The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, January 13, 2023

 
Contemporary artworks gifted to Queen Elizabeth II go on display at Buckingham Palace

A member of Royal Collection Trust staff examines Sir Isaac Julien’s Lady of the Lake (Study Portrait), part of a display opening today at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, of contemporary artworks gifted to Queen Elizabeth II to mark the Platinum Jubilee. Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023.

LONDON.- Twenty contemporary artworks gifted by the Royal Academy of Arts to Queen Elizabeth II have gone on display today at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. The works of art on paper are by Royal Academicians elected in the past decade, including Rebecca Salter (President of the RA), Wolfgang Tillmans, Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare CBE, and were presented to mark Her late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022. The Royal Academy was established in 1768 with the support of George III, and the connection between the Sovereign and the Academy has continued to flourish ever since. The Platinum Jubilee Gift follows similarly generous gifts to mark the Coronation in 1953, the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and bears witness to the diversity of contemporary British art – from traditional media such as brush and ink to the boundless possibilities of digital prints ... More



The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
View of Mathilde Denize's exhibition Never Ending Story at Perrotin Paris, 2023. ©DENIZE/ADAGP, Paris, 2023. Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.





Almine Rech London presents José Lerma's first solo show in London   Galerie Max Hetzler opens an exhibition of work by Karel Appel   Mayor's proposed cuts to libraries will hurt New Yorkers, leaders say


José Lerma, Alina, 2022. Acrylic on burlap, 121.9 x 91.4 cm, 48 x 36 in / © José Lerma. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Raquel Perez-Puig.

LONDON.- José Lerma’s recent hyper-painterly portraits are paradoxically austere. The copious amount of paint loaded onto each canvas counters the scant number of brushstrokes: only three to ten per piece. Though impasto typically conveys dynamism and spontaneity, here it rigidly describes static heads from the front or side. Stark and solemn, the faces in profile evoke Piero della Francesca’s classicizing double portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Only in place of the early Renaissance master’s diaphanous oil glazes is the opposite extreme: clotted slabs of acrylic. With so few marks and fast-drying paint thickened with gels and other materials, Lerma’s pictures require careful planning. This methodical process and the profound quietude of the resulting images neutralizes the improvisational bravura associated with gestural brushwork. Beyond the unlikely marriage of seductive expressionism and severe neoclassicism ... More
 

Karel Appel, Visage-Paysage no.4, 1977 © Karel Appel Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023, Photo: def image.

BERLIN.- Galerie Max Hetzler opened Encounter in Spring and what follows, an exhibition of work by Karel Appel (1921–2006), centring around a selection of paintings spanning from 1958 until 2006. A founding figure of the avant-garde group CoBrA (1948–1951), Appel began his career in the aftermath of the Second World War. Over the course of six decades, the artist experimented widely, drawing on sources as diverse as folk art, outsider art and Jazz’s spirit of improvisation, and working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and stage design. Distinguishable for his astonishing capacity to innovate, Appel never settled in a signature style, media or subject. Alternating between abstraction and figuration, he adopted a material-oriented approach in his practice and promoted a genuine form of expression. The exhibition’s starting point is the monumental and mesmeric painting Rencontre au printemps (Encounter in Spring) ... More
 

People use the public computers at the Bronx Library Center in New York, Jan. 11, 2023. Public libraries could be forced to cut their hours and programming. — The City Council wants to protect their funding in the next budget battle. (Bing Guan/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- During his first year as mayor, Eric Adams said he was focused on ensuring that city government served the working-class New Yorkers who helped elect him. But now he is under fire for cutting funding for libraries — a critical lifeline for people who do not have internet access at home or who need after-school tutoring and English language instruction. The proposed cuts of $13 million this fiscal year and more than $20 million next year have sparked concern among families, elected officials and library leaders. Libraries could respond to the trimmed budget by scaling back hours, workers or programming. With more than 200 locations across the city, the public library system is a beloved institution where children learn to love books and recently arrived migrants become acclimated to their new home. Before the pandemic, city libraries typically saw about 35 million annual visitors ... More


The Shed changes leadership structure   Hamburger Kunsthalle dedicates an exhibition to the stereotype of the erotic and seductive woman   Berry Campbell exclusively represents the Estate of Ethel Schwabacher


