Artipedia - Arts News

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

Arthur Køpcke and Al Hansen
in ”Music while you work” at Galerie Block, Berlin 1970
Photo: Hermann Kiessling

Action and Remains
Al Hansen & Arthur Køpcke
21.06.08 - 24.08.08

http://www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

”One puts its parts together in the manner of making a collage” – Al Hansen on happenings

“Any communication is a collage of variegated signals.” – Arthur Køpcke

Kunsthal Charlottenborg will be brimming with collages, assemblages, film, sound, painting and sculpture when works by Al Hansen and Arthur Køpcke are shown in separate wings of the gallery.

Action and Remains is the title of the double exhibition. ‘Action’ because both artists worked with actions, performances and works that in various ways encouraged active participation from the viewer. ‘Remains’ because what is left are the remains of these projects, performances and actions, but also because both of them employed the debris of the everyday in their production.

Al Hansen and Arthur Køpcke shared era, colleagues and zeitgeist. They brought international currents to Denmark at a time when the Danish art scene felt far removed from the metropolises in Europe and the US, both physically and mentally. Both artists had an unpretentious and casual relationship with the audience, encouraging active participation – and thus helped create the bedrock of our contemporary art’s cross-medial works as well as interventions, performances and social design.

An American, Al Hansen (1927-1995) primarily worked in New York but being an inveterate nomad he spent long periods of time in Denmark, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. A seminal figure in the Fluxus network, he if any dissolved the boundaries between the life he led and the art he created. Hansen was Fluxus – always on the move and always with the materials for his works at hand. His works are a humorous and intelligent conglomerate of neo-Dada, Fluxus and pop art.

Arthur Køpcke (1928 - 1977) was German, married a Dane and settled in Copenhagen. For half a decade, until 1963, he ran Galerie Køpcke in the city which, nourished by his radical innovation and driving force – became the centre of European avant-garde. Here came Robert Filliou, Diter Rot, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, Piero Manzoni and others, and from the domestic art scene Albert Mertz, Gunnar Aagaard Andersen, Preben Hornung and others. An impressive array of exhibitions was presented at Galerie Køpcke but it was also a significant stomping ground for an alternative art practice that bloomed on the Fluxus scene in Copenhagen as well as abroad.

The Al Hansen exhibition is concentrated on the works he ‘left’ in Denmark, supplemented by works from two pivotal collections in New York and Berlin. Curator is Maria Gadegaard,
Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

The Arthur Køpcke exhibition is the most comprehensive one of its kind to date, comprising works from more than forty collectors and six institutions in Denmark and Germany. Curators are artist Claus Carstensen and Helle Bøgelund, Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

A bilingual catalogue has been produced for the exhibition, containing 300 pages with colour photographs of all the exhibited works, texts on the artists and their time as well as a list of works and CV’s. The writers are Helle Bøgelund, Maria Gadegaard, Simon Anderson, Morten Søndergaard, Claus Carstensen and Marianne Bech.

The photographs are taken by Anders Sune Berg, and the graphic design is by Rasmus Koch Studio.

The first day of the exhibition is Saturday 21 June, 12-17. The last day Sunday 24 August 2008.

For additional information contact Maria LaBelle at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, tel. +45 3336 9047 or e-mail: marila@kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk.

New opening hours over the summer: Tuesday to Sunday, 12-17.

Press pictures can be downloaded at http://www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum

Travels with Isabella,
Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 (detail)

Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella,
Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008
June 26 - September 28, 2008

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway, Boston, MA USA
Open Tues - Sun, 11am - 5pm
(001) 617 278 5165

http://www.gardnermuseum.org

Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 is a new video installation by the Artist-in-Residence. Rabbia’s interest in exploring memory and the past has built up a visual dialogue between two personal scrapbooks, her own and one of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s, from her trip to China in 1883.

The artist has used digital archival photographs, as well as, a combination of digital video and computer art to create Travels with Isabella, an imaginary landscape animated with drawings of Rabbia’s past work, digital films taken during her stay in Boston, and objects from the Gardner Museum collection. The video’s soundtrack was composed by Fa Ventilato.

Travels with Isabella is also the title of a new book by the artist documenting this work. It will be released this Fall in the United States, and in the Spring of 2009 in Europe. It is published by Edizioni Charta on the occasion of the Gardner exhibition. Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 will travel to the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, in January 2009.

Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970) is an Italian artist and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum in 2007. She lives and works in Brooklyn and currently shows with the Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York, the Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin, and with Rossano Ciocco in Milan.

Events

June 28, 1:30pm: Introduction to the Exhibition
Luisa Rabbia and Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art

July 31, 7:00pm: Summer Night
Gallery talk with writer and critic Mario Diacono
DJ Concert by musician and producer Fa Ventilato

September 18, 7:00pm: Animation and Sound: A Two-Part Process
Conversation between Luisa Rabbia and Fa Ventilato

September 25, 6:30pm: Memory and Invention and Personal Travel Scrapbooks
Conversation with Alan Chong, Curator of the Collection, and Pieranna Cavalchini, followed by the book launch and signing of Travels with Isabella by Luisa Rabbia.

