Artipedia - Arts News

Tabanka 1

Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery and Performance Space
17 Second Avenue, Bay Shore NY 11706
631-669-3236 info@secondavenuefirehouse.com

Press Release 3/23/2008

Deconstructive Forms: Recent work by Steven Ceraso

Long Island Artist Steven Ceraso’s Welded Steel Sculpture entitled Deconstructive Forms, opens to the public at the Historic Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery and Performance Space, Bay Shore NY 11706, on April 6th, 2008 from 2 – 5 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through May 24th, 2008. Building hours are Sundays, 12 to 4 p.m or by appointment.

Steve Ceraso’s recent work shows its customary blend of strength of image, excellence of workmanship, and powerful use of materials. Working most often with steel and wood and working often in sizes approaching the monumental, Steve creates a visual vocabulary that has the feel of the archaic; and even when contemporary forms are suggested, they contain trace elements of the mythic and the primal. The welded work is the product of high craft, but often the steel is rusted, or will rust in time, lending his pieces an air of the found and the lost, artifacts or armatures from a lost civilization. Or, as in this most recent work, the images hint at masks and ritual practices as if they belonged to a vanished cult or were worn by strange warriors in unimaginable conflicts. Or that these forms might once have had living inhabitants, like the carapaces of huge insects or the shells of primeval crustaceans. What I always appreciate most about this work is its true modernist stat!
ure in
which haunting, even mythic forms hover on the edge of being identified but remain firmly planted in a world of abstraction and suggestivity and in which the power of the artist’s imagination renders his materials fresh, arresting, and strangely disturbing, as if they belonged to the world of dreams.

- Peter Pitzele Ph.D.

This exhibit was made possible by the efforts of Susan Barbash President, South Shore Restoration Group. More information on Deconstructive Forms and other works, can be found at Steven Ceraso’s website at www.stevenceraso.com

MuHKA

Koen van den Broek, 2007

MuHKA shows

FANTASY intervention by
Koen van den Broek
21.03 - 21.09.08

PERMANENT REVOLUTION insert by Sue de Beer
23.02 - 25.05.08

http://www.muhka.be

As part of its “interventions” program, an ongoing series of research-based monographic exhibitions of young and emerging artists, MuHKA invited Koen van den Broek [°1973] to curate an exhibition of works of art from both the MuHKA collection and various private Belgian art collections. This exhibition serves as an idiosyncratic context for reflecting upon his own pictorial practice, represented here by a series of paintings from 2007 in which Van den Broek continues to explore the formal possibilities of what has become a well-known signature motif of sorts – images and pictures of ‘grounds’: bottoms, curbs, earth, floors, streets and other supporting surfaces. Van den Broek’s allegiance and intellectual debt to the great traditions of abstract painting are made apparent in his choice of paintings by Mary Heilmann, Robert Mangold and Blinky Palermo, while his affinity with the distinct artistic sensibility of America’s West Coast manifests itself in his select
ion of works by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Works by William Eggleston, Donald Judd, Thomas Schütte, Jan Van Imschoot and Jeff Wall, as well as MuHKA’s own Flavins and artworks by Charif Benhelima and Jan Vercruysse, complete Van den Broek’s decidedly internationalist vision – the real-life ‘fantasy’ to which the title of this exhibition alludes.

In addition to Van den Broek’s interventions into the collection, MuHKA now also hosts
Permanent Revolution, a video installation by Berlin-based American artist Sue de Beer [°1973] that is loosely based on the brief but turbulent history of the German Bauhaus. In De Beer’s free-form reconstruction of the school’s profound ideological antagonisms, the Bauhaus movement – portrayed here against the apocalyptic backdrop of the Great War which preceded it – sets off an ecstatic, psychedelic ode to colour, light and form. Permanent Revolution is shown in a custom-built white cube painted gold inside – a bizarrely monolithic, alien presence in MuHKA’s futuristic circular space which adds yet another dimension to the great Atlantic art dialogue that will be occupying MuHKA’s ground floor for much of 2008.

