Artipedia - Arts News

Louise T Blouin Institute

Gary Hill and Gerry Judah
20th June - 26th August 2007

The Louise T Blouin Institute
3 Olaf Street
London W11 4BE
t: 020 7985 9600
info@ltbfoundation.org
Tuesday - Sunday (10.00–18.00). Closed Mondays.
Late opening until 8.30pm on Tuesdays.

http://www.ltbfoundation.org

THE LOUISE T BLOUIN INSTITUTE opened new solo exhibitions by Gary Hill and Gerry Judah in June 2007. There will also be an extensive programme of lectures, education work and public events to examine issues including conflict of interest and foreign policy, and to explore new solutions for the challenges of the 21st century.

GARY HILL will exhibit two new works in the 5,000 sq ft space on the ground floor gallery.

Guilt (2006) is an intriguing installation of oversized rotating gold coins mounted on columns. Images of the artist’s brutalised face are depicted on the coins which are viewed through telescopes mounted on pyramid plinths. The work is set to a provocative voiceover by the artist.

Frustrum (2006) incorporates a gigantic virtual eagle ensnared in an electric pylon, projected in a darkened room across a ten-metre tank of oil. Despite the constraints of the tower, the eagle beats its huge wings to the sound of a cracking whip. The reflection of the bird ripples across the tank of oil in which a gold bar lies half-submerged. Inscribed into the gold bar is a maxim which reads: "FOR EVERYTHING WHICH IS VISIBLE IS A COPY OF THAT WHICH IS HIDDEN".

GERRY JUDAH will exhibit a new body of work to include eight white on white panoramic landscapes that challenge the boundary between painting and sculpture. Judah’s work is inspired by images of war zones and takes as its subject the horror of war and its devastating impact on the landscape of the Middle East and elsewhere. This new body of work is a direct response to the Iraq War and recent events in Lebanon, although Judah’s landscapes of decimated settlements are generic, and not geographically specific.

Judah creates delicate collages of desolated urban fabric. Scores of miniature buildings fixed onto the canvas are systematically destroyed by the artist to create a ‘presence of absence’. Immaculately constructed and lacquered in layers of white acrylic gesso, his paintings are both environmentally and politically charged.

Both Hill and Judah create a mille feuille of references through their work, whether art historical, political or environmental, which challenge the viewer to consider our relationships to each other globally, our future together and solutions.

Related Events

Tuesday 10th July
Conor Gearty: Can Democracy withstand the "War on Terror"?
Professor of Human Rights Conor Gearty poses key political questions facing the world today. Can democratic and human rights values be rebuilt, or is the ‘War on Terror’ now a permanent feature of our democratic culture

Tuesday 24th July
Richard DeDomenici: Did Priya Pathak Ever Ger Her Wallet Back?
Subversive “one-man think-tank” Richard DeDomenici explores the complicated relationships between his artwork and the police in this provocatively topical solo show.

Tuesday 31st July
David Littlefield: The Power of Absence
Architectural journalist David Littlefield explores the narratives implicit in the artworks of Gerry Judah, and how the abandoned, lifeless ruins of the artist’s reliefs are emblematic of ways of seeing.

Tuesday 7th August
John Keane: Painting is History
Artist John Keane will trace the development of his work over the last 30 years and discuss how he has sought to address unfolding contemporary history, with particular reference to conflict and the pursuit of violence for political ends.

Tuesday 21st August
Roger Tolson: The Exploded View — Images of the city at war
Tolson, Acting Head of Collections at the Imperial War Museum London, will explore how artists have described cities during modern warfare

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

The Warehouse Gallery

Networked Nature
until 17 July 2007
Artists: C5 Corporation, Futurefarmers, Shih Chieh Huang, Philip Ross,
Stephen Vitiello, Gail Wight.
Curator: Marisa Olson, Rhizome.
The Warehouse Gallery,
Syracuse University, New York.

Faux Naturel
7 July - 25 August 2007
Artists: Alex Da Corte, Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby, Nick Lenker, Annie MacDonell, Allyson Mitchell,
Andrea Vander Kooij.
Curator: Astria Suparak, The Warehouse Gallery.
Foreman Art Gallery,
Bishop’s University, Quebec.

The Warehouse Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions: Networked Nature, organized by Rhizome Curator Marisa Olson at The Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, New York, through July 17, and Faux Naturel, curated by Warehouse Gallery Director Astria Suparak at the Foreman Art Gallery in Sherbrooke, Quebec, opening July 7.

