International Art News

Larger in Life – detail

From October 13 to November 26, 2012 – 101 exhibit – West Hollywood
Jason Shawn Alexander (B. 1975) Painter and draftsman from Tennessee, currently resides and works in Los Angeles, California. Though modern in its subject matter, Alexander’s work pulls, still, from the vulnerability, fear, and underlying strength that come from his rural upbringing. Much like good Delta Blues, his work maintains a sense of pain and passion which steers Alexander away from the standard “isms” that, in his words, “tend to muddy up what’s really important”. The result is something heartbreakingly genuine.

Larger in Life | 106×70 inches, mixed media, collage, inks, oils and paper on two canvases, 2012

“It’s probably not a coincidence that Jason Shawn Alexander, in his bio, mentions the Blues, and that when I first saw his paintings I immediately got a Muddy Waters song in my head. Alexander’s work just looks like it hums along a sweaty slide guitar chord, singing its pain and prosperity through a haze of smoke. You can tell that something bad is happening to or around his subjects, but also that they’re just people so it can’t be bad forever. His gritty, drippy, and dark style lends an ominous air, like a fresh grave, and the subject’s poses humanize the whole thing. This is the whole package.” (Brad Martin)

101 exhibit

Joan Miro - Self-Portrait, 1937-1938-February 23, 1960, oil and pencil on canvas, Collection of Emilio Fernández, on loan to the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Until August 12, 2012 – National Gallery of Art
When you hear the name Joan Miró (1893-1983), what springs to mind? Playful shapes in red, blue, and black, floating free of gravity? Stick figures, naked and distorted? Cursive letters moving across barely brushed canvases? Suns, stars, and flowers? Fields of color?

But there is another Miró – not Miró the childlike inventor, the daring Surrealist, the poet of few words, or the lyrical abstractionist (although they are all here), but rather Miró the artist of his times. In his 90 years, he lived through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and fall of Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Through it all, he remained deeply tied to his homeland of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, a region with a distinct culture and proud spirit.

Joan Miro - Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

This exhibition traces the arc of Miró’s career while drawing out his political and cultural commitments. The first two rooms explore his early work, rooted in Catalonia and then transformed in the 1920s under the influence of Paris and the surrealists. A large middle section is devoted to the terrible years of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its repressive aftermath, when Miró developed his mature vocabulary. The last two rooms cover the final decade of Franco’s rule, when Miró turned to making monumental paintings, both calm and explosive.

The story that unfolds is a complex one. Was Miró an activist, a fantasist, or both? Did his art emerge despite or because of difficult times? Miró always kept a figurative “ladder of escape” – one of his favorite images – with him, and he would scale it to flee from harsh conditions into the freedom of his imagination. Yet his ladder was firmly planted on the ground, and he often climbed down to decry oppression. These two impulses, however different, were resolved in Miró’s powerfully simple definition of an artist as “one who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something.”

This exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Angela de La Cruz, FLOOD, 2012

From April 26th to June 2th, 2012 – Galerie Krinzinger
Spanish-born de la Cruz, 45, lives and works in London. Her work is situated between painting, sculpture and installation. Her paintings are often crudely broken, ripped or folded in on themselves, wedged into corners and doorways or presented as masses on the gallery floor.
The canvases are brutally misshapen and dilapidated forms but are deftly and luxuriously painted.
After breaking the stretchers of her canvases as a student at Slade art school, de la Cruz became preoccupied with ‘freeing painting from the boundaries of its support’. Her works often allude to or stand in for the human form.

Gallery Hours

Laura Ann Jacobs, A Conch-scious She Sell (Expecting)

From April 20 to May 20, 2012 – BOSI Contemporary in Manhattan

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity
People say that most ideas can be expressed in just a few words and that, in turn, these few words can be summed up in a title.
Our daily life can therefore be enclosed between two “theoretically” antithetical drives: seduction / sex / life instinct on the one hand and, on the other hand, loss / transformation / Death, the phantom of Death which for many represents the end of everything whereas for some (luckily) but a passage to another dimension.

Although the two sex / death drives at first appear to be antithetical, they are, in reality, complementary to each other: one could not exist without the other.

So, our two heroines today, Laura and Benedetta, could certainly exist in their own right and be seen independently of one another, but by putting them in contrast, they are given life and are intimately connected.

