JOSE MARIA SICILIA. Accidens

CASTILLOS EN EL AIRE. Hans Haacke. Museo Reina Sofia

AI WEIWEI. NEVER SORRY. BERLINALE

la vida y al arte como forma de activismo politico.....o viceversa.
Gran trabajo sobre la batalla de Ai Weiwei por normalizar la vida en China....

TAPIES

“If I can’t change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it".

DOROTHEA TANNING muere a los 101 años

Dorothea Tanning, pintora americana de aire surrealista, ha fallecido a los 101 años. Se caso con max Ernst, que rompió así su relación con Peggy Guggeheim, y que previamente estaba relacionado con Leonora Carrington. 
Abandonaron Nueva York para establecerse en Arizona. Volvería a Francia con Max Ernst, visitando la casa de Sint Martin d´Ardeche, donde Max y Leonora vivieron momentos felices de creación y sus separación obligada durante la invasión nazi de Francia.
Sus galeristas de San Francisco han anunciado asi su marcha....

12

Dorothea Tanning 1910 - 2012

Dorothea Tanning in her studio with the painting Maternity, photo courtesy of Lee Miller Archives, England. We at Frey Norris were saddened this morning to learn of the passing of Dorothea Tanning in her sleep last night. Dorothea lived more than a century and experienced first hand all the adventures, travails and accomplishments any artist could hope for in her life. MoMA in New York acknowledged her art by finally acquiring a painting about two years ago, just prior to an exhibition for her at The Drawing Center. In her 101 years, Dorothea lived two centuries worth of life. And she left to all of us an enormously rich and varied legacy of art; paintings, sculptures, poetry and one of the most entertaining artist biographies around. Wife to Max Ernst, close friend to poets like Octavio Paz and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, Tanning transcended easily all the categories she felt were inflicted on her by a world too tightly clinging to the false safeties of constant characterization. She disliked no category more than “woman artist,” but we think would have nevertheless been awed by the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, currently on display at LACMA, which features prominently so many of her paintings and soft sculptures. Our thoughts and good wishes are with her family at this time of transition. Thank you Dorothea for the many sources of inspiration you have left us. Rest in peace. Wendi and Raman

REMEDIOS VARO. Surrealismo español en Mexico

                                                   CUADROS DE REMEDIOS VARO

HELEN FRANKENTHALER, ABSTRACT PAINTER.- NYT

Helen Frankenthaler, Abstract Painter Who Shaped a Movement, Dies at 83

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The artist Helen Frankenthaler in her studio on Contentment Island in Darien, Conn., in 2003, with her work, "Blue Lady," acrylic on paper. More Photos »

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: December 27, 2011

 

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-20th century and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.

 

 

Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York — via National Gallery of Art

Helen Frankenthaler's "Nature Abhors a Vacuum," 1973. Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto, Canada. National Gallery of Art, Washington. More Photos »

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Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Helen Frankenthaler in her studio in Darien, Conn., in 2003. More Photos »

