Artipedia - Arts News

MONUMENTA

MONUMENTA
2007/ANSELM KIEFER
GRAND PALAIS-PARIS

May 30 - July 8, 2007

Monumenta 2007

One artist, one place, one work :
an exceptional artistic challenge

From spring 2007, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication presents a major new art event: Monumenta. Each year, Monumenta offers an exceptional artistic challenge, inviting an internationally renowned artist to engage with the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. Each new encounter will give rise to a unique work of art, shaped and inspired by this spectacular setting.

Three contemporary artists have already agreed to participate in this bold new venture, starting with Anselm Kiefer, from May 30 to July 8, 2007. The next two installations in the series will be created by the American sculptor Richard Serra, in 2008, and the French artist Christian Boltanksi, in 2009.

Born in 1945, and a leading figure on the contemporary art scene since the 1970’s, Anselm Kiefer has chosen to live and work in France for the past decade. His work comprises paintings and sculptures of tremendous emotional power and immediacy, inspired by the great dramas of the 20th century, with a wealth of motifs and symbols exploring creation mythology and the nature of the cosmos. Kiefer’s grandiose works draw on a range of media and imagery, from sand, branches, celestial bodies and hair, to poetic, mystical or scientific texts.

Under the title Sternenfall (’Falling Stars’), Anselm Kiefer has chosen to dedicate the new group of works created specially for the Grand Palais to two central figures of 20th-century German literature, the Jewish-born poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) and the Austrian poetess Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), both noted for their strident political stance and their commitment to the duty of remembrance.

A commitment to outreach

MONUMENTA is dedicated to supporting the creation of new works of art, together with an exceptional range of services and interpretive resources for the widest possible public, designed to provide each visitor with the tools they need to understand and enjoy works by the artists of our day.
A team of contemporary art specialists will be available on site at the Grand Palais, helping the public to explore the new works on display to the full. Free audio guides deliver targeted, expert commentaries, background knowledge, and audio content covering a range of themes (’Matter and signs’, ‘European culture after the Shoah’, ‘Cosmogony and mythology’, ‘Painting, literature and poetry’ etc.) designed to highlight the importance of the individual viewer at the heart of the artist’s world.

A new perspective on today’s world. A new perspective on the Grand Palais.

The recently-renovated Grand Palais is one of the great historic buildings of Paris, and the world. Designed for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, the monumental steel-and-glass roof rises to a height of 45 metres beneath the central dome, while the nave extends for over 200 metres at ground level, covering a surface of 13,500 square metres in a single span. The Grand Palais is the setting for numerous prestigious cultural events. Now, MONUMENTA provides individual contemporary artists with an unparalleled opportunity to work in this extraordinary environment, expressing their creativity and artistic power to their fullest extent. A new way to discover the work of a living artist. A new way to discover the Grand Palais.

Curator : José Alvarez

For further information, visit http://www.monumenta.com

Monumenta 2007 : Anselm Kiefer
From May 30 to July 8, 2007
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill 75008 PARIS

Daily except Tuesday
Monday and Wednesday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday: Noon to midnight

For further information: +33 (0)1 40 15 73 11
Group visits, school parties: +33 (0)1 40 15 38 43

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

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Marlene Dumas—Broken White

14 April 2007 – 1 July 2007
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
4-1-1, Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022 Japan
Tel: +81 (0)3 5245 4111
Fax: +81 (0)3 5124 1141
http://www.mot-art-museum.jp/
The exhibition’s official site: http://dumas.jp

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) will present the first comprehensive exhibition in Japan of the works of Marlene Dumas (born in Cape Town in 1953), a female artist who creates and exhibits internationally.

Raised in apartheid South Africa, Dumas studied art at Cape Town University in the 1970s, an era when radical aesthetics rocked art to its foundations. Since 1976 she has made Amsterdam her base. Taking as subject matter her lovers, daughter and friends, or else images of people found in the media, her portraits have a suggestive character, highly provocative of the viewer’s imagination, and they document our society with disturbing honesty. To portraits and representation of the human body, traditional subjects in painting, she brings contemporary sensibilities and a forceful reality. Strongly influenced by photography and movies in her depiction of real human emotion, Dumas is restoring vitality to the painted image, as if by recombining the DNA of other media.

Because of her cultural background in South Africa, Dumas stands at a distance from Western culture and has readily absorbed references from African and Japanese art. Her existential approach to her subject, unbiased by culture, and her openness to references, as such, have engendered her unusual style.

Ceaselessly changing in her work, Dumas applies her individualistic interpretation of painting in depicting discrimination, prejudice, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and so on, thereby producing a social portrait rich in the complexity that defines our times. In this exhibition—together with “Banality of Evil” (1984) and other examples of her brightly colored, bewitching oil portraits of the 1980s; her renowned grouped-portrait series, “Female” (1992-1993), consisting of 217 drawings; and her nude portrait series—MOT will display works from her latest series, “Man Kind” (2002 – 2006), dealing with mistaken identities and fears concerning global terrorism.

As befits a presentation of Dumas works in Japan, the exhibition will reflect, in its composition, the artist’s interest and involvement in this country. Her new work “Broken White,” from which the exhibition title derives, will be displayed along with the Nobuyoshi Araki monochrome photograph that served as its model and also a Ukiyo-e print by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-1792), whose grotesque world of Eros resonates with Dumas’s works and strongly caught her interest. The first exhibition in Japan to introduce the full scope of Dumas’s chief works—through 150 works, including some 10 new creations—Broken White will precede major Marlene Dumas retrospectives scheduled for 2008 at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Marlene Dumas—Broken White is co-curated by Yuka Uematsu, Chief Curator, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art; and Yuko Hasegawa and Masami Yamamoto, respectively Chief Curator and Assistant Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be available in English and Japanese, co-published by the museums and Tankosha Publishing Co., Ltd. The catalogue will feature about 70 illustrations of key works by Marlene Dumas, including some of her new productions. Dumas’s short texts and an exclusive long interview illuminate the thoughts and practice of the artist.

[Marlene Dumas: Broken White] hardcover with jacket, 160 p color & b/w, 190×240 mm, Japanese/English hb, ISBN 978-4-473-03415-1, published in April 2007.

Marlene Dumas—Broken White will travel to the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan (21 October 2007 - 20 January 2008).

Marlene Dumas—Broken White is supported by Mondriaan Foundation; Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Japan; sponsored by Wacoal Holdings Crop.; Lion Corporation; Shimizu Corporation; Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd; and in cooperation with KLM Royal Dutch Airline.

For further information please contact Kaoru Shinahama, Press Office, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan.

Call +81-(0)3-5245-1134 / fax:+81-(0)3-5245-1141, Email k-shinahama@mot-art.jp

Also on View at MOT
Show Me Thai
18 April – 20 May 2007

Contemporary art exhibition with more than 70 artists from Thailand and Japan, commemorating the 120th anniversary of the Japan-Thai diplomatic relations.

Participating Thai artists include Montien Boonma, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Navin Rawanchaikul, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Porntaweesak Rimsakul, and Chatchai Puipea.

For more information go to: http://dumas.jp