International Art News

Peter Saul vs. Pop Art, 2012 – Acrylic on canvas – 75 x 72 cm – Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery – New York, NY

From December 6 to December 9 2012 – Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida, will host the 11th edition of Art Basel, the most prestigious art show in the Americas. More than 260 leading galleries from North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will take part, showcasing works by more than 2,000 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibiting galleries are among the world’s most respected art dealers, offering exceptional pieces by both renowned artists and cutting-edge newcomers. Special exhibition sections feature young galleries, performance art, public art projects and video art. The show will be a vital source for art lovers, allowing them to both discover new developments in contemporary art and experience rare museum-caliber artworks.

Top-quality exhibitions in the museums of South Florida and special programs for art collectors and curators also help make the event a special time for encountering art. And every year, a greater number of art collectors, artists, dealers, curators, critics and art enthusiasts from around the world participate in Art Basel – the favorite winter meeting place for the international art world.

Art Basel Miami

From May 19 to September 16, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
A Hundred Years – A Hundred Chairs. Masterworks from the Vitra Design Museum provides an opportunity to contemplate the fascinating history of chair design. Assembled from the expansive holdings of one of the world’s foremost design museums, this exhibition allows us to consider the aesthetic, technological and manufacturing concerns expressed through the design of the most ubiquitous of objects, the chair.

The exhibition begins in the last decades of the 19th century with curved wooden furniture that lent itself to mass-production. It was the introduction of the mass- produced object that changed the course of subsequent design. At the outset of the 20th century, design played a significant role in cultural development. Gerrit Rietveld designed furniture with simple lines, while Marcel Breuer created the first tubular steel chairs. This lightness in shape was subsequently a source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, who was the first to use plywood, and for Jean Prouvé, who started to use techniques and materials that had previously only been used by the aeronautical industry.

Following the Second World War, design became a key element of daily life. American designers began to collaborate closely with industry. Designers like Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia came up with designs that would be used for the mass production of furniture for American homes while in Europe, furniture design was developing mainly in Italy and Scandinavia. At the same time, the many designers wanted to make designer goods more accessible to the general public. Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen were forerunners in Scandinavian countries in creating wooden furniture, while the Italians turned their attention to more novel materials like plastic.

The considerable malleability of these materials, together with the development of new types of foam, gave rise to a wealth of creative fantasy in the sixties. At that time, Pop Art provided a source of inspiration and designers played on form and colour. The main representatives of this trend were Verner Panton and Joe Colombo. Later, in the seventies, designs became even more radical, leading to the emergence of opposition to the rules of Modernism. Groups of designers such as Memphis or Archizoom emphasized the amusing and playful nature of forms rather than functionality.

More recently, the eighties were marked by a search for individualism and pluralism, and the result was the emergence of a variety of remarkably novel approaches. Philippe Starck, Ron Arad and Gaetano Pesce are leading representatives of this trend. A search for simple but innovative shapes and materials found in the work of Frank Gehry and Jasper Morrison characterized the nineties. And finally, fantasy remains an indispensable criterion in the conception of forms as witnessed in the work of Ron Arad and Marc Newson.

Reproductions of drawings, sketches and documents belonging to the Vitra Design Museum accompany the chairs on display, and seven films reveal the manufacturing process of some of the chairs, giving the spectator general insight into different production techniques.

Tampa Museum of Art

Alex Katz Eleuthera 1984 Oil on linen 305 x 670.5 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galería Javier López, Madrid © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

9 May to 23 September 2012 – Tate St Ives
Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In July 2012 Katz celebrates his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades. Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition 2012 brings together over 30 canvases and collages from the 1950s to now.

Given the gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.

To accompany the show Katz has made a personal selection of works from the Tate Collection. Drawn from British, European and American artists, he brings together an illuminating cross-generational selection of artists for this special one-room display.

Alex Katz Round Hill 1977 Oil on Linen 180.3 x 243.8 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Partial and Promised Gift of Barry and Julie Smooke Art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Digital Image © 2012 Museum Associates / LACMA

Katz’s paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. He works in the tradition of European and American artists like Manet, Matisse, and Hopper. Many of Katz’s works picture an everyday America of easy living, leisure and recreation. Working with the themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes and flowers, Katz is influenced as much by style, fashion and music as he is art history.