With works by Nick Andrews, John Baldessari, Charif Benhelima, Marcel Broodthaers, Wim Catrysse, Jan Cox, Luc Deleu, William Eggleston, Tracy Emin, Dan Flavin, Liam Gillick, Mary Heilmann, René Heyvaert, Peter Joseph, Donald Judd, Jan Kempenaers, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul Mccarthy & Mike Kelly, Bruce Nauman, Blinky Palermo, Edward Ruscha, Thomas Schütte, Mitja Tu_ek, Koen van den Broek, William van den Broek, Patrick Van Den Eynde, Wilfried Vandenhove, Jan Van Imschoot, Dan Van Severen, Jan Vercruysse and Jeff Wall

Publication
Angles, a publication by Koen van den Broek featuring texts by MuHKA curator Dieter Roelstraete and the artist himself, will be presented on the occasion of the opening of Fantasy.
Language EN
ISBN 978–90–9022081–9

Check for more information:
http://www.muhka.be

Contact and information:
MuHKA
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium
T +32 [0]3 260 99 99
info@muhka.be

Pictured works by Tony Rosca , Joseph Fischer, Kris Steffner & Jeremiah Jenner, image courtesy of Albertini Arts

OUT OF THE BLUE;
A Group Exhibition At Albertini Arts Gallery In The Wynwood Art District

WHO:
Curated by resident artist Kris Steffner, Albertini Arts presents a
group show featuring local artists: Jeremiah Jenner, Joseph Fischer,
Kris Steffner, Rachael Rendon, Tony Rosca & Timothy Leistner and
guest artists: Greg Morgan & Magda Audifred.

WHAT:
Curated by resident artist Kris Steffner the group exhibition is a concentration of representational, surreal and abstract, 2-dimensional
& 3-dimensional, works of art with a focus on the color blue.

There are many striking images by this group of talented artists; such as a collection of (35mm film) photographs that the artists himself describes as “Abstract Urbanism” capturing a moment just out of focus where life itself is in motion, a stunning and somewhat controversial life-sized figure of a Muslim woman with piercing eyes, a haunting image of a woman who’s id, ego & super-ego have externalized themselves on the canvas, as well as some very interesting abstract watercolor & mixed medium pieces.

Active participants in The ‘Wynwood Art District Second Saturday Gallery Walk’ Albertini Arts host monthly cocktail receptions to allow patrons the opportunity to mingle with the featured artists & discuss their works.
“Our primary goal as a gallery is to bring art to the public and make it more a part of daily life and I plan to surprise patrons with a series of future events such as live painting, poetry readings, live music and much much more” states curator and resident artist Kris Steffner.

WHEN:
Artist reception & live painting show (by local graffiti artist “El Ganas”) from 7pm – 11 pm Saturday / April 12th 2008, during ‘The Wynwood Art District Second Saturday Gallery Walk’.

On view: April 12th - May 3rd from 11am – 5pm Tuesday through Friday and 12 noon – 7pm on Saturdays.

WHERE:
Albertini Arts is located at 190 NW 36 Street in ‘The Wynwood Art District’ just south of ‘The Miami Design District’ and 2-blocks west of ‘The Midtown Mall’.

For more information call (305) 576-ART1, email AlbertiniArts@gmail.com or visit http://www.AlbertiniArts.com

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

Fredrik Söderberg
”Some Men are made of Steel and Blood”, 2005
Collection Magasin 3 Stockholm konsthall

FREDRIK SÖDERBERG &
CARL LARSSON
April 11 - June 8, 2008

Curator: Elisabeth Millqvist

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen, SE -115 56 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 545 680 40
art@magasin3.com

http://www.magasin3.com

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall presents an exhibition where the Swedish artist Fredrik Söderberg (b. 1972) meets the giant of the Swedish artistic canon, Carl Larsson (1853 –1919). Fredrik Söderberg’s paintings encompassing the magical, fantastical and enchanting are a blend of contemporary cultural codes and historical references. Carl Larsson is one of these historical references.

Elisabeth Millqvist, the curator of the exhibition, describes the process as follows:
“The exhibition started with an urge to investigate why, in the year 2008, art is crawling with witches, shamans and sacrificial rites. This led me to delve into Fredrik Söderberg’s oeuvre since he has worked with related themes in the last ten years. In his work there are several paraphrases of Carl Larsson’s motifs. I wanted to bring out these references and show a Carl Larsson that seems relevant today. This is how contemporary fantasy ended up next to the dark forests of National Romanticism’s
mythical worlds.”

Fredrik Söderberg describes his works as ’collages’, referring not to the technique used to produce them but to how the content is collated from many different sources. In his watercolors, oil paintings and miniature models we find C.S. Lewis’ world of ”Narnia”, fragments of Nordic mythology, photos of spiritualist gatherings, and well-known festivals such as Midsummer. Beside these works the exhibition includes a selection of illustrations and sketches by Carl Larsson. His whorl of ornamentation and the detailed drawings of knights and dark forests place him in a context of renewed interest for contemporary artists. Several of the exhibited works are studies for his monumental paintings where figure drawings and nature studies form the basis of his fantastical compositions.

