Hubert Le gall - Fauteuil « Placide le lapin câlin » - 2012 - Fausse fourrure, drap de laine et bois verni 155 x 80 x 90 cm - Édition à 99 exemplaires
Until June 2, 2012 – Mazel Galerie
Silence is golden, from design to painting – Duo Show
Vincent Guzman « Sanguine » - Acrylique et pigments sur toile - 2012 100 x 100 cm
Alex Katz Eleuthera 1984 Oil on linen 305 x 670.5 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galería Javier López, Madrid © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
9 May to 23 September 2012 – Tate St Ives
Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In July 2012 Katz celebrates his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades. Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition 2012 brings together over 30 canvases and collages from the 1950s to now.
Given the gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.
To accompany the show Katz has made a personal selection of works from the Tate Collection. Drawn from British, European and American artists, he brings together an illuminating cross-generational selection of artists for this special one-room display.
Alex Katz Round Hill 1977 Oil on Linen 180.3 x 243.8 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Partial and Promised Gift of Barry and Julie Smooke Art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Digital Image © 2012 Museum Associates / LACMA
Katz’s paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. He works in the tradition of European and American artists like Manet, Matisse, and Hopper. Many of Katz’s works picture an everyday America of easy living, leisure and recreation. Working with the themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes and flowers, Katz is influenced as much by style, fashion and music as he is art history.
In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was still the dominant force in American art when Katz began exhibiting. Whilst his interests were firmly based in the previous generation of artists including Pollock, Rothko, Guston and De Kooning (De Kooning and Guston in particular offered early support and encouragement), his own painting developed in reaction to their work, and he is acknowledged as a hugely influential precursor to the Pop Art movement with which he became associated throughout the 1960s.
Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Allan Finkelman - ©Louise Bourgeois Trust- Louise Bourgeois Trust/VAGA, New York, by SIAE 2012
From May 8 to November 4, 2012 – Galleria dell’Accademia – Firenze
The exhibition Art Returns to art, curated by Bruno Corà, Franca Falletti and Daria Filardo, will see the installation in the rooms of the Galleria dell’Accademia of works by: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Antonio Catelani, Martin Creed, Gino de Dominicis, Rineke Dijkstra, Marcel Duchamp, Luciano Fabro, Hans Peter Feldmann, Luigi Ghirri, Antony Gormley, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Leoncillo, Sol LeWitt, Eliseo Mattiacci, Olaf Nicolai, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Alfredo Pirri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Renato Ranaldi, Alberto Savinio, Thomas Struth, Fiona Tan, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol.
Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria, hung with all its charge of “life’s emotional frenzy” in front of Pontormo’s Venus and not far from Michelangelo’s David,will offer definitive proof of how the naked form of the human body can be used to express concepts and stir sensations that are vastly different. And the effort to bring form out of brute matter, something which obsessed Michelangelo all his life, seems to still weigh heavily today on the shoulders of Giuseppe Penone in his arduous hollowing out of massive tree trunks, just as it is echoed in the forms carved out of concrete by Antony Gormley.
Giulio Paolini’s L’altra Figura will be located almost opposite Bill Viola’s video Surrender: two contemporary ways of reappraising and interpreting the theme of mirroring and reproducibility that lead, in the left arm of the Tribuna, to the 19th-century Salone dei Gessi, filled with plaster casts that were created so lely to be reproduced.
The theme of reflection is also explored in Alfredo Pirri’s floor of fractured mirrors, in Olaf Nicolai’s work Portrait of the Artist as a Weeping Narcissus, whose tears ripple the surface and alter the reflected image, and in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror picture Sacra conversazione, which includes us in a conversation of the present day.
Metaphorically, mirroring becomes a merging with the gaze of the visitor, who is conceptually made part o f the creative process in Rineke Dijkstra’s video installation that tells of a slow observation and reproduction of one of Picasso’s pictures, in Thomas Struth’s photo in front of Dürer’s self-portrait and in Martin Creed’s performance with athletes running swiftly through the spaces of the gallery.
