"These pictures were all done when he was at art college, aged 15 or 16, and were probably part of his course work. "They are watercolours or sketches, and show a completely different side of the Sid Vicious people think of now. ..." [Read Full Article]
Published By: Contactmusic.com
On: 04/06/11
Website: http://www.contactmusic.com/
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Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
SA Art Breaks New Record
"Recently, four new records for South African artists Irma Stern, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto and Francois Krige were reached at a Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers art sale in London. Giles Peppiatt, director of South African Art at the auction ..." [Read Full Article]
Published By: Times LIVE
On: 04/05/11
Website: http://www.timeslive.co.za/
Looking for original art? Visit Artistically Connected today!
Published By: Times LIVE
On: 04/05/11
Website: http://www.timeslive.co.za/
Looking for original art? Visit Artistically Connected today!
Anish Kapoor's Triumphant Return to India
Anish Kapoor’s Homecoming
When Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi pitches up to inaugurate an art show, it’s got to be a pretty big deal.
Anish Kapoor’s twin shows in Delhi and Mumbai are indeed being heralded almost as the return of an extremely successful prodigal son.
“On one level making an exhibition in India is like making an exhibition anywhere else,” the Mumbai-born artist told India Real Time after the opening on Saturday, explaining it should be of a certain standard and that it should stand out — “as it should anywhere in the world.”
On another level, it’s like no other show he’s ever laid out before.
“For me personally, it was very emotional,” said Mr. Kapoor of the first show ever in India. The sculptor and installation artist, who now lives in London, seemed genuinely moved by what he described as his “coming home.”
Mr. Kapoor left India in his late teens, eventually settling in the U.K. in the early 1970s. He soon became one of the foremost artists in his country of adoption - which he even represented at the 1991 Venice Biennale. Over the years, his popularity has grown immensely. His recent show at London’s Royal Academy was widely regarded as one of the most successful art exhibitions in history, boasting record-breaking attendance.
Mr. Kapoor had wanted to bring an exhibition to India for nearly a decade. But he never found spaces that inspired him sufficiently — until he saw the new wing of New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art and a space in a Bollywood studio in Mumbai.
On Saturday Mr. Kapoor returned home in style in New Delhi, bringing back with him one of his largest selections of works in a single show. Several old school classmates were at the opening to greet him, as were the British High Commissioner and Mrs. Gandhi.
In the show, Mr. Kapoor takes visitors on a journey of his artistic production spanning several decades — from his early pigment sculptures to his more recent stainless-steel installations.
In most pieces, Mr. Kapoor plays with the viewer’s field of vision, creating illusions of depth and form through his skillful use of surfaces and texture, all of which are sure to leave many first-time visitors mesmerized.
The 56-year old artist says his “mythologized” childhood memories of India have shaped his artistic production. “My inner India has always lived in the works,” he said. His pigment-based sculptures, for instance, are likely to remind viewers in India of the bright piles of pigment stacked up on roadside stands for Holi, the festival of colors.
The Delhi and Mumbai venues inspired Mr. Kapoor in different ways that hew to common conceptions of the first as a historic city, the second as India’s most “modern” city.
In Delhi’s National Gallery — an imposing complex, flanked by government buildings and red sandstone monuments — the exhibition is a retrospective of Mr. Kapoor’s works.
“I wanted them to be related in scale to the building, delineating a way of thinking on a big scale but represented by rather small things,” he said of the Delhi show.
Of note are the installations from his pigment series, including “To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red” (1981) in which the forms — which appear to be made of pure pigment — seem to be rising from or sinking into the ground, scattering color around them as they do. Movement is also a central theme of “Past, Present, Future” (2006), a wax-based installation that creates the powerful illusion of a large sphere slowly rotating in and out of a wall.
- Anish Kapoor
- ‘Shooting Into the Corner’ (2008-2009)
In Mumbai “the show is completely different — much more contemporary,” said Mr. Kapoor. This venue will showcase many of the artist’s more recent works, including his stainless-steel “S-Curve” (2006) and his “Shooting Into the Corner” (2008-2009), a cannon which regularly shoots blood-red wax pellets into the corner of a white-washed room.
Anish Kapoor ’s exhibition runs from until Feb. 27 at New Delhi’s National Gallery and from Nov. 30 until Jan. 1 in Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios. You can find more information at The British Council, one of the sponsors.
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- Anish Kapoor Wallpaper Exhibition (formatmag.com)
V&A Museum Director Departing
V&A director Sir Mark Jones to leave museum
Sir Mark was previously director of the National Museums of Scotland
The Victoria & Albert's director, Sir Mark Jones, is leaving his post for a role at Oxford University, the London museum has announced.
Sir Mark, knighted in the 2010 New Year's honours list for services to the arts, has been V&A director since 2001.
Its chairman, Paul Ruddock, said he had helped to make the V&A "the world's leading museum of art and design".
Sir Mark will take up his new role as Master of St Cross College, Oxford, in September 2011.
