Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman with a Hat, 1905. Oil on canvas; 31 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bequest of Elise S. Haas. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

February 28–June 3, 2012 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins’ patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins’ Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums.

Beginning with the art that Leo Stein collected when he arrived in Paris in 1903—including paintings and prints by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir—the exhibition traces the evolution of the Steins’ taste and examines the close relationships formed between individual members of the family and their artist friends. While focusing on works by Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, André Masson, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, and others.

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Pavel Hayek, Jabloň, 2008, 130x130 cm, akryl na plátně. Foto Libor Teplý

From February 29 to April 1, 2012 – Brno The House of Arts
This joint exhibition by the artists Otto Zitko (b. 1959, resident in Vienna) and Pavel Hayek (b.1959, resident in Brno), set up by the Brno gallery owner Karel Tutsche will present two artistic positions which differ but are at the same time complementary. The link between them is not a demonstrative expression of the monarchist relationship of Brno to Vienna; Pavel Hayek invited Zitko as a creative kindred spirit. The compositions in Hayek’s pictures are only compositions to the same extent that Zitko’s gesture is a true gesture. In this context Barbara Steiner talks of Zitko’s compound gesture and Jiří Valoch about Hayek’s composition-free pictures – structures sui generis. This structural aspect is the great connection between the two artistic approaches. Zitko’s endless line overgrowing the pictures and interior walls of the House of Arts, and Hayek’s floorplan-specific structures which are “themselves” placed into the position of a design.

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Lauri Laine, Visitor, 2011oil on canvas, 255 x 165 cm. Photo: Jussi Tiainen

From March 10 to April 22, 2012 – Kunsthalle Helsinki
Lauri Laine is one of the most prestigious and internationally famous Finnish artists of his generation. The retrospective exhibition showcases Laine’s paintings from the mid-1980s to the present. Working in Helsinki and Rome, the artist’s large-scale, opulent abstractions are inspired by the way Italian and Spanish masters of Renaissance and Baroque painting handled light and space in their work.

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Robert Jessup - Neighborhood Geometry - oil on canvas 80 X 74 inches

March 21, 2012 – April 21, 2012 – Besharat Gallery
Robert Jessup was born in Moscow, Idaho, in 1952. He graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Art History and a BFA in Painting, before gaining his MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa City.

Robert Jessup’s paintings describe a place neither here nor there; part memory, part imagination. They are both awkward and beautiful, and they show us what we might otherwise only see with our eyes closed. That is unless you come from a place where people balance fish or teacups on their heads, or push boulders uphill while nude. With the imagination of a child and skill of a seasoned painter, Robert Jessup creates paintings that have the unique ability to both unsettle and delight us at the same time.

Mr. Jessup’s paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; as well as many public, private, and corporate collections.

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Jean Cocteau avec un revolver 1926 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 35,5 x 28 cm. Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc

From 21 February 2012 until 29 April 2012 – Musee du Jeu de Paume
With Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), urban experience is at the heart of the exhibition: in an America shaken by the Wall Street Crash, her images of 1930s New York convey her fascination with an urban landscape in the throes of dramatic change. Also known for championing the work of Eugène Atget, Abbott, who originally wanted to be sculptor, proved to be a great photographer of matter, space and light.
This is the first exhibition in France to cover every stage of Berenice Abbott’s career, featuring over 120 vintage prints by this American photographer as well as a series of documents never previously shown. The selection of portraits, architectural photographs and scientific plates shows the many facets of a body of work all too often reduced to a handful of familiar images.

Berenice Abbott came to the French capital in the 1920s and was trained by Man Ray before opening her own studio, where she began a successful career as a portrait photographer. Mixing in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day, she photographed a cosmopolitan cast including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, André Gide, Foujita, Max Ernst, and Marie Laurencin.

Park Avenue et 39e rue, New York 8 octobre 1936 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 19 x 24,5 cm. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

The exhibition also features a substantial selection of images form her Changing New York project (1935-1939), for which she is best known. This undertaking was Abbott’s own initiative but was financed by the Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to combat the Great Depression. Conceived as both a record of the city and a work of art in its own right, this ambitious government commission focuses on the contrast between the old and the new in the rapidly changing city.
The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition is presenting a never previously exhibited selection of these) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.”
In the 1950s, Abbott produced a set of photographs illustrating the principles of mechanics and optics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining aesthetic and educational concerns, these abstract, experimental images echo her photograms of the 1920s.
An active participant in the avant-garde circles in the 1920s, a determined opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, famous for bringing Eugène Atget to international attention, Berenice Abbott spent her whole career exploring the notions of documentary photography and photographic realism. This retrospective at Jeu de Paume brings out the richness of her approach, and both the diversity and unity of her work.

