The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Sunday, November 14, 2021
Gray

 
The show goes on, even after China tried to shut it down

The artist Badiucao with his work, “Bricks,” at Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia, Italy, April 10, 2021. An Italian city rejected a request from the Chinese Embassy in Rome to cancel an exhibition by Badiucao, an artist who has been described as the Chinese Banksy. Alessandro Grassani/The New York Times.

by Elisabetta Povoledo


BRESCIA.- With a week to go before his first solo exhibition, Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao was in head-down work mode: installing the show during the day and sharpening hundreds of pencils with a knife at night. Set closely together, the pencils — 3,724 in all — were part of an installation in the show “China Is (Not) Near,” which opens Saturday in the municipal museum of Brescia, an industrial city in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. After a decade building an online following as a political cartoonist by lambasting China, whether for its censorship (and Western complicity in it), its treatment of the Uyghur minority or the crackdown in Hong Kong, Badiucao said he was keen to show work in a traditional institutional setting. He wasn’t always so forthcoming. Until not so long ago, Badiucao had been so concerned about reprisals from the Chinese government that he had kept his identity a secret, eliciting comparisons to British street artist Banksy. He reveal ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
Installation view of M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation in Sigg Galleries. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+. Courtesy of M+, Hong Kong.








A new exhibition reunites paintings and drawings by Peter Paul Rubens with the antiquities that inspired him   MOCA Toronto's online platform Shift Key launches new film and video offerings for 2021/22   Gladstone Gallery opens an exhibition of seven new landscape paintings Alex Katz


Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577 - 1640), The Calydonian Boar Hunt, about 1611–1612, Oil on panel, 23 5/16 × 35 5/16 in., 2006.4, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Rubens: Picturing Antiquity at the Getty Villa Museum, November 10, 2021–January 24, 2022, is the first exhibition to focus on Rubens’s fascination with the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. This single-venue presentation demonstrates some of the intriguing ways in which the innovative artist both celebrated and transformed his diverse sources, including antiquities from his own collection. Rubens was one of the most erudite artists of the 17th century. Throughout his life he read classical literature in the original languages, studied the physical remains of ancient (primarily Roman) civilization, collected marble sculptures and carved gems, and conducted lively correspondence with fellow antiquarians across Europe. “This important exhibition examines how Rubens’s fascination with ancient Roman antiquities inspired ... More
 

Samson Kambalu, A Thousand Years, 2013. Video still. Courtesy the artist.

TORONTO.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto today shared details of its new season of programming on Shift Key, the Museum’s digital moving-image platform. Curated by Carly Whitefield, Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, What we carry forward touches upon specific questions and themes raised in the Museum’s inaugural triennial Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA21), and expands this dialogue with the participation of eight international artists. What we carry forward takes inspiration from explorations of inheritance and the public realm elaborated across GTA21’s physical and digital spaces. Unfolding over the course of four months, the series pairs artists’ films, videos, and animations that together open up questions around remnants and legacies, ownership, and agency. Work by artists Allora & Calzadilla, Theo Eshetu, Mona Hatoum, Samson Kambalu, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Aura Satz, Cauleen Smith, and Ceci ... More
 

Alex Katz, Yellow House, 2020. Oil on linen, 84 x 72 inches (213.4 x 182.9 cm) © Alex Katz / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- Alex Katz is making one more debut, at age 94. This time at the Gladstone Gallery where he opened an exhibition of seven new landscape paintings made in the last year and a half. These paintings, all massive, were started in either Pennsylvania and Maine during lockdown, then completed in his studio of 53 years on West Broadway. When we wake in the morning who knows their age? At 94, Katz wrestles and embraces time. For this painter that sense of selfhood cannot assert inside the strange equation of hand color mark surface and eye. As Katz paints he slides into a place without time, only the one moment. The marks and colors fall on to the canvas existing only in the instant removed from quotidian reality. He has worked inside this moment of here and now for his entire life, walking a tightrope of grace and risk. With the last-minute ... More


Gilcrease works on view across the country during museum's reconstruction   Lisson Gallery announces representation of Cheyney Thompson   Four months, 5,000 miles: A refugee puppet looks for home


John James Audubon (1785-1851), The Wild Turkey, 1845, oil painting. Courtesy of Gilcrease Museum.