Alex Poots, artist director and chief executive of the Shed, in New York, April 26, 2018. (An Rong Xu/The New York Times)

by Robin Pogrebin


NEW YORK, NY.- Having come into the world just a year before the coronavirus pandemic started, the Shed — an architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center in Hudson Yards — has weathered a bumpy beginning. In addition to sold-out performances (such as the recent play about Robert Moses starring Ralph Fiennes), the institution has had its share of financial struggles (28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020). Now, the Shed is making perhaps its biggest adjustment yet, announcing that Alex Poots, the founding artistic director and chief executive, will no longer be CEO — but will continue to focus on the creative side of the institution as its artistic director. The change is effective immediately; Maryann Jordan, the Shed’s current president and chief operating officer, will handle day-to-day management in the interim ... More
 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), Helena von Troja, 1863. Öl auf Mahagoniholz, 32,8 x 27,7 cm © Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk. Photo: Elke Walford.

HAMBURG.- With the epoch-spanning exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is dedicating itself for the first time to diverse artistic treat-ments of the dazzling and clichéd image of the femme fatale. The stereotype of the erotic and seductive woman who holds men in her thrall, ultimately leading them to their downfall, has long been shaped by the male gaze and by a binary understanding of gender. The show will focus on various artistic manifestations of this theme dating from the early nineteenth century to the present while critically examining its origins and transformations: What historical changes and subsequent appropriation processes has the image of the femme fatale undergone? What role does it still play today? How do contemporary artists negotiate the gaze, power and gender constellations this image evokes in an effort to shift our perspective? ... More
 

Ethel Schwabacher, Steps of the Sun, 1957, oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches.

NEW YORK, NY.- Photographed in about 1924 or 1925, Ethel Kremer—then in her twenties—is dressed in the height of women’s fashions in Paris and New York. [1] She wears a fur-trimmed wide-shouldered wrap coat and a beret-style turban hat. Lacking feathers and frills, her attire gives off a masculine aspect, while her relaxed pose conveys her androgynous persona: she slouches on a diagonal and holds a cigarette, while gazing both toward and past the photographer, whose identity is unknown. She is at once sophisticated and bohemian, guarded and self-confident, outward and inward. The photograph captures the complexity of an artist (who became Ethel Schwabacher after her marriage in 1935) driven constantly by a search in her life and art to find and understand her identity—as a woman, artist, and American—in relation to the tide-breaking ideas and events of the second half of the twentieth century. Schwabacher was at the center of the New York ... More



Nicole Wittenberg's first personal exhibition with MASSIMODECARLO opens in london   Letters sent to avid fan of Duke of Windsor give insight into his thoughts on the media to be sold at auction   The Dhaka Art Summit reveals artist list for 2023 edition


Nicole Wittenberg, Rainbow Sunset 2, 2022, Oil on canvas, 84” x 72”, courtesy of the artist and MASSIMODECARLO.

LONDON.- MASSIMODECARLO opened Moonshine Lullaby, Nicole Wittenberg’s first personal exhibition with the gallery, showcasing a new series of glowing windswept natural landscapes. Known for her previous erotic and body-focused works, Nicole Wittenberg turned to landscape painting to break free. Advised by teachers to paint what she saw and who she was, her earlier series depicted intimate sensual scenes. Bodies and bedrooms led her to paint feelings rather than herself. “You have been told how to think and how to feel, and what art is and what art isn’t, and then you ask yourself why it needs to be that way?”. For Wittenberg, landscape painting is a schism, a rapture that guided her to her true self. The artist’s endless forests and luminous bending trees invite viewers to come closer. The quick, intuitive brushstrokes absorb us into a natural world made ... More
 

Letters written on behalf of the Duke of Windsor in the 1930s. Photo: Catherine Southon.

LONDON.- A collection of letters written on behalf of the Duke of Windsor in the 1930s that were amassed by keen Royal fan Mrs Lillian Boraston who lived in Surrey will be offered in Catherine Southon Auctioneers & Valuers’ Sale of Antiques and Collectables on Wednesday February 8, 2023 at Farleigh Court Golf Club, Selsdon in Surrey. They have been discovered in a box of family papers by her granddaughter and are estimated at £300-500. The fourteen letters that have been posted from all over the world were written by the Private Secretary of the Duke of Windsor (previously Edward VIII) and date from the period June 1937 – six months after his historic abdication - though to Christmas 1939. One letter dated September 7, 1937, comments: “His Royal Highness thanks you for the poem and your kind wishes but asks me at the same time to assure you that the information that His Royal Highness is homesick is entirely withou ... More
 

Pol Taburet. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, New York. Photography Kristien Daem.

