International Art News

Loïs Mailou Jones, La Baker (detail), 1977. Acrylic and collage on canvas. Gift of the Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noel Trust

From January 19, 2013 to October 14, 2013 – Museum of Fine Arts
“Loïs Mailou Jones” presents 30 paintings and drawings by the distinguished, internationally acclaimed graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Born and raised in Boston, Jones attended the SMFA during high school and earned a scholarship that enabled her to receive her degree in Design with honors in 1927. In 1937, she took a sabbatical from her teaching job at Howard University and spent a year in Paris, where she attended the Académie Julian, frequented museums and galleries, and noted in an interview in the Women’s Art Journal that she was far freer as an African American woman in Paris than she was in the art world in the United States. After her marriage to Haitian graphic artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël in 1953, Jones found inspiration in the spiritual beliefs, sights, and sounds of Haiti. A trip to Africa in 1970 to meet with contemporary artists there brought to fruition Jones’s earlier interest in African art. This exhibition presents works from every stage of Jones’s artistic career, beginning with her early copies after objects in the Museum’s collections, her teaching career at Howard University, and the travels that shaped her distinctive vision and contributions to American art.

Museum of Fine Arts – mfa

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

From Sept 07, 2012 to Oct 06, 2012 – Gallery Voss
Harding Meyer´s central theme still is the grappling with the human physiognomy, to which he adds, in his current exposition “Features”, a new approach by transforming photographic works.

Over the last fifteen years, he has consequently developed further the solitary portraits integrated in the paintings. The models are mainly taken from the wide range of the media: he searches magazines, the internet and TV for the starting point of his pictures. In a long forming process, layer by layer, Harding Meyer turns the media stereotype into the individual intended: the picture as picture. He reconstructs a biography, the biography of faces generated by the media, but the aim is the creation of anonymity as identity.

For the first time Meyer offers a look into his photographic activities, the origin of which can be found in his collection of portrait photographs.
In “Features” he shows a photographic series of collage-like “sculptures”, in which he mixes elements of various faces. He cuts out facial fragments, pins them to faceless Styrofoam heads, sometimes adding a glass eye, and finally equips them with hats thus creating heads that will strike the spectator as human and artificial at the same time. Here it is the right eye of a prisoner meeting a model´s glaring red lips, there it is coarse-grained pixel noses and most delicate eyelashes. To take pictures of such objects he uses the iPhone as well as traditional cameras.

Gallery Voss

Doğançay - No Future, 1999 - Mixed media on masonite tiles mounted on canvas - 122 x 122 cm.Doğançay Collection of the artist

Until the 23rd of September 2012 – Istambul Modern
Since the early 1960s, Burhan Doğançay examines the social, cultural and political transformation of modern and contemporary urban culture through the use of walls. As an urban traveller, he has been tracking walls in various cities across the world for almost half a century. With the guise of an anthropologist, Doğançay examines these surfaces that are open to all manners of contemporary interventions ranging from posters to slogans, and messages with sexual content to newspaper clippings. Doğançay’s works with different techniques and styles, are positioned in both a historical and contemporary ground through their incorporation of the icons of popular culture and political symbols.

Fifty Years of Urban Walls: A Burhan Doğançay Retrospective stands as an anthology for Doğançay’s last 50 years of work. With works that range from small sized pieces to big canvases, and installations that run beyond the walls, to various materials and pursuits, this exhibition unrolls the background to Doğançay’s ways of working. The exhibition gathers together 14 distinct series and periods of time with works coming from different collections all over the world. The accompanying catalogue presents images of works along with explanatory texts, which provide different perspectives to his ouevre while documents and photographs on Doğançay’s life alludes to his urban traveller identity.

Doğançay - Hear It With Your Heart, 1988 - Collage and acrylic on two stacked canvases - 122 x 127 cm. Dr. Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı Foundation Collection

Munich based publishing house Prestel will be printing and distributing the catalogue worldwide,  allowing Dogançay’s works to access a broader viewing public. The curator of the exhibition, Levent Çalıkoğlu maps out the artist’s body of work spanning over 50 years in his essay entitled, The Recording of History and the Anatomy of Walls. Brand new essays by Brandon Taylor, Professor Ermeritus of History of Art at Southampton University, and Richard Vine, Senior Editor at Art in America, as well as explanatory texts on each series by the writer, editor and graphic designer Clive Giboire all examine the techniques Dogançay has developed and integrated into his practice.

Istanbul Modern

Roy Lichtenstein. Masterpiece, 1962. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Gund Collection

May 16–September 3, 2012 – The Art Institute of Chicago
This exhibition, the first presentation of the full scope and breadth of Roy Lichtenstein’s career since his death in 1997, aims to offer a new, scholarly assessment of the work of this foremost Pop artist. Lichtenstein is an artist whose work is widely known, reproduced, copied, and parodied—he is an artist that we seem to know well but in fact the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood.

Roy Lichtenstein – Girl With Hair Ribbon – Oil and magna on canvas – 48 x 48 inches; 121.9 x 121.9 cm – 1965 The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Presenting over 130 paintings and sculptures, as well as over 30 little- or never-before-seen drawings and collages, this exhibition gives full consideration to all periods of Lichtenstein’s career, including but not limited to, pre-Pop expressionist work, classic Pop Romance and War cartoon paintings, Mirrors, Brushstrokes, Explosions, Artist’s Studio paintings, late nudes, and Chinese Landscapes. Special consideration is given to Lichtenstein’s relationship to art historical sources, ranging from Picasso and Cubism through Surrealism, Futurism, German Expressionism, and the American West.

Roy Lichtenstein. Ohhh…Alright…, 1964. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Finally, the exhibition offers an examination of the artist’s use of alternative media like Plexiglas, Rowlux, and perforated steel in an attempt to broaden the understanding of his art beyond the strictly canonical early Pop paintings.

Art Institute of Chicago

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Scalps in French, 2011 Oil paint, spray paint, caulk, Plexiglas, old paintbrushes and string on canvas 16 x 34 x 5 inches (40.6 x 86.4 x 12.7 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Anna Kustera Gallery, NY

From May 1 to Jul 24, 2012 – Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s innovative explorations of materials and process-based abstract painting make her one of Chicago’s most promising emerging artists. Fresh from her New York gallery debut, the artist presents new paintings that incorporate collage, found objects, and sculptural elements in unexpected ways that push the work beyond traditional notions of painting. BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Fluid Spine, 2011 Oil, acrylic, latex, spray paint, glitter, nails on hand-dyed canvas 30 x 26 inches (76.2 x 66 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Anna Kustera Gallery, NY.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung was born in 1975 in Los Gatos, California, and grew up in Olympia, Washington. She received her BA in 1998 from the Evergreen State College in Olympia and her MFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . She is a co-founder of Julius Caesar, an artist-run exhibition space in Chicago and is currently an adjunct instructor at the School of the Art Institute and Northwestern University.

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