Today’s topic is certainly that of “seduction” in its many facets. It is certainly a term which sets a situation: men, women and children alike wake up with the idea of seducing, and we all end up, inevitably, by being seduced.

Today’s exhibition is an excellent pretext to examine Seduction both as a protagonist and a victim.

Laura Ann Jacobs, Studley Stamen II

Seduction is Power, and Power is based upon Seduction.
To be seductive however entails constraints, restrictions, limitations and sacrifices. But our intrinsic joy in seducing is undeniable.

Let us not forget that a key of interpretation for both these artists is that achieving a dimension goes hand-in-hand with losing that feeling of incompleteness, that feeling that something must yet happen which we still have not attained, which hides from us and eludes us.

Through her art, Laura celebrates woman’s beauty, which is at the heart of her Universe, much like an enchantress who dominates every notion of a male mind.

Many people today are worried about their looks, and busily crowd gyms, buy cosmetics, follow rigorous diets and even resort to plastic surgery: indeed, recent data register an incredible increase in these, almost as if there were not but one model to follow but several points of reference in the – almost mechanic – reproduction of oneself.

Suffice it to think, in the female world, of Victoria’s Secret’s incredible success: nothing shows us better how feminine seduction is expected to be connected to what one wears, at any age.

But narcissism is not at all love of oneself: the transposition of one’s image comes at the cost of the annulment of individual life and its reality in the pursuit of a mythical image which is devoid of emotional content and which has become, just as an Coca-Cola can, but a mere container to recycle.

Although this can be a first and superficial perception, we soon realize that her “sculptures” are full of snares: corsets full of nails, rocks, esoteric symbols, armored and spiky shoes, heavy and stratified brassieres.

This apparently alluring seduction soon turns out to be treacherous.

So whilst we see the means of seduction, we also see the other side of the medal.

Seduction, or rather the means of seduction, is at once heaviness, ardor, stench, sweat, hard work, constriction, and it is the concrete manifestation of what Bataille purports when he says: “Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns”.

Is it us who must seduce or are we the ones to be seduced?

Is her seduction a piece of flypaper??

Moving on to a more cultured debate (are you ready for it?), according to Sartre, reality and the aesthetic experience are separated by an unbridgeable gap: the work of art is in a perpetual “elsewhere”, in a permanent absence, which consists in transposing the object from its usual perception to a new, unexpected and surprising one.

Laura Ann Jacobs, Another Evening Awwwwt

The seducing woman is thus enclosed in a beautiful prison, much as a splendid animal in its cage, not quite a hybrid.

But beware: in classical mythology hybrids embody the man-animal duplicity and bear concepts connected to danger, challenge, death or, at a deeper level, to change.

Often they are beautifully seducing female figures (you will recall the Mermaids, the Harpies, etc.), because their ultimate goal is the death of a part of ourselves so as to lead us to the other hemisphere and give us a new, changed, life.

Is this, then, the message Laura hides in her sculptures?

Is the message meant to give us access to them in order to change our knowledge or perception??
The captivating but precise names she gives to her works lead us in this direction; an ambiguous one, but open to a hidden meaning.

Benedetta Bonichi, Contorsionista

Let us now turn our gaze to Benedetta.
Benedetta loves detaching flesh from bodies as if, in her quest for the elementary truth of a human being, the bone structure was more reliable and convincing than any other part of the body.

But what do we see in Benedetta’s works?
Skeletons that couple, sinuous Vestals that look at their reflections in the mirror and who seducingly look at viewers.

What is left in her portraits is merely form: skeletons, decorated with but a few jewels and gems, which however radiate a deep emotion (be it joyous, seducing, voluptuous, sensual), which itself, in turn, becomes the main actor.

“I am a human being, I love death and I love life” Schiele wrote when he was 20 – nearly the same cry that emerges from the characters in his canvases.
And to whom Benedetta, ideally, replies: “Illusion and matter are my work”.

In Benedetta we see a very careful and formal, yet at the same time perverse, use of jewels and decorative elements which adorn her characters. It is obvious that the Artist, in her X-ray images, puts the tension and torsion of muscles before the flesh, and, with an even greater satisfaction, that she privileges by far the bones, the spinal column and the whole structure of the skeleton to flesh and muscles.