Marcel Duchamp, L'invers de la peinture, 1955 circa, 73,5 x 48 cm ,private collection, by courtesy of collector
The reproduction, repetition and circulation of images in the history of art is tackled from a critical perspective in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Luigi Ghirri, Hans Peter Feldmann and Ketty La Rocca, which refer directly to icons familiar to everyone. In his Untitled, Jannis Kounellis will recall the iconography and sense of tragedy of the Crucifixion, a theme tackled in a different way in Alberto Burri’s work and in Renato Ranaldi’s Triumphans, while the gold or ultramarine monochromes of Yves Klein can be related to the gold grounds of the 14th-century altarpieces.
Yves Klein, L’esclave de Michel-Ange, 1962, pure pigment and synthetic resin on synthetic resin, 60 x 22 x 15 cm, © Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris
The casts of the David’s eyes in Claudio Parmiggiani’s work po se the problem of the fragment, while Leoncillo and Luigi Ontani’s images of Saint Sebastian present different visions of that sacred iconography. The gaze at the past will appear emblematic and mysterious in Alberto Savinio’s Nettuno Pescatore as well as in Gino de Dominicis’s Urvasi e Gilgamesh. Interesting reflections on the work of the past will also be provided by Francis Bacon’s Figure sitting (the Cardinal), Pablo Picasso’s Arlequín con espejo and Sol LeWitt’s drawings of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, as well as by the ovoid volumes of Luciano Fabro’s Il giudizio di Paride or Eliseo Mattiacci’s large iron sculpture Carro solare del Montefeltro. Memory as recognition of origins will be the focus of Fiona Tan’s film Provenance, and the classical elements of museum architecture are the form out of which Antonio Catelani develops his Klettersteig. (©Art of the Day)
Kamagurka - The End of Cubism - 2012
From the first of May to the first of August 2012 – Arentshuis and other locations
Artist, painter, theatre and television producer Kamagurka (Luc Zeebroek) will act as curator for a special art project in Bruges: Kamarama. On several locations he will display his own works as well as works of other artists who inspire and fascinate him. It will be an exhibition full of remarkable art, surprising perspectives and a certain amount of humour.
Kati Heck - check - 2012 - courtesy Jan Mostmans
The Arentshuis will act as a live atelier in which Kamagurka will display his own art works. From time to time he will create a new work here, by himself or together with other artists such as David Bade (May 1), Stephen Tunney (May 3 & 4), Werner Mannaers (May 17 & 18), Jeroen Henneman (June 28 & 29) and Muzo (July 10 & 11).
Roland Topor
In the Garemijn Hall, Kamagurka displays works from artists who inspired and influenced him. He likes to combine historic and contemporary art. He’s also fascinated by international links and the use of mixed media in art.
Kamagurka - Retrospective VII (kubistische smurfin) - 2012
Displayed artists: Capitaine Lonchamps (B), David Bade (NL), Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart (US), Emile Salkin (F), Francis Picabia (F), Fred Bervoets (B), George Condo (US), George Grosz (D), Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (F), Herr Seele (B), J.J. Grandville (F), James Ensor (B) , Jan Fabre (B), Jeff Olsson (S), Jeroen Henneman (NL), Kati Heck (D), Luc Tuyman s (B), Lucebert (NL), Marcel Duchamp (F), Markus Lüpertz (D), Max Ernst (D), Muzo (F), Otto Dix (D), Pablo Picasso (E), Paul Joostens (B), René Daniëls (NL), René Magritte (B), Rinus Van de Velde (B), Roland Topor (FR), Stephen Tunney a.k.a. Dogbowl (US), Werner Mannaers (B), Wim Delvoye (B), Wim T. Schippers (NL) and Yves Obyn (B).
Herr Seele - Cowboy Henk, 2011 - courtesy of the artist
You will also see art works in the streets of Bruges such as his ‘accidental’ portraits of fictive people. There will be 12 portraits spread around the Arentshof garden and alongside the Dijver. If you think you recognize a family member, friend or acquaintance in one of the portraits, you can report this on this website. At the end of the project, Kamagurka will choose the one who is the best lookalike of one of his portraits.
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.
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.