He said he had spent "10 enormously enjoyable years at the V&A", during which he worked with "an outstandingly talented team of staff".
During Sir Mark's directorship, the museum underwent a £120 million refurbishment that saw it open a new wing of Medieval and Renaissance galleries.
Visitor numbers, the gallery said, are now at the highest level in its 150-year history.
Before joining the V&A, Sir Mark was director of the National Museums of Scotland from 1992 to 2001.
This article is from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11799188
Boston's New MFA Wing - A Place For Art, Not Building
A wing that works
The beauty of the MFA's expansion is how it showcases the art without calling attention to itself
The handsome new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts is a place for looking at art, not a place for looking at architecture.
That makes it a departure from other art museums of recent years. At least since architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, back in 1997, it seems we’re always being told that the museum itself, not its contents, is the real work of art.
Not at the MFA. This is a building where the art is thoughtfully displayed in an architectural setting that doesn’t call attention to itself.
That’s a surprise coming from this architect, the British firm Foster + Partners. Led by Sir Norman Foster, one of the world’s so-called “starchitects,’’ Foster + Partners is known for such spectacular spaces as the skylit Reading Room of the British Museum in London and the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin, with its spiral glass crown.
We can be grateful that Foster and his team held back on the fireworks this time. The Art of the Americas Wing, which opens to the public today, is a triumph of intelligence and pragmatism. It’s better inside than outside, but we’ll talk about that later.
There’s a lot to love in these interiors. First of all, there’s the openness. In the past, the MFA felt locked up like a guarded jewel box. The new wing throws itself open to the world around it. Artworks need to be protected from too much daylight, but the architects find ways to give us views of the Fenway, a neglected part of Boston’s famous Emerald Necklace of parkland. The Fenway now feels less isolated, more connected, more like the MFA’s own landscape. And there are other striking views, including a panorama of the downtown skyline. Whenever you feel a little claustrophobic, you can step out to a glass observation deck that runs across the front of each new floor.
Then there’s the variety. The 53 galleries of the new wing come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors. They are a refreshing change from the mazelike cube farm of white galleries you find in such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sometimes the walls are covered with fabric patterns, derived from the same historical era as the art on display. Sometimes they’re painted in soft tones. A particularly sensitive touch is the handling of the captions that label each artwork. Instead of looking pasted on, they’re color-coordinated with the walls.
Finally, for the first time in my experience, it’s now possible to figure out where you are in the MFA. Since the opening of the museum’s West Wing in 1981, designed by noted architect I.M. Pei, that’s been almost impossible. Most visitors entered through the Pei wing at the extreme end of the museum and quickly got lost in what seemed to be disorder.
The first thing Foster + Partners did was study the floor plan of the original MFA of 1909, by architect Guy Lowell. Lowell’s plan, like much traditional architecture, was based on the human body. You entered at the head, and the building wings spread out symmetrically to the left and right like arms. It’s a kind of order we grasp intuitively.
Foster has restored that old order. The Pei entry will be now used only for bus groups. The rest of us will again enter the museum at its center, either from the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue. A spine of visitor services — ticketing, tourist shop, information — now connects those two entrances.
To help you further with your wayfinding, openings between galleries tend to be lined up with one another, creating long vistas you can look or walk down. It’s an effect that was called Parade Rooms in an earlier era. The vistas let you see one part of the museum from another. They lace everything together visually. Often, for further legibility, the curators and architects site an especially bold or famous artwork at the termination of a vista.
The London-based Foster + Partners worked with local architects CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares on the job.
One space in the Art of the Americas Wing is meant to be the highlight of the whole museum. This is the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, a vast, three-story-high volume that’s mostly roofed and walled in glass. It feels like a conservatory, framed in greenery planted outside the glass walls. It’s an amazingly multipurpose space, containing a café, for instance, that can be totally whisked out of sight to make room for other kinds of events. A grand stair at one end leads you to the new galleries.
The museum sees the Shapiro Family Courtyard as a sort of town square where the museum visitor can relax with an espresso and take stock. The best you can say for this space today, though, is that it’s promising. Someone failed to figure out that in most sun conditions, the glass walls would function as mirrors. They reflect you instead of letting you see the green behind them. And the gray corporate furniture is better suited to an accountant’s seminar than a cultural space. There’s almost no art — just two big sculptures — a lack that creates a feeling of emptiness. All these problems, of course, are correctable, and it will be fun to see how the courtyard evolves.
I like so much about the new wing that I’m hesitant to deal with its exterior. I asked the MFA’s director, Malcolm Rogers, what he told his architects it should look like. “Not a palace or a prison,’’ he replied. Well, it isn’t either of those. The problem is that it lacks any particular character at all.
What you see from either the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue is a wall made of panels of glass and granite, crisply framed in black steel. The stone is the same Deer Isle granite from Maine that built the old museum. But instead of creating the impression of a massive wall, the new granite panels look as if they could be shuffled and rearranged in the frame.