TULSA, OKLA.- With Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK temporarily closed for the construction of its new building, audiences have the opportunity to view key works from its unrivaled collection in museums across the country. Works from Gilcrease's collection, which includes the world's largest public holding of art of the American West as well as historical and contemporary objects representing hundreds of Indigenous cultures across North and South America, will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Advancing Gilcrease's mission to expand access to and understanding of the rich cultural heritage of the Americas, works on loan range from John Wesley Jarvis' Black Hawk and His Son Whirling Thunder (1833) and Watching the Breakers (1891) by Winslow Homer, to La Anunciación del Nahual (1946) by José Chávez Morado ... More
 

Cheyney Thompson, Displacement(32136, 4), 2021, Oil and acrylic on linen, 207 x 156 cm, 81 1/2 x 61 3/8 in © Cheyney Thompson.

NEW YORK, NY.- Lisson Gallery announced representation of Cheyney Thompson in New York, in collaboration with Andrew Kreps Gallery. The galleries will present a dual-part exhibition of new paintings in New York in November 2022, as well as significant works from the artist's Displacement series on their booths at Art Basel Miami Beach from November 30 – December 4, 2021. Lisson Gallery will also represent the artist in London and Shanghai. At the core of Thompson’s practice is an analytical approach and unwavering commitment to the examination of painting—its production, distribution and presentation in contemporary conditions. He often applies strict sets of principles to the creation of his work, using rules-based systems as generative tools to minimize the subjectivity of creative decisions. The methods for investigation have included such varied structures as mathematical ... More
 

Puppeteers prepare for a performance of “The Walk” in Bray-Dunes, France, Oct. 17, 2021. Elliott Verdier/The New York Times.

by Alex Marshall, Carlotta Gall and Elisabetta Povoledo


LONDON.- A dozen puppeteers were crouched in a rehearsal room here studying the every move of a cheeky 8-year-old girl named Tamara, who was trying to steal a bright pink soccer ball from the middle of the floor. Tamara looked nervous and kept glancing over her shoulder, as if to make sure no one was behind her. Then, suddenly, she ran straight for the ball, scooped it up in her arms and ran off. Amir Nizar Zuabi, a Palestinian theater director and Tamara’s father, seemed pleased. “See, everything she does is with urgency,” he told the puppeteers in June. “Everything is life and death.” The puppeteers were watching Tamara closely in order to mimic her behavior and create a 9-year-old Syrian refugee named Little Amal, the lead character in “The Walk,” one of the year’s most ambitious pieces of theater — and certainly ... More



Prada opens an exhibition by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg,   Graeme Edge, drummer and co-founder of the Moody Blues, dies at 80   Bettina Grossman, an artistic fixture at the Chelsea Hotel, dies at 94


Exhibition view of “A Moon Wrapped in Brown Paper” by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. Prada Rong Zhai, 11 November 2021 - 9 January 2022. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy Prada.

SHANGHAI.- Prada presents “A Moon Wrapped in Brown Paper”, an exhibition by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, with the support of Fondazione Prada. Curated by Yang Beichen, the project will be on view from 11 November 2021 to 9 January 2022 at Prada Rong Zhai, a 1918 historic residence in Shanghai restored by Prada and reopened in October 2017. Since 2004 Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have worked closely together as an artistic duo. Through videos, animations, installations and sculptural works they create narratives suspended between the grotesque and the dramatic and evoke scenarios charged with emotional tension. Djurberg has developed an original style of filmmaking using clay animation, while Berg has composed atmospheric music and hypnotic scores for their videos and installations. Their practice plumbs the depths of human desires and animal instincts enacting ... More
 

Many of their songs incorporated his spoken-word poetry, making them pioneers in the prog-rock movement of the late-1960s and ’70s.

