International Art News

Pedro Costa Minio macho, minion fêmea, 2005, video installation (2 screens), Collection of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art – ⒸPedro Costa Courtesy of the artist

From December 7, 2012 to March 10, 2013 – Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
Cinema and sculpture – two different fields of activity engaged in by two Portuguese artists who will unveil works of light and shadow, movement and stillness within the unique space of the Hara Museum. －What kind of time and space will this confrontation between opposites give birth to? Pedro Costa and Rui Chafes are two artistic geniuses from Portugal who have won international acclaim in two different areas of expression: cinema and sculpture.

The movie director Pedro Costa has created highly original work that straddles the line between documentary and fiction. Critics have lavished praise on his films which have garnered awards at the Locarno International Film Festival and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Costa continues to fascinate viewers with films in which serene visual beauty coexist with a destructive view of the world.

Rui Chafes Vê como tremo (See how I shake), 2005, painted iron, 241(h) x 372 x 117 cm, Collection of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art ⒸRui Chafes Courtesy of the artist

Working mainly in iron, Rui Chafes creates sculptures that push the envelope of expressive possibilities. Chafes has represented Portugal at such international art festivals as the Venice Biennale and Sao Paulo Biennale. This exhibition, entitled MU in memory of the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, features a total of ten works, consisting of five video installations and five sculptural works, including three new works by each artist that were created especially for the space within the Hara Museum. One of the highlights of the show is the combined display of video material from Costa’s representative works No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) and Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) along with iron sculptures by Chafes, which are newly presented in the form of an installation. What awaits viewers is an experience of time and space that is different from a typical visit to a movie theater.

Hara Museum of Contemporary Art

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

Tidal Walk, 2009, image from endurance performance, Bondi beach, Sydney. Photo: Tereasa Trevor

From November 1st to November 20th 2011 – Artspace Visual Arts Centre
Water has always been central to me. I grew up on the harbour, learnt to swim when I learnt to walk. I spent entire days in the sea during summer, till my skin crinkled and burnt … I had no idea then that freshwater was so precious. It was on tap – we played under the sprinkler – I remember big rains in the 1970s, in my childhood … Later, the ocean spelt evolutionary beginning. We are born and gestated in water … (Fiona McGregor)
Fiona McGregor’s Water Series is a set of durational performances presented both live and via photography and video. The works are all generated through the artist’s response to the fundamental substance of water, in a time of environmental strife. This response is in part predicated on proximity – an emotional attachment to the ocean as a coastal dweller. More crucially it is generated by issues surrounding scarcity and usage of fresh water in Australia – especially the issue of salinity – deepened by the artist’s recent visit to Lake Eyre, across the outback, along the Murray River. An awareness of water as the main component of the human body then runs consistent across the series, particularly apparent in the endurance elements of the works as the artist enacts extended encounters between water and the body: the body struck by water; the body marked by water; the body consuming liquidity; the body expelling liquidity.

When I see a tap running unattended, I feel like I am watching someone bleed.

Water Series is an accumulative project. A major multi-channel video installation, Vertigo, developed from an endurance performance on the cliffs of Bondi, will show throughout this exhibition, as will photographic work based on the performance Tidal Walk, where McGregor walked up and down Bondi Beach for the duration of a tide cycle as a form of homage to the ocean as life force and farewell to a place where she lived for almost twenty years. McGregor will then undertake three performances over the three weeks of the project, each of which will leave installation traces in the gallery space.

Look out the window when you fly over Australia. See floodplains, everchanging. Not rivers so much as venal systems, which remain dry for decades on end.

For Water # 1: Descent, the artist will lie for twenty-four hours covered with salt as rainwater equivalent to her body weight, collected and suspended in a bladder above, drips onto her forehead.

McGregor will appear coiled in tubing for Water # 2: Passage, one line introducing saline into her body, the other drawing blood from it. This performance will conclude with the artist’s back being tattooed with water.

Water #3: Expulsion is a further twenty-four action during which McGregor will consume large amounts of water, producing urine that will activate a small fountain.

The body as function. The body as factory. The body as filter. The body as alchemical point between water and blood; water and urine.

Fiona McGregor is a Sydney-based writer and artist working across a range of disciplines including writing, live art, video and installation. McGregor’s performance work is body-based, with a focus on endurance. Crucial to her practice are risk and duress. States of stillness are explored in a variety of contexts; time is her raw material. McGregor’s one-on-one performance, You Have the Body, a meditation on unlawful detention, toured Australia from 2008 – 2009 and was voted Show of the Year by critic James Waites. The work was subsequently produced by UK performance artist Michael Mayhew at ART Studio, Manchester. Since late 2008, McGregor has been engaged in this ongoing series concerning the fundamental substance of water. McGregor’s writing is well known, her fifth book and latest novel, Indelible Ink, recently awarded the Age Book of the Year.

Museum Hours

Yang Fudong, Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), 2011 35mm film transferred to HD, 1 screen Black and white, 13’ Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris / New York; ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

From September 13 to November 6, 2011 – Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art
Parasol unit foundation presents a major solo show to the renowned Chinese film maker Yang Fudong. Fudong is considered to be one of the most influential artists to emerge from contemporary China. In addition to the recent work Fifth Night, two new films will premiere at Parasol unit: One half of August, 2011, an eight screen black and white video installation, and Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), 2011, a one screen HD video installation.

Foundation Hours