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

The Fir-Palm (1991/2012) Silver Gelatin Print (Photomontage); 50h x 40w in (127h x 101.6w cm)

April 11 – May 19, 2012 – Alexander Gray Associates
Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present Lorraine O’Grady’s second exhibition with the Gallery, entitled New Worlds. On view is the artist’s recent video work, Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2011, in conversation with two photomontages from her iconic BodyGround series, conceived in 1991 and re-formatted in 2012.

The Fir-Palm (1991/2012), a black-and-white photomontage, depicts a hybrid New England fir–Caribbean palm tree sprouting from a female torso, clouds looming in the background. With this legible symbolism, O’Grady—born and raised in Boston to Jamaican parents—questions the nature of desire, identity, and stability in a society rooted in physical, psychological, and cultural hybridity.

Where The Fir-Palm identifies a new Western landscape, O’Grady’s photo-diptych The Clearing confronts the old one through narrative. The left panel presents an image of an inter-racial couple, ecstatic and intertwined, floating in the sky. Two children play in the forest clearing below, a pile of clothing topped with a gun laying haphazardly nearby. In the right panel, the Black woman’s vacant body is stretched out on the grass, and her White partner is masked by a skull and draped in a chain-mail vest. No children are in sight. Through its subtitle—or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me—O’Grady reminds viewers that this most basic Colonial interaction, in all its pleasure, brutality, and complexity, paved the way for the Western hemisphere as it is known today.

Body/Ground (The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me) (1991/2012) Silver Gelatin Print (Photomontage); Diptych; 40h x 50w in (101.6h x 127w cm) (each)

O’Grady’s amalgamation of the colonized body and landscape reaches its zenith in Landscape (Western Hemisphere), in which O’Grady’s own hair is transformed into landscape. For the duration of the video’s 18 minutes, the artist’s hair waves, rustles, and bends to the wind, against a subtle audio collage of sounds from the hemisphere’s natural and urban landscapes. The video was funded in part by The Albright-Knox Gallery and Beyond/In Western New York.

“My attitude about hybridity,” says O’Grady, “is that it is essential to understanding what is happening here. People’s reluctance to acknowledge it is part of the problem…. The argument for embracing the Other is more realistic than what is usually argued for, which is an idealistic and almost romantic maintenance of difference. But I don’t mean interracial sex literally. I’m really advocating for the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.”

Gallery Hours

Amedeo Modigliani - Elvire au col blanc (Elvire à la collerette)- 1917 ou 1918 - Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm. - Private Collection © Photo : Pinacothèque de Paris

Until the 9th of September 2012 – Pinacothèque de Paris
Jonas Netter, is one of the most influential collectors of the 20th century, a discoverer of talents, all the more inspired and brilliant, in that he was totally discreet throughout his life, to such an extent that he is even today still completely unknown by the general public.
However, without him, Modigliani would probably not have existed, nor Soutine, nor Utrillo. This exhibition will now pay him the homage he deserves by nally enabling the public to discover an ensemble of works of astounding beauty, chiefly by Modigliani.

Maurice Utrillo - Place de l’église à Montmagny-c. 1907 - Oil on canvas, 54 x 81 cm. - Private Collection - © Adagp, Paris 2012- © Jean Fabris, 2012- © Photo : Pinacothèque de Paris / Fabrice Gousset

Jonas Netter was Alsatian, an agent for various trademarks settled in Paris, and he was fascinated by art and painting. He discovers a painting by Modigliani and decides to buy it. He was one of the very first to acquire works by that artist, taking over from Paul Alexandre, who had supported him until then, before World War One. A collector in his very soul, Netter started off buying all the works by Modigliani that he saw at Zborowski’s. He became passionate about that artist of whom he managed to acquire about forty paintings at the end of the Twenties.

Then he noticed Soutine. Long before Barnes, he was fascinated by him. He, the middleclass and discreet Alsatian Jew, was overtaken by a limitless passion for all those artists who made up the Paris School. He also discovered Utrillo : his white period delighted him and he started buying them also by the dozen, always via Zborowski. The latter found himself, thanks to Netter, at the head of a genuinely new market and of a bunch of young artists who suddenly found themselves propelled forward by this new generation of dealers and collectors.

Chaïm Soutine - L’Escalier rouge à Cagnes - c. 1918 - Oil on canvas, 61,6 x 46,5 cm. - Private Collection - © Adagp, Paris 2012 - © Photo : Pinacothèque de Paris / Fabrice Gousset

Valadon and Kisling were also part of that group of painters, as well as many others, just as wonderful even if they did not necessarily attain the same notoriety: Kremègne, Kikoïne, Hayden, Ébiche, Antcher and Fournier.

