International Art News

From May 24 to September 2, 2012 – Miami Art Museum
A major career retrospective of the work of José Bedia at Miami Art Museum (MAM) explores the influence of indigenous cultures and religions from Cuba, North and South America, and Africa on the artist’s work over the last three decades. Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia, featuring 35 artworks including large-scale figurative paintings, installations and drawings, highlights the layering of spiritual, social and historical constructs in Bedia’s body of work—all of which are retold through a highly personal lens. On view from Thursday, May 24 through Sunday, September 2, 2012, the exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the rich iconography of Bedia’s artistic output. Transcultural Pilgrim is among the last four exhibitions MAM will show in its current building, before making the transition to its new Herzog & de Meuron facility in Museum Park in fall 2013.

“The incredible melding of cultural ideas and symbols in José Bedia’s work has a special resonance in the distinctly diverse Miami community, where so many nationalities, races, heritages and religions come together and Bedia, himself, lives,” said Thom Collins, director of Miami Art Museum. “Transcultural Pilgrim reveals the unexpected parallels between the cultural practices of disparate communities from around the globe and, in doing so, creates new parallels to contemporary life—exemplifying MAM’s dedication to presenting artists and works to which our audiences will have strong connections.”

Bedia is an acclaimed member of Cuba’s “Generation of the ‘80s,” a group of pioneering young artists who incorporated Cuban vernacular and spiritual references into their work and experimented with eclectic visual forms. Throughout the last 30 years, Bedia has traveled to the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, North American Plains, Amazonian rain forest, Dominican countryside, and the Central African savanna, among numerous other locations, in search of artistic and spiritual peers and to participate in what he defines as “diverse spiritual worlds.” The featured works in Transcultural Pilgrim—with their sacred and autobiographical references, strong graphic quality, and philosophical complexity—represent the traces of Bedia’s artistic and spiritual journeys, which have shaped his artistic practice. The exhibition also includes select objects from Bedia’s personal collection, housed in his Miami home, which have inspired the forms and content of his work.

 Miami Art Museum

From September, 02  to September, 25 2011 – Erarta, Contemporary Art Museum and Galleries
“Stability” is conceived as an exhibition of young artists from the generation that is decided to blame for the political apathy and infantilism. Fifteen participants of the project have tried to refute this view and shared their feelings of being in contemporary Russia. The authors, among them Alexei Chizhov, Denis Patrakeev, creative association “KGB” and Do plu do, presented their works in various kinds of art: from paintings to street art.

Young artists were given a theme: the cornerstone concept of “stability” for debate today. It is interpreted as the achievement of the country and as a sign of stagnation. The artists, for the most part, to the possibility of protest statements preferred a reflection of the phenomenon of “stability”. Creative association “KGB” using traditional Roman techniques, brought together a large-scale mosaic, and the leader of the artistic group “Creative forging” Konstantin Benkovich created a powerful sculpture “Cocoon” of a steel strip. This work can effectively enter into the interior, and can be made to speak in a vacuum of the gallery hall.
Other artists working at the abstract forms prefer slogans in English. Denis Patrakeev, debunking stereotypes about the Russian, painted on a huge canvas a group of young people who demonstrate a complete unwillingness to have anything to do with vodka and bears. But the picture does not give us an answer to the question, what the modern Russian bears a relation to. Hyperactive project participants Do plu do decided to try themselves at the very provocative and trendy to this day Street Art. They chose for their slogans not movable spans of bridges and billboards, but the provincial Swedish fences and patios of Brussels. And what, in fact, is their project “To say it” screaming? The fact is that they have really nothing to say: Art about Art about Art.

Museum Hours

Until the 24th of April – Műcsarnok – For the Contemporary Arts
This exhibition opens the stage for groups of young artists for whom the creative process goes hand in hand with collective reflection. Some of these communities bring together in their work several fields of the arts, from architecture through fine and media art to design or literature. The exhibitors include the builders of sound and space installations, architects who seek cooperation with different professions and branches of art, teams of visual artists engaged in theatre, groups that collect and publish arts publications and fanzines. Some of the exhibits will emerge from the interaction of what is on display, offering, thanks to the common thinking of the groups, multiple views of certain artistic problems, while often making one utopia or another the yardstick of their collective work. The exhibition takes a look at these communal work processes, and the utopias that motivate the creative communities.

We have invited duos and groups of artists to make works particularly for this occasion, which will also reflect on the venue. Thanks to its vast space and a history that goes back to the birth of modern art, Műcsarnok, a prominent exhibition place of contemporary Hungarian art, is both a symbolic venue, and a forum for the life of a more broadly understood arts community. With the programmes, discussions and actions that the participating groups will organize, the exhibit will attempt to turn the building into the scene of live discourses and events, as well as to highlight certain problems of the contemporary contexts of Hungarian art and society.

The spaces of Műcsarnok will now fulfil a double function: beside the traditional role of the exhibition hall, i.e. the presentation of artworks, they will also serve the community, giving home to not only the artworks, but the artists as well. The exhibiting groups will participate in the weekly events, which will be loosely related and will cover different art forms. Practically a one-month festival, the lively and dynamically transforming event will include theme-oriented discussions and debates, as well as theatre performances, concerts, film screenings, performances and parties.

No One Belongs Here More Than You will seek to create a situation that enables exhibition goers and exhibiting artist alike to freely reinterpret the customary settings of an exhibition.

Exhibiting groups of artists:
Table Company / Under Classification / D1618 / Group / laci&balázs / Plagium 2000 / AMBPA – Association of Mouth and Brain Painting Artists of the World / Szentirmai Tamás + Vági János + Szakács István / Association ’39 / The Corporation / The Randomroutines / Tehnica Schweiz & Katarina Šević / New Direction Group / 1000%
Curators: Petra Csizek, Gábor Döme

Museum Hours

From the 20 January to 19 February 2011 – Fundació Suñol
White Whispers, the Absent Library is the resulting work from the first edition of the post-production grant awarded to Antònia del Río by the Fundació Suñol, in collaboration with the Master’s in Artistic Productions and Research (PAIR) from the University of Barcelona.

The Majorcan artist exhibits an installation that alludes to the mechanisms of transmission and loss of knowledge, using the representation of a nearly imperceptible library as a metaphor for the storehouse of memory—memory as a construction of discourse, knowledge and thought, as a means to preserve lived memories and experiences and as a resource for avoiding the loss of knowledge that each change of generation entails. It is an intimist work on books, reading and their comprehension, the disappeared knowledge from books that no longer exist and the traces they have left us behind. The piece is accompanied by a documentation space where spectators can consult the readings that were the basis for giving shape and content to the project.

The Fundació Suñol’s Nivell Zero hosts different avant-garde artistic productions with its own projects and also in collaboration with other institutions. In a line of strong commitment to training young artists, in 2009 the foundation signed an agreement with the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona to award a grant to a graduate student in Art and Intermedia Contexts (PAIR Master’s). The award is for €6,000, and it provides the artist with a studio at the Fundació Suñol for six months to conceptualize and undertake the project. The foundation then assesses the project’s suitability to be exhibited at Nivell Zero, as was the case with Antònia del Río for having succeeded in creating an optimal work.

Museum Hours