Publication: An artist book published with Charta will be available in September 2008.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s 2008 Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and generous individuals. The Gardner Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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http://www.open-player.com

Media Sponsor: The Boston Phoenix

Jeu de Paume

Richard Avedon
Photographs 1946 - 2004

Virginie Yassef
The Second Stated First

July 1 - September 28, 2008

Jeu de Paume – Concorde
1, place de la Concorde
75008 PARIS
France

http://www.jeudepaume.org

The Jeu de Paume presents this summer the first major retrospective of Richard Avedon’s work in France since his death in 2004. The exhibition brings together some 250 photographs spanning his entire career, including a large selection of prints from his famous In the American West series.

Richard Avedon, Photographs 1946 - 2004

Richard Avedon, fashion photographer

In 1945, Richard Avedon started working for Harper’s Bazaar, for which he soon became head photographer – a position he kept until 1966, when he moved to Vogue. His lively and passionate eye transformed fashion photography from something monotonous and stiff to something dynamic and entirely innovative for its times, by emphasizing movement and capturing his models in public spaces such as parks, nightclubs and shops. Avedon set out to recreate everyday and social situations, and to give the impression that his photographs were taken spontaneously.

Richard Avedon, portraitist

Richard Avedon also made numerous portraits, radically transforming the codes of genre, as did that other great American photographer, Irving Penn.

But Avedon went even further than Penn. He shattered the iconic images of the stars of show business, literature, the arts and the political elite in the United States. His portraits show all the facets of his models’ personality, however great their mastery of the codes of representation.

In the American West

Between 1979 and 1984, Avedon travelled across the western part of the United States, which was suffering from the effects of a serious economic recession. His idea was to bring outsiders and disadvantaged people into the tradition of the portrait. All the photos in the In the American West series were taken in broad daylight and outdoors, against a simple white paper backdrop hung on the side of a truck. What resulted were uncompromising images in which Avedon was able to depict the daily struggle to survive and the decline of a system of values traditionally associated with the
American West.

Exhibition organised by the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark) and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, New York and the support of the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre.

“Avedon” / Talk by Bernard Blistène, art critic and curator.
Friday 4 July at 7 pm
Registration: +33 (0)1 47 03 12 41 / serviceculturel@jeudepaume.org

Richard Avedon. Photographs 1946 - 2004
Tuesday 1 July at 7 pm
Tour of the exhibition with Norma Stevens, director of The Richard Avedon Foundation, and Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume.

”Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” (Helen Whitney, 1995, 87’, colour and black and white, in English with French subtitles)
Tuesday to Sunday at 12.30 pm, 2 pm, 3.30 pm, 5 pm

Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957, 103’, color, in English with French subtitles).
Tuesday 8 July at 7 pm
Film introduced by Bernard Bénoliel, from the Cinémathèque Française.

Virginie Yassef: The Second Started First

The fourth and last part of “Playgrounds,” the Satellite programme curated by Fabienne Fulchéri, is dedicated to Virginie Yassef, a French artist born in 1970. In her project for the Jeu de Paume, she questions the role of the body in the exhibition space, through video, sculptures and installations. In collaboration with visual artists and a composer, she experiments with stage design collaboration, by questioning the ambiguous relations between high art and popular art, the logic of mass production and artistic creation.

Exhibition organized with the support of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques
The Jeu de Paume receives a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
It gratefully acknowledges support from Neuflize Vie, its global partner.

Information : +33 (0)1 47 03 12 50
Tuesday : noon - 9 pm
Wednesday to Friday : noon - 7 pm
Saturday and Sunday : 10 am - 7 pm

Laznia Centre For
Contemporary Art

“A STORY DIFFERENTLY TOLD”
6 June - 8 August 2008

Tomasz Ciecierski, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Zofia Kulik, Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Zbigniew Libera and Darek Foks

Laznia Centre For
Contemporary Art
ul. Jaskolcza 1
80-767 Gdansk
Poland
E-mail: office@laznia.pl
http://www.laznia.pl

The project “A Story Differently Told” examines contemporary artistic practice to find threads which are revisionist towards the picture of 20th century art history known from institutional discourse and space. It is not about a radical contestation or ideological struggle. The search is for more self-controlled and yet perverse strategies of verifying the canons supported by institutional authority.

The participating artists highlight what so far has been hidden in the shadow of institutional categories and developed on the margins of the assimilated and assimilating mainstream. Their narrations often prefer individual memory and experience to the codyfing records of institutionalized art history. They suggest an alternative reading of contemporary art and tradition and boost doubts about universally accepted hierarchies and divisions. In another versions of history or in a history differently told they ask questions about the criteria and the role of the teller.

Project Curator: Bozena Czubak
Cooperation on the side of Laznia CCA: Agnieszka Wolodzko
6 June - 8 August 2008, Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00 – 6:00 pm