International Art News

From July 7 to August 8, 2012 – A plus A – Centro Espositivo Sloveno
After the New Museum in New York and the Mumok Museum in Vienna, Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanovic comes to Venice for his first Italian solo exhibition Good Night – State of Body at A plus A Slovenian Exhibition Centre. The exhibition will be presented next autumn in Regensburg and New York.

Mladen Miljanovic is one of the most interesting contemporary artists in the East European art scene. He was in fact chosen by Massimiliano Gioni for his triennial Younger than Jesus held at the New Museum in New York in 2009.

After Ibro Hasanovic’s exhibition in November 2011, A plus A continues its exploration of Balkan art with Good Night – State of Body which features two works by Mladen Miljanovic: the film Do You Intend to Lie to Me? and the photographic work Show By Your Hand Where do You Feel Pain. During the opening, the artist will do the performance At the Edge of Margin, in which he will hang his body outside the gallery.

The powerful visual impact of Miljanovic’s work goes beyond the cliché of post-war Balkan art and it has had wide international appreciation. The artist takes as a starting point of reflection the reality that surrounds him. He creates original works that can simultaneously be disturbing and touching for their capacity to unravel truths in a very direct, almost brutal, way.

Mladen Miljanovic was born in 1981 in Zenica, an industrial city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 70 km north from Sarajevo, and graduated from the Academy of Art in Banja Luka. In 2007 he receives the ZVONO price for best Bosnian young artist. Numerous international participations will follow, such as the Busan Biennal in South Korea in 2008, a show at Palazzo Forti in Verona, Italy, in 2009, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Wien in 2010 and the 53rd Belgrade October Salon in 2011.

Centro Espositivo Sloveno

From 4 June to 27 November 2011 – The Museo Correr – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
The exhibition presents more than forty works, exploring Julian Schnabel’s career from the 1970s to the present and offering an opportunity to admire paintings and sculptures by a great artist and all-round American phenomenon. The retrospective illustrates his aesthetic, strongly influenced by Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, but also drawing on the European and Mediterranean tradition. His art recalls the style of the old Spanish and Italian masters, like El Greco and Tintoretto, and reworks ancient and modern literary and cultural references from Homer to Aeschylus, to the art of the great masters like Giotto, Goya, Antoni Gaudí and Pablo Picasso.
Painter, sculptor and film director of international fame, Julian Schnabel stands out for his astounding capacity for creative metamorphoses and the arresting expressive power of his works. A painter first and foremost, he has explored various fields of art, including film, as the acclaimed director of Basquiat in 1996, Before Night Falls in 2000 (which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007 (which earned him the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival). Schnabel’s films are closely connected to his art, and his work in film can be viewed as a natural continuation of his painting.
Best known for his plate paintings, Schnabel has in fact used an infinite variety of media and materials to create his works, from velvet to oil cloth, from pieces of wood from all over the world to sails, photographs, rugs, tarpaulins and in general any flat surface that inspires his creative process. This painting process influenced people into making new kinds of art.
Towards the end of the 1980s Schnabel began to work with outsize formats. This approach, although often interpreted by critics as a mere attempt to impress the viewer, actually springs from the artist’s desire to reference the imposing paintings of the past commissioned by the state or the church, as well as the “big paintings” of post-war America.

Museum Hours

Andy Warhol, “Ileana Sonnabend,” 1973. The Sonnabend Collection. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, by SIAE 2011

From May 29–October 2, 2011 – Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait brings together more than 60 works by almost 50 artists, selected by Antonio Homem (director of the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend). It will include Andy Warhol’s portrait of Ileana Sonnabend, works on Italian themes by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, works by Italians such as Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Schifano and Piero Manzoni, works by American artists inspired by Italian culture (Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari for example), by artists of the Arte Povera movement (Zorio, Anselmo, Calzolari, Jannis Kounnelis, and Merz), by several international photographers (including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins), and by many others—whether Italian (Giulio Paolini, Luigi Ontani) or not (Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Philip Haas, Rona Pondick for example).
Today she is not as well known as her ex-husband Leo Castelli but Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) was his equal in being one of the great figures of the art world in the XXth century. A Romanian beauty and heiress of a great industrial dynasty, Ileana Schapira (she took the name of her second husband, Michael Sonnabend) linked her destiny to that of the young executive of the Generali insurance company, when he was on a mission in Bucharest on the eve of World War II. It was in the United States that the two discovered their talents as exceptional art dealers and collectors. The exhibition set up in the sanctuary of another exceptional woman – Peggy Guggenheim – can be looked at like a Who’s Who of the great art currents, from the avant-gardes of the fifties to the most recent ones, from Rauschenberg to Lichtenstein, from the Becher couple to Jeff Koons. But the aim of this exhibition is mainly to illustrate the links Ileana Sonnabend had with Italy, embodied not only in the Arte povera (Kounellis, Merz, Pistoletto) but in Fontana’s slashes or Mimmo Rotella’s reassembled collages as well.