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Lipman STILL LIFE WITH VINES, 2011 Courtesy of Hellar Gallery

February 24 to February 28, 2012 -  Naples International Pavilion
The second annual Naples International Art & Antique Fair (NIAAF) will return February 23 – 28 to the Naples International Pavilion at Immokalee and Livingston Roads. Inaugurated in 2011, NIAAF introduced international fine art galleries to the flourishing art scene of Florida’s Gulf Coast for the first time.
The 2012 edition will again showcase an array of international galleries exhibiting works for sale including American and European 19th and 20th century paintings, objet d’art, modern and mid-century Murano glass, sculpture, haute and period jewelry and original design.

Charles Messonier (1844-1917) Taking Tea” - Oil on Canvas - Signed - Size: 28 - Provenance: Private Collection, Paris - Courtesy of Callaghan Fine Paintings

“This new fair will bring 60 – 70 carefully selected, prestigious art, antique, and jewelry dealers of the highest caliber from around the world to Southwest Florida for the first time in a spectacular setting consistent with the other major IFAE international events in Palm Beach, London and Miami,” said David Lester, IFAE Founder and Fair Director. “The fair will take place in a newly renovated 55,000 square foot facility to be designated the Naples International Pavilion and will be consistent in size with our original International Pavilion in Palm Beach where we began our Palm Beach International Art & Antique Fair in 1997. ”

The Preview evening, February 23rd, will be under the patronage of the Patty and Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art.

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Marc Chagall (Vitebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul de Vence, 1985). The Blue Circus (Le cirque bleu).- 1950-52- Oil on linen canvas - 232.5 x 175.8 cm - Centre Pompidou, Paris. Dación 1988. En depósito, Musée national du Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Niza. © RMN / Gérard Blot.

Until May 20th 2012, – Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
For more than eighty years Marc Chagall cultivated an art practice inspired by love, memories, Russian and Jewish traditions, and the historical or artistic events he witnessed and in which he often played a part. This retrospective traces his artistic development chronologically and examines the main themes that pervade the work of this artist, who is essential in envisioning the twentieth century.

Marc Chagall - Portrait of Vava. 1953-1956. Oil on canvas. 95 x 73 - Private Collection

Organised by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and Caja Madrid Foundation and curated by Jean-Louis Prat, President of the Comité Chagall, this exhibition will be the first major retrospective in Spain devoted to this Russian artist. Its principal aim is to highlight the prominent role played by Chagall within the history of art. The galleries of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum will display work from the artist’s early years and from his period in Paris, at that time capital of the avant-garde. In addition, there will be sections on Chagall’s experience in Revolutionary Russia and in France up to the time of his enforced exile to the United States in 1941. The exhibition space of Caja Madrid Foundation will focus on the artist’s American years and on his subsequent artistic evolution. Attention will be paid to his use of biblical subjects and his relationship with contemporary poets. Also on display will be works in other media such as sculptures, ceramics and stained-glass windows.

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Gopal Samantray Skinn Less IV Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 48"

16th February 2012 to 8th March 2012 – Indigo Blue Art Gallery
Indigo Blue Art is pleased to present Paradigms & Perspectives, a group show featuring five fresh emerging talents from India.

Showcasing a diverse collection of works, the exhibition explores a myriad of expressions and issues ranging from societal changes and expectations to urbanisation, religion, culture and violence.

Artists include Jimmy Chishi, Nabanita Guha, Kundan Mondal, Gopal Samantray and Parag Sonarghare.

Born in Nagaland, Jimmy Chishi (b. 1977) is greatly influenced by the culture of North-East India. He incorporates traditional folklore, storytelling and theology of North-East India with a contemporary twist.

Nabanita Duttaguha Encapsulate frozen frame Acrylic & thread on canvas 36" x 30"

Nabanita Guha (b.1982) employs dark humour to critique the insular and hypocritical values of the middle class society. Her paintings evoke the sensibilities of a pre-modern era and its corresponding value systems through references to old Indian prints and calendar art.

Kundan Mondal (b.1980) tends to arrange his work in a frenzied style, often forming a tapestry of images that takes references from art history, folk art, mythology, and folk tales. Using the metaphor of the cosmic mythical churning of lord Vishnu, Kundan tries to capture the contradictions and complexities that result in the metaphysical ‘churning’ through his paintings.

In his paintings, Gopal Samatray (b.1976) philosophises on the destructive relationship between humans and nature. His animal subjects are portrayed as being detached and alienated from their natural habitats. The perils of global warming and deforestation are revealed, as wild animals make sudden and incongruous appearances in urban spaces, as if they were the reminders of an impending catastrophe.

Parag Sonarghare Imagine it Done Acrylic on Canvas 75" x 30" (each)

Parag Sonarghare (b.1987) feels that we can never exist in a social vacuity. He is aware of the different identities and characters that people often adopt in daily life. He questions the role of identity in an age of technological advancement, where relations between people have become impersonal and distant.

