fortytwofifty: December 2010

Thursday, December 30, 2010

francis alys . . .

Francis Alÿs was born in Belgium in 1959 and trained as an architect/urbanist before re-locating to Mexico City in 1986, where he has been based ever since. He is best known for his actions which he documents in various ways. Some just involve him walking through the city; other actions are epic events set in dramatic landscapes involving hundreds of participants. Alÿs also works with painting, animation and drawing, and many of the images he creates have a dreamlike surreal quality. His actions are frequently humorous, often transient, and can sometimes seem absurd, but they are always concise and carefully planned. Alÿs is interested to show and deal with his work through unconventional means.

Silencio, 2003 – present
Rubber carpets 61 x 47,8 x 06, cm (each)
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Installation featuring a floor covered in multicolored rubber mats showing an image of a finger being pressed to lips.

fred wilson . . .

Fred Wilson (American, born 1954) Iago’s Mirror. Murano glass, 2009.

Partial gift of The Pace Gallery in honor of Georgia E. Welles and partial purchase with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 2010.9 © Fred Wilson, courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Fred Wilson (American, born 1954) Iago’s Mirror. Murano glass, 2009. (detail)

TOLEDO, OH.- The Toledo Museum of Art has purchased the dramatic work in glass entitled Iago’s Mirror by artist Fred Wilson. The large, ornate work in black Murano glass has been installed in Gallery 5 of the Glass Pavilion®.

“Fred Wilson is an important artist whose work crosses boundaries between the glass world and contemporary art,” said TMA Director Brian Kennedy. “One of the Museum’s goals is to acquire works of art of singular merit by distinguished living artists. Iago’s Mirror is a perfect fit within our comprehensive glass collection.”

Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954. He received a BFA from SUNY/Purchase where he was the only African American student in his program. A conceptual artist with a focus on social justice, he returns, with this object, to a common thread within his work: a meditation on themes in Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago is the jealous villain of the story who sets about destroying his “friend” Othello, a black man, through the deliberate sowing of jealousy and suspicion that his wife is unfaithful. When Iago looks in the mirror, all he sees is blackness—in this case, the blackness of his own soul.

Wilson was introduced to glass as a medium in 2001 during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School. In 2009 he worked with Berengo Studios in Venice to develop a process for layering mirrors together while preserving the intricate details of a traditional 18th-century Murano mirror. To create the dark reflection cast by Iago’s Mirror, the back side is colored black rather than silver. Black glass is the most difficult to create and always has a colored hue, here a deep purple.

While he has always been interested in big concepts, Wilson remains fascinated by the way beauty functions in art and society. This accounts for some of the strong appeal of glass as a medium for his work.

He has said of the piece, “I like the fact that it is beautiful yet not comforting.” “Iago’s Mirror ties in beautifully with the Museum’s glass collection,” said Jutta Page, curator of glass and decorative arts. “Glass mirrors are an important aspect of luxury glass production since the Renaissance, and Venetian mirrors especially—which had to be imported and were precarious to ship due to their size—were and still are the epitome of such luxury home furnishings.”

Fred Wilson was named a MacArthur “Genius” fellow in 1999, and is currently the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College where he received an honorary doctorate degree. He received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 1987 and 1991, and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2003). Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo (1992) and twice at the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2009). It was there that Iago’s Mirror was unveiled, the first in a proposed series of six. His work can be found in numerous public collections. He is represented by the Pace Gallery in New York.

empty frames / stolen art . . .

MADRID.- Some of the most important works by recognized geniuses like Picasso, Matisse, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Goh, Cézanne and Sorolla were stolen years ago and the Spanish National Police, which tracks them, has released a video with images of the most wanted paintings.
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These works of art, some stolen more than 20 years ago could reach the black market "at an exorbitant price, " according to specialist officers working in their search and that belong to the Heritage Brigade, of the UDEV the Office of the General Commissioner of the Judicial Police.

Only one of the pieces investigated by agents, according to the National Police, the oil Auvers Sur Oise, Paul Cézanne, is valued at 4.8 million euros. This painting was stolen in January 2000 from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (United Kingdom). Le Pigeon aux petits pois by Pablo Picasso, and La Pastorale, by Matisse are some of the most looked for paintings.

Also, more than ten years ago, ten masterpieces valued at 250 million, including Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a painting by Rembrandt made in 1663, were stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston.

Experts are also trying to trace the whereabouts of two works by Van Gogh: Brooms and Red Poppies, stolen in Giza (Egypt) and View of the Sea at Scheveningen, stolen in December 2002 from the museum named after the artist in Amsterdam.

The officers also seek a painting by Sorolla, El Santero of the Brotherhood, stolen earlier this year from the house museum Benlliure in Valencia and a work by Toulouse Lautrec, Lady with a Hat, stolen in Italy.

But the specialists who have the database of stolen works of art, called Dulcinea, have been looking for some works for over 20 years, some of these were stolen from the Royal Palace in Madrid in August 1989: Unknown Lady Hand and San Carlos Borromeo, in Bayeau both by Velázquez, and Portrait of a Lady by Juan Carreno de Miranda.

More than 8,000 paintings, sculptures, carvings, architectural or archaeological items are recorded in the computer file Dulcinea, a pioneer system in Spain.

The empty frame, center, from which thieves cut Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" remains on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The painting was one of more than a dozen works stolen from the museum in 1990 in what is considered the largest art theft in history. AP Photo/Josh Reynolds.

Empty frames from which thieves took "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," left background, by Rembrandt and "The Concert," right foreground, by Vermeer, remain on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The paintings were among more than a dozen works stolen from the museum 20 years ago in what is considered the largest art theft in history. AP Photo/Josh Reynolds.

rachel perry welty . . .

james michael starr . . .

I FIND THE AGED AND BATTERED OBJECTS commonly employed in assemblage and collage to be both beautiful and moving, but am weary of their tendency, as art mediums, to take themselves so seriously. I hope to tweak that somberness and agenda, and make works that are more accessible, by evoking frivolous imagery from our collective consciousness.

andy warhol: motion pictures . . .

In August 1962, Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987) began making silkscreen paintings of popular icons, including a series of images of Marilyn Monroe that he began a month after her death. He went on to experiment in portrait making with public photo booth machines, which automatically take four exposures several seconds apart and print them in a strip, like a sequence of film frames.

Combining the seriality of these silkscreen and photo booth portraits with the ephemeral quality of the filmed image, between 1965 and 1966 Warhol shot approximately 500 rolls of film: several-minute silent portraits of acquaintances, friends, and celebrities, including many of the artists musicians, poets, actors, models, playwrights, curators, collectors, critics, and gallerists who composed New York City’s avant-garde scene. Some subjects were invited to the artist’s East 47th Street studio, known as The Factory or The Silver Factory, to sit for their portraits; others were captured spontaneously. At times Warhol left his subjects alone with the camera, creating a heightened sense of vulnerability that is perceptible in the films. His first subjects, seated before a sterile backdrop, were asked not to move or speak (later portraits were shot under more flexible conditions). These films, known as “stillies” around the Factory, were also referred to by Warhol as Living Portrait Boxes, and, later, as Screen Tests.

Warhol shot the portraits at the standard speed for sound film (24 frames per second), but specified that they should be projected at a 16 frames per second, the conventional projection speed for silent films in the early period of cinema. The result is an unusually slow fluidity of pace, a rhythm gently at odds with the large-scale close-ups, which are rendered almost abstract by stark contrasts of light and shadow. The images, still yet moving, play in a continuous loop, bearing a timeless presence.