La Pinacothèque de Paris will show, for the first time ever, a group of never before exhibited works by Modigliani that recreates, alongside other works we have managed to find, Jonas Netter’s collection such as it was in his own time.
The Pinacothèque de Paris is therefore very proud to be able to partake in this outstanding discovery and to undertake Jonas Netter’s first wish, i.e. that the largest possible public should have access to these marvels.

Museum Hours

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991 - © Damien Hirst

Until the 9th of September 2012 – Tate Modern
Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition in a disused warehouse which showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.
Image of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991

Spot painting

This will be the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution and will bring together key works from over twenty years. The exhibition will include iconic sculptures from his Natural History series, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. Also included will be vitrines such as A Thousand Years from 1990, medicine cabinets, pill cabinets and instrument cabinets in addition to seminal paintings made throughout his career using butterflies and flies as well as spots and spins. The two-part installation In and Out of Love, not shown in its entirety since its creation in 1991 and Pharmacy 1992 will be among the highlights of the exhibition.

Museum Hours

George Segal, Three People on Four Benches, 1980. Bronze and steel. Martin Z. Margulies Collection. Image © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

March 31 – September 9, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
Many leading artists of the 20th century went to great lengths to replace the representational with the abstract. But some artists found it difficult to rid their works of all traces of the real, and in particular, the figure. Masterworks of 20th Century Sculpture from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection allows a thoughtful consideration of the tension between the abstract and the representational that dominated 20th century aesthetic concerns.

An abiding fascination with the figure unites the works in the exhibition. While many modern artists abandoned the figure as inspiration, these seven artists made use of the figure (human and otherwise), even as the final work sometimes barely resembles the figure in reality. In the straightforward works by Willem de Kooning (Seated Woman on Bench), George Segal (Three People on Four Benches), Louise Nevelson (Dancing Woman), Manuel Neri (Untitled), and Deborah Butterfield (Jerusalem Horse), the form remains readily identifiable. With works by Joan Miro (Oiseau) and Isamu Noguchi (Figure and Judith), however, the work is more abstracted, but the referent is still the figure.

In this exhibition, our third partnership with the Martin Z. Margulies Collection in Miami, the Museum has selected key works from the latter half of the 20th century that pay tribute to the fascination with the natural form. The Margulies Collection is known for its extensive sculpture collection that contains some of the best examples of post-World War II movements in Europe and the United States.

Museum Hours

Nicolas de Leyde, atelier, Sainte Barbe, Strasbourg, vers 1465 Provient de Wissembourg. Frêne, dos évidé, polychromie originale. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters. Berlin © bpk

Until July 8, 2012 – Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum
The sculptor Nicolaus van Leyden (c. 1430-1473) is considered to be one of the most important late 15th century artists north of the Alps, responsible for decisive innovations in both form and iconography. He was widely renowned in his lifetime for the modernity of his works and particularly for his skill in rendering facial traits. His importance was recognized essentially in the German-speaking areas of Europe, where he influenced the development of such widely famed sculptors as Veit Stoss, Michel Erhart or Tilman Riemenschneider. His work, however, is almost unknown to the general public and his background, career and output are shrouded in mystery, there being few extant works or written sources.

Nicolaus van Leyden’s European career included a notable period spent in Strasbourg between 1462 and 1467. He there executed several substantial works, in particular the epitaph for Canon Conrad of Bussnang in the St John Chapel of the Cathedral (signed and dated 1464) and especially the Great Door of the Chancellery, a building which, apart from a few fragments, has not survived.

Suite de Nicolas de Leyde, Vierge agenouillée d'une Annonciation, Vienne, vers 1480 Feuillu, polychromie originale. Slovaquie, Bratislava, Slovenska narodna galeria (dépôt de l’église de Vel’ky Biel). Photo : Pavol Breier

This is the first exhibition wholly devoted to Nicolaus van Leyden and it has been organized in collaboration with the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Museum in Frankfurt, where it is on display from 27th October 2011 to 4th March 2012. It includes part of the artist’s work in wood and stone, among which are four sandstone busts of male figures in the keeping of the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum in Strasbourg, including the celebrated melancholy Man leaning on his elbow. In particular, the exhibition bring together for the first time since the 19th century the two surviving fragments of the Strasbourg Chancellery portal decor, the Head of a bearded man,likewise belonging to the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum, and its pendant, Head of a young woman, held by the museum in Frankfurt.

The exhibition brings together some 70 works, executed using various techniques and materials, from public and private collections in Europe and America, in particular Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York and Chicago. It is being held in the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum, the exhibition rooms of which have been specially fitted out for the occasion.

Museum Hours