DHAKA.- The Dhaka Art Summit today announces the full list of artists who will be participating in the 2023 edition. Titled Bonna - both the word for ‘flood’ and a girl’s name in Bengali - the Summit will bring together a diverse array of over 160 artists and collectives to explore Bangladesh’s nuanced relationship to words and water. Free to the public, the biannual 9-day research and exhibition platform takes place at the Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka from 3 – 11 February. Organised by the non-profit Samdani Art Foundation, DAS has become the global meeting point for research, discourse and engagement with South Asian art. A bridge connecting Bangladesh to the rest of the world, the Summit has developed across five previous successful iterations under the leadership of Nadia Samdani MBE, who, along with her husband Rajeeb Samdani, drives the production of this dynamic platform ... More


The Cape Ann Museum offers female artist perspectives in two new exhibits   Vito Schnabel Gallery's first exhibition with Otis Jones opens in New York   Newport Art Museum welcomes new Interim Director, Danielle Ogden


Carly Glovinski, Nasturtium and Moon Beam Gift Basket, 2022. Colored pencil, graphite, acrylic, correction fluid, and weaving on paper, 14h x 11w in (35.56h x 27.94w cm).

GLOUCESTER, MASS.- The works of Mary Blood Mellen (1819-1886) and Emily Sargent (1857-1936), two talented 19th century female artists, are on display at the Cape Ann Museum. “Emily Sargent, A Glimpse into her World” is on view now through May 7, 2023 and “The Art of Mary Blood Mellen” can be viewed January 13 through April 2, 2023. Although often thought of in terms of her mentor, Fitz Henry Lane, Mellen was a talented and accomplished artist in her own right who commands a place in the history of art on Cape Ann. To better understand Mellen and her artistic skills, the Cape Ann Museum is delighted to present this special exhibition of her work, on view in the center of the Lane Galleries from January 13 to April 2, 2023. “There is a rich tradition of women artists associated with Cape Ann, now and in the past,” said Museum Director, Oliver Barker, “…and CAM with the generous support ... More
 

Otis Jones, 2 Smudged Red Oxide Circles and 2 Black Circles, 2022, Acrylic on linen on wood, 65 1/2 x 56 x 5 inches (166.37 x 142.24 x 12.70 cm) Photo by Kevin Todora; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- Vito Schnabel Gallery presents Otis Jones: New Work, the gallery’s first exhibition with the critically admired Dallas-based painter. The presentation will feature approximately six new works from Jones’ ongoing series of shaped canvases – ovals and circles constructed in layers that exert a sense of enormous weight, celebrating their own making while simultaneously vibrating with an ethereal, almost spiritual energy. Opening January 12, 2023, Otis Jones: New Work will been view through February 25 at Vito Schnabel Gallery’s 43 Clarkson Street location. With a career spanning over six decades, Otis Jones began his life as an artist during the heyday of 1960s and ‘70s Minimalism. His practice is characterized by a reductive style that celebrates the ‘objectness’ and tactility of painting’s material identity and the labor of making ... More
 

Ogden brings over 17 years of Museum and academic experience to the role, including serving as Associate Director of Academic Programs and Museum Specialist in Adult Learning at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

NEWPORT, RI.- The Newport Art Museum welcomes Danielle Ogden as Interim Executive Director. Ogden brings over 17 years of Museum and academic experience to the role, including serving as Associate Director of Academic Programs and Museum Specialist in Adult Learning at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, and supporting the launch of the National Gallery Singapore as Senior Manager of Adult Learning and Access Programs. Ogden is excited about this opportunity to listen, learn, and initiate at the Museum, "I have been inspired by the Board of Trustees and staff's eagerness to embark on the year ahead with open-mindedness, a growth mindset, and a lot of enthusiasm," she said, "I look forward to championing the enriching engagement opportunities for all the artists, families, students ... More