Terms such as ‘narrative elements’ and ‘fictional worlds’ are often used to describe a tendency in contemporary art. Through the work of Fredrik Söderberg this exhibition explores the contemporary preoccupation with a search for something beyond a rational worldview, as well as its historical predecessors. By bringing together the work of these two artists we see a common artistic interest in charged symbols, the worlds of mystical heroes and supernatural phenomena dated from the1890’s to the present.

Fredrik Söderberg graduated from Konstfack in 2000. Parallel to his exhibition at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall he will be opening a solo exhibition at Milliken Gallery, Stockholm. This spring he participates in the Armory Show, as well as exhibiting at the Rental Gallery in New York. This exhibition was preceded by a show at Galleri Brandstrup in Oslo in 2007. In Sweden Söderberg has been included in group exhibitions at Marabouparken, Sundbyberg (2004) and Dunkers kulturhus, Helsingborg (2003), amongst others. International group shows include venues such as NO+CH Nordic Chinese Visual Arts Exhibition Fake Space, Bejing (2007) Galleri De Praktijk in Amsterdam (2007) and Galleri Glassbox in Paris (2006). In addition the artist has designed several album covers for IDEAL records.

Carl Larsson is perhaps Sweden’s best-known and most beloved artist. After attending the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Stockholm he worked as an illustrator of books, magazines and newspapers. He also spent several years in France. On his return to Sweden he and his wife Karin Larsson, also an artist, combined traditional rural Swedish design with modern concepts of color and pattern in the family’s newly acquired house in the village of Sundborn in Dalecarlia. The Larssons created a style that has had extraordinary impact on interior design both nationally and internationally. In 1997 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London presented an exhibition entitled “Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style” which underlines the importance of their design work. In 1894 Carl Larsson began to paint a series of watercolors of his home and family, which were published in book form in 1899 under the title “Ett hem” (A home). These works have been strongly influential i
n the creation of the image of Sweden, and have spread the knowledge of their design. As an artist he created several prominent monumental works, such as large frescoes in schools, museums and other public buildings. Carl Larsson is represented in all major Swedish museum collections.

Public program in connection with the exhibition:

Sunday, 13 April at 2pm
Curator Elisabeth Millqvist gives a tour of the exhibition.

Thursday, 8 May 7pm
Lecture by Susanna Åkerman (Ph. D. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis)

In her lecture Susanna Åkerman will use examples from the exhibition to talk about themes such as esoteric movements and the occult, hermeticism, emblems and talismans, the Key of Solomon (Clavis Salomonis), Arbatel de magia veterum and The Sworn Book of Honorius.

Thursday, 22 May, 7pm
The artist Fredrik Söderberg will give a lecture on his sources of inspiration – from the British artist and magician Austin Osman Spare to the writer and mystic Aleister Crowley, the author HP Lovecraft, the film-maker and artist Kenneth Anger, and the horror cult classic The Wicker Man.

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall publishes a newsletter every month in connection with our up-coming programme. You can sign up at: http://www.magasin3.com/newsletter.html

11th International
Istanbul Biennial
September 12 - November 8, 2009
Curated by What, How & For
Whom / WHW

Talks & Conversations
Red Thread
April - June, 2008

ist.biennial@iksv.org
http://www.iksv.org/bienal

The 11th International Istanbul Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and sponsored by Koc Holding is set for 12 September-8 November 2009, under the curatorship of What, How & for Whom / WHW.

What, How and for Whom/WHW is a curators’ collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. WHW organizes different exhibition, production and publishing projects, and has since 2003 directed the program of Gallery Nova –a city-owned gallery in Zagreb. WHW members are curators Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Natasa Ilic and Sabina Sabolovic.

11th International Istanbul Biennial events start with the first series of talks and conversations under the title “Red Thread,” to be held in April and June 2008. The first talk, “5Ws of What, How and for Whom” by WHW will be held on April 21, 2008 at the ITU Faculty of Architecture.

Lecture “5Ws of What, How and for Whom” refers to questions implicit in the very name of the WHW collective - what, how and for whom: the three basic questions of every economic organization that also concern the planning, conception and realization of exhibitions, as well as the production and distribution of artworks, or artists’ position in the labour market. These questions, which were the title of WHW’s first project dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, in 2000 in Zagreb, are recurrent in all of WHW’s projects.

