International Art News

Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Allan Finkelman - ©Louise Bourgeois Trust- Louise Bourgeois Trust/VAGA, New York, by SIAE 2012

From May 8 to November 4, 2012 – Galleria dell’Accademia – Firenze
The exhibition Art Returns to art, curated by Bruno Corà, Franca Falletti and Daria Filardo, will see the installation in the rooms of the Galleria dell’Accademia of works by: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Antonio Catelani, Martin Creed, Gino de Dominicis, Rineke Dijkstra, Marcel Duchamp, Luciano Fabro, Hans Peter Feldmann, Luigi Ghirri, Antony Gormley, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Leoncillo, Sol LeWitt, Eliseo Mattiacci, Olaf Nicolai, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Alfredo Pirri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Renato Ranaldi, Alberto Savinio, Thomas Struth, Fiona Tan, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol.

Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria, hung with all its charge of “life’s emotional frenzy” in front of Pontormo’s Venus and not far from Michelangelo’s David,will offer definitive proof of how the naked form of the human body can be used to express concepts and stir sensations that are vastly different. And the effort to bring form out of brute matter, something which obsessed Michelangelo all his life, seems to still weigh heavily today on the shoulders of Giuseppe Penone in his arduous hollowing out of massive tree trunks, just as it is echoed in the forms carved out of concrete by Antony Gormley.

Giulio Paolini’s L’altra Figura will be located almost opposite Bill Viola’s video Surrender: two contemporary ways of reappraising and interpreting the theme of mirroring and reproducibility that lead, in the left arm of the Tribuna, to the 19th-century Salone dei Gessi, filled with plaster casts that were created so lely to be reproduced.

The theme of reflection is also explored in Alfredo Pirri’s floor of fractured mirrors, in Olaf Nicolai’s work Portrait of the Artist as a Weeping Narcissus, whose tears ripple the surface and alter the reflected image, and in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror picture Sacra conversazione, which includes us in a conversation of the present day.

Metaphorically, mirroring becomes a merging with the gaze of the visitor, who is conceptually made part o f the creative process in Rineke Dijkstra’s video installation that tells of a slow observation and reproduction of one of Picasso’s pictures, in Thomas Struth’s photo in front of Dürer’s self-portrait and in Martin Creed’s performance with athletes running swiftly through the spaces of the gallery.

Marcel Duchamp, L'invers de la peinture, 1955 circa, 73,5 x 48 cm ,private collection, by courtesy of collector

The reproduction, repetition and circulation of images in the history of art is tackled from a critical perspective in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Luigi Ghirri, Hans Peter Feldmann and Ketty La Rocca, which refer directly to icons familiar to everyone. In his Untitled, Jannis Kounellis will recall the iconography and sense of tragedy of the Crucifixion, a theme tackled in a different way in Alberto Burri’s work and in Renato Ranaldi’s Triumphans, while the gold or ultramarine monochromes of Yves Klein can be related to the gold grounds of the 14th-century altarpieces.

Yves Klein, L’esclave de Michel-Ange, 1962, pure pigment and synthetic resin on synthetic resin, 60 x 22 x 15 cm, © Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris

The casts of the David’s eyes in Claudio Parmiggiani’s work po se the problem of the fragment, while Leoncillo and Luigi Ontani’s images of Saint Sebastian present different visions of that sacred iconography. The gaze at the past will appear emblematic and mysterious in Alberto Savinio’s Nettuno Pescatore as well as in Gino de Dominicis’s Urvasi e Gilgamesh. Interesting reflections on the work of the past will also be provided by Francis Bacon’s Figure sitting (the Cardinal), Pablo Picasso’s Arlequín con espejo and Sol LeWitt’s drawings of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, as well as by the ovoid volumes of Luciano Fabro’s Il giudizio di Paride or Eliseo Mattiacci’s large iron sculpture Carro solare del Montefeltro. Memory as recognition of origins will be the focus of Fiona Tan’s film Provenance, and the classical elements of museum architecture are the form out of which Antonio Catelani develops his Klettersteig. (©Art of the Day)

Firenze Musei

Until September 4, 2011 – Musée d´art contemporain de Montréal
Taking up all of the museum’s galleries, the exhibition comprises more than a hundred major works that rank among the most important in the Permanent Collection. While seemingly modest in terms of numbers, relative to the total of over 7,600 pieces listed in the inventory of the Collection, in terms of scale the sélection nevertheless occupies the largest space ever devoted to displaying the Collection.

Laid out in nine distinct segments that fill up the two large blocks of four galleries and the long hallway connecting the building’s north and south wings, the display offers a sélective overview of the Musée’s history by placing some of the works back in the exact settings where they have already been seen, in previous shows: for example, The Sleepers by Bill Viola and Parabole no 9… ainsi soit-il: les usines ferment, les musées ouvrent by Melvin Charney, shown in the inaugural exhibition Pour la suite du monde in May 1992; Pascal Grandmaison’s Solo, from the theme-based exhibition of works from the Collection, Matters of Time and Space, held in summer 2005; Geoffrey Farmer’s Ghost Face, featured in his eponymous exhibition in winter 2008, and so on. It presents, yet again, exceptional, visionary works that have been loaned to leading nstitutions around the world: pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar and Mario Merz, shown at the Tate Modern in London, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Getty Institute in Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Whitney Museum of American Art and Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, Seoul National Museum of Modern Art— the list goes on. Finally, this is the first time some major acquisitions have been exhibited at the Musée: among them, works by Fernand Leduc, Alain Paiement, Laurent Grasso, Rodney Graham and Mowry Baden.

