Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Reviews: The Week In Art

This week: Quiet as It’s Kept, the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, is now open to the public at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

The Art Newspaper’s associate editor Tom Seymour, Americas editor Ben Sutton and staff reporter Gabriella Angeletti gather to discuss it. As the latest incarnation of the show Afro-Atlantic Histories is unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, we speak to its curator, Kanitra Fletcher, about the gallery’s approach to this complex subject. And the National Gallery in London’s long-planned Raphael blockbuster, postponed due to the pandemic, is finally open, so for this episode’s Work of the Week, we speak to Tom Henry, one of the curators of the show, about the Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano (1519-20), one of the Renaissance master’s final paintings.

Previews: Architectural Review – April 2022

Ibavi | AAU Anastas | Taller Mauricio Rocha | Grafton | Building Beyond Borders + BC Architects and Studies | Sebastián Arquitectos | Fernand Pouillon | Dimitris Pikionis

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AR April 2022

‘A great deal of human history is told in stone alone’ writes Arianne Shahvisi, ’what is carved in stone is a hard, enduring message to the future’. Messages etched onto stone walls and tablets tell us of a past literally writ in stone, but the rocks we plunder from the Earth’s crust can also help us build a liveable future. The April issue of the AR examines stone as an architectural and urban material, digs into the political landscape it is extracted from and explores the weight of cultural and social meanings it holds. This issue features projects by IBAVI, Building Beyond Borders, Mauricio Rocha, Grafton Architects, Fernand Pouillon, Demetris Pikionis, and contributions by Steve Webb, Tomoki Kato, Nami Ogura, Nadi Abusaada, Perdita Phillips, Pierre Bidaud, and many, many more.

The front cover of the issue features Tito Mouraz’s Open Space Office series, where the lithic violence of stone creation is frozen and silent in the quarry, the detritus of human extraction feeble and tiny in comparison.

Stone

Keynote: Stone age, Steve Webb
Social housing, Mallorca, Spain, IBAVI, Rafael Gómez-Moriana
Foundations of empire, Arianne Shahvisi
City portrait: Jerusalem, Israel-Palestine, Nadi Abusaada
Case study: Analogy pavilion, AAU Anastas
Case study: St Mary of the Resurrection Abbey extension, AAU Anastas
Lithic love, Perdita Phillips
Museo Anahuacalli extension, Mexico City, Mexico, Taller Mauricio Rocha, Juan Carlos Cano
Rock-hewn churches in Ethiopia, Tarn Philipp
Town House, Kingston, and Marshall Building, LSE, London, United Kingdom, Grafton Architects, Stephen Parnell
Outrage: Colonial legacies of concrete, Mohamed Ismail and Caitlin Mueller
Revisit: Climat de France, Algiers, Algeria, Fernand Pouillon, Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs
Women’s house, Ouled Merzoug, Morocco, Building Beyond Borders + BC Architects and Studies, Lina Meskine and Anouar Ahdaf
In the Japanese rock garden, Tomoki Kato and Nami Ogura
Reputations: Dimitris Pikionis, Freddie Phillipson
Village and chapel renovations, Ruesta, Spain, Sebastián Arquitectos, Elena Lacilla Larrodé
The stonemason, Pierre Bidaud

Artworks: Collection Loïc Malle (Sotheby’s)

Collection Loïc Malle (6 April 2022 | Paris) – Sotheby’s presents a collection which reads like an anthology of contemporary art, particularly artworks that deal with the act of experience. The experiences expressed through the collection are as diverse as the artists that it encompasses, which includes Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds? 

We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines.

As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw—focusing on the spaces in Poland and Ukraine used by Holocaust survivors to escape Nazi persecution—we talk to the artist behind it, Natalia Romik. Though long planned, the show has gained a troubling topicality as the Russian invasion and destruction of Ukraine continues.

And in this episode’s Work of the Week, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Piet Mondrian’s birth, we discuss his painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44). Caro Verbeek, the co-curator of Mondrian Moves, an exhibition opening this week at the Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Hague, the Netherlands, tells us about the feverish creation and unfinished nature of the Dutch artist’s final work.