This talk will be followed by “Open Labyrinth,” a talk by Zdenka Badovinac, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru and Vasıf Kortun in conversation with Stephen Wright. “Open Labyrinth” describes the condition of an art that, conceptually, has lost its self-definition; that finds itself stripped of its spatial demarcation and historical moorings; which, ontologically, is without its self-evident modalities of appearing in the world. What threads can guide curatorship in the age of an open labyrinth? The loss of self-evident exteriority cuts to the quick of artistic agency inasmuch as documents and archives are all too often fetishized instead of being the performative impetus for renewing the ontological status of whatever it is that is documented or archived. Yet the condition of an open labyrinth is also a chance for a renewed approach to curatorship, opening the prospect of divulging – without betraying – practices with impaired coefficients of artistic visibility.

For further information
Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts
Istiklal Caddesi 64 Beyoglu 34435 Istanbul Turkey
ist.biennial@iksv.org

Press Office
Üstüngel Inanç
uinanc@iksv.org
T: +90 (212) 334 07 57

YOKOHAMA TRIENNALE 2008
“TIME CREVASSE”
13 September - 30 November 2008

http://yokohamatriennale.jp

Artistic Director
Tsutomu Mizusawa (Chief Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama)

Curators
Daniel Birnbaum (Rector of the Städelschule Art Academy and Director of the Portikus,
Frankfurt am Main)
Hu Fang (Artistic Director of the Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou)
Akiko Miyake (Program Director, Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Kitakyushu)
Hans Ulrich Obrist (Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, The Serpentine Gallery, London)
Beatrix Ruf (Director, Kunsthalle Zürich)

Yokohama Triennale, Japan’s largest international exhibition of contemporary art, is proud to make further announcements to present Yokohama Triennale 2008, its 3rd exhibition taking place from September 13th to November 30th.

Established in 2001, the Yokohama Triennale has become a forum for new cultural production in the contemporary art scene. Featuring works by some 70 artists from approximately 30 countries and set in the cosmopolitan port city of Yokohama, Japan, this year’s exhibition aims to reaffirm the boundless energy that art affords us. The exhibition will greatly take advantage of Yokohama’s social and geographical characteristics as well as the unique spaces of the venues to display an incredible array of works by various international artists, many of which incorporate performance-like elements that bring out the physicality of their creations. Symposiums, workshops, and various other opportunities for interaction and exchange will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, providing further points of encounter for people, art, and the host city.

Yokohama Triennale 2008 aims to tie in with the Sydney, Shanghai, Gwangju, and Singapore biennales, all of which will be held around the same time as the Yokohama Triennale. Under the banner Art Compass 2008, plans are under way for a worldwide publicity campaign and Grand Tour program encompassing all of these international exhibitions.

Says Director Tsutomu Mizusawa on the theme “Time Crevasse”:

“Art shakes up our everyday perceptions. It gives us glimpses of the ‘abyss’ we normally fail to notice, or perhaps pretend not to notice. It can horrify us, give us courage, console us, or provide us with what we need to face life. Art arises when we confront that abyss squarely and, by waiting attentively at the edges of ‘time crevasses,’ we scrupulously register various forms of mutual differentiation - individual or social differences, differences of nationality, gender, generation, ethnicity, religion, and so on-including the particular circumstances in which we ourselves are currently situated. Art has the power to dispel the temptation to let ourselves fall into such crevasses. It is also an act of bridging those gaps so that people can communicate and interact through them.”

As the Yokohama Triennale 2008 prepares to kick off this autumn, it will offer an opportunity for honest reevaluation and reaffirmation of art’s essential value and power today and in the future. This forum for artistic expression will be maintained not only for the sake of mere novelty to be consumed like information, but rather so that, by confronting and accepting the myriad ‘crevasses’ etched in their histories, people can work toward achieving a better mutual understanding of a deep and far-
reaching kind.

Venues
Central and Waterfront Sites in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
- Shinko Pier Exhibition Hall
- Red Brick Warehouse No.1
- NYK Waterfront Warehouse (BankART Studio NYK)
and others

Organizers
- The Japan Foundation
- City of Yokohama
- NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)
- Asahi Shimbun
- The Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale

Contact
E-mail: PR@yokohamatriennale.jp

Yokohama Triennale Office
c/o The Japan Foundation Ark Mori Bldg 20F 1-12-32 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-6021, Japan