Museum Hours

A. Gottlieb, Burst 1973, 1973 Acrilico e smalto su tela. Collezione Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY/by SIAE 2010

From September 4, 2010, to January 9, 2011 – Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The exhibition surveys the art of the American artist Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974): from his initial paintings of Surrealist influence, to his expressionist and abstract works. The popularity of Gottlieb derives from his invention of a visual language more basic and universal than written language, purged of symbols with historical precedents. His Pictographs are images of what appear to be archaic symbols in irregular grids; his Bursts and Landscapes  are symbols of cosmic and universal, as well as uniquely aesthetic value. The show includes sketches, prints and sculptures. The exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York. It includes loans from the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, various private collections, as well as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou), and the Museum Frieder Burda.

Museum Hours

From the 29th August to the 21st of November 2010 – Architecture
From the 1st to the 11th of  September 2010 – Cinema
The Venice Biennale, which has its offices in Ca’ Giustinian (San Marco, 1364/A), has for over a century been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. Ever since its foundation in 1895, it has been in the avant-garde, promoting new artistic trends and organising international events in contemporary arts. It is world-beating for the International Film Festival, for the International Art Exhibition and for the International Architecture Exhibition, and continues the great tradition of the Festival of Contemporary Music, the Theatre Festival, now flanked by the Festival of Contemporary Dance.

Headed by its mayor, Riccardo Selvatico, the Venetian City Council passed a resolution on 19th April 1893 to set up a biennial exhibition of Italian art, to be inaugurated on 22nd April 1894. However, the event took place in 1895, two years later than it had been planned. On 30th April, the 1st International Art Exhibition was inaugurated.

In the 1930s new festivals were born: Music, Cinema, and Theatre (the Venice Film Festival in 1932 was the first film festival ever organized). In 1980 the first Intl. Architecture Exhibition took place, and in 1999 Dance made its debut at the Venice Biennale.
Today the Biennale has an attendance  of over 370,000 visitors at the Art Exhibition.

More on the events, shows…

From august 29, 2010 to january 9, 2011 – Fondazione Musei Civici
A project conceived especially for Ca’ Pesaro by one of the protagonists of sculpture today, Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949). With an itinerary through the three floors of Ca’ Pesaro – from the entrance hall and small room on the ground floor, to the monumental staircase, second floor and façade overlooking the Grand Canal – the exhibition offers forty works of art, in glass, bronze, steel, plastic, wood and stone, but also drawings, preparatory sketches and watercolours, spanning thirty years activity, from the 1980s to today, most of which have never been on show in Italy before.
These are all works that document the versatility of the languages and products of his work, while also establishing a close relation with the permanent works on display in the museum and its rooms.

The exhibition, curated by Silvio Fuso and Jon Wood, is a co-production by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and KunstMeran/Merano Arte (where it will be on display from 5 February to 28 May 2011, curated by Valerio Dehò), in collaboration with Galleria Michela Rizzo and Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice.

Catalogue Marsilio…
…After his initial phase (the Seventies), during which he combined coloured fragments of city debris in innovative compositions between collage and sculpture, Tony Cragg gradually moved towards more majestic works in which minimalism became monumental, using huge blocks of wood, iron, bronze and glass fibre. His main interest became “the creation of objects and images that don’t exist in the natural or functional world but that are able to reflect and transmit information and sensations about the world and [its] very existence” (Tony Cragg, 1985). Fundamental is not only the choice of the element to be used in his creations, but also its actual working into forms that are able to develop and be transformed. In what is almost a scientific attitude, Cragg’s “manic” interest for the potential movement of bodies drives him to search for, study and reveal all the possible mutations of a primary structure. All of this takes place within a poetics of creation. Not “closed” forms but ‘openings’ in which the main idea is the relationship with space and between objects, material, and images. A self-declared layman and “materialist”, Tony Cragg carries out an aesthetic-philosophical operation in which art has the task of revealing a profound physical and plastic spirituality, “as an alternative to looking at nature, and an alternative to looking at a dull-headed industrial utilitarian reality” (Tony Cragg, 2005).