International Art News

From May 16 to June 3, 2012 – 00130Gallery
Self-portraiture is about treating personal history and documenting a process of self-exploration and self-discovery. Taking pictures of others seems very different from self-portraiture but I approach it as different way of documenting myself. My photographs always have a part of me in them; they contain my personal history, no matter whom they are of.

The emotions reflected in my art are also a common issue for all human beings, so that they can see their own reflection in my work and in the sympathy it evokes

Born in Seoul, South Korea, HyeKyong Yun has been living and working in Montreal since 2003. She holds a BFA in cinema at Sangmyung University in Seoul, Korea as well as a BFA in photography at Concordia University. For several years the focus of HyeKyong’s photography has been self-portrait. In her latest project, “Boys”, she uses this self-portrait approach to portray others.

00130Gallery

José Bedia, Utenu Kazaye, 2007. Acrylic on canvas. 180 x 454 cm. Collection of Roger and Mariela Tovar.

From May 24 to September 2, 2012 – Miami Art Museum
A major career retrospective of the work of José Bedia at Miami Art Museum (MAM) explores the influence of indigenous cultures and religions from Cuba, North and South America, and Africa on the artist’s work over the last three decades. Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia, featuring 35 artworks including large-scale figurative paintings, installations and drawings, highlights the layering of spiritual, social and historical constructs in Bedia’s body of work—all of which are retold through a highly personal lens. On view from Thursday, May 24 through Sunday, September 2, 2012, the exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the rich iconography of Bedia’s artistic output. Transcultural Pilgrim is among the last four exhibitions MAM will show in its current building, before making the transition to its new Herzog & de Meuron facility in Museum Park in fall 2013.

“The incredible melding of cultural ideas and symbols in José Bedia’s work has a special resonance in the distinctly diverse Miami community, where so many nationalities, races, heritages and religions come together and Bedia, himself, lives,” said Thom Collins, director of Miami Art Museum. “Transcultural Pilgrim reveals the unexpected parallels between the cultural practices of disparate communities from around the globe and, in doing so, creates new parallels to contemporary life—exemplifying MAM’s dedication to presenting artists and works to which our audiences will have strong connections.”

José Bedia, Mama quiere menga, menga de su nkombo (Mama Wants Blood, Blood of His Bull), 1988. Acrylic on canvas. 139.7 x 200 cm. Collection of Diane and Robert Moss, Miami, Florida.

Bedia is an acclaimed member of Cuba’s “Generation of the ‘80s,” a group of pioneering young artists who incorporated Cuban vernacular and spiritual references into their work and experimented with eclectic visual forms. Throughout the last 30 years, Bedia has traveled to the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, North American Plains, Amazonian rain forest, Dominican countryside, and the Central African savanna, among numerous other locations, in search of artistic and spiritual peers and to participate in what he defines as “diverse spiritual worlds.” The featured works in Transcultural Pilgrim—with their sacred and autobiographical references, strong graphic quality, and philosophical complexity—represent the traces of Bedia’s artistic and spiritual journeys, which have shaped his artistic practice. The exhibition also includes select objects from Bedia’s personal collection, housed in his Miami home, which have inspired the forms and content of his work.

 Miami Art Museum

Vincent van Gogh Iris, 1889 Oil on thinned cardboard, mounted on canvas 62.2 × 48.3 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

From May 25 to September 3, 2012 – National Gallery of Canada
Van Gogh: Up Close is the first major exhibition in Canada in over 25 years of works by this famous Dutch artist. It brings together more than 40 of Van Gogh’s paintings from private and public collections around the world, as well as a selection of Japanese woodblock prints, nineteenth-century photographs, and works on paper from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This exhibition explores Van Gogh’s love for nature and his gift for representing the world around him, from landscapes down to the smallest blade of grass.

Vincent van Gogh View of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer , 1888 Oil on canvas, 64.2 × 53 cm Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands Photo © Stichting Kröller-Müller Museum

For example, the show includes Iris (1889), from the National Gallery of Canada’s collection, as well as paintings that depict another corner of the garden where Van Gogh painted Iris, but from a wider angle. Van Gogh: Up Close will demonstrate how these paintings became the most radical and innovative in the artist’s body of work.

In early 1886 Van Gogh arrived in Paris from the Netherlands and came face to face with a revolutionary new way of painting. For the first time he was exposed to the art of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, which compelled him to revise his painting in both content and style. He quickly abandoned the sombre hues of his earlier Dutch works in favour of a brighter palette and modernized brushstroke, beginning with a series of flower still lifes painted in a typical 19th century Western style. But Van Gogh swiftly departed from this tradition and focused increasingly on the subject itself, eliminating the surrounding space.

Vincent van Gogh Sunflowers, 1887 Kunstmuseum Bern Gift of Prof. Hans R. Hahnloser, Bern

At the same time, Van Gogh developed a keen interest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he admired for their aesthetic qualities. Like the Impressionist painters who had discovered these prints earlier, Van Gogh became fascinated with Japanese art. This led him to experiment with unusual visual angles, decorative use of colour, cropping and flattening of his compositions.