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Her longtime assistant, Maureen St. Onge, said Ms. Frankenthaler died after a long illness but gave no other details.
Known as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Ms. Frankenthaler was married during the movement’s heyday to the painter Robert Motherwell, a leading first-generation member of the group. But she departed from the first generation’s romantic search for the “sublime” to pursue her own path.
Refining a technique, developed by Jackson Pollock, of pouring pigment directly onto canvas laid on the floor, Ms. Frankenthaler, heavily influencing the colorists Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, developed a method of painting best known as Color Field — although Clement Greenberg, the critic most identified with it, called it Post-Painterly Abstraction. Where Pollock had used enamel that rested on raw canvas like skin, Ms. Frankenthaler poured turpentine-thinned paint in watery washes onto the raw canvas so that it soaked into the fabric weave, becoming one with it.
Her staining method emphasized the flat surface over illusory depth, and it called attention to the very nature of paint on canvas, a concern of artists and critics at the time. It also brought a new, open airiness to the painted surface and was credited with releasing color from the gestural approach and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism.
Ms. Frankenthaler more or less stumbled on her stain technique, she said, first using it in creating “Mountains and Sea” (1952). Produced on her return to New York from a trip to Nova Scotia, the painting is a light-struck, diaphanous evocation of hills, rocks and water. Its delicate balance of drawing and painting, fresh washes of color (predominantly blues and pinks) and breakthrough technique have made it one of her best-known works.
“The landscapes were in my arms as I did it,” Ms. Frankenthaler told an interviewer. “I didn’t realize all that I was doing. I was trying to get at something — I didn’t know what until it was manifest.”
She later described the seemingly unfinished painting — which is on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington — as “looking to many people like a large paint rag, casually accidental and incomplete.”
Unlike many of her painter colleagues at the time, Ms. Frankenthaler, born in New York City on Dec. 12, 1928, came from a prosperous Manhattan family. She was one of three daughters of Alfred Frankenthaler, a New York State Supreme Court judge, and the former Martha Lowenstein, an immigrant from Germany. Helen, their youngest, was interested in art from early childhood, when she would dribble nail polish into a sink full of water to watch the color flow.
After graduation from the Dalton School, where she studied art with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, she entered Bennington College in 1946. There the painter Paul Feeley, a thoroughgoing taskmaster, taught her “everything I know about Cubism,” she said. The intellectual atmosphere at Bennington was heady, with instructors like Kenneth Burke, Erich Fromm and Ralph Ellison setting the pace.
As a self-described “saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington,” Ms. Frankenthaler made her way into the burgeoning New York art world with a boost from Mr. Greenberg, whom she met in 1950 and with whom she had a five-year relationship. Through him she met crucial players like David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Franz Kline.
In 1951, with Mr. Greenberg’s prompting, she joined the new Tibor de Nagy gallery, run by the ebullient aesthete John B. Myers, and had her first solo show there that year. She spent summers visiting museums in Europe, pursuing an interest in quattrocento and old master painting.
Her marriage to Mr. Motherwell in 1958 gave the couple an art-world aura. Like her, he came from a well-to-do family, and “the golden couple,” as they were known in the cash-poor and backbiting art world of the time, spent several leisurely months honeymooning in Spain and France.
In Manhattan, they removed themselves from the downtown scene and established themselves in a house on East 94th Street, where they developed a reputation for lavish entertaining. The British sculptor Anthony Caro recalled a dinner party they gave for him and his wife on their first trip to New York, in 1959. It was attended by some 100 guests, and he was seated between David Smith and the actress Hedy Lamarr.
“Helen loved to entertain,” said Ann Freedman, the former president of Knoedler & Company, Ms. Frankenthaler’s dealer until its recent closing. “She enjoyed feeding people and engaging in lively conversation. And she liked to dance. In fact, you could see it in her movements as she worked on her paintings.”
Ms. Frankenthaler’s passion for dancing was more than fulfilled in 1985 when, at a White House dinner to honor the Prince and Princess of Wales, she was partnered with a fast stepper who had been twirling the princess.
“I’d waited a lifetime for a dance like this,” she wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed article for The New York Times. “He was great!”
His name meant nothing to her until, on returning to her New York studio, she showed her assistant and a friend his card. “John Travolta,” it read.
Despite the early acknowledgment of Ms. Frankenthaler’s achievement by Mr. Greenberg and by her fellow artists, wider recognition took some time. Her first major museum show, a retrospective of her 1950s work with a catalog by the critic and poet Frank O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was at the Jewish Museum in 1960. But she became better known to the art-going public after a major retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969.
Although Ms. Frankenthaler rarely discussed the sources of her abstract imagery, it reflected her impressions of landscape, her meditations on personal experience and the pleasures of dealing with paint. Visually diverse, her paintings were never produced in “serial” themes like those of her Abstract Expressionist predecessors or her Color Field colleagues like Noland and Louis. She looked on each of her works as a separate exploration.
But “Mountains and Sea” did establish many of the traits that have informed her art from the beginning, the art historian E. A. Carmean Jr. suggested. In the catalog for his 1989-90 Frankenthaler retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, he cited the color washes, the dialogue between drawing and painting, the seemingly raw, unfinished look, and the “general theme of place” as characteristic of her work.
Besides her paintings, Ms. Frankenthaler is known for her inventive lithographs, etchings and screen prints she produced since 1961, but critics have suggested that her woodcuts have made the most original contribution to printmaking.
In making her first woodcut, “East and Beyond,” in 1973, Ms. Frankenthaler wanted to make the grainy, unforgiving wood block receptive to the vibrant color and organic, amorphous forms of her own painting. By dint of trial and error, with technical help from printmaking studios, she succeeded.
For “East and Beyond,” which depicts a radiant open space above a graceful mountainlike divide, she used a jigsaw to cut separate shapes, then printed the whole by a specially devised method to eliminate the white lines between them when put together. The result was a taut but fluid composition so refreshingly removed from traditional woodblock technique that it has had a deep influence on the medium ever since. “East and Beyond” became to contemporary printmaking in the 1970s what Ms. Frankenthaler’s paint staining in “Mountains and Sea” had been to the development of Color Field painting 20 years earlier.
In 1972, Ms. Frankenthaler made a less successful foray into sculpture, spending two weeks at Mr. Caro’s London studio. With no experience in the medium but aided by a skilled assistant, she welded together found steel parts in a way that evoked the work of David Smith.
Although she enjoyed the experience, she did not repeat it. Knoedler gave the work its first public showing in 2006.
Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions.”
Ms. Frankenthaler and Mr. Motherwell were divorced in 1971. In 1994 she married Stephen M. DuBrul Jr., an investment banker who had headed the Export-Import Bank during the Ford administration. Besides her husband, her survivors include two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell, and six nieces and nephews. Her two sisters, Gloria Ross Bookman and Marjorie Iseman, died before her.
In 1999, she and Mr. DuBrul bought a house in Darien, on Long Island Sound. Water, sky and their shifting light are often reflected in her later imagery.
As the years passed, her paintings seemed to make more direct references to the visible world. But they sometimes harked back to the more spontaneous, exuberant and less referential work of her earlier career.
There is “no formula,” she said in an interview in The New York Times in 2003. “There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”
She never aligned herself with the feminist movement in art that began to surface in the 1970s. “For me, being a ‘lady painter’ was never an issue,” she was quoted as saying in John Gruen’s book “The Party’s Over Now” (1972). “I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.”