Natalia Romik’s exhibition, Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, until 17 July; TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland, 4 August-6 November

Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands, 2 April-25 September. Mondrian Evolution, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 5 June-9 October; K20, Düsseldorf, Germany, 29 October-10 February 2023

Views: ‘Seeing The Samurai’ With Japanese Armour

This fascinating Japanese armour was part of the first diplomatic gift between Japan and Britain. It is over 400 years old and one of the first documented Japanese armours to have been seen on British soil.

Learn more about this amazing object in this short film. See the armour in our exhibition Japan: Courts and Culture at The Queen’s Gallery, London from 8 April 2022 – 26 February 2023.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – April 2022

• What was really behind Surrealism?

• An interview with Cecilia Alemani, Artistic Director of the Venice Biennale

• Revealing the mystery of Bassano’s Quails

• The Venice Pavilions you must see

Plus: Beyond the Biennale, greenwashing in museums, what we’re losing with Bastion House

Read more

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

We talk to Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the new plans for the museum’s wing of modern and contemporary art, including the appointment of the architect Frida Escobedo in place of David Chipperfield. 

As The Art Newspaper is about to publish its annual museum attendance survey, showing that visitors are beginning slowly to return to museums after the height of the pandemic, we ask Hollein how the vision for the museum has changed following the events of the past two years. Plus, Aimee Dawson talks to the curator Sam Bardaouil about the exhibition Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, as the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, opens a major Meret Oppenheim survey, the show’s curator Natalie Dupecher discusses Oppenheim’s Surrealist object Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen (1936): a pair of white heels on a silver platter, trussed like a chicken.

The Art Newspaper’s visitor attendance survey is in the April print edition, and online next week at theartnewspaper.com, or on our app for iOS and Android, which you can get from the App Store or Google Play.

Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility, Gropius Bau, Berlin, until 12 June.

Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, Menil Collection, Houston, until 18 September; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 30 October-4 March 2023

Art History: ‘Poussin And The Dance’ (The Getty)

“One of the hopes of this exhibition was really to try to enlist visitors’ bodily experience in their understanding of these works of art that can sometimes seem a little bit like they live entirely in our heads, a little bit intellectualized.”

Although Nicolas Poussin is widely regarded as the most influential painter of the 17th century—the father of French classicism—he is not as well-known as many of his contemporaries, such as Rembrandt, Rubens, and Caravaggio. This is due, in part, to Poussin’s austere painting style and erudite subject matter, which often came from Roman history or the Bible. As a result, his work can sometimes feel a bit cold or remote to today’s audiences.

But earlier in his career, Poussin was inspired by dance. His paintings of wild revelry, filled with dancing satyrs and nymphs, emerged as his signature genre from that time. Poussin and the Dance, organized by the Getty Museum and the National Gallery in London, is the first exhibition to explore the theme of dance in Poussin’s work. By supplementing his delightful dancing pictures with new dance films by Los Angeles–based choreographers—this unique exhibition invites viewers into the world of Poussin in a fresh, relatable way.

In this episode, Emily Beeny, curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curator of Poussin and the Dance, joins Sarah Cooper, public programs specialist at the Getty, to delve into Poussin’s process and love of dance.

The exhibition, which received generous support from the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation and is sponsored by City National Bank, is on view at the Getty Center through May 8, 2022.

Views: Jennifer Packer – ‘The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing’ (Whitney)

Join Jane Panetta, the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection, as she discusses key works from Jennifer Packer’s exhibition of paintings and drawings.

Jennifer Packer is an American painter living and working in New York City. In 2020, she won the Hermitage Greenfield Prize and the Rome Prize. Packer won the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome 2020-2021. 

Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing was initiated by Serpentine and curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Curator, Exhibitions and Public Art with Natalia Grabowska, Assistant Curator. The presentation at the Whitney is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, and Jane Panetta, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection, with Ambika Trasi, Curatorial Assistant.