Artdaily.cc - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

Saatchi Gallery announces exhibition of works created by George Westren
LONDON.- From 6 25 January, Saatchi Gallery presents George Westren: On the straight and narrow in one of the main spaces at the Gallery. This free-to-enter exhibition celebrates the life and work of a relatively unknown artist, George Westren. The show represents a positive outcome to an emotive story that gained worldwide news attention in the summer of 2022. In June 2022, George Westren became the unlikely subject of a viral news story reported by TV, radio and print media across the world. Westren, a relatively unknown artist living in a tiny housing association flat in Spitalfields, East London, had sadly died in July 2021 during the UKs Covid lockdown. A year later, in June 2022, a neighbour stepped in to prevent Georges portfolio of intricate op art drawings from being destroyed by a home clearance firm. The artwork went viral on Twitter ... More

Crescent City Auction Gallery announces highlights included in the Winter Estates Auction
NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Original paintings by renowned artists Keith Haring (N.Y./Pa., 1958-1990) and George Louis Viavant (La., 1872-1925), an 89-piece set of Herend porcelain dinnerware and a 110-piece sterling flatware set by Gorham-Alvin are a few of the expected top lots in Crescent City Auction Gallerys Winter Estates Auction slated for January 20th and 21st. The auction, starting at 10 am Central time both days, is loaded with nearly 1,000 choice lots in a wide variety of collecting categories. Bidding is available online, as well as live in the Crescent City gallery at 1330 Saint Charles Avenue in New Orleans. In-person gallery previews will begin on Wednesday, January 11th, from 10-5 Central time. Phone and absentee bids will be accepted. Keith Harings unique pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s ... More

Norton Museum of Art announces Dr. Deborah Willis as the 2023 Artist-in-Residence
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.- The Norton Museum of Art recently announced Dr. Deborah Willis as the 2023 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence. The Museums residency program began in January 2019 and demonstrates Nortons deep commitment to fostering creative and intellectual growth for mid- to late-career artists whose work warrants greater attention, and emphasizes the promotion of gender, racial, and ethnic parity in the arts through dedication of two residencies annually for women artists. One is exclusively for an African American or Latina woman artist and is endowed as the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence. Dr. Willis is a celebrated author, photographer, and acclaimed historian, whose work and research examine iconicity and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. Among Williss many awards and honors ... More

Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul opens a group exhibition of new work by three artists
SEOUL.- Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Myths of Our Time, a group exhibition of new work by three artists for whom Koreas artistic, cultural and social landscape serves as a vital source of inspiration: Heemin Chung (South Korea, b.1987), Sun Woo (South Korea, b.1994) and Zadie Xa (Canada, b.1983). While the work of each artist illustrates their own unique perspective and distinct approach to artmaking, the title of the show highlights their shared engagement with mythological traditions of storytelling. Through sculpture, textile and painting created especially for the exhibition, narratives drawn from diverse cultural contexts are reimagined through a contemporary lens to address urgent issues relating to technological developments, identity and notions of self. Employing a visual language of poetic abstraction, Heemin Chung presents three large-scale ... More

Farewell to 'Stomp,' a show at the beating heart of New York
NEW YORK, NY.- The stage has no curtain. The set is littered with highway signs and mass transit insignia. And then there are the gigantic oil drums, ominous and puzzling. It could be a storage facility. Or the site of an industrial warehouse party. But then the sweepers start to trickle in, swooshing across in balletic punk pageantry. Since its debut at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village in 1994, Stomp, the wordless percussion spectacle of twirling, tapping, sweeping, banging, clanging and yes, stomping, has gone from a scrappy neighborhood attraction to a mainstay of the culture of New York City. In honor of the shows 10th anniversary in 2004, a mayoral proclamation declared March 14, 2004, as Stomp Day. For its 20th birthday in 2014, the Empire State Building shone in red light in its honor. That year, the production was also the centerpiece of the citys Stomp Out Litter ... More

