Artipedia - Arts News

Shona Queen by Tufani Magabali

Art Rouge Gallery and Miami Beach Botanical Garden present Shona Stone Sculptures Art Exhibit, a special collection of 23 pieces by established and also very promising artists from the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe, Africa.

This exclusive exhibition of contemporary Stone Sculptures presents the symbiosis between the African forms of expression (strongly marked by mythology) and the representation of the birth of Jesus. With this collection, several Shona sculptors show us their particular vision of Christ Nativity. In this way, a direct bond is established between African art expression nature and the Christian faith.

Sculptures of the Shona ethnic group of Zimbabwe are entirely carved by hand. The artists do not use machines to cut the stone or to sandpaper the sculpture. Wood or a gas lamp is used to heat the front stone before certain parts are waxed and polished to accentuate the natural colors of it. The stones must commonly use are Serpentine and Springstone. Artwork results from a direct dialogue between the material (the stone) and the creator. The sculptors ask the stone to reveal what should become the creation

In a Newsweek article SHONA stone sculpture was described as having become the most interesting art manifestation of the 20th century. During the past decade, Zimbabwe Shona Sculpture has become the most collected form of African Art. It has found its way into important repositories such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Rodin Museum, and into the homes of the Rockefellers and the Princes of Wales. Picasso was an admirer of early Shona Sculpture; now evidence is surfacing that he was influenced by it, too.

Abraham / 24″ x 36″ / Oil on Mylar paper - collage - 2007

Cutting Edge Art Exhibit

Contemporary conceptually designed multimedia artworks by Houston based artist Rodrigo Aguilera are in an intense dialogue with art theory and philosophy as well as with the broader social reality.
Science and Art, both have the Kantian aesthetic interest when referring to the beauty of complexity in nature and to its creative and self-reflexive aspects. The notion of sublime in general pertains to that in nature which transgresses the capabilities of imagination and the life of an individual being. Art, in particular modern art, must be the most complex subject in the world to understand. To reach this comprehension we should use that ‘freshness of vision’ of a child, limiting adult perception subjugated by thinking.
Rodrigo is one of those artists who by ‘tricking’ the mind comes to break down its formatting, that is, avoids activating pre-formatted patterns and pre-formatted perceptions. Such paintings as “Abraham, “David Michael Angelo” and “Mona Lisa” present a non logical design of juxtapositioned elements of abstract collage and perfect academy style painting, unconventional perspective, and non-linear lines that helps to prevent set patterns from being triggered in the mind, causing the attention to focus at the painting and creatively assemble the parts anew. In particular, this aids integration of the parts into the whole picture rather than viewing a ‘framed’ subject set out and separate from the background.
Melting two art concepts: abstract and figurative… Aguilera paints a piece and then re-creates it using all of its original parts. Following the principal of nature that parts form a whole, with this rearrangement process he confirms that everything in creation has a place and a purpose. There is no question that we do see the presence of pictorial beauty, and harmony; we receive enjoyment from its viewing; we perceive integrity and wholeness and a sense of completion. The qualitative interrelationship is obtained through harmony of color, line and masses and good overall composition and design, and a consistency of technical rendering.

“Cutting Edge” opens February 9, 2008 at Art Rouge Gallery International Contemporary Art which is located in the Wynwood Art District, 46 NW 36 St., Loft 3, Miami, FL 33127. The opening reception will be from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and the art show will run until March 15, 2008. For more information please visit www.artrouge.com or call 305-448-2060.

me and Arafat,Tamara Moyzes

15 February – 15 March 2008

Opening
14.02.08, between 19.00 – 21.00

Project curator: Juraj Carny
Project co-ordinator: Katarina Slaninova

Participant artist
Matus Lanyi
Stano Masar
Tamara Moyzes
Vladimir Nikolic
Sara Nuytemans/ Arya Pandjalu
Brendan Powell Smith

Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte as it aims to create the most vital facilities for contemporary art in the city of Vienna on non-profit base concerned with bringing the current developments of the enlargement of Europe to the fore through generating interconnected routes; the founder and director of Open Space, Gulsen Bal invited Space Gallery to stage an exhibition to create a zone of communicative transfer beyond physical borders.