NEW YORK, NY.- Graeme Edge, drummer and co-founder of the British band the Moody Blues, for whom he wrote many of the spoken-word poems that, appended to songs such as “Nights in White Satin,” made the group a pioneer in the progressive-rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died Thursday at his home in Bradenton, Florida. He was 80. Rilla Fleming, his partner, said the cause was metastatic cancer. The Moody Blues first gained attention as part of the British Invasion that dominated the American rock scene in the mid-1960s. Their repertoire originally consisted largely of R&B covers, but by their second album, “Days of Future Passed” (1967), they had developed the blend of orchestral and rock music that would make them famous. “In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” Justin Hayward, the band’s lead singer, wrote in a statement on the Moody Blues website after Edge’s ... More
 

The artist Bettina Grossman with her artwork outside her apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, where she lived for a half-century, Nov. 2, 2011. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.

by Corey Kilgannon


NEW YORK, NY.- It might seem unlikely, upon seeing Bettina Grossman pushing her shopping cart filled with artwork outside the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, that she was an accomplished artist with a once-promising career. Grossman was unusual even by the standards of the Chelsea, the storied haven for quirky artists. Her studio apartment, Room 503, at the end of a long fifth-floor hallway, had become so crowded with her accumulated artwork — largely abstract, highly conceptual drawings, sculptures and photographs — that she had been displaced from her own living space. She slept in her hallway on a lawn chair. “She was eccentric with a capital E,” said Robert Lambert, a painter who lived down the hall from Grossman at the Chelsea, which over the years was home to the likes of Mark Twain, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. ... More


The Centro Botín presents Itinerarios XXVI, a new engagement with the present state of contemporary art   Cornelius Annor's debut solo exhibition in the United States opens at Venus Over Manhattan   Saving the forgotten Connecticut farm that helped spark MLK's dream


Anna Moreno. Itinerarios XXVI. Photo: Belén de Benito.

SANTANDER .- Itinerarios is an annual exhibition dedicated to the work of the artists who received one of the previous year’s Fundación Botín Visual Arts Grants, a programme launched in 1993 with the aim of supporting upcoming artists to realise and to make known their most ambitious projects, ventures in which research and production merge, and at the same time to give them the opportunity to complete and deepen their training. This series of exhibitions, which has been running for over a quarter of a century, provides a unique platform for these creators to present their work to the world in an institutional context and an exceptional opportunity for the public to get to know and to appreciate the most innovative developments in contemporary art. The works on show, created in a variety of locations and in a range of disciplines, are also featured in a catalogue published by the Fundación Botín. Saturday, November 13, saw the opening t ... More
 

Cornelius Annor, Baby Kai, 2021. Fabric collage, fabric transfer, and acrylic on canvas. 47 3/4 x 37 1/2 in. 121 x 95.5 cm.

NEW YORK, NY.- Venus Over Manhattan is presenting an exhibition of new works by Cornelius Annor, whose collaged paintings of family photographs draw upon his personal history in Ghana. Entitled “Lost But Found,” the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the United States features twelve works, including new portraits, images of his relatives, and complex narrative scenes. Cornelius Annor: Lost But Found will be on view at Venus through December 18th. Cornelius Annor paints portraits and figurative works that picture moments of community and intimacy, set in domestic spaces. The artist has a longstanding fascination with the human face, and his works show a focused attention to the expressiveness of various faces and figures. Annor’s paintings typically incorporate segments of fabric, adding to the intimacy and evocativeness of the portraits. ... More
 

Barns on a farm, known locally as Meadowood, where a young Martin Luther King Jr. worked for two summers in the 1940s, in Simsbury, Conn., Oct. 28, 2021. Yehyun Kim/The New York Times.

by Corey Kilgannon


NEW YORK, NY.- In the 1940s, a group of Morehouse College students came up from Atlanta to work on tobacco farms in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley as part of a tuition assistance program. Even in Simsbury, an overwhelmingly white New England town, those two summers were a far cry from the overt segregation and oppressive Jim Crow laws back home. For at least one of the students — a teenage Martin Luther King Jr. — the experience would help shape his life and, by extension, the course of history. The summers served as an awakening of sorts for the impressionable youth who briefly glimpsed better treatment for Black people. In their downtime, the young Black farmhands could attend integrated ... More




Francis Bacon 'Pope with Owls' | New York | November 2021



More News

Brazil's Instituto Inhotim to house the Museu de Arte Negra (Museum of Black Art)
BRUMADINHO.- Abdias Nascimento's life-long trajectory (1914–2011) was defined by activism and his fight against racism. In 2021, the year that marks the 10th anniversary of Nascimento's death, as well as Inhotim’s 15th anniversary, in partnership with IPEAFRO, Inhotim presents the project Abdias Nascimento e o Museu de Arte Negra (Abdias Nascimento and the Museum of Black Art), a two-year long proposal that underscores the artists’ continued legacy to Brazilian visual arts and history. Inhotim will endeavour to house a museum within their museum, by inviting the Museu de Arte Negra (The Museum of Black Art), which was originally founded in 1981, to occupy the Galeria Mata space from December 4, 2021 through to 2023. The idea behind Museu de Arte Negra was originally conceived and developed by Nascimento to promote the multifaceted production of Black ... More

