{"id":1548,"date":"2015-06-05T19:17:43","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T18:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyeplug.net\/magazine\/?p=1548"},"modified":"2011-03-25T17:31:04","modified_gmt":"2011-03-25T17:31:04","slug":"exhibition-newsfeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/exhibition-newsfeed\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibitions Newsfeed"},"content":{"rendered":"
Shadow puppets, otherworldly masks, taxidermy dioramas, from Greek epics to the Brothers Grimm: a new exhibition celebrates the fantastical tales that have passed through countries and cultures<\/p>
Marina Warner has\u00a0spent her life studying the cultural and psychological uses\u00a0of imaginative tales, be they of fairies, ghosts or saints\u2019 lives. It\u2019s perhaps no surprise then that The Shelter of Stories, a new exhibition curated by the leading mythographer, contains much to tingle spines as well as tickle\u00a0fancies.<\/p>
There are artworks drawing on alternative folkloric worlds by top contemporary artists such as Paula Rego or Kiki Smith, while old master paintings confront spiritual or social horrors. It boasts a wealth of offbeat ephemera too, including Red Riding Hood as an early kids\u2019 board game and taxidermy dioramas with a rodent fortune teller and avian peddler of love potions. The curator\u2019s own collection of Mexican Ex Voto paintings shows how ordinary people have recorded and given thanks for overcoming their own dramas, be it fire or an inconvenient spouse.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Morgan Library & Museum, New York<\/strong><\/p> Famed impressionist painter\u2019s lesser-seen drawings are the focus of a major new exhibition that invites us into the stages of his artistic process<\/p> His luminous colours and sensual brushwork adorn countless mugs, posters and tote bags as well as blockbuster exhibitions<\/a>. But the commodification of Pierre-Auguste Renoir<\/a> and his fellow impressionist painters has been missing something.<\/p> Renoir was an accomplished draftsman who produced a distinguished but largely unheralded collection of drawings, pastels, watercolours and prints.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> This year\u2019s edition, a statewide juggernaut spanning more than 30 exhibitions and events and a major show at the Art Gallery of South Australia, celebrates the past and present while looking to the future<\/p> Walking through the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) alongside Nici Cumpston, it\u2019s as if the Barkandji artist and curator is surrounded by old friends.<\/p> For the past 10 years, Cumpston\u2019s role as artistic director of Tarnanthi festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art \u2013 which this week celebrates a decade with a supersized statewide iteration spanning more than 30 exhibitions and events, including a major exhibition at AGSA \u2013 has seen her travel widely and listen deeply to bring these canvases, sculptures and video works to Kaurna country.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Readers respond to Jonathan Jones\u2019s Tate Modern review, including the charge that the artworks \u2018fail to impose themselves on the venue\u2019s vast space\u2019<\/p> Jonathan Jones\u2019s review of M\u00e1ret \u00c1nne Sara\u2019s installation at Tate Modern in London completely misses the point (13 October<\/a>). The land the S\u00e1mi live in is \u201cquite big\u201d, just as the Turbine Hall is in Jones\u2019s words, but the S\u00e1mi do not take over the entirety of their landscape. They live within it.<\/p> The \u201cfort\u201d is not a place to \u201chide\u201d. That is a city-boy reading rather than a deeper understanding of the ancient methods that S\u00e1mi families use for herding reindeer in the vastness of their lands, combined with the political realities that surround them. Jones is too close to playgrounds and not close enough to the realities of the S\u00e1mi and northern political history.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Small worlds go under the microscope, botanical art is investigated, and renegades come in for a reckoning \u2013 all in your weekly dispatch<\/p> The Singh Twins and Flora Indica<\/strong> The revered 83-year-old Mexican photographer talks about her groundbreaking career as she celebrates her first ever retrospective in New York<\/p> If you\u2019re at all familiar with contemporary Latin American photography, you\u2019ve probably encountered the unforgettable image of a Zapotec woman crowned with live iguanas, radiating quiet, unshakable dignity. Captured in 1979 by Graciela Iturbide, Nuestra Se\u00f1ora de las Iguanas, Juchit\u00e1n was neither planned nor staged. It was taken on impulse, guided by the artist\u2019s instinct and deep respect for her subject, and has since become a touchstone of Mexican visual culture and feminist photography.<\/p> \u201cWhat drives my work is surprise, wonder, dreams, and imagination,\u201d Iturbide recently told the Guardian.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Still Life with Guitar, worth \u20ac600,000, noticed missing after van arrives in Granada from Madrid<\/p> Police in Spain are investigating the disappearance of a tiny Picasso painting, worth \u20ac600,000 (\u00a3520,000), which vanished en route from Madrid to an exhibition in the southern city of Granada.<\/p> The gouache and pencil work, Naturaleza muerta con guitarra (<\/em>Still Life with Guitar), was due to go on show at a new exhibition at the CajaGranada foundation, which opened last week.