PODCAST—A Closer Look: Episode 002, Curatorial Assistant



More News

Peter Freeman, Inc. opens an exhibition of works on paper by Paul Anthony Harford
NEW YORK, NY.- Peter Freeman, Inc. is presenting The Circus Animals’ Desertion, an exhibition of works on paper by Paul Anthony Harford (1943–2016) selected by Cecily Brown. Originally trained as a painter, Harford drew almost every day of his life. Over the years he produced hundreds of highly finished drawings but resisted opportunities to exhibit them, remaining virtually unknown until after his death. This is the first Harford exhibition outside of the United Kingdom. Like William Butler Yeats’s narrator in The Circus Animals’ Desertion, Harford found inspiration in the debris and “refuse” of everyday life in the sleepy coastal towns of Southend-on-Sea and Weymouth where he lived. A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags ... More

Perrotin Paris opens an exhibition of works by Mathilde Denize
PARIS.- Perrotin Paris is presenting the first solo exhibition by Mathilde Denize in Paris. Following the artist’s presentation at the Centre d’art contemporain d’Alfortville La Traverse in May 2022 and her solo exhibition at Perrotin New York in September 2021, Never Ending Story gathers a series of new paintings and instal- lations. A woman’s umbrella lay flat on the sidewalk and a step or two beyond a glove had been forgotten on a bench. The Paris night grew big with shadows and these lost objects seemed to become a part of it. Mathilde Denize took possession of painting when she decided that certain of her canvases would enjoy a more interesting perspective if she separated them from their stretchers. As soon as they were freed from the wooden frame that acted as both support and tension, her paintings fluttered like laundry from a window, overhanging the void ... More

James Coupe appointed as Head of Programme for Photography at the Royal College of Art
LONDON.- The Royal College of Art announced the appointment of James Coupe as Head of Programme for Photography within the School of Arts & Humanities. The programme focuses on photography as a discourse that encompasses and extends across multiple practices. Professor James Coupe will join the RCA from the faculty at the Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, where he has taught classes in Video, Internet and Data-Driven Art since 2004. Coupe’s work explores questions of visibility, surveillance, labour, and identity by engaging with prevailing and emergent image-making systems, including social media, deep-fakes, and machine learning. His recent solo show, Warriors, was the inaugural exhibition at the International Center of Photography’s museum in New York ... More

Rhona Hoffman Gallery opens an exhibition of works by James Wines
CHICAGO, IL.- "Global warming and the future of the environment are still major issues today, and Nature’s Revenge is a response to the over-built world. Considering the complex definitions for the word ‘nature’ - now increased to include social, political, psychological, functional and ecological associations - the drawings represent an effort to comment on various aspects of meaning. Most of these graphic works come from my 2021 retrospective at the Tchoban Museum in Berlin. This earlier show emphasized nature in terms of the architectural absorption of such green elements as vegetation and topography, as well as energy-conscious uses of materials in construction. Nature’s Revenge expands on these ideas by including some buildings, public spaces, objects and posters that constitute critical and/or sardonic viewpoints on a variety of environmental aberrations ... More

With different singers, one opera classic can seem like two
NEW YORK, NY.- As the first act of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” ends, Violetta, a high-end prostitute, is suffering the symptoms of tuberculosis. A well-to-do young man’s declaration of love shakes her seen-it-all cynicism; should she put an end to her life of pleasure and accept him? Screw it, she decides: As champagne fizzes of coloratura rise and rise, she declares that she is “forever free” and brings the curtain down in defiance. At the Metropolitan Opera in November, soprano Nadine Sierra sang that moment with luxuriant ease and confidence, a woman certain that she still had all the time in the world. On Sunday at the Met, though, Ermonela Jaho — her tone far less plush than Sierra’s and the aria less easy for her — made it a kind of mad scene. Violetta’s fragility, her sleep-when-I’m-dead mania, were scarily center stage. Same words, same notes, an entirely different effect ... More

Simon Lee Gallery announces representation of the estate of Olivier Debré
LONDON.- Simon Lee Gallery announced representation of the estate of French artist Oliver Debré. The first exhibition of works by Debré will take place at the gallery’s London space in June 2023 and will coincide with Signes, a ballet inspired by a series of Debré’s abstract tableaux, running from 19 June to 16 July 2023 at Opéra Bastille, Paris. Olivier Debré was born in Paris, France in 1920 and died in Paris, France in 1999. Born into a family of doctors and politicians, Debré defied expectations by joining the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study architecture under Le Corbusier. It was from this formal training in architecture that he developed his sophisticated understanding of space and light. Debré’s early work was influenced by a range of artistic movements and traditions, from Cubism to Japanese calligraphy ... More

