ADEMEIT Exhbition and Film by Michael Bauer & Marcus Werner Hed at Galleria Norma Mangione in Turin

Exhibition from 2 February – 10 March 2012
Over a period of more than twenty years Horst Ademeit (1937-2010) built up an archive of thousands of photographs and texts. Although he considered himself an artist, Ademeit documented the impact of cold rays – radiations that he considered a health hazard and a potential threat – with no particular artististic intent. To do so he used
measuring instruments and, in the margins of his Polaroid photos he meticulously noted down the circumstances, dates, and descriptions, which became increasingly cramped over the years.
His photographs are divided into two groups: 6006 numbered “daily photos”, taken each day in his apartment, and “observation photos” taken in the Düsseldorf district where he lived.

The exhibition will show selections from both series and the film Ademeit (2010) will be screened. Directed by the artist Michael Bauer and the director Marcus Werner Hed, the film was produced by Punderson Gardens.

This documentary-portrait is a poignant journey into the work and life of Horst Ademeit, with an in-depth interview, an exploration of the places he lived in and which appear in his photographs, and his own interpretation of them.

The way Ademeit conveys aspects of time and biography allow comparisons with conceptual artists such as Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, and Roman Opalka. And he shows how it is customary in art to find an openness to non-official scientific theories and to personal obsessions. But together with his radically systematic nature and
unparalleled perseverance, the most interesting thing is that, as he himself declared, his method was an activity that kept him alive, and an objective reality through which he was able to counter invisible, subjective forces.

Norma Mangione Gallery

"Darkness is a Space", Evgen Bavčar at Museo di Roma in Trastevere

A selection of more than fifty shots by one of the most talented photographers: Evgen Bavčar. The pictures by the blind Slovenian artist, philosopher and photographer, are evocative visions of space, lights, shapes and smells of childhood, snapshots of tactile and sensory perceptions captured by his daring and poetic inner eye. Evgen Bavčar teaches us how to “see” from another perspective.

Evgen was born in Lokavec, Slovenia, (a small city near the Italian border, in a country that was then called Yugoslavia), in 1946. And for the first 11 years of his life, everything was fine: he played with his little sister, he went to regular school, and did what normal children in his native country did. But one day, while playing in the woods, he was speared in the left eye by a branch. Doctors couldn’t repair the damage, and they were forced to remove the eye, and replace it with prosthesis. A few months later, he lost his other eye while handling a mine detonator, and was hospitalized on and off for the following two years. Nevertheless, he was lucky in his bad luck; shrapnel had planted itself in his prosthesis. If he had still had had a real left eye, the shrapnel would have gone through the eye, and into his brain.
Two years of rehabilitation later, Evgen was sent to a school for the blind in Ljubjana, to complete his education. And it was at that school that his life changed, (even though he wouldn’t notice it until about 25 years later.)
In 1962, at age 16, Evgen got hold of a camera, in order to take a picture of his then-girlfriend.
As he pressed the shutter, he realized that, even though he would never see exactly what his photos looked like, he was a great photographer. But he knew also that he would never be able to make a living out of it; so he took courses at the University of Ljubljana, in order to become a telephone switchboard operator. He graduated in 1963, and found a job at a local switchboard office.
But a few years later, he felt this wasn’t a job for him anymore; and so in 1969, he returned to the University of Ljubjana.
He graduated in 1972, and then went to study philosophy at the Universite de Paris 1, the Sorbonne, where he graduated in 1975. The following year, he started work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, (French equivalent of the National Research Council), as a temporary worker. He still works there today

Museo di Roma in Trastevere
19 January - 25 March 2012

In Memory of Karl Junker who died 100 years ago today

Zdenek Kosek at Palais de Tokyo in Paris

ZdenekKosek’s works will be shown at the inaugural exhibition of the new Palais de Tokyo in April 2012.

As part of its collaboration with guest curators, Palais de Tokyo has invited Bruno Decharme, abcd founder, and Barbara Safarova, its president, to present an exhibition of Zdenek Kosek, a Czech artist with whom abcd has collaborated closely from 2003, thus contributing to the recognition of this exceptional oeuvre.

