October 19,2013–January 12, 2014
la maison rouge
10 bd de la bastille
75012 Paris
France
Théâtre du Monde
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Tag Archives: exhibition
Art in the Age of Altamira – Botín Foundation
Until 29 September 2013
Botín Foundation
http://www.fundacionbotin.org
more info
Mammoth spear thrower, c.14,000-12,000BC
Curator: Jill Cook
In an exciting collaboration between the Fundacíon Botín, Santander, and the British Museum, London, the histories of art and humanity are being united in a new exhibition, Art in the Age of Altamira. The curator is Jill Cook, Deputy Keeper of the Department of Prehistory and Europe, British Museum.
Using sculptures and drawings of humans and animals from the period 22,000 to 12,000 years ago alongside modern works by Miró, Matisse, Hecht and Pasmore, as well as a film installation reflecting the synesthetic experience of creating art in artificial light underground, the exhibition reveals that the concepts and techniques used have changed little through time. All art is the product of the modern brain and the ability to make art was and is crucial to human survival.
When fully modern people arrived in Europe out of Africa where they had evolved and begun to use pigments, create patterns and make personal ornaments, they began to make the first figurative art, about 40,000 years ago. Although capable of expressing their ideas through complex language, this alone was not sufficient to meet the demands of harsh environmental conditions in which they were greatly outnumbered by animals.
Fixing ideas in images that people could share provided opportunities for bonding and socialising that enabled communities to collaborate and endure. The age of Altamira was a period of Renaissance in Ice Age art when new techniques, different styles and distinctive repertoire of decorative and figurative art emerged. In the exhibition, these are represented by works from nine museums in Spain, Britain, France and Germany that show the skill and accomplishment that allows most of them to be described as masterpieces.
It includes the extraordinary 13,000-year-old sculpture of swimming reindeer created from mammoth ivory from France curated by the British Museum; the beautiful sculpted ibex head from Tito Bustillo on loan from the Museo Arqueológico de Asturias, Oviedo; and the unique 16,000-year-old sculpture of a wolverine from Jarama II, one of the treasures in the collection of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid. Realism, imagination and abstraction are revealed in drawings on bone and stone, as well as distinctive ivory sculptures of women on loan from museums in Halle and Weimar in Germany.
These exceptional works are coming together for the first time with modern works that help to break down the time barrier and provide ways of seeing the similarity of concepts and techniques that have not changed except in their cultural context. Miró visited Altamira in 1957 and, as a result, often painted his large later works off easel using earth colours. In prints from a series called “Grans rupestres” (Cave art) created in 1977 and produced in 1979, he presents a metaphor for the infancy of art that opens the exhibition.
The exhibition develops themes explored in highly successful exhibition Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind shown at the British Museum earlier this year and incorporates Spanish and French works not seen there. It also celebrates the Botín family connection with the discovery of Altamira in 1879, when the authenticity of the great paintings was doubted because the techniques used showed similarities to those of the contemporary impressionists such as Monet. The antiquity of the images has not been in doubt since 1902, but only now are they beginning to take their place in the history of art rather than just archaeological objects.
Matthew Day Jackson
Total Accomplishment
May 18–November 10, 2013 at KM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Matthew Day Jackson, Axis Mundi, 2011. Repurposed cockpit of a B-29 aircraft. Private collection. Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.
With Matthew Day Jackson. Total Accomplishment, one of the most inventive artists of the new generation is presented for the first time within Germany. The exhibition is a comprehensive thematic show in which Jackson, starting out from American cultural history, undertakes a critical, multi-approach examination of the technological occupation of our world. In his work, he scrutinizes the impact of this technological occupation both on the individual and collectively through various media. In doing so, he thematizes the Western civilization by unraveling its myths through the creation of new enigmas.