Allie Martin selected as second Aminah Robinson Writing Resident at Columbus Museum of Art
COLUMBUS, OHIO.- The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) has selected Allie Martin as the second Aminah Robinson Writing Resident. The program supports and amplifies the work of African American artists while honoring the legacy of Robinson, a beloved Columbus artist. The annual residency program awards a U.S.-based African American writer, scholar or researcher the opportunity to spend 90 days working on a writing or research project in the late artist’s newly renovated home studio in Columbus, Ohio along with a $15,000 cash award. Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Dartmouth College. She is an ethnomusicologist who explores the relationships between race, sound and gentrification in Washington, DC. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies, she considers how African Americans in the city experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Her work has been supported ... More

Rehman Rahi, 97, eminent Kashmiri poet who restored a language, dies
NEW DELHI.- Rehman Rahi, a celebrated Kashmiri poet who devoted his life to promoting and preserving the Kashmiri language and gave its poetry a distinct identity, died on Monday at his home in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city. He was 97. His son, Dr. Dildar Ahmad, confirmed the death. Throughout his career as a writer and university professor, Rahi was committed to Kashmiri, a language he considered the source of Kashmiri identity and essential for preserving the ancient culture of a divided territory. He published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose in Kashmiri and is credited with restoring the language spoken by more than 6 million people to the realm of literature, lifting it out of the shadow of Persian and Urdu, which once dominated the literary scene in Kashmir, a disputed territory that straddles India and Pakistan ... More

Public unveiling of monumental Willie O'Ree portrait at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery on January 18th
FREDERICTON.- The Beaverbrook Art Gallery announced a very special event that will honour one of New Brunswick’s finest citizens and a hockey icon. A monumental portrait of Willie O’Ree has been presented to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery by a generous anonymous donor. Measuring five feet by five feet, the painting shows an older O’Ree proudly wearing his Boston Bruins jersey, while he holds a hockey stick and sports his Hockey Hall of Fame ring. The portrait was featured as the cover image of O’Ree’s recent autobiography “Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player” as well as the poster image of his recent film documentary. The public unveiling will take place at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery on January 18th at 6:30 pm, which is the 65th anniversary of Willie O’Ree’s first NHL game ... More

Nye & Company to host 3-day Chic and Antique Estate Treasures Auction
BLOOMFIELD, NJ.- Nye & Company Auctioneers is gearing up for a three-day, online-only sales extravaganza Wednesday through Friday, January 25th-27th, featuring American furniture, folk art and Native American art, starting each day at 10 am Eastern time. The Chic and Antique Estate Treasures auction will feature nearly 1,000 lots – a curated mix of fine and decorative arts spanning from the 18th century to the present day, including an exceptional selection of property from the Stanley Weiss collection, folk art from the Maggie Cohen collection and superb early American furniture from a private Connecticut collection. Headlining the auction is property from the well-known and highly regarded Rhode Island collector, Stanley Weiss. For over 30 years, Stanley developed an eye for the early American aesthetic ... More

Sorolla-Soto-Picasso: The Hispanic Society Museum & Library announces reopening with a multi-tiered celebration year
NEW YORK, NY.- The Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) – the primary institution dedicated to the preservation, study, understanding, exhibition and enjoyment of art and cultures of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries and communities – announces its phase one of reopening with a robust 2023 programming line-up and exhibition schedule. With a focus on the commemoration of Joaquín Sorolla’s Centennial, Jesús Rafael Soto’s Centennial and Pablo Picasso’s Semi-Centennial, the institution will recognize the great Spanish artists with a series of exhibitions, lectures, concerts and receptions. The Hispanic Museum & Library is amid its most ambitious capital project in its history ... More


PhotoGalleries

Lebbeus Woods

Yayoi Kusama

New Images in the Age of Augustus

Alexander McQueen


Flashback
On a day like today, Belarusian-French painter Chaim Soutine was born
January 13, 1893. Chaïm Soutine (13 January 1893 - 9 August 1943) was a Russian-French painter of Jewish origin. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Soutine developed an individual style more concerned with shape, color, and texture over representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism. In this image: Chaim Soutine, Two Pheasants.

  
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