Theater professors are under the gun in 'Preparedness'
NEW YORK, NY.- Theater people and academics share two traits: They are convinced of their calling’s moral importance to the world, which can provide a feeling of superiority, but they also often feel misunderstood and beleaguered, which makes them defensive. As members of a university’s theater department, the characters in Hillary Miller’s new comedy “Preparedness” — presented by the Bushwick Starr and HERE — belong to both constituencies, which means that their shoulders slump under boulder-size chips. That wariness is warranted, though, as their department is under attack from the university’s brass, which wants not just to cut their budget, but eliminate the program altogether. Figurative and literal survival become entangled when an irrepressibly chirpy human resources representative, Kath (Alison Cimmet), turns up in the department’s shabby ... More

Deep underground, a Chinese miner discovered poetry in the toil
NEW YORK, NY.- More than three decades after scribbling his first poem as a teenager in the mountains of northern China, Chen Nianxi is living a literary dream. He has published two critically acclaimed books. He hobnobs with intellectuals around banquet tables. He tours the country promoting his writing, flitting between book fairs and university lecture halls. Still, he often finds his joy tempered with a sense of alienation. “I can’t completely leave behind my old life. I also don’t really know how to participate in this new life,” said Chen, 51, in a video interview from the southern city of Ningbo, where he was attending a book trade fair. “So I really feel like I’m in a very awkward position.” The source of that tension is the vast gulf between his new circumstances and his old. For more than 15 years, he labored in gold, iron and zinc mines across China, detonating explosives by day and ... More

A frenzy of book banning
NEW YORK, NY.- Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board this week voted unanimously to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed from school library shelves. For two members of the school board, this didn’t go far enough; they wanted to see the books incinerated. “I’m sure we’ve got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them,” said one of the members, Kirk Twigg. “Just so we can identify, within our community, that we are eradicating this bad stuff.” This was just one example of an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America, as the campaign against critical race theory expands into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told me ... More

Exhibition highlights representative works from the six decades long career of New York based Rakuko Naito
NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradley Projects is presenting Rakuko Naito, curated by Gabriela Rangel. The exhibition highlights representative works from the six decades long career of New York based Rakuko Naito (b. Tokyo, 1935) and is the first major gallery survey of the artist, showcasing early monochromatic paintings, a tinted photo-collage, and more recent paper and mesh cage sculptural works. Selected by Rangel, an independent curator and writer, the works on view aim to shed light on the artist’s unique practice, drawing on her early studies and utilization of traditional Japanese painting techniques to challenge pictorial flatness in conversation with the art of her time and in a truly New York practice of experimentation. Rakuko Naito ... More

Pristine Lincoln ferrotypes from private collection featured in Heritage Auctions Americana & Political event
DALLAS, TX.- Few, if any, American presidents are as collectible as Abraham Lincoln. The country’s 16th president is one of those crossovers who appeals to collectors in multiple categories. Among the 328 lots in Heritage Auctions’ Dec. 4-5 Collection of Tom Charles Huston Americana & Political Signature® Auction is a trove of lots relating to Lincoln, whose popularity among collectors can be traced to his presidency, his role in helping to end slavery and the furthering of civil rights for all Americans and his time in Congress. The event is the second in which Heritage Auctions has offered a portion of the Indianapolis real estate developer’s collection; the first was a hugely successful event in May 2021. “If Abraham Lincoln isn’t the most collected President, he certainly is right there near the top of the list,” Heritage Auctions Americana & Political Consignment Director ... More

