Until April first 2012 – State Hermitage -Rotunda, Winter Palace
Beginning in 1936, Boris Vorobyov began both a course of study at the Academy of Arts and a job at the Leningrad Porcelain Factory, which would be tied to his artistic career for more than three decades. He created a great number of models that added to the gold portfolio of the factory; many of them are still being duplicated, and are in as high demand among lovers of porcelain as ever. Contrary to established academic traditions, this artist remained true to the “animalier” style, using his creative gifts to shape a wide variety of materials: porcelain, faience, ceramics, glass, wood and metal.

Around 200 items from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, the artist’s family and OJSC “Imperial Porcelain Factory” were included in the exhibit.

Every piece represents the artist’s deep appreciation of the value of nature, and of its simultaneous vulnerability; each of them is an embodiment of his serious and thoughtful approach to his models. The thematic range of Boris Vorobyov’s “animalier” style is very broad, but one unique motif in this artist’s work is the polar bear, which he used several times, reaching a pure stylistic conclusion in the classic paired figures of a walking and sitting polar bear.

Tigers and leopards were also frequent characters in Vorobyov’s sculpture. The monumental nature of the sculptures entitled Recumbent Tiger and Panther (Fury) demonstrates the artist’s complete command of form and material, as well as his understanding of the nature of his subjects. Panther is distinguished by its remarkable grace and elegance of form, and the acuity of its sculptural design. Created in the late 1960s, it might be said to represent a capstone to the artist’s many years of work in porcelain. In his work, this sculptor always strove to express the interior character of his subject as he understood and felt it himself.

Animals were the main, but not the only theme that attracted Boris Vorobyov’s style. Literary images from the work of I.A. Krylov, A.S. Pushkin, M.Y. Lermontov, N.V. Gogol, A.P. Chekhov, S.V. Mikhalkov, translated into the language of porcelain sculpture, became equally important for the artist. Immediately after their creation, these works drew great interest from collectors and lovers of porcelain and were in high demand. Although these sculptures had literary antecedents, they were, nonetheless, works of art of their own right. Each of these groups is characterized by the freshness of the artistic approach taken to creating them and the absence of compositional and artistic cliche’s. Each of these figures preserves its own individuality.

The series of characters based on N.V. Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Dead Souls, which are often called the “Gogol types” was literally created in one breath; in four months, according to the artist. These figures all produce a similar impression; their nearly identical height emphasizes and even grotesquely overdoes the character traits and “typecasting” expressed in Gogol’s prose.

The sculptural cycle dedicated to Chekhov’s stories presents not only characters, but plot groups. The Chekhov series, while remaining without the domain of indoor sculpture, demonstrates the artist’s tremendous sculptural and compositional virtuosity.

These series of literary cycles concluded with a group of sculptures dedicated to the works of M.Y. Lermontov. The primary artistic principle at work here is that of the conventionality of the sculptural form, emphasized by the contrast between black and white tones and the various structures of the material. The artistic devices used here made it possible to express a dramatic internal duality, the psychological conflict that Lermontov’s characters are embroiled in.

In addition to the porcelain pieces from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum and that artist’s family, this exhibit includes thirty works of graphic art by Boris Vorobyov. The strongest impression is made by the watercolors, created by the artist in the 1980s, while he was severely ill; working from memory, the sculpture put an entire gallery of animal images, from both memory and fantasy, down on paper.

As part of this exhibit, the artists of the Imperial Porcelain Factory have presented their own decorative rendition of the image of the polar bear, transforming the same classical form created by Boris Vorobyov into a new, non-standard type of art object.

The “animalier” had been given the undeserved label of a “light genre.” Boris Vorobyov’s work is full of a deep and sincere approach to sculpture. Highly valuing his characters, he aspired to place the world of “out little brothers” on the same level with the human world, or even higher. Boris Yakovlevich Vorobyov felt that the aim of his work was to make sure that “these “porcelain animals” showed people the beauty of nature, forced them to listen to the voice of nature and fall in love with it.”