REMEDIOS VARO. Exposicion en San Francisco

REMEDIOS VARO - INDELIBLE FABLES

JANUARY 19, 2012

RECEPTION 5:00 TO 8:00 PM

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The first exhibition of Remedios Varo to ever take place in the western United States, Indelible Fables illuminates the ever-imaginative and prescient world of this surrealist artist. Spanish born Varo certainly died prematurely, by heart-attack in 1963, but in a short career she had acquired a cult-like following among friends in Mexico City, her adopted home. Many of these friends were involved in an informal investigation into esoteric religion and the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and his student Peter Ouspensky. As part of this soteriological pursuit, with close friend, the celebrated English artist Leonora Carrington, Varo created some of the most inventive painted scenarios of any of the artists associated with surrealism. Varo would remain something of a marginalized, but popular figure in Latin American art right through the 1990's, when a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC elevated global awareness of her work and in part catalyzed an ever accelerating level of scholarship and market demand. In 2008, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City hosted a comprehensive retrospective exhibition, timed to coincide with an international symposium, with papers delivered by scholars from throughout Latin America, the United States and Europe. A monograph, "The Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo", was published at this time, with essays by six contributing authors. The Frey Norris exhibition will include a variety of rare oil paintings, drawings, objects and ephemera.

LAURA F. GIBELLINI. galeria ASM28. MADRID

La geografia emocional de Laura.
 Pintar paredes y fabricar mapas.
 In and Out.
Topografías de lo doméstico  y geografias del alma.

YANI PECANINS. Collage. México

Exposición de collage y caja tridimensional "APUNTES Y BORRADORES" de Yani Pecanins,
el sábado 29 de octubre a las 12:30 hrs. en la galería Machado Arte Espacio ubicada en la calle de Sonora 178, frente al parque México, Col. Hipódromo Condesa.

