Wednesday 15 February 2012

Horst Ademeit at Norma Mangione, Turin

Horst Ademeit
untitled, undated
mixed media on polaroid
11 x 9 cm

Over a period of more than twenty years Horst Ademeit (1937-2010) built up an archiveof thousands of photographs and texts. Although he considered himself an artist, Ademeit documented the impact of cold rays – radiations that he considered a healthhazard and a potential threat –with no particular artististic intent. To do so he usedmeasuring instruments and, in the margins of his Polaroid photos he meticulouslynoted down the circumstances, dates, and descriptions, which became increasinglycramped over the years.

His photographs are divided into two groups: 6006 numbered “daily photos”, takeneach day in his apartment, and “observation photos” taken in the Düsseldorf districtwhere 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 inhis 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 heshows 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.

Galleria Norma Mangione

Via Matteo Pescatore 17, Torino

Tel. +39 011 5539231

info@normamangione.com

Mousse Magazine and Publishing

Via De Amicis 53,
20123, Milano, Italy
T: +39 02 8356631

www.moussemagazine.it

Saturday 11 February 2012

Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli´s Field, 1965,


Seeing spots: Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern - in pictures
At Tate Modern, London
from 9 February to 5 June 2012


The polka dot-obsessed octogenerian artist Yayoi Kusama's work has gone from free love and foraging in the 50s and 60s to infinity rooms filled with mirrors and twinkling lights in this decade. Her life has seen body parties in Andy Warhol's Factory and friendships with Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell – and this retrospective takes it all in.

www.tate.org.uk

Friday 10 February 2012

Chris Hipkiss at exhibition "Contemporary surrealist drawings Rotterdam" Collection de Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen



Institut Néerlandais
01/03/2012 - 13/05/2012


Le cabinet des estampes du musée Boijmans Van Beuningen à Rotterdam plus de 70 000 feuilles. C’est l’une des plus riches collections de dessins et estampes d’Europe, comportant de remarquables collections partielles de maîtres italiens, allemands, néerlandais et français.

Depuis quelques décennies, le musée met également l’accent sur son fonds d’œuvres contemporaines, et plus particulièrement sur celles émanant d’un état d’esprit surréaliste. Il s’agit donc d’œuvres procédant d’une forme d’imagination automatique, parfois d’une concentration profane, et qui cherchent à créer une vision du monde personnelle.

Ces dessins contemporains jettent un pont vers le noyau de la collection de tableaux surréalistes du musée, qui est certes restreinte mais admirable, et qui comporte des toiles célèbres de Dali et Magritte ainsi que de membres du cercle parisien d’André Breton. Le musée ne recule pas devant la collection d’un bloc représentatif d’un artiste spécifique ni devant l’acquisition de dessins de (très) grands formats. Il s’oriente aussi largement au-delà des frontières néerlandaises.

Cette collection réunit environ 70 œuvres de dessinateurs-nés tels qu’Oscar de las Flores (Mexique), Peter Feiler (Allemagne), Ewoud van Rijn (Pays-Bas), Charles Avery (Angleterre), Charlie Roberts (USA), Ronald Cornelissen (Pays-Bas), Elmar Trenkwalder (Autriche), Paul van der Eerden (Pays-Bas), ManfreDu Schu (Autriche), Hans de Wit (Pays-Bas), Jason Fox (USA), Robert McNally ( Angleterre), Paul Noble (Angleterre), Trenton Doyle Hancock (USA), Chris Hipkiss (Angleterre), Krijn de Koning (Pays-Bas), Kinke Kooi (Pays-Bas).
L’occasion de montrer à quel point le dessin est une discipline contemporaine active et séduisante.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

The works of Marcel Storr in Paris

Marcel Storr: bâtisseur visionnaire
Mairie du 20. Arrondissement
16. 12. 2011 - 31.03.2012






Marcel Storr, bâtisseur visionnaire (or visionary builder), runs through March 31 at Le Pavillon Carré du Badouin in the 20th arrondissement. His drawings on display at this repurposed hôtel particulier draw you in, inexorable and a bit disorienting, like a guide who has led you to a dark strange landscape and then leaves you on your own to figure your way back to the light and a more recognizable reality. Little is known about Storr (1911-1976).

He was a humble groundskeeper at the Bois de Boulougne and various other parks and gardens of Paris. In the meantime he created an urban universe of towering churches and skyscrapers looming over febrile landscapes, part hallucinatory and biblical, part science-fiction and pre-apocalyptic.