18th-century Tipu Sultan Throne Finial worth £1.5 million at risk of leaving UK
LONDON.- Valued at £1.5 million, a gold jewelled tiger head, which once adorned the gold-covered throne of Tipu Sultan in the 18th century, is at risk of leaving the country unless a UK buyer can be found. Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, was regarded as the greatest threat to the British East India Company until his defeat and death in 1799. As ruler of Mysore, Tipu identified himself and his personal possessions with tiger imagery and this finial offers scholars the opportunity to illustrate the vibrant culture of Tipu’s court and closely examine British imperial history. Three surviving contemporary images of the throne are all in the UK. The finial, made of gold and set with rubies, diamonds and emeralds, is a rare example of fully documented 18th century South Indian goldsmiths’ work and its existence was unknown until 2009. Its marble pedestal is unique among the five surviving ... More

Pieces from prominent Texas estates sparkle and shine at Heritage Auctions' holiday jewelry event
DALLAS, TX.- On Dec. 6, Heritage Auctions will offer one of the finest single-owner collections of Oscar Heyman jewels that the auction house has ever presented. Part of the estate of Texas philanthropist Kittie West Nelson Ferguson – a descendant of one of the state’s most important and influential cattle-ranching families – the jewels are a highlight of Heritage’s Holiday Jewelry Signature® Auction. As such, they represent the best of Oscar Heyman, a famed American jewelry maker whose exquisite craftsmanship has garnered fans ranging from first ladies to Hollywood stars. Remarkable not only for its quality and quantity, but also for its variety, the collection features more than 20 pieces by the renowned jeweler, including a menagerie of brooches, a stunning selection of rings and earrings, and several examples of Oscar Heyman’s signature floral designs. ... More

Legendary novelist Wilbur Smith dies aged 88: publisher
JOHANNESBURG.- Internationally acclaimed author Wilbur Smith has died in South Africa aged 88, his publisher announced Saturday. "Global bestselling author Wilbur Smith died unexpectedly this afternoon at his Cape Town home after a morning of reading and writing with his wife Niso by his side," said a statement released on the Wilbur Smith Books website. With 49 titles under his belt since his first novel 'When the Lion Feeds' was published in 1964, Smith became a household name in literature. "The undisputed and inimitable master of adventure writing, Wilbur Smith's novels have gripped readers for over half a century, selling over 140 million copies worldwide in more than thirty languages," said the statement. His bestselling 'Courtney Series', was the longest running in publishing history, said the statement. It spanned generations and three centuries, "through ... More

'Be nice to tourists': New York's arts scene needs international visitors
NEW YORK, NY.- When many readers in Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong open their newspapers Monday, they will be greeted with a full-page advertisement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “We reopened in August 2020, but have been missing one critical thing — you, our international visitors,” the ad will say. “The Met is only The Met when it is being enjoyed daily by visitors from around the world.” The unusual display — museum officials say they do not believe they have ever run a global marketing campaign of this scope aimed at visitors so far from their Fifth Avenue home — is a signal of the thirst among New York arts institutions for foreign visitors to return. U.S. borders reopened to international tourists this week for the first time since the early months of 2020. Their return represents another milestone in New York’s reopening, and few sectors of ... More

A Bank of England Newcastle on Tyne £5 note to be sold by Dix Noonan Webb
LONDON.- A Bank of England £5 note issued in Newcastle on Tyne - one of only two known examples in private hands - will be offered by Dix Noonan Webb in their auction of British, Irish and World Banknotes on Thursday, November 25, 2021 at their Mayfair saleroom (16 Bolton Street, London W1J 8BQ). Dated 15 July 1889, this rare and fine note is estimated to fetch £8,000-12,000. This is complemented by a very scarce £500 Bank of England note from Liverpool, which is signed by Kenneth O. Peppiatt, and dated from 30 September 1936. This too is estimated at £8,000-12,000, while a very rare uncirculated £10,000,000 Treasury Bill from 2003, stamped cancelled is estimated at £4,400-5,000. As Andrew Pattison, Head of Banknote Department at Dix Noonan Webb, explains: The Newcastle Branch of the Bank of England issued comparatively few notes in the 19th ... More


PhotoGalleries

RIBA

The King’s Animals

DOMENICO GNOLI

Karlo Kacharava


Flashback
On a day like today, French painter Claude Monet was born
November 14, 1840. Claude Monet (14 November 1840 - 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). In this image: In this Jan. 19, 2011 photo, Dean Yoder, conservator of paintings for the Cleveland Museum of Art, gently dusts Claude Monet's vast water lilies painting at the museum in Cleveland.

  
© 1996 - 2021
Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez