International Art News

From 29 September 2012 to 25 April 2013
During its temporary stay in the Hermitage Amsterdam, the Van Gogh Museum will present works by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) from its permanent collection in a completely new way. In this display of some 75 paintings, selected letters, objects and works on paper, visitors will follow Vincent van Gogh on a personal quest into the heart of his artistic identity. The themes that the artist himself identified as central to his development will form the basis of the presentation Vincent: The Van Gogh Museum in the Hermitage Amsterdam.

During this seven-month renovation, most of the works by Van Gogh in the museum’s collection will be on display at the Hermitage Amsterdam. Many major paintings will be included, such as Sunflowers, The bedroom, Almond blossom, The potato eaters and The yellow house, in surprising combinations of early and late works. Van Gogh’s most famous and best loved paintings will be shown side by side with lesser known works in closely integrated thematic pairings.

Hermitage Amsterdam

Until the 13th of January 2013 -  Hermitage Amsterdam
The Hermitage Amsterdam present Impressionism: Sensation & Inspiration: the world-famous Impressionist paintings from the vast collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, are presented in their artistic context.

Masterpieces by pioneers like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro are accompanied by the work of other influential French painters from the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The exhibition focus on contrasts between artistic movements. For instance, visitors can see and experience the sensational quality of Impressionism, the movement that heralded a new age.

All the paintings, drawings, and sculptures come from the collection of the St. Petersburg Hermitage. Seldom has such a rich survey of this period been on display in the Netherlands.

 Hermitage Amsterdam

Extended to June 15th, 2012 – Hermitage Amsterdam
The current exhibition featuring the great Flemish painters Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens is to be extended for three months, until 15 June 2012.
A stunning selection from the Flemish art collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. With 75 paintings and about 20 drawings, this definitive survey will include numerous masterpieces by the three giants of the Antwerp School  – Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens – accompanied by the work of well-known contemporaries.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) will be a special focus of the exhibition, represented by 17 paintings and many drawings. Rubens was the most accomplished and influential Flemish painter of the seventeenth century. At the same time, he was known as a charming aristocrat, diplomat, and collector, and his workshop was a smoothly operating business. He was a legend in his day, a homo universalis. Both Rubens’s religious and his secular works illustrate his unequalled talent. One of his masterpieces is the famous Descent from the Cross (c. 1618), which depicts Christ’s suffering with compelling drama. This painting has never before been sent out on loan.

The exhibition will also examine Rubens’s influence and followers in detail, devoting particular attention to the elegant and refined portraits of his greatest pupil, Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). Around 1638, Van Dyck painted King Charles I of England and his wife, the French princess Henrietta Maria. By that time, he had been serving as the king’s court painter for several years and had been knighted Sir Anthony.

The third great master of the Flemish school, Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), did not study with Rubens but was influenced by him. His impressive paintings invite viewers to share in his exuberant Flemish joie de vivre. Even his history paintings have a Flemish ambiance.

Chirping birds, freshly killed game and floral bouquets grace the still lifes of Frans Snijders, while David Teniers the Younger was renowned for his genre pieces of everyday life. The exhibition will also feature a touching family portrait of Cornelis de Vos and many other major paintings by Flemish masters, displayed in their full glory.

It is the first time that this superb collection will be shown in the Netherlands. Many of these paintings were acquired by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. They belonged to world-class collectors such as Pierre Crozat and Heinrich von Brühl, whose collections Catherine purchased in their entirety. Most of them were commissioned by churches and secular patrons in Antwerp and other European cities, and were produced against the backdrop of the Eighty Years’ War and the Counter-Reformation. This Catholic movement, a reaction to the Reformation, encouraged both churches and private individuals to commission sacred art on a large scale. The epic Baroque style of Rubens and his contemporaries made an excellent propaganda tool for the Catholic church, the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie.

With the aid of an audio tour, a film, and computer displays, the exhibition offers a close look at Flemish art and the history of the Flemish art collection at the St. Petersburg Hermitage. The vitality of seventeenth-century Antwerp comes to life on a special wall of the exhibition that shows painters’ studios, churches, and monuments in word and image. The accompanying catalogue will include essays by Russian and Flemish authors.

Museum Hours

From September 3 to October 15, 2011 – Galerie Fons Welters
The universe of American artist Matthew Monahan (Eureka, CA, 1972) is full of powerful and bizarre human-like objects that have an enormous presence in the space. He creates a world humming with its own mythology and language, one that plays with our collective and individual unconsciousness, while searching for his own breathtaking artistic solutions.

According to the artist, the human body is the formal frame into which he throws all his magic. For his new show in Galerie Fons Welters he subjects the body to all kinds of formal shocks: ornamentation, fracture, excavation, erosion or dissection. But whatever he does, the gamut of testing they may have run is only to bring out the character, the face of survival, the whole surface of a human landscape, and ultimately, a feeling of love and empathy. His imagination is according to the artist a cluttered scrap heap of souvenirs, relics, and sex drive. In this context, imagination is not just a flicker on the eyelids but a hard won process of bringing images into reality, an encyclopedia of methods that has a life of its own.

Monahan has a clear set of materials that he limits himself to, each one ‘opposing’ but also complementing each other. Charcoal is dust on paper; wax is translucent; glass is transparent and brick is ambivalent. Since a few years he started to use the heaviness and grandeur of bronze. The artist is interested in all the transformation phases between materials and also images; in ”the degree of physicality a soul needs to be to stand out in the world”.
In the gallery space his objects look like figures coming from an elusive and beautiful but raw fantasy world: fragmented bodies, figures made up of exciting combinations of forms, materials and formats are accompanied by subtle charcoal drawings. The drawing is a very important medium to the artist since it stands for his artistic interest that in general focuses on the image and not on the space. “For me, drawing is a kind of digging — a line is an incision, a shadow makes a cavern. Where the cavern leads to is not clear to me. If I dig far enough, I will wrap around the image and then we can call it a sculpture. I am mostly concerned with the face, the façade that most ‘modern’ sculptors would object to. Space is too much for me. I have to work my way from the tip of the nose, and bring the ghost to the surface. You can’t rush something like that just to fill the dance floor. Think how long it took to get the Kouros boy to loosen his hips.”

In this time-consuming, intuitive and technically demanding process Monahan incarnates his artistic ideas and wakes a whole spectrum of archetypical figures to life.

Galerie Hours

April 23 to July 16, 2011 – Galerie Alex Daniels – Reflex Amsterdam
For many decades now, Nobuyoshi Araki’s central themes have been sex and death. In his photographs they have always co-existed, depended on each other: there can be no lust for life, without the threat of death.

In this as-yet-unseen collection of devastating new works by the world-famous Japanese photographer, now in his 71st year, it is not so much death he is concerned with, but grief. In each of these 40 diptychs, he addresses the complex relationship between loss and desire, which translates as despair and hope, separation and symbiosis, the internal and the other.

The diptychs, each comprising two very different styles of photographs bring these two essential sides of Araki’s world together. But they also suggest other pairings: home and work; the personal and the impersonal; the homely and the erotic.

On one side of the diptych, in nostalgic, elegiac monochrome, he captures his private world. Often, these are close-ups of his beloved Tokyo balcony, a sanctuary where he used to enjoy the companionship of both his late wife and his cat. In these images, that personal space, although still redolent of happier times, has become a wasteland inhabited and patrolled by plastic dinosaurs, The dinosaur – at once fascinating,  predatory and fabled – has long been recognised as Araki’s alter-ego. While Araki himself is not present in these black and white images, the toy dinosaurs that populate the scenes serve to show the indelible, inescapable, nature of memory.

Countering these black and white scenes are striking colour images of naked women in erotic and at times, challenging poses. Some are tied up – almost bandaged; others are more freely provocative. This is Araki’s trademark subject matter, which has earned him international admiration. Occasionally, perhaps inevitably, the intimate mingles with the erotic, manifest in a plastic dinosaur crossing from one scene into another

Visually, Araki’s diptychs startle and excite. They leave an imprint in the mind.

At first they bear no relation to each other, but taken together, they are some of the most complete and personal works the artist has ever produced.

Araki has exhibited his work in international art institutions including Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Muenchen, among others.  His last solo exhibition was at the Museo d’Arte della Citta di Lugano.

Galerie Hours

19 March to 16 September 2011 – Hermitage Amsterdam
Splendour and Glory will provide the first overview in the Netherlands of the time-honoured spiritual and artistic traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. More than 300 religious artefacts – icons, fresco fragments, robes, paintings, historical books and gold and silver objects associated with Christian worship – form the tangible evidence of this rich and enduring sacred institution. Themes in the exhibition include the Church’s Byzantine origins and tradition, ecclesiastical feast days with Pascha (Easter) as the high point of the religious calendar, and the tsars and their ‘private’ church. On display for the first time are an imposing iconostasis, exceptional fourteenth-century frescoes from Pskov and a wealth of magnificent icons from the Hermitage St Petersburg and other renowned Russian collections.

Museum Hours