PASODOBLE A BARCELO

El pasodoble torero sirve para rematar con alegría una buena faena en el ruedo. Pero lo más importante es que sus ecos elevan a mito a figuras del toreo. El 'pa qué te metes' de Manolete o el 'con mas salero' de El Cordobés se han convertido en verdaderos himnos de gloria popular, que siguen canturreándose en las jaranas. Solo lo más grandes terminan mereciendo el tiempo del compositor y solo los mitos perviven en el cancionero. No se quedarán sin su pasodoble José Tomás o Morante de la Puebla, nuevos magos de este secular rito ibérico. Y no solo convertirán su arte en música.

También la pintura o el cine terminan coronando al toreo. El Picasso de nuestro tiempo, genio en la mirada y el trazo, sabio en lo popular y maestro de la vanguardia, es Miquel Barceló, que también ha entendido lo telúrico del trasunto de la fiesta. Barceló ha creado el cartel para hacer imperecedera la última corrida prevista en la Monumental de Barcelona, la primera plaza donde el pasodoble amenizó la faena. También es Barceló el que ha colocado un título felizmente equivoco, 'Los pasos dobles' a la película sobre su experiencia creativa en África, firmada por Isaki Lacuesta y consagrada en el festival de San Sebastián. Polémica, como el arte de los toros, envuelve entre arenas africanas y ritos de dogones la complejidades del origen del arte.

Carmelo Bernaola le compuso un pasodoble a Azcona, maestro del guión y gran aficionado. Ha retratado el americano Stephen Higgins a 'El Fandi' en 'Matador', ha rodado el austriaco Gunter Schwaiger a los más grandes en 'Arena' y ahora se estrenará en el Festival de Sevilla 'Morarte', sobre el maestro de La Puebla del Río. Echamos en falta su pase en televisión para degustar y profundizar en las claves de un rito fundamental para la supervivencia del toro bravo.

Carne apropiada del arte cinemático, inspiración singular para los artistas, la corrida desaparecerá de la plaza, pero pervivirá en las artes. Con banda sonora a ritmo de un pasodoble; el que ya se ha merecido el maestro Miquel Barceló. Va por él, artista de la fiesta.

BARCELO. el ultimo toro de Barcelona....

Cartel de Miquel Barceló para la última corrida en la Monumental de Barcelona.
OLE

Cy Towmbly, ADIOS

THE LAST ABSTRACT EXPRESIONIST ARTIST

LEONORA CARRINGTON, 94 abriles

Leonora Carrington ha cumplido 94 años en su casa de Ciudad de México, última superviviente del grupo original de los surrealistas. una flor de primavera.

JUAN CARLOS EGUILLOR. Homenaje

Juan Carlos Eguillor  ha sido uno de los artistas mas originales desde finales de los setenta, aportando una visión simpatica y esperpentica de los cotiodiano, con un dibujo original y divertido. Su obra era realmente como la de todo gran artista una prolongacion de su personalidad, de niño grande y despierto, corrosivo y afable. Destacó son sus trabajos en TRIUNFO y se prolongo en las videoinstalaciones, como la de Las Meninas de la que se sentía tan orgulloso. Siempre en vanguardia.

Eguillor en Triunfo

OBJETO DE JUEGO

¿Por qué jugamos?. Sea como formula para aprender el mundo o sea para evadir los límites de la realidad, el juego nos hace desarrollar la imaginación y nos relaciona con otros. Nos hace creativos y sociables. Acabamos de pasar la apoteosis del juguete, desde las miniaturas del belén a los sacos de sorpresas de los Reyes Magos, dedicandoles un tiempo amplio y necesario. En la era de las pantallas, los conceptos de juego y de juguete están cambiando. Lo real- el objeto de juego -, está siendo suplantado por lo virtual, con la pantalla convertida en el verdadero terreno de juegos de la infancia.