The conception of the exhibition INTERFACE is based on the presentation of art works which consciously confront themselves with religion. The aim of the exhibition is neither to shock nor draw attention to the religious questions, but trace different approaches to this theme by artists coming from various religious environments – Islam, Jewish and Christian, as well as different local contexts (Asia, Europe, America). The main intention of the exhibition is to search possibilities of understanding among various religions. In the eyes of an ordinary man the mass media manipulation can easily turn every Muslim into an enemy, a terrorist. Similar manipulations can deform our opinions on the Jewish, Christian or other religious identity.

Works, created in the media of video, object and painting, presented at the exhibition INTERFACE raise questions about how artists from different cultures and religions express themselves in art. How does a universal language of contemporary art reflect different religious and philosophical approaches? To what extent does religion even today effect our ability to see and interpret the visual reality? Did contemporary art lose the Church as a patron that for many centuries had commissioned artists to create art works? Do religious topics and motifs, the sacred and transcendent still belong among topical issues of art? The exhibition does not have an ambition to judge nor take an apriori attitude about the theme but on the basis of the presented works it wants to provide a space for a discussion.

° Visit us

Open Space
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
Schwedenplatz
1020 Wien
Austria

(+43) 699 115 286 32
(+43) 127 625 41

For more info please contact: office@openspace-zkp.org

http://www.openspace-zkp.org

° About SPACE
projects | residency lab | store

Františkánske námestie 7
811 01 Bratislava 1
Slovak Republic

(+42) 1 2207 33 116
(+42) 1 911 33 11 87

For more info please contact: space@crazycurators.org

www.crazycurators.org

Angela Dwyer - girls, dogs, falling cities, courtesy Galerie Volker Diehl

Angela Dwyer’s present series of paper works heralds a return to representational art after 20 years of nearly exclusively working in abstracts. During that time, she was almost obsessively fascinated by the qualities of squares or patterns, using thick spatula-applied paints to transform geometric precision into coarse, three-dimensional shapes. In parallel works, Angela Dwyer was creating script pictures on paper by adapting a process closely related to sampling in music. For these works, textual fragments from poems, novels, essays, Biblical quotes, newspapers or personal notes are dislocated from their original context and embedded as hand-written elements into the material of the pictures.

For her new series, she has further refined this principle by including image quotes from the canon of art history, for example, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel or Titian’s Diana. Similarly, she is also integrating pictorial images from sketches or drawings of live models. In Angela Dwyer’s works, these different components are combined to form a closely woven synthesis of image and text, evoking associations of archaic, alchemistic processes. Ultimately, the individual elements remain identifiable, though they seem to have been exposed to some enormous heat or pressure that has melted them down to form an extract-like amalgam, cracked in places: multiple layers of paper overlapping or glued one over the other, the edges frayed and torn, the work left in a fragile, vulnerable state.

The magic of Angela Dwyer’s pictures rests on the intensely sensual treatment of the material, the vital luminosity and delicate nuances of colour and her essential attitude towards the picture as an object. Her works are always very close to the realm of the studio, as if the transformation of the material has been left in a kind of intermediate stage, a limbo on the borders of hell. In this way, she transports the viewer into a world where the artistic act has a tangible presence – a presence perhaps last seen as vividly in Jacques Rivette’s 1991 film masterpiece La belle noiseuse. Standing in front of Angela Dwyer’s works, it seems as if one can hear the scratching of the charcoal, the crackle of pigment particles, the sound of a hand brushing across paper. These are existential witnesses of a dialogue where the artist remains present in two ways. Firstly, in the shape of the crafted processes and, secondly, in the form of an idea evident in the selection and use !
of the
texts which, by offering a wealth of associations, allow each viewer to access the work differently.