In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was still the dominant force in American art when Katz began exhibiting. Whilst his interests were firmly based in the previous generation of artists including Pollock, Rothko, Guston and De Kooning (De Kooning and Guston in particular offered early support and encouragement), his own painting developed in reaction to their work, and he is acknowledged as a hugely influential precursor to the Pop Art movement with which he became associated throughout the 1960s.

Tate St Yves

Roy Lichtenstein. Masterpiece, 1962. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Gund Collection

May 16–September 3, 2012 – The Art Institute of Chicago
This exhibition, the first presentation of the full scope and breadth of Roy Lichtenstein’s career since his death in 1997, aims to offer a new, scholarly assessment of the work of this foremost Pop artist. Lichtenstein is an artist whose work is widely known, reproduced, copied, and parodied—he is an artist that we seem to know well but in fact the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood.

Roy Lichtenstein – Girl With Hair Ribbon – Oil and magna on canvas – 48 x 48 inches; 121.9 x 121.9 cm – 1965 The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Presenting over 130 paintings and sculptures, as well as over 30 little- or never-before-seen drawings and collages, this exhibition gives full consideration to all periods of Lichtenstein’s career, including but not limited to, pre-Pop expressionist work, classic Pop Romance and War cartoon paintings, Mirrors, Brushstrokes, Explosions, Artist’s Studio paintings, late nudes, and Chinese Landscapes. Special consideration is given to Lichtenstein’s relationship to art historical sources, ranging from Picasso and Cubism through Surrealism, Futurism, German Expressionism, and the American West.

Roy Lichtenstein. Ohhh…Alright…, 1964. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Finally, the exhibition offers an examination of the artist’s use of alternative media like Plexiglas, Rowlux, and perforated steel in an attempt to broaden the understanding of his art beyond the strictly canonical early Pop paintings.

Art Institute of Chicago

Sarah - Alex Katz, 2012 - 104 x 99 cm-41 x 39 inch - Lithograph on paper Edition: 60

From May 12 to July 06, 2012 – Galerie Fluegel-Roncak
On view are paintings and prints, mostly from the last 15 years with his famous portraits and landscapes.
Alex Katz was born in 1927 on July 24th in Brooklyn/New York and is one of the most important artists of american contemporary and pop art. His works are in all major museums around the world including Albertina/Vienna or MOMA/New York.
He developed his own kind of painting by producing iconic, cool effective images of life in the wealthy leisure class, and of natural idylls. In a further step, he reproduced, reflected, and reduced his motifs in his prints, which retained the planes of deep, radiant color that characterize his paintings.
Alex Katz celebrates his 85th Birthday on July 24th 2012.

Galerie Hours

February 25 and 26, 2912 – Downtown Lake Worth
Welcome to the Annual Lake Worth Street Painting Festival! Watch as over 400 Artists use the pavement as canvas to transform downtown Lake Worth into a temporary outdoor museum of original art and masterpiece reproductions. See the streets come alive as the artists transform the pavement into works of art. It happens every February in downtown Lake Worth, Florida

Traced back to 16th century italy when itinerant artists would use their chalks to transform pavement into a makeshift canvas, street painting has retained its appeal through the centuries. As in ages past, crowds still gather to watch as fine works of art emerge. The “paintings” last only until the next rain, but the lively spirit and accessibility of the exhibition captivates new audiences each year and inspires lasting memories.

Downtown Lake Worth and the Greater Lake Worth Chamber of Commerce invite you to the annual Street Painting Festival, which claims bragging rights as the world’s largest. The 2-day event transforms the downtown streets with more than 200 street paintings sponsored by businesses, organizations, families and individuals, covering more area than any other festival of its kind in the world. Hundreds of artists converge to display their diverse talents on the asphalt – using only chalk – in styles that range from Renaissance classicism to Cubism and Pop Art. Street performers, strolling minstrels and Mainstage musical entertainment add to the creative atmosphere. And of course, don’t miss the Festival Food Courts, accommodating culinary tastes and thirsts as diverse as the surrounding artwork.

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