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CIFO

CIFO Art Space PRESENTS Three Perspectives: CIFO 2007 Commissions Program Artists ON VIEW MARCH 17 – MAY 6, 2007

Exhibition in downtown Miami features new work by three artists from Latin America selected through CIFO’s 2007 Commissions Program

This spring, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) will present 3 Perspectives: CIFO 2007 Commissions Program Artists showcasing newly-commissioned work by the three artists from Latin America selected through CIFO’s 2007 Commission Program: conceptual artist & painter Eugenio Espinoza (Venezuela); painter Alvaro Oyarzún (Chile); and video artist José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia).

The exhibition, featuring new work by each artist alongside selections of their previous work, will be on view from March 17 to May 6, 2007 at the CIFO Art Space at 1018 North Miami Avenue. The exhibition is curated in house by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill CIFO’s Chief curator and Laura Lavernia, CIFO’s assistant curator. Three curators have been invited to lead public talks with the artists and to write essays on the artists: Cuauhtemoc Medina (Mexico) on Restrepo, Cecilia Brunson (Chile) on Oyarzún, and Ruth Auerbach (Venezuela) on Espinoza.

A bilingual illustrated catalog for 3 Perspectives will be published. The catalogue will be launched at a special event prior to the close of the exhibition.

“CIFO’s goal is to broaden global understanding of the work of artists who are making a significant impact in Latin America but are less familiar to U.S. audiences,” said CIFO Director and Chief Curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. “The Commissions Program gives these artists a forum to develop and present new work, and provides residents and visitors to Miami with the rare opportunity to learn about their important contributions to contemporary art.”

CIFO established the program in 2006 to support and share the work of mid-career visual artists from Latin America who are exploring new directions in contemporary art. Submissions are reviewed by an international panel of leading artists, curators and art professionals, and two to four artists are selected each year to receive funding for a new project and an exhibition at CIFO. CIFO launched the Commissions program last May with the presentation of Savage Modern/Moderno Salvaje by Alexander Apóstol (Venezuela) and Surfaces/Superficies by Magdalena Fernández (Venezuela).

Miami-based Venezuelan artist Eugenio Espinoza is the recipient of the 2007 CIFO Achievement Commission, a special honor recognizing the significant contributions of an artist from Latin America that have an extensive career track by providing them with broader exposure. “The Achievement Commission is especially significant, as it offers an international platform for artists with an important trajectory—an exchange that enriches both artist and audience alike,” noted Fajardo-Hill.

Espinoza will present a series of painted canvases—each using the grid structure that has become a signature element of his work—creating mounted structures that oscillate between sculpture, installation and painting. This series is a response to Espinoza’s 30-year conceptual oeuvre that has expanded and challenged the rigidity of the modernist grid, while also using it as artistic language. The canvases will be presented alongside historic photographs, artist sketchbooks and a new installation, Negativa Moderna, a direct response to his 1972 work, Impenetrable–an installation of a grid on canvas covering the floor of the exhibition space thereby denying public access.

Installation artist Alvaro Oyarzún of Chile will present a new project entitled, La imagen pintada o los más bellos recuerdos de la vida del Capitán Zanahoria (The Painted Image or the Most Beautiful Memories of the Life of Captain Carrot). This large-scale piece, encompassing an entire gallery wall, is composed of some 500 small-scale drawings, paintings and photographs. Oyarzún refers to his work as a visual montage of various intertwined stories where the characters—amorphous archetypes of artists—carry out one plot. In The Painted Image, these characters question the existence of art and the relationship between art and the artist. The piece also explores the relationship between painting and the contemporary image through photographic documentation and the multiplicity (and inherent irony) of Oyarzún’s humorous drawings as both didactic and illustrative tools.

José Alejandro Restrepo, considered one of the pioneer video artists in his native Colombia, will produce the newly-commissioned video installation Protomárties, a contemporary interpretation of the santoral, or calendar of the lives of saints. Restrepo will present Protomárties along with a selection of works—a video/sculpture and three video pieces—all which, through the use of new media, re-contextualize religious iconography and myth. The dramatic, baroque visual expressions of Christianity in Latin America are a key influence in Restrepo’s work, offering “a rich laboratory from which to develop a repertoire of figures and bodies that can be re-interpreted within a contemporary context.”

Special Events - Conversations with Curators

Eugenio Espinoza and curator Ruth Auerbach (Venezuela)
Saturday, March 17 at 11 a.m.

Alvaro Oyarzún and curator Cecilia Brunson (Chile)
Sunday, March 18 at 11 a.m.

José Alejandro Restrepo and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico)
Monday, March 19 at 7 p.m.

All talks will be held at CIFO Art Space at 1018 North Miami Avenue and are free to the public.

About CIFO
CIFO, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, is a non-profit organization, established in 2002 by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and her family to foster cultural and educational exchange within the visual arts. CIFO has three primary initiatives: CIFO Art Space – a permanent venue for the presentation of engaging and provocative contemporary art exhibitions highlighting works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, works by its grantees and commissioned artists and experimental, challenging art programs; Grants and Commissions Programs supporting emerging and mid-career contemporary multi-disciplinary artists from Latin America; and offering support to other cultural endeavors through partnerships and funding.