It’s a modernist look, which is fine, and it rightly implies that the museum is expandable. But other than a glimpse of statues just inside the glass walls, it’s a look that fails to communicate much about the riches inside. And as often happens in architecture, there’s an unintended metaphor. This part of the museum looks too much like a stack of shipping containers on a wharf somewhere.
In the larger scheme of things, the disappointing facades don’t count for much. The Art of the Americas Wing is a deeply humane, deeply thoughtful piece of architecture.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
Stolen Paintings Returned After 32 Years
Stolen art’s return ends long drama
Paintings were taken from Stockbridge home
Michael Bakwin (left), and Assistant US Attorney Jack Pirozzolo, at a news conference in Boston yesterday, unpacked one of the Jean Jansem works that was stolen from Bakwin’s home in 1978. (Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe)
Michael Bakwin and his wife left their Stockbridge house on Memorial Day weekend in 1978 for a short trip. Soon after they returned, they discovered that someone had broken in and stolen seven paintings together worth millions, including a major still life by Cezanne. It was the costliest burglary from a private residence in Massachusetts history.
Yesterday, after a saga that spanned two continents, featured characters ranging from a Pittsfield thief to a British sleuth of stolen art, and culminated in the 2008 conviction of a Watertown lawyer-turned-artist, the last two of the missing paintings were returned to Bakwin.
Federal prosecutors turned over two small works by the French artist Jean Jansem to Bakwin at the US attorney’s office in Boston. Bakwin, who bought the two paintings in Paris in the late 1950s, said he had not seen them since they disappeared 32 years ago and was grateful to get them back, even though they were the least valuable of the lot. Together, the two are worth no more than $10,000.
“My hobby was collecting art,’’ the 76-year-old man said with a catch in his voice. “When they’re taken away from you, you feel like something has left your life. It’s a big hole.’’
The two Jansems, titled “Woman Seated’’ and “Boy,’’ have been in the custody of the FBI since Robert M. Mardirosian, a retired criminal defense lawyer, was convicted in federal court in Boston in August 2008 of possessing six of the stolen paintings. Mardirosian, who is also 76 and had stopped practicing law to become a painter and sculptor, is serving a seven-year prison term.
After a federal appeals court upheld his conviction this year and the US Supreme Court declined to consider further appeals, prosecutors were able to return the two Jansems.
Bakwin got the other five paintings back earlier and sold the Cezanne titled “Bouilloire et Fruits’’ in December 1999 for $29.3 million at Sotheby’s.
“Often, we’re here to deliver bad news,’’ Jack W. Pirozzolo, the first assistant US attorney, told reporters and photographers gathered in front of the paintings. “Today, we’re here delivering very good news.’’
All seven paintings, most of them post-Impressionist, had adorned a room in the house of Michael Bakwin and his wife, Doris, who died six years ago.
The highly publicized theft was so devastating to the family, Michael Bakwin said, that he, his wife, and their children moved to Ossining, N.Y., within a year.
According to evidence presented at Mardirosian’s trial, a client of his, David Colvin of Pittsfield, stole the artwork and then left them in the lawyer’s Watertown office.
Mardirosian had the paintings when Colvin was shot to death in February 1979 by two Boston men who had come to his home to collect on a debt.
Mardirosian kept the artwork in Massachusetts until 1988, when he moved it out of the country and eventually to a Swiss bank, prosecutors said. He was able to keep his possession secret through a variety of means, including creating a Panamanian shell company called Erie International Trading Co.
Mardirosian tried to move the paintings to London for sale, prosecutors said. But an investigation by the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that maintains a database of stolen artwork, determined that the artwork was stolen.
The company, which is headed by a hunter of missing art named Julian Radcliffe, contacted Bakwin and brokered an agreement in October 1999 with Erie for return of the Cezanne in exchange for relinquishing claims on the remaining six paintings, prosecutors said. The six were valued together at about $1 million.
Two months later, after getting the Cezanne back, Bakwin auctioned it through Sotheby’s in London.
In April 2005, Mardirosian had four of the remaining six paintings transferred from Geneva to Sotheby’s London auction house in preparation for a sale.
But Bakwin, with the help of the register, filed a suit to void the 1999 agreement and halt the sale. The lawsuit and public disclosure of Mardirosian’s name in connection with the paintings prompted the federal investigation that led to his surrender to federal authorities in 2007.
It took the jury about three hours to convict Mardirosian of possessing six stolen paintings.
Radcliffe, who stood next to Bakwin at the US attorney’s office yesterday, said the saga shows that “art crime doesn’t pay’’ and that hunters of stolen artwork “should never give up.’’
Bakwin has drawn his own conclusions. He now believes that individuals should not own extraordinarily valuable masterworks such as the Cezanne. It is too easy for such artwork to be stolen or destroyed by fire.
“It’s too much responsibility to have something like that,’’ he said.
The Jansems are another matter, he said. Asked whether he intends to hang them in his house in Ossining, he replied, “Yes, probably.’’
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
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