Month: September 2015

James Turrell

James Turrell, “Twilight Epiphany”, Light Sculpture Installation, Rice University, Houston, Texas

The Mayan looking mound with the flat roof suspended above it at the head of Rice University’s forlorn upper quad is artist James Turrell’s latest Skyspace — one of only 73 in various incarnations he’s made so far, and the the second in Houston. But it’s the first Skyspace designed for music — the kind you’d want to listen to while staring through a 14-ft.-by-14-ft. opening in a raised roof at the darkening sky around sundown, or a lightening one at dawn.

The structure has been named “Twilight Epiphany”. It sits just outside the east entrance of Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. A sold-out, silent performance in the space marked the space’s public opening. The new structure was designed by Turrell with New York architects Thomas Phifer and Partners. An array of computer-controlled LEDs at the top of the mound projects a 40-minute light show on the underside of the roof, matched — for the audience inside — against the single lot of aerial real estate seen through the center opening.

Dawn and dusk light shows are planned daily; A website set up by Rice (http://skyspace.rice.edu/cms/visit-skyspace/) shows the schedules and a continuous countdown clock showing the time till the next performance.

The Marble Lion

Marble Statue of a Lion, Greece, 400-390 BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 31.25 x 63.5 Inches

Marble statues of lions were used as monuments or guardians at the ends of a large tomb facade. This Greek statue was taken by the Romans to Rome during the Imperial Period.  In archaeology, that term is usually taken to cover the period from the rule of Augustus and his reformation around 30 BC until the beginning of the onset of the Migration period at 375 AD.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “He Smiled Understandingly, Much More Than Understandingly”

Photographer Unknown, (Fascination of an Object Above)

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Xu Zhen

Xu Zhen, “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” and “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian”, Solo Show at the Long Museum, West Bund Branch, Germany, 2015

With his characteristic humor, Xu Zhen intervenes in all manners of subject matter concerning global culture. With a taut expressiveness, he ingeniously integrates a Western spirit with Eastern culture—a new culture which transcends traditional schemas is hereby born. The all-new creation “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography, the work deals with both the sense of form and spirituality, thereby manifesting a vigorous vitality which dumbfounds the audience’s visual perception.  “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian” joins two Western sculptural works; its absurd and yet stunning visual effect perfectly showcases the balance of force and belief.

Jim Dine

Tool Series: Etchings by Jim Dine

Jim Dine’s work has been the subject of major surveys and retrospectives in venues spanning the globe, and he is represented in museum collections worldwide. While others have often associated his work with the Pop Art movement of the mid-20th century, his fascination with popular imagery and everyday objects has always carried a more personal component.

Dine has extensively explored particular themes in a variety of media throughout his career, such as the universal symbol of the heart and images of tools. These themes have acquired the status of personal iconography and he claims them as part of his vocabulary or his “glossary of terms.”

Jim Dine believes that tools provide a ‘link with our past, the human past, the hand’. They feature in many of his works, and can be seen as a symbol of artistic creation. There is also an autobiographical resonance, as Dine’s family owned a hardware store in Cincinnati.

Youssef Nabil

Photography by Youssef Nabil

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Nabil started his photography career in 1992, shortly before meeting the American photographer David LaChapelle in Cairo, with whom he worked in New York in 1993. In 1997, Nabil worked in Paris with the Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino till late 1998. In 1999, Youssef Nabil had his first solo exhibition in Cairo. Through the years he remained a close friend with the Egyptian-Armenian studio portrait photographer Van Leo (Leon Boyadjian, 1921–2001), who encouraged Nabil to leave to the West. In 2003, Youssef Nabil was awarded the Seydou Keita Prize in the Biennial of African Photography in Bamako.

In 2001, while visiting Cairo, British artist Tracey Emin discovered Nabil’s work and later nominated him as a future top artist in Harper’s article Tomorrow People. Nabil left Egypt in 2003 for an artist residency at La Cité internationale des Arts in Paris. In 2006, he moved to live and work in New York City.

Many have been subject to Nabil’s lens and distinctive technique of hand-colouring gelatin silver prints, including artists Tracey Emin, Gilbert and George, Nan Goldin, Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, and Shirin Neshat; singers Alicia Keys, Sting, and Natacha Atlas; actors Omar Sharif, Faten Hamama, Rossy de Palma, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, and Catherine Deneuve.

Mimmo Paladino

Paintings and Etchings by Mimmo Paladino

Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker. He was born Domenico Paladino in Paduli, Campania, southern Italy. He attended the Liceo Artistico of Benevento (Benevento Art High School) from 1964 to 1968, when minimalism and conceptualism dominated the international art scene. He played a leading part in the international revival of painting towards the end of the 1970s.

His first work, in line with the prevailing conceptual climate at the time, showed an interest in photography, but in 1977 he had already moved on to the creation of two major tempera murals, one at the Toselli gallery in Milan and one at the Lucio Amelio gallery in Naples. In 1980, he exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale, in the “Aperto 80” exhibition.

However, it was largely thanks to a picture exhibition held in a range of Central European museums, from the Kunsthalle in Basel, to the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that Paladino finally consolidated his international fame. Meanwhile, two personal exhibitions were held simultaneously in New York that year, by Annina Nosei and Marian Goodman, extending his fame to the United States.

Richard Huntington

Richard Huntington, “Joe E Brown Calls the Lightning Down”, Collage, Archival Pigment Print and Oil on Paper Mounted on Board, 2010

Richard Huntington is a painter, printmaker, writer and art critic. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Syracuse University and his Master of Art and Humanities at the State University of New York located in Buffalo. Using his technical knowledge, Huntington works in a wide range of fields, including paintings, drawings, collages, print making, and computer generated graphics. 

From 1982 to 1985, Huntington was the Visual Arts Director at Artpark, a public sculpture park in Lexington, New York. Under his directorship, the late video and installation artist Vito Acconci executed his first major public sculpture and the late Chris Burden created his “Bean Drop”, a performance piece in which seventy-one iron beams were dropped, over the course of a day, into a pool of fresh concrete. This kinetic form of abstract expressionism was recreated at Inhotim, Brazil, in 2008, after surviving only as documentation for twenty years.

Richard Huntington has had many residencies over his career, including Visiting Critic at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center for the Arts. He was also a contributing reviewer for publications, including ARTNews, Art New England, and High Performance  Magazine. Huntington served as art critic for The Buffalo News from 2095 to 2007, where he wrote critical articles and reviews on regional and international exhibitions.

Huntington won the 2007Associated Press Award for Criticism for his review which challenged O’Keefe’s status in American art. He is the author of two novels: “An Art Critic Walks into a Bar” and a sequel with the same character, “7 Dead or Otherwise Forgotten Artists”. Huntington also authored a number of essays for art catalogues including “Storyboard: The Sexual Politics of Jackie Felix”, for the 2012 retrospective at Burchfield Penney Art Center; and “Duayne Hatchet: Form, Pattern, and Invention” for a 2009 retrospective at Burchfield Penney.

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Hunting, “Squares of Mine”, 1965, Acrylic on Canvas, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York