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Tyler Mitchell takes inspiration from skateboarding, art history and British style mags to show how beauty, intimacy and empowerment are at the heart of the Black experience<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> The uniquely irreverent artist, whose work includes everyone from Mozart to Sonic Youth, has a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art<\/p> On a recent Friday night in the vast atrium space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six string players took their place in a semi-circle and began performing the first movement of one of Mozart\u2019s most sanctified sonatas. For the first five minutes or so, the musicians played his String Quartet No 15 in D Minor exactly as it was written until, suddenly, the conductor began acting like the host of a bingo game by throwing a six-sided die, with each side representing a particular player.<\/p> \u201cTwo,\u201d the conductor cried, before pointing at the second violinist, who immediately stopped what she was performing and began to play her part in the piece back from the start, while the others soldiered on through the score. \u201cFour,\u201d the conductor called after his next toss, pointing at the cellist who, likewise, went back to the beginning of his part, in the process establishing a pattern of calls and restarts that continued for the next 25 minutes. Amid the unfolding drama, one of the world\u2019s most well-worn classical works was twisted into something strangely fresh, resulting in not so much a deconstruction of Mozart\u2019s work as a reformation of it, with each component treated like a separate piece in a bold new puzzle.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Inspired by Gustav Klimt\u2019s \u2018golden phase\u2019 and the religious icons of medieval Europe, US photographer Tawny Chatmon reimagines Black identity by upturning art history<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> 180 Studios, London<\/strong> Do exhibitions have to make sense? The people in charge at the vast, subterranean video art wonderland at 180 the Strand sure don\u2019t seem to think so. In the past they have been masters of immersive art exhibitions in London. Their major debut, The Infinite Mix<\/a>, in 2016, set a standard that all video art shows since have tried \u2013 and largely failed \u2013 to reach. This time, down in the bowels of this enormous concrete behemoth, they\u2019ve chucked a whole bunch of video art at the walls and hoped that some of it would stick. But not much does.<\/p> It starts with Mark Leckey<\/a>\u2019s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Pipilotti Rist<\/a>\u2019s Ever Is Over All and Gillian Wearing<\/a>\u2019s Dancing in Peckham \u2013 three of the most important works of video art of the 1990s. Leckey\u2019s film, a paean to rave, youth culture and getting pinged off your nut, still has an impact almost 30 years later. Wearing\u2019s endearingly awkward silent solo danceathon in a Peckham shopping centre is one of the definitive works of its era. And if you\u2019re looking for contemporary influence, then Rist\u2019s video, following a smiling woman down the street as she smashes car windows with a flower, was ripped off by Beyonc\u00e9 in her video for Hold Up<\/a> in 2016.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Pinball, boomboxes and vintage cars! Victor Wedderburn\u2019s photographs capture the joys \u2013 and struggles \u2013 of the era for the city\u2019s immigrant communities<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stage<\/p> Some primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.<\/p> And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context. The effect of the works created by the Zaria Art Society<\/a>, the generation that congregated in Lagos and exhibited all over the world, was profound. Their work helped the nation to reconnect with its ancient ways, but adapted to modern times. It was a new art, brooding and celebratory. Often it was an art that hinted at the many dimensions of Nigerian mythology; often it drew upon daily realities. Spirits, ancestral presences, rituals, masquerades featured prominently, alongside popular subjects of dancing figures, portraits and landscapes, but rendered in a unique light, with a palette that was utterly unlike anything in the western tradition.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> How author researched his plots and letters from Alec Guinness feature in Oxford exhibition <\/p> Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters \u2013 they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carr\u00e9. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters\u2019 real creator, David Cornwell.<\/p> As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University\u2019s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. \u201cI am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,\u201d one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: \u201cWhat is loyalty \u2013 to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual\u2019s relationship to the institutions he services?\u201d<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> They may not have called themselves artists but, as a new exhibition explores, the mostly anonymous painters, sculptors and craftspeople working under the pharaohs still made their mark in distinctive style<\/p> The earliest creator in world history whose name is known to us today was Egyptian. The\u00a0priest Imhotep is credited with designing the step pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara about 4,700 years ago, and so\u00a0starting the sublime aesthetic achievements of the ancient state that\u00a0straddled the Nile.