Vincent van Gogh Undergrowth with Two Figures, 1890 Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio Bequest of Mary E. Johnston Image: The Bridgeman Art Library

Often remembered for his battles with mental illness and suicide in July 1890, Van Gogh was first and foremost an ambitious, well-read and sophisticated thinker whose work was informed and deliberate.

Born in 1853, he was fluent in English, French and Dutch, and he had a great love for the written word. Throughout his life he read a vast amount of literature that stretched from the Bible to French Naturalist writings. Vincent Van Gogh also had a strong understanding of art history that extended from Old Master paintings right up to the emergence of photography.

National Gallery of Canada Hours

Chung, Soyoung _Uncompleted Fragments III, Under Construction_2012_mixed media_dimensions variable

From April 26th to June 10th, 2012. – Arario Gallery Cheonan
Sporadic Positioning is a group exhibition presenting works by eight young Korean artists. The term ‘positioning’ from the title signifies re-establishing the comprehensive hypothetical images that derive from conventional notions of an actual specific subject, into properties that are distinguishably characteristic of that specific subject. Rather than acting upon a subject, positioning is about ‘situating’ the subject in the minds of the viewer. In the exhibition, eight artists continue to re-establish their positions as an artist in the art world. Repeatedly gathering and dispersing, and exchanging and severing, positioning in the works by eight artists thus reflect the sporadic and arbitrary topography of art in Korea.

Hyounsoo Kyung_Debris_2012_acrylic on canvas_145x97x5cm

Through a total of 42 works of sculpture, painting, video and installation presenting diverse aesthetic approaches of eight artists, Sporadic Positioning provides the opportunity to assess the extensive range of artistic outlooks in Korea. Furthermore, the various positioning of the eight artists encourages the audience to reflect on the current Korean art world at large from an analytical, expansive perspective.

Participating Artists
Hyounsoo Kyung
Song, Myungjin
Yongseok Oh
Lee, Eunsil
Chung, Soyoung
Jung, Song
Ha, Jiin
Hong, Sooyeon

Arario Gallery Hours

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011 | Animation: 3:17 minutes, colour, sound, 16:9, ed. 2/8 | Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © Deborah Kelly. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2012

Until 22 July 2012 – Gallery of Modern Art
‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ — the second in the Gallery’s Contemporary Australia exhibition series — celebrates the diversity, energy and innovation of contemporary women artists working in this country today.

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011

This exhibition acknowledges the strong history of work by women artists and recognises the ways that their critical, provocative, unexpected and illuminating contributions have reshaped, and continue to shape, the landscape of contemporary art. It features more than 70 new and recent works, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles, video and performance by 33 artists and collectives, a total of 56 visual artists.

Jennifer Mills | What’s in a name? (detail), 2009–11 | Mixed media on paper 323 drawings, varying dimensions Installed dimensions variable Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Photograph: Natasha Harth

The exhibition also includes Embodied Acts, a program of performative works; the Children’s Art Centre installation art work ‘Fly Away Home’ by Fiona Hall; and a film program curated by renowned Australian producer and critic Margaret Pomeranz, AM.

GOMA

El Greco and Jorge Manuel, Immaculate Conception, 1607-1613, oil on canvas, 108 x 82 cm, © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

From April 28 to August 12, 2012 – Museum Kunstpalast
It is for the first time that the elective affinity between early Expressionism and El Greco is examined with direct reference to originals and that the phenomenon of an Old Master becoming the catalyst of a young avantgarde art movement is illustrated this vividly. The intention is to reveal the multifaceted levels on which exponents of Expressionism concerned themselves with El Greco’s pictorial world. In the process, attention is paid to the genres of religious painting as well as portrait and landscape painting. A wealth of works tell us of the profound fascination which, quite astonishingly from today’s perspective.

The Vision of Saint John, aka The Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608-1614), oil on canvas painting by El Greco, 222.3 cm x 193cm, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

El Greco inspired Beckmann, Macke, Kokoschka, Franz Marc and all the German avant-garde of the XXth century? This is one thing most had forgotten but this exhibition “El Greco and the Modernists” is here to remind us. It is presented one century after the storm that took place when the paintings by El Greco arrived on German soil. They belonged to the Nemes collection, and were presented in Berlin, then in Dusseldorf in 1912 and finally at the Städtische Kunsthalle. It was there that the young artists were able to see this strange artist up close and the way he transformed proportions using an aggressive palette, filling his compositions with ecstatic characters with wax-colored complexions… One hundred years later, the dream of bringing together the great master and his students is finally a reality. Next to some forty paintings by El Greco, brought in from the Metropolitan, the Louvre or Toledo, we h ave works by Beckmann, Lehmbruck or Oppenheimer put in counterpoint, proving that Cézanne was not their only reference.

Museum Kunstpalast