Martin Ramirez Exhibition @ Museo Reina Sofia / Madrid

Martin Ramriez, c. 1960-63, Gouache, colored pencil and graphite on pieced paper
28 x 43 cm
Image courtesy: Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York

Martin Ramirez. Reframing Confinement
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia / Madrid
Exhibition from March 31 until July 12, 2010
Curated by Brooke Davis Anderson
This exhibition on Martín Ramírez will bring together some eighty drawings from 1948 to 1963, exploring this artist’s extraordinary production. These works highlight Ramírez’s memories of Mexico, as well as his encounter with the North American landscape and the richness of his unique imagination. Art critics celebrate Ramírez’s oeuvre for its bold lines, meticulous repetitions and extraordinary variations within the same themes addressed consistently by the artist. Also to be shown together with these works is a selection of drawings discovered in a garage in California in 2007, which have not yet been exhibited outside New York.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo shows the Outsider Art Collection of Joost van den Toorn

Image: George Widener, copyright: Joost van den Toorn

Joost van den Toorn and the outsider art

March 13th, 2010 - June 20th, 2010

In the print room, the museum is showing bronze and ceramic sculptures by Dutch artist Joost van den Toorn, in combination with a collection of outsider art accumulated by the artist himself. Van den Toorn feels it particularly poignant to display his collection in the Kröller-Müller Museum due to the large collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Of all artists, Vincent in particular was regarded as an outsider in his early years, and thereafter.

He says of his collection: “Good art is so hard to find that you are better off searching for it in the less obvious places as well. Not just from afar, but also on the fringes of our society. Much of the work collected here was made in psychiatric institutions, such as the Gugging in Maria Gugging in Austria, in homeless shelters, or on the streets. The results of ten years of frenzied collection are displayed in the museum. Acquired from five or so specialized galleries in Europe, America and at auctions. I hope that this impassioned, uncompromising art inspires you as much as it has, and still does inspire me.”

Joost van den Toorn (1954) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In 1990 he was presented with the Leonado da Vinci award. He exhibits in solo and group exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. Joost van den Toorn’s work is characterized by irony, gravity, melancholy and human inadequacies.

Represtented artists: Franz Artenjak, Anton Dobai, Wolfgang Hueber, Aurel Iselstöger, Fritz Koller, Monsiel, Otto Prinz, Philipp Schöpke, Harald Stoffers, Theo, George Widener and others

Image: Franz Artenjak, copyright: Joost van den Toorn

Miroslav Tichy Exhibition @ International Center of Photography, New York

Foto: Susanne Zander, 2009

This is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of the reclusive and mysterious Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Now over eighty years old, Tichý is a stubbornly eccentric artist, known as much for his makeshift cardboard cameras as for his haunting and distorted images of women and landscapes, many of them taken surreptitiously. Tichý began photographing in the 1950s, in part as a political response to the social repressions of Czech communism. However, it is only in the past five years that his intensely private work has gained public attention. The exhibition, organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, includes a number of Tichý's homemade cameras as well as approximately 100 of his photographs.

The exhibition “Miroslav Tichy” continues through May 9 at the International Center of Photography.

See also: The New York Times : "An Ogling Subversive With a Homemade Camera" by
Karen Rosenberg.

Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness

In Surrealsm and Madness paintings, drawings and prints by the surrealists are juxtaposed with works from the Prinzhorn Collection which Hans Prinzhorn had published in Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). The same year as it was published Max Ernst brought the book to Paris, where, as a 'Picutre Bible', it became a source of inspiration of many surrealists.

There are remarkable analogies in creative processes: the automatic drawings of Andre Masson are
anticipated in the "scribblings" and 'informal' paintings of asylum inmates: in his paranoiac-critical method, Salvador Dali explicitly refers to charachteristics of psychic illness which produce visual double meanings and ambiguities; Max Ernst was paritculary intested in the combination of heterogeneous elements, a practice which Prinzhorn describes in detail for some illustrations in his book; and precursors for Hans Bellmer's body fusions and 'cephalopods' can als be found in the Collection.

See also an article about the book "Gegenwelten in Zwirn, Bettlaken und Papier" by Julia Voss,
Frakfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18. Februar 2010

Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness
Edited by: Thomas Röske and Ingrid von Beyme
Wunderhorn ISBN: 978-3-88423-338-2

Max Ernst, Oedipus, 1931 / (Cover of he special edition of "Cahiers d'art" 1937)


August Natterer (Pseudonym: Augus Neter), Wunder Hirthe (II), ca. 1911-13

Horst Ademeit @ White Columns, New York

White Columns presents the first solo exhibition in the United States by Dusseldorf-based Horst Ademeit. Working independently, and outside of the context of art, since the late 1980s Ademeit has embarked on an obsessive program of collecting evidence – through photography and meticulous note-keeping – that would establish, in his mind, the existence of what he called “cold rays,” unseen forces that he believed severely impaired and impacted upon his life and surroundings.
The exhibition will run until April 17.

Fotos: Nicole Delmes 2010