2011.09.09 to 2011.10.22 – Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts
Do contemporary artists still dream when the biggest challenge for visual art is to produce vigilant reactions on the social and political reality of the present?
The goal of the international group exhibition is to show possible answers for basic questions, which try to find out, if it is possible to produce art, which reacts on the social reality, but goes beyond the notion of the document, and documentarism – and beyond criticalism as method as well, which became a more and more static aestehtical form. Are such realms really totally exploited as the visual language of surrealist film, with it’s confrontative system based on associations, or the absurdely co-ordinative constructions of collages, or the poesis of conceptualism, or the performativity of public actions?
The other aim of the exhibition is, to construct a mental collage – expanded in the gallery space – of the Eastern-European identity, which can be described only by a more and more complicated formula. Thus the set of the exhibited artworks reflects on the process, which mixed up the main and forever lasting exotic feature of the region: the post-communist transit-state, with the neoliberal economic world order, which suffers critical blows and cracks in the present day. This pile of symptoms makes social inequality and political radicalism more visible, not only regionally any more, but globally as well.
Artists: Igor and Ivan Buharov, Svätopluk Mikyta, Miklos Onucsan, Szabó Péter

Gallery Hours

Until the 17th of July 2011 – City Gallery Wellington
Tender is the Night features work by over thirty artists based in New Zealand and internationally. Works have been generously loaned from public and private collections, including a number of works from artists’ own personal collections.
City Gallery’s new group exhibition Tender is the Night asks us all how it feels to fall in and fall out of love. The show brings together a selection of art works which explore the complex and intense nature of desire, love and the loss of a loved one.

Tender is the Night is a mix-tape of emotions, a gathering of artists’ explorations from the 18th to the 21st centuries, of the sticky and exhilarating mix of longing and consummation, and those intensely felt moments of loss that characterise the evolution and devolution of human relationships.

Everyone has their favourite love songs, movies, or poems that form the subjective soundtrack or tell the story of their lives. Geographically you can chart a town or city by where significant moments have taken place, and each time you pass that site, a memory is triggered. Love can be joyous, messy, and complicated and, as this exhibition reveals, is an incredibly difficult entity to define and to depict.

Within our visual cultures there are themes and scenarios to do with love and relationships returned to by artists again and again. While it may be easy to argue for the universality of such experiences, at the same time the works within Tender is the Night are intensely subjective and personal expressions that reflect the nuances of the context within which they were produced according to specific times, places and cultures.

While courting and romantic partnerships are a key focus for the show, so too are the not always smooth-running dynamics of family relationships, the intense bonds between parent and child, how siblings interact and the ways in which contemporary families are built. Another thread running through the exhibition is that of the loss of a loved one, through relationships breaking up and through death.

Tender is the Night includes work by: Rita Angus, Kushana Bush, Derrick Cherrie, Phil Dadson, George Dawe, Marlene Dumas, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Eric Gill, Jeffrey Harris, Michael Harrison, Frances Hodgkins, Jesper Just, Katsukawa Shunchō, Utagawa Kunisada, Henry Lamb, Liz Maw, Anne Noble, Catherine Opie, Fiona Pardington, Alan Pearson, Edward Poynter, H. Linley Richardson, Auguste Rodin, David Rosetzky, Ava Seymour, Laurie Simmons, Stanley Spencer, Douglas Stichbury, Suzuki Harunobu, Francis Upritchard, Robin White, Brendon Wilkinson, Erica van Zon and unknown artists/makers.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the 1934 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald of the same name. The novel charts a dysfunctional, yet surprisingly resilient bond between a husband and wife, pressured through infidelity, mental illness and financial crisis. The phrase ‘tender is the night’ also appeared earlier in the well-known John Keats’ 1819 poem Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet explores the fleeting nature of mortal existence. In more recent times British indie-pop group Blur echoed the phrase in their moving love song Tender which was released in 1998.

The exhibition Tender is the Night doesn’t strive to illustrate any of the phrase’s previous uses—rather it takes the repetition of this phrase across time and place, within a range of meaningful contexts, as the inspiration for gathering together a selection of works that explore the human condition. The exhibition will offer visitors a range of experiences from the melancholic and unsettling through to the sentimental, euphoric and the downright lusty.

Gallery Hours

February 5 to May 15, 2011 – Kunstforeningen Gl Strand – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
Horror, humour, fear and fascination are all reactions which the sensuous works of wax in this exhibition induce. Contemporary wax sculptures underline a new strategy in sculptural praxis which experiments with sensing, immediacy and dialogue. The international group exhibition: WAX SENSATION – NEW SENSUALISM IN CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE gathers a number of the contemporary rising and acknowledged artists who all within the last couple of decades have contributed to a new sensory and sculptural principle, particularly through sculptures of wax. Among them are Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Robert Gober, Emil Westman Hertz, John Isaacs, Oleg Kulik, Anne Schneider, Gavin Turk, Brigitte Waldach and Andro Wekua.

Museum Hours

Until April 17 2011 – Musee d’Art Moderne de St. Etienne
Thematic group exhibition (35 international artists)
The exhibition “Islands never found” wants to show, through the works of 35 international artists (Japan, USA, Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Cyprus, Morocco …) and shared a common sensibility, oriented towards the pursuit of authenticity, in a complex sociological and anthropological context.