Museum Hours

From June 24 to September 18, 2011 – Museum of Contemporary Art
Snorre Ytterstad’s universe seems at first sight rather mundane and simple, but on closer inspection it reveals a complexity of form and content. Ytterstad often uses everyday objects like ballpoint pens, nails and coins. By placing these familiar objects in unusual contexts, where they are alienated from their intended functions, they emerge in a new light, often producing whole new chains of associations. Ytterstad is fascinated by the range of meanings that language and words can take on depending on the context they appear in. The titles of his works often function on many levels and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
Seeing the world in a new way, by shifting perspective or presenting it in a slightly new light, is an important aspect of Ytterstad’s work. This is reinforced by the fact that the viewer often has to move around his installations to grasp them in their entirety. Sometimes one even has to go searching for them. Either the everyday objects that Ytterstad presents don’t initially look like works of art, or they are so small and tucked away in such unassuming places that they are hard to spot.
One of the main themes of the exhibition is “space”. Both the physical space – the room – the work is set in, takes possession of, and thereby modifies, or other kinds of space, such as our inner world. Outer space also plays a part in Ytterstad’s world, as illustrated by many of his work titles and his frequent use of the circle as motif. Another crucial aspect of Ytterstad’s work is concealment. He uses wires that are all but invisible and constructs hidden spaces inside his sculptures.
Many of his works have political overtones, and can be read as criticisms of modern society and its capitalist system. He uses familiar symbols, like the Norwegian one-krone coin, to put his message across. In his use of found objects and high quality craftsmanship, Ytterstad can be compared to major Norwegian artists such as Jon Gundersen and Børre Larsen.
Born in Bodø, Snorre Ytterstad now lives and works in Oslo. He trained at Kabelvåg Art College (1990–92), the West Norwegian Art Academy, Bergen (1992–95) and the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo (1995–96). He has had several solo exhibitions including at Bodø Art Society (1994) and Satelliti, Galleria Kari Kenetti, Helsinki (2001). In addition, Ytterstad has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at UKS Biennial, Henie Onstad Art Centre (1998) and “Modellmakerne” (The Model Makers), Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2000).

Museum Hours

6 April to 19 June 2011 – Museum of Contemporary Art
Michael Stevenson, a New Zealand artist based in Berlin, has been described as an ‘anthropologist of the avantgarde’. This MCA survey is the first opportunity to review a broad cross-section of the artist’s activities drawn from his perspective over the last 20 years. It includes ambitious installation, object, drawing and film projects realised in the last 10 years, in relation to the artist’s earlier works undertaken in Australia and New Zealand. Stevenson’s practice is based in the documentary and frequently re-tells the historical in exemplary form rendering tenable the possibility for allegory in and amongst historical fact. His earlier works and his sculptures, installations and films, invoke a documentary narrative form.

Delving into questions from within and beyond the art world, Stevenson’s work could be said to engage with certain absurdities that arise when universalisms take hold in insular situations and, especially when these forms arrive in parts foreign, masked in radical and perplexing guises. Stevenson’s practice constantly reveals the fascinating and complex relationship between the specific and the universal.

Museum Hours

From the 19th of November to the 11th of  December 2010 – Mazel Galerie
Quentin Garel is graduate  from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (1998).
his work of sculpture, out of bronze, iron, wood or porcelain, is characterized by the creation of a bestiary, sometimes very realistic, sometimes brought back to a state of skeleton. Garel explains: “For a few years, I have developed a work of sculpture implementing various wood assemblies around the topic of the trophy; proud habit of the man whom I try to divert with the profit of the animals of consumption by denouncing the ridiculous character of this practice. I prolonged this topic with through the pig iron which brings a more monumental dimension to him and which opens it towards outside. Such a part can for example use the garden as base thus giving the feeling that it crosses partially the surface of the ground, like the vestige of an emergent past”. Excellent draughtsman, Garel works the subjects of its sculptures first on paper and supplements each exposure of a series of drafts and preparatory studies.

Since the ordering of a series of sculptures for the New Municipal Gardens of Lille, Garel extended its bestiary, centered up to now on the animals of consumption, with the animals of savanna and the jungle.

Galerie Hours

From the 16th of September to the 11th of October – Gallery Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman
Kienzer’s sculptures subvert conventional mechanisms of perception and revolutionise the observer’s visual and cognitive system. Kienzer’s artistic strategy, accordingly, is the strategy of conspiration. He explores the potential, inherent in all objects, for aesthetic transformation and shifts in meaning. He pits his art against complex spatial and social systems of reference, and undermines the representative characteristics and innermost structures of the materials and spaces he encounters, in order to subtly and subversively readapt them to his purposes. In this manner, he brings about interventions that unsettle us – by disrupting the preconditioned, ever same chains of association that permanently signal and suggest to us the proper use of objects and reinforce the standards of our values. The delirium of representative mechanisms in Michael Kienzer’s work instantly captures the observer’s unconscious attention. Getting closer to the core of his art, though, requires further study and mental as well as physical mobility.

Michael Kienzer, born in Steyr in 1962, winner of the Otto Maurer Prize in 2001, lives and works in Vienna and Graz. Contributions to international exhibitions, solo exhibitions, and numerous projects for public spaces since 1984.

Galerie Hours

Parc de la Villette – Until the 15th of August
The Parc de la Villette presents the last works of the sculptor Duane Hanson, considered today as the major artist in American hyperrealism. In the 60s, he developed his own artistic style and distinguished himself from the then dominating abstract expressionism current in the US.

Duane Hanson passed away in 1996 and has hardly been exhibited in France, and yet he is still very much of our times, as his critical view of American society between the 1970s and 1990s can find an echo in the utter distraught many find today in our own society.

The exhibition includes 15 sculptures, in resin and fibreglass, more real than life itself. Through his works the artist represents “today’s stars”, a cleaning woman, a student, a worker, a retired man. And he explores the sense of life, the life of each one of us.

The exhibition foments a surprising encounter with these characters, both touching and critical of our contemporary lives.

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