Networked Nature

Networked Nature is a group exhibition that inventively explores the meaning and representation of "nature," from the perspective of networked culture. The featured works employ various scientific processes and locative media, such as global positioning systems (GPS) and robotics, and take the form of installations, video and sound art. Together, they make new contributions to the discourses of extant genres, such as sculpture, earth works and landscape imagery, while also demonstrating the scientific beauty and complexity of electronic and digital art. This exhibition premiered at Foxy Production in New York City and was expanded for The Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, with additional works by C5 Corporation and Huang, who is included in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Faux Naturel

The group of North American artists presented in Faux Naturel is young enough to have grown up with a more informed sense about the environment, with Earth Day pre-printed on calendars and global warming existing as more than just a theory. These artists explore the territory delineated by the destruction of the natural world, with all its attendant themes: entropy, redemption, apocalypse, the fall from grace, the temptations of commercial culture, and the relationship between science and magic. There is an authenticity in these artists’ practices, stripped of trendy cynicism. Many of the works draw from personal stories–sublimations of painful experiences reclaimed and reshaped into something beautiful and heartfelt, with the power to transform. This exhibition premiered at The Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse in fall 2006.

Acknowledgements:

The Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University exhibits and commissions work by emerging and accomplished artists whose work engages the community in a dialogue regarding the role the arts can play in illuminating critical issues.

Rhizome is a leading new media organization affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Its programs support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways.

The Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University is committed to art presentation and discourse, as well as the exploration of diversity of culture.

Upcoming Exhibitions at The Warehouse Gallery:

Aw, c’mon: Sexualizing the Female Gaze
Jo-Anne Balcaen, Juliet Jacobson, Rachel Rampleman
23 August - 27 October 2007
Reception Sept. 20, 5-8pm

The Yes Men
13 November 2007 - 26 January 2008
Reception Nov. 15, 5-8pm

For further information, contact:
T: 315.443.6450
press@thewarehousegallery.org

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette Street
Syracuse, NY 13202
http://www.thewarehousegallery.org

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

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Anish Kapoor
Svayambh
June 1st - September 1st
Curator : Jean de Loisy

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
10 rue Georges-Clemenceau
44000 NANTES
10am-6pm daily
Thursdays until 8am
Closed Tuesdays and public holidays

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, in France, is taking part in the Estuaire Nantes Saint Nazaire 2007 project, from 1 June to 1 September.

To mark the occasion, Anish Kapoor has been invited to create a work especially for the Museum.

Anish Kapoor has chosen to show Svayambh, a monumental installation extending across the entire ground floor. This work comprises a gigantic block of red wax transported by a flatcar that gradually crosses the exhibition space on rails set 150 centimetres above the floor. Cumbrously the flatcar makes its way through the arches of the patio, leaving dramatic strips of its wax cargo on the pillars in a painful but inexorable advance that can be read as an allegory of memory and history - two themes central to the museum’s functioning. The fifteen tons of red matter that are slowly worn away by the arches speak to us of the suffering of human beings caught up in the mysterious workings of destiny.

Staying true to his interest in forms produced by forces or stresses that modify an object’s shape, the artist offers a work generated by the architecture of the space. Whence the title Svayambh, a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning - something like "self-engendered, shaped by one’s own energy" - hints at the cosmic connotations underpinning the work of Anish Kapoor. From 12 October-13 January this sculpture will be shown at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Anish Kapoor’s oeuvre is one of the landmarks of the sculpture of the last twenty years. Making its appearance in the context of the new English sculpture in the early 1980s, it at once stood out as dissenting from that of such major sculptors of the same generation as Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. Where their work is characterised by the use of materials typical of the late industrial period, Kapoor’s has a timeless look that seems to owe its existence to inner processes of maturation. His first sculptures made his reputation with their bright coatings of pigment and the intense spirituality they seemed to radiate; since then he has been undertaking astonishingly monumental projects to which, in terms of ambition and sheer physical effect, we can only compare the achievements of American sculptors of the 70’s. He recently elaborated on an already singular vocabulary in the gigantic Marsyas, presented in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London: a work whose dimensions, tragic
lyricism and plastic innovation left Europe stunned.

Born in Bombay in 1954, Anish Kapoor lives in London. After training at the Chelsea School of Art & Design in 1977-78, he began his career in the early 80’s with an exhibition in Paris and followed up with a host of solo and group shows. He was awarded the Premio Duemila at the 1990 Venice Biennale, then the Turner Prize in 1991. He was given an Honorary Fellowship at the London Institute in 1997 and was named CBE en 2003. His work has been acquired by major collections including the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The catalogue
A 72-page catalogue, published by Fage, accompanies the exhibition. Texts: Blandine Chavanne, Jean de Loisy, Olivier Schefer et Gilles Tieberghien

This exhibition has been organised with the backing of Gaz de France and the Société Générale bank.

Anish Kapoor, Svayambh is open every day including Tuesdays.

Press Officer
Véronique Triger
+ 33 (0)2 51 17 45 40
veronique.triger@mairie-nantes.fr

For more information go to: