International Art News

Colin Chillag

From May 31 to September 8, 2013 – The University of Arizona Museum of Art
Each of the four artists featured in the exhibition critically examine place by questioning and exploring connections to each other and our surroundings, according to Brooke Grucella, who curated the exhibit. “In their explorations, the artists, Colin Chillag, Carrie Marill, Matthew Moore and Kevin Cyr look at the personal bonds we maintain with the spaces we inhabit, often times without sincere reflection,” she said.

Colin Chillag scrutinizes the immediate geography that surrounds his home.  He then creates paintings that represent his observations, incorporating fragments from his art-making process, such as his paint palette, sketches and notes, directly into the scenes. By doing so, Chilag allows the viewer to witness his entire creative process.

Carrie Marill

Carrie Marill’s points out commonalities within what are thought to be opposite states, such as nature versus built environments.  In her series, Doing a Lot with Very Little, she renders plants, discovered in an online Japanese architectural book, translating them from virtual objects to physical drawings.  The plants become symbols for the comforts of home.

Matthew Moore – Digital Farm Collective_Sundance installation

Matthew Moore, who is both a farmer and an artist, has never seen the carrots his farm produces in the marketplace.  His artwork encourages the consumer to gain knowledge of the production process, healthy living through education, and promotes community building through food.

Kevin Cyr – Little Tag Along – Sculpture

Home is also the central character in Kevin Cyr’s art, however, home is often mobile, transitive and compartmentalized.  Cyr’s “Little Tag Along” sculpture is a dwelling that needs no fixed foundation, but offers the comforts of homeownership without damaging the surrounding environment.

The University of Arizona Museum of Art

Camille Pissarro – Field of Cabbages, Pontoise – 1873 – Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on deposit with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

From 04 June to 15 September 2013 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza presente the first monographic exhibition in Spain on the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). A key figure within Impressionism (he wrote the movement’s foundational letter and was the only one of its artists to take part in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886), Pissarro was nonetheless eclipsed by the enormous popularity of his friends and colleagues, in particular Claude Monet. Over 80 works – views of the Seine, Parisian perspectives, portraits and self-portraits –and among them the venerable with the long white beard – show how Pissarro was a gifted guardian of the temple. But he never dared the chromatic audacities Monet imagined or the virtuoso group scenes Renoir was so successful at.

Camille Pissarro – Self Portrait – oil on canvas – 1903 – 41 X 33 cm – Tate Britain

The exhibition aim to restore Pissarro’s reputation and presenting him as one of the great pioneers of modern art. Landscape, the genre that prevailed in his output, will be the principal focus of this exhibition, which offers a chronologically structured tour of the places where the artist lived and painted: Louveciennes, Pontoise and Éragny, as well as cities such as Paris, London, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre. While Pissarro is traditionally associated with the rural world, to which he devoted more than three decades of his career, at the end of his life he shifted his attention to the city and his late output is dominated by urban views.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Edvard Munch – Madonna

May 19, 2013–July 28, 2013 – National Gallery of Art
This 150th birthday tribute to Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Norway’s most famed painter and printmaker, includes more than 20 renowned works from the Gallery’s collection, such as Geschrei (The Scream) (1895), The Madonna (1895, printed 1912/1913), and a unique series of six variant impressions, Two Women on the Shore (1898, printed 1906–c. 1917 or later). Munch is today revered for his passionate visual expression of intense human experiences. “Art is your heart’s blood,” he said. His most famous image—a screaming figure, its eyes wide with horror—is an icon of anxiety, alienation, and anguish. Attraction, love, jealousy, and death were also recurring themes. In addition to these dramatic subjects, Munch made many telling portraits, tender visions of women, as well as sensitive studies of lovers, children, and adolescents. However, the real power of his art lies less in his biography than in his ability to extrapolate universal human experiences from his own life. In recent decades the National Gallery of Art has presented three major exhibitions of Munch’s work, the last in 2010.

National Gallery of Art

The Sermon of St John the Baptist including Preti’s self-portrait

From May 4 to July 7 2013 – The Palace State Rooms – Valletta
Caravaggio was definitely damned. He never managed to have the recognition of the Order of Malta nor a peaceful death in his bed. One of his epigones did… That was Mattia Preti, a brilliant artist of Roman and Napolitan baroque. He was born in 1613 in Calabria and was a national glory in Malta where he died in 1699. Once he had the protection of the great master Martin de Redin, commissions poured in: his paintings adorn the chapel de la Langue d’Aragon, that of Castilla and Leon as well as in Saint John’s co-cathedral, where he left his greatest masterpiece, the frescoes in the vault. We can well understand that the exhibition organized for his fourth centenary at the palace of the Grand Masters, including loans from the Uffizi, the Prado, the Louvre, from Capodimonte or the museum of Taverna, his native town, must absolutely be accompanied by a visit to the island’s churches. We can see works by Preti at La Valette as well as at Vittoriosa, Rabat, Mdina, Sliema…(Art of the Day Weekly)

Pablo Picasso. Retrato de la tía Pepa. Málaga, junio-julio, de 1896.
Foto: Gassull Fotografia. Museu Picasso, Barcelona © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2012

From February 25 to June 9, 2013. – Museo Picasso – Palacio de Buenavista
What did Picasso look like before being Picasso? That is the question put forward by the museum dedicated to the artist in the city of Andaluzia where he was born on 25 October 1881. He left it when he was young, first for the Coruña , then to Barcelona and Paris, and he never returned after 1901.

Pablo Picasso.El viejo pescador, 1895.
© Museo de Montserrat © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2013.

The 53 works presented show a promising but academic painter, trained in a cultivated but provincial family under the control of his father, both a drawing professor and the curator of the local museum. Most of the paintings present his family, the port, the fishermen and the artisans. In order to give a wider panorama of this city in southern Spain, the exhibition also includes works by some thirty artists from the same era.

Museo Picasso Málaga

Federico Barocci, Italian, c.1533–1612; Study for the Head of Saint John the Evangelist for the Entombment, c.1580; oil on paper, mounted on linen; 16 5/8 x 12 3/4 inches; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund 1979; image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

From February 27 to May 19, 2013 – The National Gallery
Experience the charm and sensitivity of Barocci’s masterpieces – never before seen outside Italy.

Federico Barocci (about 1533–1612) is celebrated as one of the most talented artists of late 16th century Italy. Fascinated by the human form, he fused charm and compositional harmony with an unparalleled sensitivity to colour.

The exhibition will showcase Federico Barocci’s most spectacular altarpieces, including his famous ‘Entombment’ from Senigallia and ‘Last Supper’ from Urbino Cathedral, thanks to the cooperation of the Soprintendenze delle Marche.

The display assembles the majority of Barocci’s greatest altarpieces and paintings, together with sequences of dazzling preparatory drawings, allowing visitors to understand how each picture evolved and revealing the fertility of Barocci’s imagination, the diversity of his working methods and the sheer beauty and grace of his art.

Federico Barocci, Italian, c.1533-1612; Entombment of Christ, 1579-82; oil on canvas; framed.

Barocci’s works, drawn from life and inspired by the people and animals that surrounded him, are characterised by a warmth and humanity that transform his religious subjects into themes with which all can identify.

He was an incessant and even obsessive draughtsman, preparing every composition with prolific studies in every conceivable medium.

Highly revered by his patrons during his lifetime, Barocci combined the beauty of the High Renaissance with the dynamism of what was to become known as the Baroque, a genre he was instrumental in pioneering. When he died in 1612, he was not only among the highest paid painters in Italy, but also one of the most influential.

The National Gallery