He stashed away the drawings – often under the kitchen table cloth. Toward the end of his life, while Storr was out of the house, his wife invited a couple of collectors to see some of his works. Impressed, they tried to convince him to sell them, but he refused. Preferring, perhaps to keep his fantastic urban visions to himself (though he thought highly of what he called his "genius"). Yet his sixty or so creations were gathered together for display after his death, and Storr's works have gradually begun to become known. This exposition covers four periods marked by the evolving focus of Storr's drawings. During his first period, from the 1930s to the end of World War II, Storr drew and sketched, in crayon, ink and in watercolor, a series of churches. Some are modeled after Parisian churches, but the architecture is sui generis: they are all the work of Storr, with more towers than you would think a church could support. An excess of excitement about the possibilities for reaching the sky. The colors here, and in many of his drawings, are rose-pink and orange, with touches of green or yellow or somber green. His palette grew progressively darker, and his later drawings are almost claustrophobic, both in the abundance of tiny details and in the thick and overlaid inking of the drawing. During the second period, after the war and up to about 1960, Starr created diptychs and triptychs that presented enormous visions of the church as skyscraper – the kind of building you would never see except in a digital rendering of a science-fiction world, as if each fictive house of worship were a sprawling Soviet-era apartment complex with High Gothic delusions and a yearning to launch into outer space. Storr's obsessive drawing style is evident in the repetition of small motifs, such as a gothic cross that is repeated many thousands of times in a drawing. Storr had a feel for, but not a mastery of, foreshortening and perspective. So sometimes his buildings appear flat on the board, and too tall even for such an imaginary landscape. They can fall toward you or give the impression of extending too far into the background. But they have an undeniable energy. Storr might not have read, nor heard, and though he spent much of his time crafting an alternate reality, his drawings filter the anxieties of the age. They seem to cry against the atrocities of wartime Europe, to shudder from the threat of nuclear annihilation, to want to capture the inhumanity of society even as they depict a world that represents a vision of, for Storr, something like hope. The exuberance of these drawings belies the autumnal gloom of their colors, and the weight of their inking. In the third period shown here, from 1964, is a series of twenty-five imaginary basilicas or cathedrals, all in the same format, in autumnal colors (ochre, yellow), in which the churches (combinations of Notre Dame de Paris and others) feature spikes over the roofs – like radio towers, really – that utterly dwarf the few antlike humans below them. You may think of Monet's Rouen series, but you'll quickly think again. Storr's series of churches don't represent states of light, of day, of fleeting time or the shifting colors of an emotional reverie of seeing and interpreting. These are at once blunt and delicate, childlike and wizened. You can't really interpret anything here, but you often find yourself asking, "What was he thinking, exactly?" Storr himself might not have known. But these aren't places for worship (unless it involves supplication), nor cities for living: they are visions of a weird alternate reality that exists under a cloudy orange light that fosters strange vegetation and stranger architecture. In what would be his final phase, Storr drew dense, unwieldy megacities, the architecture a phantasmagoric combination of ziggurats, towers, domes, poles, and the cities heavy with gardens, extraordinary vehicles, waterways populated with fantastical creatures, a mishmash of references. Buildings that don't seem to be made for habitation, but rather, devotional subjugation. Devotion to Storr's ideas of anti-utopian utopias, perhaps.

Mairie du 20. Arrondissement
Pavillon Carré de Baudouin
121 rue de Ménilmontant 75020 Paris
www.mairie20.paris.fr

Uraufführung "Sammlung Prinzhorn" ein Tanztheaterstück Im Schauspiel Heidelberg



Premierenabend, 18. Februar

Johann Kresnik entwickelte seine bahnbrechende Idee eines modernen choreografischen Theaters von 1979 bis 1989 als Ballettdirektor am Theater Heidelberg. Jetzt, nach über 20 Jahren, kehrt er zurück – mit einer Inszenierung, die Schauspiel und Tanz, bildende Kunst und Musik verbindet zu einem einzigartigen Gesamtkunstwerk: Sammlung Prinzhorn über den Arzt und Kunsthistoriker Hans Prinzhorn.

Prinzhorn kam in den 20er Jahren an die Psychiatrische Klinik der Universität Heidelberg. Hier sammelte er über 5.000 künstlerische Arbeiten von Patienten psychiatrischer Anstalten in ganz Europa. Die Sammlung sollte schon damals zu einem Museum ausgebaut werden und die Bedeutung der Kunst psychisch kranker Menschen dokumentieren. Stattdessen wurde sie 1938 in der NS-Ausstellung »Entartete Kunst« gegen die Kunst der Moderne instrumentalisiert und geriet nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in Vergessenheit. Erst von 1980 an wurde die Sammlung restauriert, katalogisiert und der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht – unter Mitarbeit von Johann Kresnik.

Theater und Orchester Heidelberg

Henry Taylor showing at MOMA PS1




to be seen till 9. April 2012

MoMa PS1

Henry Taylor - New York - "Meine Arbeit, das bin ich." im art Magazin
Politische Porträtstudien und Installationen: Henry Taylor wurde mit abstrakten Porträtstudien bekannt, in denen er sich mit Menschen und Ereignissen aus seinem direkten Lebensumfeld beschäftigt. Mittlerweile versucht er sich auch an Installationen aus gefundenen Objekten, um sich weiterzuentwickeln...

Abb.: Courtesy the artist and Untitled, New York. © 2011 Henry Taylor

Friday 3 February 2012

New Film on Henry Darger



Revolutions of the night: The Enigma of Henry Darger
A film by Mark Stokes


About the Film 'Revolutions of the Night' tells the story of the amazing discovery of Henry Darger's secret world of writings, paintings, objects and collections, created and collected over decades in his one room apartment in Chicago: apocalyptic visions of an imaginary war-torn planet in which children are pursued and enslaved by a race of evil adults.

Darger died unmourned in 1973 and was buried in a pauper's grave. As far as anyone knew, he had led an anonymous and isolated life, doing so-called menial jobs in hospitals on the north side of Chicago. This documentary charts Darger's journey from obscurity to what the New York Times has called his 'almost van Gogh-like mythic stature.'

www.dargerfilm.com