The predominantly sculptural work of the New York-based artist Matthew Day Jackson (b. 1974; Panorama City, California) is distinguished by its selection of interdisciplinary themes. Here, technology and pop culture, but also aesthetics, philosophy, and sport comprise the wealth of sources from which the works emerge and negate a linear model of history. The artist’s questions turn on the deconstruction of history. Through his use of bricolage, connecting the remains of artifacts with high-tech materials, objects emerge that combine utopian as well as dystopian elements of a technologized world. Jackson’s practice of unveiling the past renders him as an artist-archaeologist who, in his versatile work, combines historical realities with a fictional search for traces—whereby media-critical reflection is an inherent feature of his works. In this process, the artist’s self-mythologizing invariably occupies the center of his oeuvre, thus contextualizing physicality and the destructive results of the human power of invention.
The Intelligence of Things
2013 Parsons Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition
Parsons The New School for Design is pleased to announce The Intelligence of Things, the 2013 Parsons Fine Arts MFA Thesis Show curated by Wendy Vogel and Jess Wilcox.
The exhibition features new works by Maricruz Alarcón, Elysa D. Batista, Lauren Denitzio, Sarah Allen Eagen, John Furer, Brenda Goldstein, Bing Han, Grace Hong, Sara Jimenez, Lilian Kreutzberger, Wilson Parry, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Isaac Pool, Jessica Posner, G. Scott Raffield, Kaitlynn Redell, Christine Howard Sandoval, Chaney Lane Trotter, Michael Watson, and Ilyn Wong.
For a growing number of contemporary artists and thinkers, the ontology of objects has prompted new investigations and modes of making. Perhaps in reaction to the dominance of screens and images in our daily life, artistic practice has embraced the object-as-thing: estranged, powerful and physical. A like-minded investment in materiality can be observed among the 20 artists in this exhibition. The Intelligence of Things presents these artists’ practices, which attest to the importance of the object in contemporary life. In these works, spanning different aesthetics and mediums—painting, performance, photography, video, sculpture and installation—objects become ciphers for memory, desire and fantasy. Far from simple gestures, thethings in these works articulate their place as icons and bodily analogs, and as protagonists in interiors, architectural spaces and the scope of history.
The exhibition privileges the role of the displayed objects over any overarching curatorial concept. As a title The Intelligence of Things both emphasizes this approach and illuminates these artworks’ powerful effect and affect. That is to say that following Kant’s purposeful purposelessness, these artworks upend our notions of a thing’s effect or intent, and each one has a particular character, demeanor, and accent—whether fierce or foppish. The Intelligence of Things brings together a group of works that resist clear categorization and do not adhere to rigid stylistic doctrines. The exhibition and the works therein, rather, critically explore how things and human subjects together produce meaning in the world.
Julieta Aranda
Julieta Aranda, What right?, 2013.
Single channel HD video (live video, 3-D object scanning, animation).
from e-flux:
If a body meet a body
“If you cut off my arm, I say “me and my arm.” You cut off my other arm, I say “me and my two arms.” Take out my stomach, my kidneys—assuming that were possible—and I say “me and my intestines.” And now, if you cut off my head, what would I say? “Me and my head” or “me and my body”? What right has my head to call itself me? What right?”
May 9–June 30, 2013
Press preview: Thursday, May 9, 11:30–13:30h
Opening: Thursday, May 9, 18h
Museo Villa Croce
via Ruffini 3
Genova
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things
an exhibition curated by Mark Lecky, 27 April – 30 June 2013
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, 2013. Exhibition view; the Bluecoat, Liverpool 2013. Photo: Jon Barraclough.
Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has curated an exhibition that explores the magical world of new technology, as well as tracing its connections to the beliefs of our distant past.
Historical and contemporary works of art, videos, machines, archaeological artefacts and iconic objects, like the giant inflatable cartoon figure of Felix the Cat – the first image ever transmitted on TV – inhabit an “enchanted landscape” created in Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, where objects seem to be communicating with each other and with us.
In Leckey’s exhibition “magic is literally in the air.” It reflects on a world where technology can bring inanimate “things” to life. Where websites predict what we want, we can ask our mobile phones for directions and smart fridges suggest recipes, count calories and even switch on the oven. By digitising objects, it can also make them “disappear” from the material world, re-emerging in any place or era.