CHRIS HIPKISS AND ROBYN O'NEIL Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan (WI) January 22–April 29

Robyn O’Neil (CA) creates sweeping narrative drawings in graphite on a large scale—some as large as five feet tall by fourteen feet wide. For eight years, O'Neil developed a narrative series of drawings depicting an epic drama of weather, wildlife, and the human race.

Each installment follows an environment in flux, navigated by tribes of men in sweat suits and white tennis shoes struggling to survive against dominant natural forces. Meant to represent the everyman, these figures appear woefully out of place in their overwhelming and raw environment. Throughout the series, O’Neil suggests that their survival is questionable. Over the course of this entire account, her drawing techniques stretch and weave in response to the changing moods in each scene, from the high-contrast, hard-lined snowscapes of the earlier works to the smudgy overcast skies and murky seas in later works.

Chris Hipkiss, a British artist living in France, also works in graphite and makes large-scale, incredibly intricate images of a barely recognizable future world. For several decades, Hipkiss has been developing an epic tale in which mutated humans negotiate a threatening and unruly—and equally mutated—landscape. In contrast to O’Neil’s remote and barren corners of the planet, Hipkiss focuses on cultivated gardens and cityscapes that appear to grow out of control in spite of their seemingly rigid structures. While O'Neil’s protagonists are track-suited men, Hipkiss's scenes are dominated by androgynes attempting to control, survive, and sometimes merge with their surroundings.

Both artists’ work—the tri-paneled scenes by O’Neil and the vast scrolls by Hipkiss that stretch up to 35 feet—recall the layered narratives and complex landscapes of Northern Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Similarly depicting roiling events of biblical proportions, Hipkiss and O’Neil allude to contemporary feelings of alienation and unease over a rapidly changing and increasingly volatile environment through the perilous scenarios they illustrate.

J.B. Murray: Writing in an Unknown Tongue: Reading Through the Water

John Bunion (J. B.) Murray (1908-1988) was a farmer who lived in rural Glascock County, Georgia, near the community of Mitchel. When he was approximately seventy years of age, believing he had experienced a vision from God, he began writing a non discursive script on adding machine tape, wall board, and stationery. He described it as "the language of the Holy Spirit, direct from God" and interpreted it using a bottle of water as a focusing device. In the last ten years of his life he made over a thousand paintings, introducing the script into fields of color and adding figures that represent "the evil people; the ones that are dry tongued, the one's that don't know God". Murray's works are exhibited throughout the world and he is represented in collections in Japan, Switzerland, France, and the United States.
See the filmmaker Judith McWillie's site on at http://art.uga.edu/lessonsandchants/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJGl1MGoMs&mid=56

New Book about August Walla by Johann Feilacher Weltallende

Weltallende:

das Monumentalwerk zu Leben und Schaffen eines Künstlers. August Walla ist einer der weltweit bekanntesten Künstler der Art Brut. Sein ganzes Leben war ein langer Prozess des Schaffens. Das künstlerische Werk, das dabei weitgehend unabhängig entstanden ist, ist völlig eigenständig und zugleich unglaublich vielgestaltig. Die groß angelegte Monographie, die hier nun in vier Bänden vorliegt, trägt dieser Vielseitigkeit Rechnung. Sie beinhaltet Reproduktionen seiner Werke, Texte und Dokumente zu seinem Leben, zu Wallas Aktionismus, seiner Fotografie und Environmental Art, Faksimiles seiner Briefe, seiner Schriften und Zeichenblöcke. Texte von Peter Weiermair, Gerhard Roth, Nina Katschnig, Margit Zuckriegl, Silvia Aigner und Helmut Zambo ergänzen das monumentale Werk.
Über den Autor
August Alois Walla, 1936 geboren, wurde von seiner Mutter als Mädchen erzogen, damit ihm der Kriegseinsatz erspart bleibe. In der Rückschau auf seine Kindheit erklärte er, von den Besatzern zu einem russischen Knaben umoperiert worden zu sein. Walla begann schon in seiner Jugend künstlerisch zu arbeiten. Er zeichnete, malte, fotografierte, war Kalligraph und Lettrist und gestaltete seine Umgebung, indem er Häuser, Straßen und Bäume beschriftete. Ab 1983 lebte und arbeitete Walla im Haus der Künstler in Gugging. Er starb dort am 7. Juli 2001.