International Art News

Daido Moriyama, Shinjuku #11, 2000, gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 x 9 in., courtesy of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. © Daido Moriyama

April 7, 2012–July 31, 2012 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA - Japanese Pavilion
Photographer Daido Moriyama (Japan, b. 1938) first came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his gritty depictions of Japanese urban life.  His highly innovative and intensely personal photographic approach often incorporates high contrast, graininess, and tilted vantages to convey the fragmentary nature of modern realities. Fracture: Daido Moriyama presents a range of the artist’s renowned black-and-white photographs, exemplifying the radical aesthetic of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus), as well as the debut of recent color work taken in Tokyo. A selection of his photo books—Moriyama has published more than forty to date—highlights the artist’s highly influential experimentation with reproduction media and the transformative possibilities of the printed page.  In total, Moriyama’s achievements convey the artist’s boldly intuitive exploration of urban mystery, memory, and photographic invention.

Beauty Parlor, Tokyo - Daido Moriyama c. 1975 - Gelatin silver print - 7 x 10 5/8 in. - Ralph M. Parsons Fund - © Daido Moriyama

Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography with Takeji Iwaniya, a professional photographer of architecture and crafts. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, he assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years and became familiar with the trenchant social critiques produced by photographer Shomei Tomatsu. He also drew inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima.

Museum Hours

Until January 1st 2012 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals presents a group of Monet’s Impressionist Rouen cathedral paintings together with Lichtenstein’s 1969 appropriation of the same subject.

Monet painted thirty views of the Rouen Cathedral from 1892–1895 from different viewing positions, all quite close to one another, at different times of day. The series stands as the hallmark of the revolutionary Impressionist movement. Over six decades later, Lichtenstein was inspired to paint his Cathedral series in the style of Pop art as a response to the exhibition Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum. Pop delved into the nature of repetition and seriality by taking an iconic image, cheapened by overexposure, and reinvesting it with renewed, ironic vigor and relevance.

For both Monet and Lichtenstein, the subject of the cathedral is less important than the act of seeing; the installation investigates the nature of this obsession with sight.

These paintings by Monet and Lichtenstein, essential to the formation of modern and post-modernism, present a visual narrative that unites the thematic concerns and visual strategies of these chronologically disparate artists.

Museum Hours

From September 8 to December 31, 2011 – Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman consists of twenty-nine, 6 x 7 1/2 ft. photographs taken by the artist between 1999 and 2010. Over the course of a decade, Eastman captured Havana’s changing cultural landscape in his images of the city’s architecture and lush interiors, ravaged by the effects of time. His large-scale photographs evoke the nostalgia and wealth of a bygone era, while shedding light on the harsh economic realities faced in present day Cuba. While in Havana, Eastman photographed a number of subjects, from the interiors of homes along Ambassador Way, to stairwells and music schools, to abstract patterns found on the exteriors of buildings. Eastman is known for his richly colored photographs, which he captures with his 4 x 5 camera. This exhibition will be the first to explore the depth and range of Eastman’s Havana photographs.

About the Artist
Michael Eastman has established himself as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists. The self-taught photographer has spent four decades documenting interiors and facades in cities as diverse as Havana, Paris, Rome, and New Orleans, producing large-scale photographs unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color. Eastman is most recognized for his explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay, which create mysterious narratives about time and place. He continues to resist the digital movement, capturing his images on film and printing them himself.

Eastman’s photographs have appeared in Time, Life, and American Photographer, and they reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious institutions. His books include Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli) and Horses (2003, Knopf), which is now in its fifth edition. Eastman lives in St. Louis.

Museum Hours

From August 20, 2011 to February 12, 2012 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA
The Zodiac Project is Ai Wei Wei’s first major public sculpture. For this monumental new work, Wei Wei has recreated the famous the twelve bronze animal heads that once adorned the Zodiac Fountain in Yuan Ming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace, in Beijing. Cast around 1750, the original heads were looted by Anglo-French troops who took part in the destruction of Yuan Ming Yuan in 1860 during the Second Opium War. The heads remain a potent trigger for Chinese nationalist sentiments. Wei Wei’s new work suggests a dialogue about the fate of art objects that exist within dynamic and sometimes volatile cultural and political settings.

Ai Wei Wei is known for his constant engagement with Chinese history as a shifting site rather than a static body of knowledge. With his subversive wit, the artist adapts objects from the Chinese material canon going back to antiquity, twisting traditional meanings toward new purposes. Wei Wei’s continuous exploration of the historical object finds great resonance with the encyclopedic collection of LACMA, which includes Chinese art from the Neolithic to the Qing Dynasty period.

Ai Wei Wei grew up the son of acclaimed poet Ai Qing and spent several years as a child exiled in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He spent more than a decade in New York, returning to China in 1993. He has been detained since April, 2011 on unspecified charges and has become an international symbol of the ongoing struggle for freedom of expression and dissent.

Museum Hours

Bruce Nauman - Human Nature/Life Death/Knows Doesn't Know - 1983 - Neon - 107 1/2 x 107 x 5 13/16 in. (273.05 x 271.78 x 14.61 cm) Modern and Contemporary Art Council Fund (M.84.36)

March 13, 2011 to July 4, 2011 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection represents the most extensive presentation of the museum’s permanent  collection of contemporary art in ten years: approximately 75 works of art in  diverse media, including painting, drawing, photography, video, and audio. Borrowing its title from a work by artist Bruce Nauman, Human Nature surveys works by several generations of artists who have made defining  contributions to the recent art landscape, from 1968 to the present. Many of  the works are on view for the first time since their acquisition, including  pieces by Haegue Yang, Leslie Hewitt, Rachel Harrison, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer, and Zhang Huan, among others. The exhibition also includes works by Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, Vito  Acconci, George Herms, Betye Saar, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Richter, Mark Bradford, and many more. Additionally, the installation will incorporate some  key loans to amplify and extend the selection of works from the  collection.

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art Council (MCAC) has been instrumental in  acquiring many works that will be on view in this exhibition. Founded in 1961,  the MCAC is the longest-running support group for contemporary art at any  museum in the country. With nearly 800 works of art purchased in part or in  full by the MCAC—LACMA’s contemporary art holdings reflect the critical role the council’s patronage plays as a cornerstone of collection development.

February 13 2011 to April 3 2011 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Protest marches, birthday parties, weddings, concerts, and political rallies—from blue collar to black tie, Larry Fink has photographed gatherings of every sort during his 40-year career. He is keenly attuned to the emotional vibrations that animate social events. Deploying basic capacities of photography—framing, flash, depth of field—he shows us gestures, textures, and fleeting expressions we would otherwise miss.

Fink is, among other things, a society photographer. But this does not mean he flatters the elite. Under contract with Vanity Fair from 2000 to 2009, Fink documented the magazine’s annual Oscar-night party. The Academy Awards have always been equal parts ceremony and celebration; the very presence of Fink—who is neither paparazzo nor photojournalist—is just one indication of how the parties, and Hollywood culture, have evolved into the twenty-first century. Mainstream media coverage gives everyone a glimpse of glamour, but Fink provides a different kind of access. The revelation of Fink’s society photographs is not that celebrities are superficial, but that their humanity is profound and complex.

All prints are lent by the artist and were made in 2010. Larry Fink thanks Vanity Fair for allowing him to participate in their annual elegant salute to the Academy Awards and the Oscar recipients.