Laika’s suit
“I think of this show as a work of fiction: a non-realist, anti-realist, magic-realist, speculative, slipstream fiction, a sort of sci-fi show. An inflation or amplification of the way the world appears to me now, a shape of ‘things’ to come. As it seems to me, the further technology evolves the more our minds devolve back to the imaginings of our superstitious past. Call it an animistic future or techno-atavism. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things is a world beyond tomorrow when every ordinary, unthinking object—tinned meat, refrigerators, paving stones—becomes an active participant in the Great Connection. Now I already find objects bewitching as they endow blessings and inflict punishments on me every day. And technology seems only to be increasing their supernatural potency as I sit in front of my machine and with a touch my wishes are made manifest. The mental gets materialized.
“So let’s say that all the objects in the show have already communicated with each other and they’ve called themselves together. They’ve formed a Parliament with representatives from the Vegetable World, Animal Kingdom, Mankind and the Technological Domain. And the breadth of that assembly is contained within its two hands: a Medieval reliquary and a bionic limb. Everything from one hand to the other is equal in aspect, with no distinctions drawn between, whether it is organic or inorganic, from the past or the present, whether it’s imagined or real. The full figure of Sputnik continually girdles the earth as the Giant of Cerne Abbas stares forever up to the stars and the stars keep staring back.”
–Mark Leckey
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things is the latest in a series of acclaimed artist-curated Hayward Touring exhibitions. It includes work by the artists William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Prunella Clough, Peter Coffin, Martin Creed, John Gerrard, Robert Gober, Richard Hamilton, Nicola Hicks, Roger Hiorns, Andy Holden, Elad Lassry, Pierre Molinier, Jonathan Monk, Mick Peter, Richard Prince, Jim Shaw and Tøyen, amongst others.
It also features marvels and artefacts such as a mummified cat and canopic jar from Pharaonic Egypt, a phallic sculpture from A Clockwork Orange, a mandrake root, a drawing by ‘Joey the Mechanical Boy,’ the helmet of a Cyberman from Dr. Who, a giant inflatable Felix the Cat, a 13th-century silver reliquary in the form of a hand and a clay concept car. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things expands on Leckey’s practice of exploring the tenuous boundaries between the virtual and real worlds by creating a network of objects that communicate with each other and the visitor. Read this way, it could also be considered his most ambitious exhibition to date.
Mark Leckey lives in London and was born in Birkenhead in 1964. He won the Turner Prize in 2008. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things opened at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and will be presented at The De La Warr Pavlion in Bexhill-on-Sea from 13 July.
primal
Esther Schipper presents “primal”
works by Ugo Rondinone.
APRIL 26 – MAY 30, 2013
Working in a variety of media like sculpture, installation, painting, photography and video, Ugo Rondinone has been continuously addressing transient and ephemeral phenomena of time, fleeting emotions and momentous changes in atmosphere and moods of a place. During the last years the artist has captured these themes in a series of sculptures using different methods of casting. Motifs of Rondinone’s sculptural series range from genres classical of art history, such as still lifes and nudes, to redefined archetypical forms of primitive art: masks, large abstracted heads and animal figures. The artist reinvents these motifs in different scales and materials and plays with multiple historic and visual references, translating these timeless images in the contemporary art context.
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Archaeology of the Digital
Exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) running from 7 May–13 October 2013
The Lewis Residence by Frank Gehry (1985–1995), Peter Eisenman’s unrealized Biocentrum (1987), Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere (1992) and Shoei Yoh’s roof structures for Odawara (1991) and Galaxy Toyama (1992) Gymnasiums: four seminal projects that established bold new directions for architectural research by experimenting with novel digital tools. Curated by architect Greg Lynn, Archaeology of the Digital is conceived as an investigation into the foundations of digital architecture at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.
Makeda & Pauli 