A tablecloth as source material
NEW YORK, NY.- The Edith Piaf impersonator was belting out La Vie En Rose as an ice sculpture of the divine Greek stallion Pegasus slowly melted between two seafood towers. Potted orchids dotted the draped tables alongside standing ice buckets filled with bottles of Champagne, in a nod to a more midcentury kind of evening decor. What had seemed an ordinary winter night at Orsay, a French bistro on New Yorks Upper East Side, had been temporarily transformed into a scene from the citys 1940s cabaret culture. And even if the partygoers, who included actors Lucas Bravo and Tommy Dorfman, artist Nate Lowman, model Ella Emhoff and fashion designer Aurora James, appeared more interested in the present than the past, it didnt matter. The evenings hosts fashion designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla and fine-jewelry designer Jean Prounis ... More

Frank Galati, mainstay of Chicago theater, dies at 79
NEW YORK, NY.- Frank Galati, a writer, director and actor whose work in Chicago, especially his celebrated adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, furthered that citys international reputation in theater, and whose long resume included directing the Broadway hit Ragtime, died Monday in Sarasota, Florida. He was 79. His husband, Peter Amster, said the cause was complications of cancer. Galati was a towering figure in Chicago-area theater for decades, working with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters and other houses there and teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He specialized in adaptations, and in 1988 his version of John Steinbecks Dust Bowl epic, The Grapes of Wrath, was a hit for Steppenwolf. He wrote and directed The Grapes of Wrath, although it took work to persuade Steinbecks widow, Elaine Steinbeck, to release the rights ... More

Prototype, an essential New York opera festival, turns 10
NEW YORK, NY.- There are all these unbelievable artists who are creating work thats really hard to define, Beth Morrison, a music theater impresario, said during a recent interview. Its the work that falls between disciplines, that is beautiful and strange and challenging, and theres so little space for that in New York right now. Morrison, the leader of Beth Morrison Projects, produces exactly those types of works operas and other pieces that can approach cabaret, concert or musical forms but defy categorization with white-hot fervor, particularly as one of the founders of the Prototype Festival, which started 10 years ago and returns Thursday with seven shows as idiosyncratic and fearlessly strange as ever. The niche that Prototype occupies on the New York performing arts calendar something of a purely musical cousin to the Under the Radar theater festival ... More

Fay Weldon, British novelist who challenged feminist orthodoxy, dies at 91
LONDON.- Fay Weldon, a British novelist and dramatist who explored the rifts and rivalries between men and women and whose embrace by feminists loosened over time as critics accused her of retreating from the cause and even betraying it, died Wednesday in a nursing home in Northampton, England. She was 91. Her death was confirmed by her son Dan Weldon, who did not specify a cause but said she had experienced strokes and had some health problems. While she was too weak to hold a pen, she was still writing in her head, he said. She was thinking about writing poetry, he said. She was a writer to the very end. By turns elusive and confessional, Weldon liked to say she divided her life into two segments. The first, which she termed mildly scandalous and delinquent, lasted until her early 30s and was covered in her autobiography, Auto da Fay ... More

Danish ceramist, Morten Löbner Espersen opens an exhibition at Jason Jacques Gallery
NEW YORK, NY.- Jason Jacques Gallery is presenting its fourth solo exhibition of work by the iconic Danish Ceramist, Morten LÃ¸bner Espersen, following his first solo museum exhibition outside of Denmark at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and coinciding with his tour de force one-man-show at the CLAY Keramikmuseum. "Some of the oldest fragments of human civilization are made in clay," says Espersen, whose oeuvre hones in on classical forms from around the globe and takes them to fantastic extremes using color and texture. Color and texture themselves become subjects in his work, which he carries to their own extremes through a combination of masterful glaze chemistry, technical precision in his wheel-throwing and hand-building, and the application of multiple firings that ensure an abundance of exuberant detail in his works ... More