<\/p> Yet ancient Egyptians did not imagine creativity as an individual achievement or see artists as celebrities \u2013 unless they were literally gods. Imhotep was believed to be the son of the creator god Ptah and was deified as\u00a0a god of wisdom and knowledge, patron of scribes. Most Egyptian artists were no more likely to\u00a0be remembered by name than Stonehenge\u2019s builders. \u201cArt\u201d was not an idea. Golden mummy masks and statues of spear-wielding pharaohs were not made to be admired but to help dead people on their journeys through the afterlife. As for individual creativity, there wasn\u2019t much place for it in art that conserved the same style, with only superficial changes, for 3,000 years.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> Peter Doig soundtracks his new show, the latest Turbine Hall commission is unveiled and Frieze opens for super-rich shoppers \u2013 all in your weekly dispatch<\/a><\/p> M\u00e1ret \u00c1nne Sara<\/strong> From an eye-opening shot of David Byrne to footballers from a bygone era, a new exhibition focuses on portraits taken before the digital age<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> National Portrait Gallery, London<\/strong> At the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery\u2019s new Cecil Beaton exhibition, there\u2019s a wall-sized reproduction of a 1948 colour transparency, originally printed in Vogue. In it, eight coiffed white women wear elegant evening gowns by designer Charles James, chatting and preening in an 18th-century style French-panelled room. They engage only with each other, uninterested in the camera, looming larger-than-life above us. The effect on the viewer is of being excluded, unseen. This feeling only mounts as you proceed through Cecil Beaton\u2019s Fashionable World, a show that presents the photographer as a sharp-tongued socialite obsessed with high society, beauty \u2013 and himself.<\/p> Beaton\u2019s first exhibition at the NPG was in 1968. It was then the first ever solo show by a photographer at a British museum. Sixteen surviving silver gelatin prints from it are presented in the show\u2019s first room. They are lavish, theatrical portraits of brooding beauties with dark-painted lips, a swansong to the age of elegance.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> From Amazon warehouses to Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna gig, his pictures have made him one of the world\u2019s most feted photographers. So why did the German artist want to postpone his new show?<\/p> Andreas Gursky started out shooting mostly black and white landscapes on a handheld camera, but in the 1990s he switched, taking the pictures that he has now become famous for. Out went analogue and in came epic panoramas that were digitally stitched together, capturing in intricate detail and colour stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, 99 cent stores, Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna concert.<\/p> \u201cMy works,\u201d he recalls, \u201cwere selling for more and more.\u201d In fact, his rising status in the art world was reflected in his photographs inside Prada and Gucci stores \u2013 the former was taken while he was waiting for his wife, who was shopping there. Then, in 2011, Gursky\u2019s 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (\u00a32.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold<\/a>. \u201cHow do you deal with a thing like that?\u201d he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray\u2019s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d\u2019Ingres, which went for $12.4 million.<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li> At New York\u2019s Whitney museum, a new show finds ways to highlight the less dominant artistic forces of the era<\/p> We all know the familiar story of art in the 1960s \u2013 pop art, conceptualism and minimalism ruled the decade, dominated by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Jasper Johns. Bringing a welcome dose of counter-narrative to this calcified story, the Whitney\u2019s bold new show Sixties Surreal, aims to introduce a new cohort of 60s artists who channeled the chaotic id of the decade, but only got a fraction of the acclaim.<\/p> \u201cA generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in,\u201d said show curator Scott Rothkopf, who has longed to curate this exact show since his student days in the 1990s. \u201cThe 60s was a time of so much change \u2013 the fear of the atom bomb, multiple sexual revolutions, the civil rights movement, drug culture. These days felt to many young people like surreal days.\u201d<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n
<\/strong>A look at the colonial history behind British botany, plus a survey of Indian botanical art in the age of the East India Company.
\n \u2022 Kew Gardens, London<\/a>, until 12 April<\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
CGI sea creatures \u2018queer evolution\u2019, ravers rave on, Wonder Woman goes disco \u2026 none of it makes any sense but these legendary video works from Warhol and Jarman to Nan Goldin and beyond may still just blow you away<\/p>
<\/strong>Expect an earthy, and earth-conscious, installation on a grand immersive scale from the latest commission in the Tate Turbine Hall.
\n \u2022 Tate Modern, London, 14 October-6 April<\/a><\/p> Continue reading...<\/a><\/li>
The \u2018King of Vogue\u2019 was a desperate social climber and the world on view here seems constricted and parochial. Still, his backdrops are fabulous \u2013 usually more interesting than his subjects<\/p>