Location: 1018 North Miami Avenue, downtown Miami
Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Public information: Available online at http://www.cifo.org or by calling 305.455.3380.
Tours: To schedule an appointment or tour (for groups of 5 or more), call 305.455.3385.

Media in Miami contact:
Andrea Navarro, Communications Coordinator
Email: anavarro@cifo.org; 305.455.3337

National and international media contact:
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
Lily Mitchem, 212.671.5163; lmitchem@resnicowschroeder.com
Laura Bradley Davis, 415.513.3852; ldavis@resnicowschroeder.com

Para informacio_n en Espanol:
Andrea Navarro, Communications Coordinator
Email: anavarro@cifo.org; 305.455.3337

Bios of the artists are provided below. High-definition photos are available upon request.

Eugenio Espinoza
Born in San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela in 1950, Espinoza studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas (EAPCC) in Caracas and later at Pratt Institute in New York and New York University. Espinoza is regarded as one of the first conceptual artists in Venezuela and also one of the most influential artists of his generation. Over the course of thirty years, Espinoza has developed an oeuvre investigating the paradigms and concepts of geometric abstraction.

At 22, Espinoza was given his first solo exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas where he exhibited 20 Obras (20 works)—his conceptual investigation of the modernist grid. That same year, 1972, at the Ateneo de Caracas, he presented El Impenetrable (The Impenetrable), an installation made of reticulated fabric covering the floor, which restricted the viewer from entering the exhibition space — a parody of the Penetrables created by artist Jesus Soto. Among some of his most important solo exhibitions are: Tequeños at the Museo de la Estampa y Diseño Carlos Cruz-Diez, Caracas, Venezuela (2004); Linea Blanca at the Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero (1995); Orla at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofia Imber, Caracas (1992); and Karakana at the Museo de Arte La Rinconada, Caracas, Venezuela (1985). Espinoza has also participated in group exhibitions such as: Jump Cuts: Venezuelan Contemporary Art from the Mercantil Collection at the Ameri
cas Society in New York (2005); Geo-metrías: Abstracción Geométrica en la Colección Cisneros at Malba in Buenos Aires and the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, Uruguay (2003); Utopolis at the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas, Venezuela (2000), among others. His work has also been included in various anthologies on contemporary art from Latin America and is in various museum collections such as, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Museo de Are Contemporáneo Sofia Imber, and the Fundación GEGO, as well as many private collections. Espinoza has also taught at EAPCC in Venezuela and has worked as an art critic. He currently lives and works in Miami.

Alvaro Oyarzún
Self-taught, since 1987 Chilean artist Alvaro Oyarzún has engaged in the creation of large-scale, mixed media work he calls “paintings,” each comprised of numerous accumulated small drawings, paintings, and photographs he creates that encompass the gallery wall. Composed of intertwined, sometimes fictional, stories, humoristic drawings and illustrations taken from a variety of sources, Oyarzún’s work explores art historical topics and the complex role, and life, of the artist.

Oyarzún’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions such as: Perdimos la Patria pero Ganamos un Lugar en la Foto, with the Group “El Piano de Ramon Carnicer,” Galeria Bucci, Santiago (1987); Fragilidad de Zona, Instituto Cultural de las Condes, Santiago (1990); Collectio Organum – Transplante, Galeria Animal, Santiago (2001); Cambio de Aceite, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Chile (2003); El Autodidacta, Galeria Animal, Santiago (2003); and Marking Time at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas (2005). He is the recipient of the Fondart Grant in Chile (2004, 2002, and 2001). He lives and works in Santiago, Chile.

José Alejandro Restrepo
José Alejandro Restrepo was born in 1959 in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied at the Universidad Nacional (Bogotá) and at the Ecóle des Beaux Arts in Paris. Considered one of the pioneer video artists in his native Colombia, Restrepo’s work explores the complex socio-political situations present Colombia, and Latin America, through a revision of colonial heritage and scientific exploration; and an analysis of religion, myth and iconographies. Restrepo’s video installations are characterized by the exploration of a central theme through a complex interrelation of these various avenues.

Restrepo’s work has been the subject of various solo exhibitions such as: TransHistorias: Mito y Memoria en la Obra de José Alejandro Restrepo, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogota (2001); Musa Paradisíaca, Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá (1997); Anaconda, Aphone in Geneva, Switzerland (1993); and Terebra at the Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Bogotá— one of the first video installations made in Colombia (1988). Among the various group exhibitions is work has been featured in are: Arte y Violencia en Colombia, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota (1999); The Sense of Place, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1998); Tempo at the Museum of Modern Art Queens, New York (2002); Botánica Poltica, Santa Montcada, Fundación la Caixa in Barcelona (2004) and Cantos/Cuentos Colombianos: Contemporary Colombian Art at the Daros-Latinamerica, Zurich (2004). He has participated in several international art events, such as The Havana Biennial (1994, 2
000), Sao Paulo Biennial (1996) and the Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, where his work received the biennial award. Recently, Restrepo has been invited to participate in the Art Exhibition at the International Venice Biennale, slated for June 10 – November 21, 2007. He lives and works in Botogá, Colombia.

