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An oratorio about Shanghai's Jews opens in China at a difficult time
NEW YORK, NY.- Émigré, a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor. Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore, they sing. Shanghai, answer these desperate cries. The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s and their survival of the Holocaust is one of World War IIs most dramatic but little-known chapters. In Émigré, a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center. The piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell ... More

Antonia Bennett used to sing with Tony. Now she's carrying on solo.
NEW YORK, NY.- Antonia Bennetts childhood had some unique charms. There were the parties, where the likes of Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel TormÃ© would gather around the piano and sing. There were the times Bennetts father, Tony, took her to work, beginning when she was about 5, and gave her an early taste of the spotlight. My dad would just bring me up onstage, and we would sing together, Bennett recalled in a recent interview. I guess it started with The Hokey Pokey and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, and then I graduated to Puttin on the Ritz, and we just kept going from there, you know? Bennett, 49, is the younger of the crooners two daughters by the second of his three wives, actress Sandra Grant Bennett. Over the years, she too has sung professionally, releasing a 2014 album, Embrace Me, and an ... More

Winston Branch "The Sweet Scent of Magnolia" solo exhibition opens in London
LONDON.- Varvara Roza Galleries, exclusive representative of Winston Branch, in collaboration with The Blender Gallery, opened a major solo exhibition by Winston Branch titled The sweet scent of Magnolia. The Sweet Scent of Magnolia runs from 21st November to 19th December at Varvara Roza Galleries, 8 Duke Street, St. Jamess, London In his exhibition The sweet scent of magnolia, Winston Branch presents his new body of work, consisting of large-scale canvases painted in his London studio during a prolific period in 2023.   Also, Sothebys are presenting Winston Branch 'Journey Into Light, at Sotheby's New Bond Street, London between 17 November15 December 2023. Winston Branch's preoccupation as an artist has been the re-examination of finding a more palatable means of expression. The excitement with which his paintings have developed over the years, has always ... More

New audio-visual installation by Jarman-Award winning artist, David Panos, opens in Northampton
NORTHAMPTON.- NN Contemporary Art is presenting Gothic Revival, a new audio-visual commission by Jarman Award-winning artist, David Panos. Part film, part musical score, Gothic Revival is a poetic exploration of place; a cinematic tapestry that interweaves digitally manipulated footage with film, sound recordings and fragments of video collected in Northampton. The artists process began through exploring the connections between Northamptons Gothic Revival architecture and the legacy of its post-punk music scene, which birthed the band Bauhaus, credited with initiating the gothic rock music genre. Seeking to explore the descendants of such an alternative scene, the film documents local band Raven Rust, whose rehearsal of Bauhaus most famous track, Bela Lugosi's Dead, recurs across the piece, almost as a modern act of establishing tradition through repetition. Panos engages with the towns oft ... More

Richard Hunt, the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at MoMA, joins White Cube
NEW YORK, NY.- White Cube announced the global representation of Richard Hunt (b.1935, Chicago, Illinois), one of the leading American sculptors of the 20th century. The artists first solo exhibition with the gallery will take place in spring 2024 at White Cube New York. Over a seven-decade-long career, Hunt has staged over 150 solo shows, with more than 160 large-scale public sculpture commissions worldwide. In 1971, at the age of 35, he achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at MoMA, New York. With a profound fascination for biological science and the natural world, working predominantly in metal, Hunts hybrid sculptures are characterised by dualities, that of the natural and the industrial, the surreal and the abstract, the geometric and the organic. Hunt has paid tribute to some ... More

Aarons' fourth solo exhibition at Staley–Wise to open tomorrow
NEW YORK, NY.- The photographs of Slim Aarons are so closely associated with the good life that Aarons name is now shorthand itself for luxury, privilege, and style. In the introduction to his 2003 book Once Upon a Time, Aarons said I believe in fairy tales. For six decades I have concentrated on photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. Ironically, the beginning of Aarons life was anything but a fairy tale, and his sunny and escapist images were a rejection of the terrors of war and familial heartbreak that he was all too familiar with. As a precursor to social medias promotion of the perennial perfect moment, Aarons photographs are aspirational yet nostalgic. This is Aarons fourth solo exhibition at Staley-Wise after his first-ever exhibition at the gallery in 2003, only 3 years before his death. Several of the photographs in this exhibition were recently discovered in his archive and have never bee ... More

Alexandria Smith's debut solo exhibition 'Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom' now on view in Asia
HONG KONG.- Gagosian is now showing Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom, American artist Alexandria Smiths debut solo exhibition in Asia. Opened since November 16 in Hong Kong, the exhibition features new assemblage paintings and collage drawings that explore the protean nature of selfhood and identity. The works in Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom envision cosmic environments inhabited by figures in flux. Smiths practice is grounded in her exploratory drawings, represented in Hong Kong by works on paper housed in custom frames. From these, she develops boldly colored assemblage paintings that incorporate shapes made from painted wood and 3D-printed elements that rise from their surfaces and extend beyond their frames. Smiths new works focus on symbols of genesis, light, and growth, inspired by her interests ... More

'Afra Al Dhaheri: Give Your Weight To The Ground' has opened at Green Art Gallery
AL QUOZ .- The earth pulls us down to ground us. Grounding: slowing down and observing; becoming conscious of our surroundings; and absorbing and processing. A yearning that lingers in the shadows of scattered minds. The metamorphosis of hair has been a ritual within my practice. My mother once told me, Take your fallen hair and bury it in the soil of your house plant. They will nourish it. The poetry of the gesture stayed with me and made me think of the ways in which our bodies return to the earth to nurture it. Could grounding ourselves be another manifestation of that return, a way to access nurturing? I ground myself in the process of making work, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing elements of the material and concept. I often develop a visual vocabulary to engage the audience only to unlearn it to find a new l ... More

Jeanne Bucher Jaeger presents an exhibition of works by Antoine Grumbach
PARIS.- VÃ©ronique Jaeger is presenting the second part of ENCHAN-TEMPS cycle, the exhibition Les Yeux du Ciel devoted to Antoine Grumbach. Antoine Grumbach (1942) is an artist-architect and urban designer who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Paris in 1967 and received the Grand Prix National dUrbanisme et dArt Urbain in 1992. His international achievements are countless, as are his major architectural and urban planning projects, which include the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, the new inhabited bridge over the Thames in London, as well as the restructuration of Shanghais historic district, Greater Moscow, the Paris tramway and the Greater Paris Seine MÃ©tropole project... For over 40 years, he taught at the Ecoles nationales darchitecture de Paris-La Villette et Belleville, the Ecoles des ponts et chaussÃ©es ... More

Brigitte Bardot captivates as lead entry in Chiswick' 19th/20th Century Photographs Auction
LONDON.- A famous image of French film star Brigitte Bardot taken by Terry O'Neill in 1971 leads the 19th and 20th Century Photographs Auction slated for November 30 at Chiswick Auctions. The silver gelatin print of Bardot on the set of Les Petroleuses, number 20 from an edition of 50, is expected to bring Â£10,000-Â£15,000 ($12,605-$18,905). Later in life, O'Neill (British, 1938-2019) reflected on what his called the best shot of his career. He related that he only had one shot left on his roll of film when he captured the image that would define his career as a master of the candid celebrity portrait. "The wind was blowing, and she had a cigar as part of a scene. I was surrounded by hundreds of people, and was praying they didn't move or jostle me, as I had this perfect composition. I just wanted the wind to blow once more and it did. Then everyone started pushing and shoving and I lost the place but I k ... More