Angela Dwyer - girls, dogs, falling cities
Februar, 2 – March, 29 2008

Galerie Volker Diehl
Lindenstrasse 35
10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Germany

www.galerievolkerdiehl.com, www.angeladwyer.de

PAC MURCIA

ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL & LAURENT TIXADOR
Horizon moins vingt
2008
Jardín del Malecón. Murcia
Courtesy Latitudes

ESTRATOS’’

CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECT MURCIA 2008
31 January to 31 March 2008

PAC MURCIA / HORIZON MOINS VINGT BY POINCHEVAL & TIXADOR
STARTS FEBRUARY 11TH

http://www.pacmurcia.es

During a meeting held by the adventurers’ club, it was said that the quality of a journey depends much less on the final destination than on the mode of transport used.

Not long after, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, while joking around, came up with the idea that one could travel from point A to point B through a closed tunnel—that is, the tunnel would be resealed by its occupants as they would move forward, thus travelling as if they were in a kind of troglodyte mobile home.

“After a feasibility study validated the possibility of carrying out this project, it is now a question of advancing by this means for the space of twenty days. The resistance of the soil will determine the speed and distance that will be travelled. No one knows in advance how this journey will unfold, seeing as there is no prior experience to use as a point of reference. HORIZON MOINS VINGT (H-20) project consists of the construction of a tunnel that will be gradually filled in behind them by its dwellers as they go along, in such a way that the resulting underground space will consist of a kind of air bubble cut off from the outside. The estimated duration of the performance is twenty days (starting February 11th), with the excavation of one metre per day, producing a total displacement of 20 metres.

Air will be pumped into and extracted from the tunnel and all necessary equipment and provisions will be in place from the start, because it will not be possible to rely on external supplies once the project begins. For the entrance, it will be necessary to begin by digging a 5-metre access ramp as well as to open 10 metres of tunnel that will comprise the living space. Therefore, the total excavation required will be 35 metres. The height of the tunnel will be 166 cm, and its depth at ceiling level will be 100 cm. For this reason it is absolutely essential to build it in deep ground with at least 3 metres of soft soil. A 24-hour guard duty will be in place to monitor the correct functioning of the pumps and to communicate with the two occupants. Site huts will be built to house the pumps and guards.”
Abraham Poincheval & Laurent Tixador

The work of Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval may be defined as an adventure. That is, as the fact of discovering something extraordinary. In their proposals, they never repeat the same experience twice and their projects include, for instance, an attempt to survive for a week on the island of Frioul, in the precariousness of prehistoric life, or a two month straight line walk from Nantes to Metz. Utopian expeditionary projects through itineraries and situations unknown to the artists, ultimately remitting to the conquest of space, a reflection on chance and its limitations.

The PAC MURCIA Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo (Contemporary Art Project) opened January 31th. It is one initiatives conceived by the Regional Administration of the Region of Murcia to lay the foundations for a consistent and referential context in the contemporary art field. As well as the exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, titled ESTRATOS”, including site specific works by Lara Almarcegui, Juan Cruz. Mark Dion, Abraham Poincheval & Laurent Tixador and Marjetica Potrc, it will also feature a selection of films with this same topic in the Filmoteca Regional during the month of February; a parallel program of exhibitions by local galleries and institutions and the seminar “HETEROCHRONIES: Temporality and image in contemporaneity”.