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

MIT-Press

New from MIT-Press (Leonardo Book Series)

MediaArtHistories, Edited by Oliver GRAU,
MIT-Press, Cambridge/Mass. 2007.
English
504 pages, numerous coloured and b/w illustrations, hardcover
ISBN-10: 0262072793
ISBN-13: 978-0262072793

Please visit
http://www.mediaarthistories.org/pub/mediaarthistories.html

Bridging the Gap

MediaArtHistories, Edited by Oliver GRAU,
with contributions by Rudolf ARNHEIM, Andreas BROECKMANN, Ron BURNETT, Edmond COUCHOT, Sean CUBITT, Dieter DANIELS, Felice FRANKEL, Oliver GRAU, Erkki HUHTAMO, Douglas KAHN, Ryszard W. KLUSZCZYNSKI, Machiko KUSAHARA, Timothy LENOIR, Lev MANOVICH, W. J. T. MITCHELL, Gunalan NADARAJAN, Christiane PAUL, Louise POISSANT, Edward A. SHANKEN, Barbara Maria STAFFORD and Peter WEIBEL.

Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today’s media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines–film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.

Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp’s inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They re-examine and redefine key media art theory terms – machine, media, exhibition – and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images.

Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history.

Oliver Grau is Professor for Image Science and Dean of the Department for Image Science, Danube University Krems (Austria) http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dis

He is the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT Press, 2003), editor of Mediale Emotionen (2005) and founder of the pioneering international digital art archive http://www.virtualart.at

For more information go to: http://www.mediaarthistories.org/pub/mediaarthistories.html

Deste Foundation

Deste Prize 2007
for Contemporary Greek Artists

Opening:
Thursday 24th May 2007
Award Ceremony:
24th September 2007

Deste Foundation
Centre for Contemporary Art
11, Filellinon & Em. Pappa Street
142 34 Nea Ionia, Athens, Greece
T: +30 210 2758490, F: +30 210 2754862
E: info@deste.gr
http://www.deste.gr

The Deste Foundation is pleased to launch its new visual identity designed by M/M (Paris), on the occasion of the announcement of the shortlisted artists for the upcoming Deste Prize 2007 for Contemporary Greek Artists.

The Deste Prize was established in 1999 as part of the Foundation’s policy of supporting and promoting contemporary art in Greece and is awarded every two years to a Greek artist living and working either in Greece or abroad. Through this prize, Deste hopes to endorse the spirit of exploration, ingenuity and ambition, so essential to the Foundation’s mission and to the vitality of contemporary art.

The Selection Committee has chosen the following six (6) short-listed artists for the Deste Prize 2007:

Loukia Alavanou, for the video collages she creates by sampling images from classic animation movies, cult horror films and early 20th century family photographs.

Nikos Arvanitis, for the versatility he demonstrates in his use of media (video, music, drawing, installations, performance) and for his approach of the notions of the public and the political, of high and mass culture.

Yiannis Gregoriades, for his investigation into the various aspects of reality and urban space and for the way in which his work combines a recording of data with a process of research and classification that is reminiscent of the practice of archaeology.

Eleni Kamma, for employing the methods of copying and editing to create utopian space and to articulate a critique of ideologies and stereotypes.

Socrates Fatouros, for his distinctive gestural language that produces a palimpsest of iconographic types and symbols.

Savas Christodoulides, for his particular approach of the tension that is typical of bipolar models, such as the hand-made versus the ready-made, the high versus the low, the place of the artwork versus that of the viewer.

This year marks the fifth presentation of the Deste Prize. Since its inception the Prize has been awarded to: Panayota Tzamourani (1999), Georgia Sagri (2001), Maria Papadimitriou (2003) and Christodoulos Panayiotou (2005).

The winner of the Deste Prize 2007 will be announced on September 24th in a special ceremony at Deste Foundation.

DESTE Prize 2007 Selection Committee:
Nadia Argyropoulou – Independent curator, Kostis Velonis – Artist, Harry David – Collector, Despina Zefkili – Art critic, Athinorama magazine, Elpida Karamba – Art critic / Curator, Margarita Pournara – Journalist, Kathimerini newspaper.

Deste Prize 2007 Jury Committee:
Pawel Althamer - Artist, Laura Hoptman - Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Hans Ulrich Obrist - Co-Director Exhibitions & Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, Amanda Sharp - Publisher, Frieze Magazine, Dakis Joannou, President of the Deste Foundation

M/M (Paris) on Deste´s new visual identity:
An efficient visual identity is a concretion of identities, that of the person, the event or the place that needs an identity and that of the person or group of people hired to create this identity. Creating an identity means giving a visual existence to a point of view on the person, the place or the event who needs an identity. The graphic designer hired to create the identity by strongly giving his point of view will communicate his/her insight into this specific person, place or event that will then exist through the eyes of their viewers. To sum this up in simple words, something which can not be seen throughout a point of view has no identity. Therefore we have created for Dakis Joannou a peeping hole, so he and the public can look at his collection through a different perspective.
M/M (Paris), March 2007

For more information go to: http://www.deste.gr