Museum Hours

Louise Bourgeois. Arch of Hysteria (Arco de histeria), 1993. Bronce, pátina pulida, pieza colgante. 83,8 x 101,6 x 58,4 cm. Cortesía de Cheim & Read y Hauser & Wirth. Fotografía: Allan Finkelman

Until June 19, 2011 – Fundación Proa
Fundacion Proa presents for the first time in Latin America the greatest exhibit of work by Louise Bourgeois: the return of the repressed. Bourgeois, one of the most well known artists of the 20th century, was born in Paris in 1911 and traveled and lived in the United States from 1938 until her final days in 2010.

The exhibition opens with the famous spider Maman (1999) displayed in the entrance to Proa, and in the interior rooms display a collection of 86 pieces. Her first sculptures, in which the spiral appears along with various forms and figures that figure prominently in her work, include the Arch of Hysteria, 1993; Spider, 1997, and the emblematic installations Red Room (Parents), 1994, and The Destruction of the Father, 1974. A solid and extensive collection of drawings and sculptures highlight Bourgeois’ radical thoughts and reflections on love: filial, parental, familiar—love itself.

The pieces are a testament to the impact of psychoanalysis on the artist’s thoughts and reveal how her dialogue with this discourse created an emotional universe involving the complexities, conflicts, and subtleties of contemporary life. The interior world, family relationships, the role of the father, the mother, the daughter, and the wife are treated in a singular and personal manner, converting Bourgeois into an icon of the most transcendental themes of the twentieth century.

Her famous hanging pieces, pendants on a string, show the fragility, the delicacy of the events, demonstrating the ambivalence between the exterior world and the interior world of the subject.

Louse Bourgeois: the return of the repressed, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, is organized in conjunction with the Louise Bourgeois Studio in New York and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Sao Pablo, Brazil, and is supported by Tenaris, both for its presentation in Argentina and its tour in Rio de Janeiro and San Pablo.

Foundation Hours

12 February – 14 May 2011 – Hauser & Wirth
Gnarled, sinewy and wrinkled with age, Louise Bourgeois’s hands were fascinating. Her hands are the subjects of portraits taken by the artist Alex Van Gelder, who, at Bourgeois’s invitation, photographed her at her New York townhouse during the last year of her life. The resulting portfolio of eighteen photographic prints will be on display at Hauser & Wirth Zürich from 12 February.

More than purely a portrait project, Bourgeois considered this collaboration to be an extension of her work. Through this series, she put forth her own physicality to be viewed as an element of her art, focusing on her hands as her tools.

Clenched or cradling, her hands recall many of her works, from the entwined finger-like forms of ‘Clutching’ (1962), to the skein of lines of her ‘Insomnia Drawings’ and the poised spiders of her ‘Maman’ series. Van Gelder’s images are stark, showing just the hands against the black fabric of her clothes. They are flooded with intimacy and warmth, reflecting his closeness to Bourgeois and the trust she placed in him to work with her on this project.

Gallery Hours

February 5 to May 15, 2011 – Kunstforeningen Gl Strand – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
As a tribute to the widely renowned artist Louise Bourgeois, who recently passed away, GL STRAND shows a selection of her newest works in gouache on paper and her sculptures. The focal point being the relationship between mother and child, raises central questions about femininity, sexuality and isolation. These topics are embedded in rituals embodied by the relationship between the father, the mother and the child.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lived in New York, where she passed away in May 2010.
The Exhibition is created in collaboration with Nordiska Akvarellmuseet. All photos: Courtesy of Cheim & Reid, Hauser & Wirth/Copyright Louise Bourgeois Trust

Museum Hours

Until the 12th September – Museum of Cycladic Art
The main emphasis of the presentation of her work at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens will be the display of the so-called Personages, sculptures which have Surrealist origins and are totem-like in appearance. Made between 1947-1953, they were originally carved in wood and intended to be produced in bronze. These life-size sculptures were designed to be seen in groups, like social groups of standing figures. The Personages series and a series of slender fabric columns are an outstanding contribution to the history of sculpture in the twentieth century, giving rise to the artist’s central themes and concerns that have dominated her entire body of work.

The presentation at the Museum of Cycladic Art will also include the impressive sculpture Avenza Revisited II (1968-1969). This sculpture belongs to a group of works that the artist described as representing an ‘anthropomorphic’ landscape, inspired, in that case, from Avenza, an area in Carrara, Italy, which is a region famous for its marble quarries, where Bourgeois worked in stone.

In total, eight representative sculptures will be displayed in the exhibition alongside with her recent series of gouaches. Two of Bourgeois’s more recent series of vivid red gouaches reveal the artist’s preoccupation with the relationships of family, with coupling, pregnancy and child rearing.

Born in 1911 in Paris, Louise Bourgeois is widely acknowledged as a Modern Master. During the course of her career, Bourgeois has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde art movements from abstraction through realism, surrealism and readymade art forms such as her early environments and installations. Louise Bourgeois passed away on 31 May 2010

Museum Hours