ARTISTS
LARA ALMARCEGUI, BERND & HILLA BECHER, BLEDA Y ROSA, JUAN CRUZ, VERNE DAWSON, MARK DION, JIMMIE DURHAM, CYPRIEN GAILLARD, ILANA HALPERIN, JOACHIM KOESTER, MARK LOMBARDI, ALLAN McCOLLUM, PAUL NOBLE, PAULINA OLOWSKA, DIEGO PERRONE,
ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL & LAURENT TIXADOR, MARJETICA POTRC, GREGOR SCHNEIDER, EVE SUSSMAN & THE RUFUS CORPORATION, KEITH TYSON

CURATOR
NICOLAS BOURRIAUD

VENUES
Centro Párraga
Espacio AV
MAM (Museo Arqueológico de Murcia)
MUBAM (Museo de Bellas Artes de Murcia)
Museo de Santa Clara
Sala San Esteban
Sala Verónicas

Public spaces

CENDEAC (Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo)
Filmoteca Regional Francisco Rabal

http://www.pacmurcia.es

For further information, please contact:
Press Office
T. (+34) 902 106 504
info@pacmurcia.es
http://www.pacmurcia.es

Artpace

Kate Gilmore, Endurance Makes Gold, 2008 (still)

GIRL FIGHT

KATE GILMORE’S PERFORMANCE-BASED VIDEOS AT ARTPACE
SAN ANTONIO
Through April 20, 2008

Artpace
445 North Main Avenue
San Antonio, Texas 78205

http://www.artpace.org

Artpace San Antonio is pleased to present Girl Fight, on view through April 20, 2008 in the Hudson (Show)Room. The exhibition features eight videos by Kate Gilmore, marking the artist’s first major solo exhibition in a museum. Organized by Artpace Executive Director Matthew Drutt, Girl Fight provides a comprehensive look at Gilmore’s performance-based practice, and features the debut of a new video and accompanying sculptural installation created at Artpace.

Kate Gilmore’s work depicts the artist confronting a series of self-imposed challenges. Her tragicomic situations—a smiling performer relentlessly pelted with rotten tomatoes (With Open Arms, right), an elegantly dressed woman attempting to hammer her leg out of a bucket of quick-drying mortar (My Love is an Anchor, below)—question the futility of personal and cultural ritual, bringing to the foreground issues surrounding feminine identity and the struggle for success.

While occasionally humorous, Gilmore’s performances have a more serious subtext: the daunting, often self-subverting obstacles that many women face. Subjecting herself to precarious situations while wearing clothing incongruous with her circumstances, Gilmore persistently and methodically labors onward, sometimes negotiating her own sculptural tableaus as she encounters life’s many perils in heels, dresses, and makeup.

Endurance Makes Gold (2008), created at Artpace, is Gilmore’s most ambitious project to date. The video documents her unaided attempt to pile a motley collection of furniture, piece by piece, in the museum’s ground-floor courtyard. Once the colorful mountain of discarded sofas, chairs, and dressers reaches the second-story ledge, she ascends the precarious tower dressed in a bright yellow dress and red high-heel boots and enters her exhibition space via a blue-carpeted ramp. The pile of furniture and the ramp remain as sculptural elements of the installation, evidence of the artist’s Sisyphean task.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kate Gilmore was born in Washington D.C. in 1975 and currently lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, in 2002. She is a 2007-2008 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has had solo exhibitions at Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2006); Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH (2006); and White Columns, New York, NY (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Reckless Behavior, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006); Mixed Emotions, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2005).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
This exhibition is made possible in part by the Linda Pace Foundation; the City of San Antonio’s Office of Cultural Affairs; and The Brown Foundation, Inc.; with additional support from Texas Commission on the Arts.

ABOUT ARTPACE
Artpace San Antonio serves as a laboratory for the creation and advancement of international contemporary art. Artpace believes that art is a dynamic social force that inspires individuals and defines cultures. Our residencies, exhibitions, and education programs nurture the creative expression of emerging and established artists, while actively engaging youth and adult audiences.

Artpace is located downtown at 445 North Main Avenue, between Savings and Martin streets, San Antonio, Texas. Free parking is available at 513 North Flores Street. Artpace is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 12-5 PM, Thursday, 12-8 PM, and by appointment. Admission is free.

Copyright: 2008 Artpace San Antonio