Without denying or refusing to see reality as it surrounds us, the artists exhibited are all trying to uncover more than just creativity, full of visions, rerouting and poetry. The artist is sometimes contradictory, self-destructive and tormented in the excess and fantasy, full of insatiable curiosity. It creates new values, new languages, new signs and metaphors, and generates new connections, and offers new contexts and cultural and mental systems.

The “Islands never found” are areas of special creation, unique and individual in which each artist defines and clearly communicates its own approach, its own language and symbol system, its own ideological vision, philosophy, aesthetics and history of the world. The life and work of artists can also be understood in the metaphorical quest for “the island”, “their place”, “their land”. All inventions organizational forms, languages, visual signals and new personal accounts are the land of empathy and imagination that present themselves as islands.

In this sense,  the artwork looks like a long and eternal journey through which artists, following their own star, continually discovering new islands and new continents and new worlds – conquer new territories, develop and occupy new areas by their methods and abilities.  This eternal journey is an account at once dramatic, poetic and picturesque, a conflict of hope and disappointment, loss and discoveries, work, pleasure and joy, but also destruction lapse, anger, sadness, loneliness and self-denial, reason and irrationality, madness and obsession.

Above all, the exhibition “Islands never found” is  a tribute to those artists capable of creating new situations and new territories  , like the islands of the vast oceans, simultaneously evoking the asylum and prison, home and Hell, the release and dissolution.
Artists
Marina Abramovic (Serbia), Alice Aycock (USA), Marina Bolla (Italy) Louise Bourgeois, (USA) Yves Bresson (France), Tony Cragg (Great Britain), Danica Dakic (Bosnia) Latifa ECHAKCH (Morocco), Jan Fabre (Belgium), Hans Peter Feldmann (Germany), Gloria Friedmann, (Germany / France) , Carlos GARAICOA (Cuba), GILBERT & GEORGE (UK) Siobhan HAPASKA, (Great Britain) Rebecca HORN (Germany) , Ilya Kabakov (Russia), Anselm Kiefer (Germany) , Kimsooja (Korea / USA), Jannis KOUNELLIS (Greece / Italy), Maria Loizidou (Cyprus), Richard Long (Great Britain) , Natsuyuki NAKANISHI (Japan), Nannucci Maurizio ( Italy ), Luigi ONTANI ( Italy ) , Dennis Oppenheim (USA) , Orlan (France), Michelangelo PISTOLETTO ( Italy ) , Lucas Samaras (Greece / USA), Toguo (Cameroon / France) , TSIVOPOULOS Stefanos (Greece), Costas TSOCLIS (Greece) , Mamoru TSUKADA (Japan, lives in Berlin), Günther Uecker (Germany), Lois Weinberger (Austria) and Dimitirs XONOGLOU (Greece).

Museum Hours

22nd November 2010-10th of January 2011 – Carbon 12 Dubai
Carbon 12 proudly presents The Unbearable Lightness of Being, exhibiting the works of Katherine Bernhardt, Sara Rahbar, Rui Chafes, Erwin Olaf, Farzan Sadjadi, Michael Sailstorfer, Gil Heitor Cortesao, and Ralf Ziervogel. With their highly idiosyncratic style, each artist epitomizes the “Es muss sein!” (It must be so!) of Milan Kundera’s Book, which inspired the exhibition’s title.
The exhibition’s statement is literary: the works are like books, and the artists like authors.
The artist’s medium gives form to the concepts of structure and space, density and texture as a leaf of paper conveys thoughts, ideals, absolute truths and emotional distortions with every written word.
The relationship between the work and its creator is intertwined with originality and individuality. The oeuvre reveals the character of the artist, and vice-versa: the two form an inseparable entity, literally a body of work. The works offer paradigmatic solipsism and absolute ideals, and only what we call a true work of art manages to bring form and content together, in an intersection that allows the viewer to take part in artistic epiphany. The burdens of the daily grind, the joys of metaphysical horizons: light and darkness, to be or not be, inevitably omnipresent and unbearably beautiful.
A group exhibition featuring:
Katherine Bernhardt
Sara Rahbar
Rui Chafes
Erwin Olaf
Farzan Sadjadi
Michael Sailstorfer
Gil Heitor Cortesao
Ralf Ziervogel

Gallery Hours

November 27, 2010 from 6-9 pm and run through December 11, 2010 – Studio 1608 – MAP
This exhibition titled ONE will be a group collective show.
WHAT IS ONE?
One is a group exhibition that will showcase one piece of artwork per artist. With over 50 artists exhibiting in multiple disciplines, there will be a wide range of interpretations.

Artists

Mary Brittain Cheatham Ellen Liman montana pritchard steve johnson clemente Jefro damon fuller susie phips deborah bigeleisen natalie levine michelle miller ric blum vicki cohen dianne bernstein Thomas tribby natalie levine john rachell Nancy Tart

kurt merkel orlando chiang lynn morgan Jeanette Carol Cohen Kristin Bartie joel cohen barry seidman paul lange eduardo mendieta TD Gillispe Veronica Volini-inza Cheri Mittermaler damon fuller Andrea berg John Rachell clara urbahn

wheaton mahoney Cheri Mittermair Paul Heiner Bogdan Kravechenko K. Chisolm Dora frost Josue Romero chris leidy suzanne snider kate kuhner helmut koller john kaywell dan neuman ken walker Bob Hall steve cohen Joanie Van Der Grift Beverly Meyers

Gallerie