En el Museo Picasso de Málaga, José Lebrero ha desplegado en fecha apropiada una impresionante colección de  “juguetes de las vanguardias”, muestrario de cómo mentes brillantes, desde Duchamp a  Sophie Tauber-Arp, han hecho del arte juguete o del juguete arte, si es que no son la misma cosa. Un mero listón  hecho caballito condensa todo el estilo mironiano y una muñeca de Pablo Picasso para su hija resume el cubismo. Ni el peso del nombre de sus creadores, ni el altar museístico, les privan de su condición de meros juguetes. Objetos para tocar, mover, relacionar, descubri….y hacer así del tiempo de infancia una época de ilusión y creatividad. 

Durante las navidades, el televisor ha ampliado considerablemente sus sesiones de dibujos animados, que en manos de los programadores son chicle entre el que colocar miles de anuncios. Cada vez son mas los  de juegos virtuales para Wii, DS,  PlayStation o X-Box. Puede que el juguete termine perdido como concepto- como pieza de museo –entre el bosque de ofertas digitales en el campo de juego de las pantallas.  Tocabamos en aquella lejana infancia el aro, lanzábamos las chapas o apuntábamos con las canicas al guá. Todos objetos de juego materiales para hacer crecer la imaginación. Ahora los bits parece que nos invitan a jugar con la imaginación misma.. Hasta creamos nuestros avatares para jugar virtualmente en planetas inventados. Una antesala para manejarnos en un mundo digital tan sorprendente como un truco de magia.

PECANINS, OTRO ADIOS

El fallecimiento de las gemelas Pecanins, obras de arte por si mismas, y regentes de la galeria inolvidable, puente entre España y Mexico durante carenta y cinco años, obliga a cerrar el local.

 Su memoria será permanente. 

ANDREA DEZSO

Born and raised in Nicolae Ceausescu's Communist Romania, Andrea Dezsö received her MFA from the Hungarian University of Design in 1996. A visual artist and writer, Dezsö creates deeply personal narratives across a broad range of media including drawing, artist's books, cut paper, embroidery, sculpture, installation, animation and large-scale murals. Currently she is creating a permanent public artwork for the MTA system in New York City, her second in the city's subways.


Work in many of these media will appear in "Things We Think When We Believe We Know," the artist's first exhibition with Frey Norris Gallery, opening in October, 2010. Rabbit (2009, edition of 12) is a figure in a black jumpsuit, often arranged as a group of multiple figures, which grew out of the artist's residency at a Kohler ceramics facility. These pieces were cast in vitreous china and painted with acrylics, slightly ominous and playful half-life size figures that populate a room with clownish smirks, pot bellies and bulbous bottoms. Dezsö's tunnel books are illuminated manuscripts in cut and painted paper (similar to a once popular and collapsible Victorian form), exploring fables only vaguely articulated in the artist's writing and interviews. Thirty of these tiny narrative tableaux appeared recently in "Slash: Paper Under the Knife," at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Each tunnel book is rendered in receding layers of richly detailed, hand cut and painted paper - an alien rests in a vineyard, fingers are cut off, a woman's torso is rendered transparent, her organs detailed in intricately cut and bright-hued shapes. Dezsö's recent embroideries - yes, she also sews - reflect aphorisms told to her as a child by her mother, many exhorting her to remain pure and chaste for all sorts of fabulist reasons. These include "A woman's belly starts growing simply from being married" and "My mother claimed that men will like me more if I pretend to be less smart" or "My mother claimed that hepatitis is a liver disease you get from eating food you find disgusting." Some such works, with the "spacesuit" appearance of her figures, often linger on elaborate fantasies born from her childhood experiences. Her mother's tragi-comic truisms and imaginative departures find new life in the new context of the artist's current existence in New York. The fabulist images Dezsö is known for were recently scaled to the size of a building at Rice University's gallery in Houston, where her installation Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly is on view through August of 2010.

ALTAMIRA

Arte, Pintada, Documento, Relieve, Juego, Enseñanza, Naturaleza, Anatomía, Rito, ...

THE BIRD SUPERIOR by THE BRIDE OF THE WIND