:
Farîd-Ud-Dîn’Attar, Robert Breer, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dee Ferris, Jason Fox, Vidya Gastaldon, Richard Hawkins, Uwe Henneken, Karl Holmqvist, Jonathan Horowitz, Dorota Jurczak, John Kleckner, Petra Mrzyk & Jean-François Moriceau, Alessandro Pessoli, Nathalie Rebholz, Nick Relph & Oliver Payne, Re-Magazine, Markus Schinwald, V/Vm, Camille Vivier, T.J. Wilcox, and several historical damaged art works to be discovered.

A fully illustrated catalogue edited by Lisette Smits and Alexis Vaillant, with texts by Phillip van den Bossche, Brian Dillon, Raimundas Malasauskas, Noellie Roussel and the curators is published by Veenman Publishers.
RAW, Among the Ruins, Lisette Smits & Alexis Vaillant, eds.
ISBN/EAN: 9789086900671

For more press information please contact Floor Krooi, floor@marres.org or +31-(0)43-3270207

Marres
Open: wed – sun, 12 – 17 hrs.
Bookshop: wed – sat, 12 – 17 hrs.

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

Norwich Gallery

Revolution is not a Garden Party

Michael Blum, Nick Crowe, Igor Grubic, Sanja Ivekovic, Gergely László / Péter Rákosi, Nils Norman and Adrian Paci

Curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes / http://www.translocal.org

22 March – 21 April 2007

Norwich Gallery
Norwich School of Art and Design
Francis House 3-7 Redwell Street
Norwich NR2 4SN
tel +44 (0)1603 756247
info@norwichgallery.co.uk
http://www.norwichgallery.co.uk

The international exhibition ‘Revolution is not a Garden Party’ considers the resonances of social and political revolution in contemporary art against the backdrop of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising.

The exhibition consists of new and recent works that examine the global economic and political context against which revolutions take place, as well as the intersection between personal and artistic heritages of revolution. It expresses the sorrow of failed political struggles in the past and the future, and considers the shared experience of a communist past and the post-communist reality. Other concerns include the experience of revolutionary literature, the gendered images of resistance fighters in contemporary media, and the legacy of 1956 for the relationship of art and revolution.

As the first major popular rebellion against Soviet domination and the communist system in Eastern Europe, 1956 was a vital precursor of later revolutionary struggles. At the same time, it was part of wider geo-political shifts, such as the movement for decolonisation, and had cultural as well as political ramifications across Europe. In the history of art, the demolition of the Budapest Stalin Statue was the ultimate symbol of the decline of Socialist Realism. The truth about revolution is part of a contested history, a living process of rewriting and interpretation in which art takes a decisive part.

The exhibition publication brings together the artistic response to contemporary revolution represented by the exhibition and new reflections on the relationship between art and revolution by theorists and art historians. It includes illustrations and interviews with the artists, and new essays by Gerald Raunig, Benda Hofmeyr, Simon Sheikh, Chus Martinez and Maja and Reuben Fowkes that engage with issues such as art and revolution, aesthetics and politics, and ecology and anarchism. Additionally, responses to individual works in the exhibition highlight the variety of experiences and understandings of revolution in the context of contemporary art. It is published by MIRIAD, the Manchester Metropolitan University Research Institute for advanced cultural inquiry and creativity, and distributed by Cornerhouse Manchester http://www.cornerhouse.org/books

The SocialEast Seminar on Art and Revolution takes as its primary focus the legacy of political, social and cultural revolutions for art and visual culture in Eastern Europe and beyond. This includes discussion of the role of the historical avant-garde, the specific trajectory of Conceptual Art in Central Europe, and the re-evaluation of Socialist Realism as an art historical problem in the context of modernism, post-modernism and the polarised aesthetics of the Cold War. Speakers include Gerald Raunig, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Malcom Miles, Bettina Jungen, Michael Blum, Dorota Monkiewicz, Edit András, Marian Mazzone and Klara Kemp-Welch.
http://www.socialeast.org

Exhibition Venues

Trafó Gallery 26 October – 26 November 2006 http://www.trafo.hu
Holden Gallery 3 – 27 February 2007 http://www.holdengallery.mmu.ac.uk
Norwich Gallery 22 March – 21 April 2007 http://www.norwichgallery.co.uk
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic 14 June – 6 July 2007 http://www.g-mk.hr

The exhibition is supported by MIRIAD Manchester Metropolitan University, European Cultural Foundation, Hungarian Ministry of Culture, Croatian Ministry of Culture and ACEX - Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange.

For more information go to: http://www.norwichgallery.co.uk