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Urs Fischer, Dr. Random, 2003 © Urs Fischer Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Andy Keate

February 17 – May 28, 2012 – Kunsthalle Wienn

I believe that art is like people: you can’t reduce it to a couple of sentences—art is much more complex and rich. (Urs Fischer)
Urs Fischer’s multimedia art, which is grounded in sculpture despite the artist’s training as a photographer, offers grand gestures with a pop attitude. A yellow teddy bear weighing several tons in the midst of Manhattan; a house made of bread placed in the public space of Vienna; images of mundane subjects like donuts, London telephone booths, and crumpled Diet Coke cans precisely rendered via silkscreen on mirrored chrome boxes—in Fischer’s work of opposites, transformations of material, media, and scale are not uncommon. Private becomes public, stone turns into bread, and everyday commodities collapse into flat reproductions to decorate minimal objects. In a sculptural balancing act, the Swiss-born artist (b. 1973) grapples with size, gravity, and volume. Fragile and floating objects seemingly suspended in the air—works in which the shadow is a fundamental aspect of their form—live next to gigantic amorphous sculptures cast in aluminum and steel.

Fischer has been known to cut holes through walls (à la Gordon Matta-Clark) and erode the floors of the exhibition space in interventions that recall land art of the 1960s and ’70s. He is less interested in radical aesthetic measures or art historical cross-referencing that could easily relate him to Franz West, Dieter Roth, or Francis Picabia, but rather finds inspiration in artistic alliances that bridge time and place. For nearly every positioning of his work one runs into a companion piece: bodylike walls with bulging scars, floating pink clouds, and installations of countless monochromatic raindrops suspended in midair bear witness not to the bombastic, but to a sensitive artistic intervention.

However, there are also constants without counterparts in Fischer’s work. Over the years certain motifs such as chairs, cats, candles, and still-lifes are repeated in multiple, often-awkward variations—they seem like an agitated ode to everyday life. Certain forms are proclaimed, though never forced. Handcrafted fabrication, flawless mechanical execution, found images, and objets trouvé go hand in hand, never without a hint of irony.

Fischer’s art makes an important contribution to the discourse of form as defined by Georges Bataille’s principle of l’informe. Probing the aesthetic frontiers between object and art, he aims at destabilizing content and form, and integrates in his art anarchistic detonators that reduce identifiable thought and action to absurdity. Occasionally KUNSTHALLE wien, Urs Fischer, 2nd press release, February 2012
dismissing static concepts of artworks, he indulges in anti-form, illustrates processes, and depicts fusion and dissolution: wax figures melt, as does the streetlight made from cast aluminum whose surface, like erupting magma, seems to have gotten out of hand—Frozen Pioneer—a mutation frozen in flux.

Urs Fischer, Untitled (Pink Lady), 2001. Collection Fundação de Serralves—Contemporary Art Museum, Porto, Portugal. © Urs Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.

Fischer’s creative urge transcends the work by means of reference; it oscillates between abstraction and figuration and is both static and dynamic. Rather than imposing his own will onto his work, he searches for each work’s singular momentum, cultivating apparent accidents and incorporating chance as an integral part of his production. Fischer questions the creation of values added to art, as when a fruit sculpture rots during the run of the exhibition or when a seemingly benign installation of a spotlight projects the shadow of a banana or ladder onto a wall. His choice of unconventional materials including styrofoam, mirror glass, lacquer, and glue, as well as wax—imbues the work with a sense of temporality. The transience of life is also evident in motifs such as the skeleton of Skinny Sunrise—in
the Kunsthalle exhibition he will for the first time show a self-portrait, another burning candle sculpture. Nothing remains the same, as the title of another of his works—Thank You Fuck You—reminds us.

Urs Fischer has previously participated in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle, including Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection (2007) and Skulptur. Prekärer Realismus zwischen Melancholie und Komik (2004). This solo exhibition offers a retrospective of his extensive work from the beginnings of his creative production to new works.

Urs Fischer’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York (2009), the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2006), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2005), the Kunsthaus Zürich (2004), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2004). He has participated in important group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (2011, 2007, 2003) and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006). He is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; and the Modern Institute, Glasgow. He lives and works in New York.

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Pablo Picasso The Three Dancers 1925 Tate © Succession Picasso/DACS 2011

From February 15 to July 15, 2012 – Tate Britain
Picasso remains the twentieth century’s single most important artistic figure, a towering genius who changed the face of modern art.

In a major new exhibition at Tate Britain, Picasso and Modern British Art explores his extensive legacy and influence on British art, how this played a role in the acceptance of modern art in Britain, alongside the fascinating story of Picasso’s lifelong connections to and affection for this country.

It brings together over 150 spectacular artworks, with over 60 stunning Picassos including sublime paintings from the most remarkable moments in his career, such as Weeping Woman 1937 and The Three Dancers 1925.

It offers the rare opportunity to see these celebrated artworks alongside seven of Picasso’s most brilliant British admirers, exploring the huge impact he had on their art: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney.

Picasso and Modern British Art is the first exhibition to trace Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity. From his London visit in 1919, working on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s ballet The Three Cornered Hat; to his post-war reputation and political appearances; leading up to the phenomenally successful 1960 Tate exhibition.

Full of beautiful and inspirational artworks, this exhibition is an unmissable treat and a fascinating insight into how British art became modern.

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