Benedetta Bonichi, Gli Sposi Studio N6 Per Il Banchetto Di Nozze

“I wanted to use X-rays to deceive light. What happened was the contrary.. (…) X-rays don’t lie, or perhaps they are another illusion, the disappointment of the illusion that generated them in the first place”.
Removing the flesh brings Benedetta to the skeleton, and the skeleton sets her free to express emotions which otherwise would be “polluted”, and dominated by, the full image.

It is a perpetual game between what we are and what we will become, with, undoubtedly, a privileged emphasis on the “future”: what we are is laden with meanings, including negative ones; the future is filled only with pleasure.

Benedetta Bonichi, Stelle

In the truth of the skeleton the Artist shows she is akin with the German painters of the High Middle Ages, fascinated as she is by the mechanic figurines of the death dances that revolve in a circle when the hours strike, in the clocks of the old bell-towers of Central and Northern Europe.

Just like in the mechanic figurines, there is also an ironic and seductive component, a playful emotion which encircles them and is at the same time reminiscent of Mexican mythology.
There is never sadness in them…: disenchantment but not melancholy.
Perhaps, at times, some spleen.

We should note that what is missing in both our artists Laura and Benedetta is Flesh itself, the flaccid, solid, rough-handled, tortured, cared for, smoothed down, corrupted Flesh; a heritage, for some more and for others less, which belongs to everyone.
Flesh is something extra, something that because it is central to our obsessions, is the most overexposed part of ourselves.

Today’s two Artists point out a scene while at the same they set its boundaries and a trap, because they tend not to hide the expositive and exhibitionist quality of art, both of a pictorial and sculptural nature. Ideally they represent day and night. A classical dichotomy, unchangeable but, luckily, full of nuances.
In truth we are trying out a different dimension, and the price for accessing it is the loss of a material perspective.

Are you pleased to achieve it?? (Renato Miracco)

Laura Ann Jacobs (born 1960, in Baltimore) is an American sculptor who lives and works in San Francisco and Palm Beach. She earned her BFA From San Francisco State University, and attended postgraduate studies at Academy of Art University and California College of Arts and Crafts.

Benedetta Bonichi was born in 1968 in Italy. She has been working in her family’s atelier since she was four. Bonichi studied music, Romance languages, anthropology, Greek history and archaeology.She started exhibiting in 2002.

Gallery Hours

Clyfford Still 1949-A-No.1, 1949 Oil on canvas, 93 x 79 in. © Clyfford Still Estate

Until September 2, 2012 – Norton Museum
American Masters at the Norton:
Three exceptional canvases by Joan Mitchell and Clyfford Still, each a master of late twentieth century American painting,  will be on view at the Museum from March 22 through the Fall of  2012.  Still (1904 – 1980) is credited with laying the groundwork for the Abstract Expressionism movement, which is exemplified by a variety of styles from the pour paintings of Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko’s fields of luminescent color. Until the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum last year, there were few public insitutions where his sublime, remarkable canvases could be seen. On view at the Museum are 1949-A-No.1 (1949) and PH-1033 (1976). Although younger than Still, Mitchell found her voice (as did many other artists of succeeding generations) within the style of gestural abstraction. While the very action of the manner of painting was powerful, Mitchell (and her peers) reinterpreted it, using paint directly from tubes, applying it with her hands and conceiving of compositions that worked from the center out, rather ethan over the entire surface of her canvas. These characteristics are seen in the untitled canvas by Mitchell (circa 1960) also on view.

Museum Hours

David Hockney, 'Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006', 2006. Oil on 6 canvases. 182 x 366 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo credit: Richard Schmidt

From January 21 to April 9,  2012 – Royal Academy of Arts
The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major exhibition of new landscape works by David Hockney RA. Featuring vivid paintings inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape, these large-scale works have been created especially for the galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts and are shown alongside related drawings and film.

‘David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture’ spans a 50 year period to demonstrate Hockney’s long exploration and fascination with the depiction of landscape. New work that dates from 2005 captures the beauty of the changing seasons, the cycle of growth and the journey that Hockney has taken through his beloved landscapes in Yorkshire.

The exhibition also reveals how Hockney has embraced new technology, including his early use of the Polaroid, his innovative use of the colour photocopier, and more recently his iPhone and iPad. The exhibition includes a display of his iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using 18 cameras, which are displayed on multiple screens and provide a spellbinding visual journey through the eyes of David Hockney.

Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney’s stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.

Museum Hours