Artist: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor unleashes whale-like monster on Paris by Vicky Buffery

PARIS | Tue May 10, 2011 8:41pm IST

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - Entering Anish Kapoor's latest sculpture through a dark, windowless revolving door, visitors experience a momentary blackout before emerging into a womb-like cavity -- warm, oppressive and bathed in red light.

This is "Leviathan" at Paris's Grand Palais, the Mumbai-born British sculptor's first work in France for 30 years, to be unveiled to the public on Wednesday, and an experience one can only imagine is like being swallowed by a whale.

Famed for his critically acclaimed Cloud Gate in Chicago and Sky Mirror in New York, Kapoor is the fourth artist to be invited by the Grand Palais to create the annual Monumenta exhibition in its vast, glass-roofed central nave.

Previous exhibitors at the historic Art Nouveau building, erected for the 1900 World Fair, were Christian Boltanski in 2010, Richard Serra in 2008 and Anselm Kiefer in 2007.

"It's fabulous. It's a challenging space and that's the main motivation for me," Kapoor told Reuters on the sidelines of a preview of the exhibition.

In an interview with British media earlier on Tuesday, Kapoor dedicated his installation to artist Ai Weiwei, calling Ai's arrest and detention by Chinese authorities "barbaric" and urging museums and galleries to close for a day in protest.

Ai, an outspoken critic of China's human rights record, has not been heard of since he was detained at Beijing airport on April 3.

"This takes us back to a Soviet-style time when the voice of artists was seen as dangerous," Kapoor told the BBC.

ARCHAIC FORCE

Inside Leviathan, the viewer is invited to take part in a physical and mental experience, a sensory immersion in a translucent membrane designed to interact with the architecture of the building in which it is housed.

The red glow is created by daylight flooding from the nave's glass roof and through the sculpture's tent-like walls, and its intensity, as well as the temperature in the cavity, vary as clouds pass over the sun.

From the outside, however, Leviathan offers a completely different experience, a feeling of awe at the overwhelming scale of the bulbous, rubber-like installation, which stands 35 metres (yards) high and fills the entire 35,000 sq metres (376,700 sq ft) of the nave.

"For me, this huge archaic force is linked to darkness. It is a monster burdened with its corpse, which stands guard over some forgotten regions of our conscience," Kapoor explains.

Perhaps reminiscent of the intimate, womb-like interior, however, there is still something faintly erotic about the outside of the sculpture and it is hard to shake off the feeling one is looking at a giant, three-balled massage device, rather than a mythical sea-monster.

But as Kapoor says in a blurb on his work:

"I think there is no such thing as an innocent viewer. All viewing, all looking comes with complications, comes with previous histories, a more or less real past."

(Reporting by Vicky Buffery; editing by Paul Casciato)

Leviathan is 35 metres high and comprised of tautly-stretched PVC over a giant metal frame and is the highlight of the exhibition which opens tomorrow and runs until June 23.People can walk around it and inside it.

Kapoor said: 'My ambition is to create a space within a space, responding to the great height and light of the nave of the Grand Palais.

'People will be invited to enter the artwork to immerse themselves in its colour and it will be I hope a contemplative, poetic experience.'

http://gu.com/p/2p2xc

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1385590/Anish-Kapoor-Leviathan-sculpture-unveiled-Grand-Palais-Paris.html

Artists: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Clouds, 2002. Styropor. 105,1 x 187,6 x 40 cm. Courtesy Galerie Kreo, Paris © Paul Tahon und Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec
and the Ideal House exhibition ­ 2004 installation IMM Koln, Germany

http://www.bouroullec.com/

Artist: Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991 - 2009

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Droga, 2009.

SculptureCenter is pleased to premiere Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991 - 2009. Organized by SculptureCenter, this traveling exhibition will include a selection of the artist's most significant sculptures, including wall reliefs and monumental cedar works created from 1991 to 2009. The SculptureCenter presentation will also feature several works not traveling including a new cast resin piece to be installed in SculptureCenter's outdoor exhibition court. Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture will be accompanied by a fully- illustrated monograph co- published by Prestel and authored by art historian Patricia Phillips. The exhibition will be on view January 24 - March 28, 2011. An opening reception will take place Sunday January 23rd 5-7 pm and is open to the public. The artist will be present.

Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, glues, clamps, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work's textured, faceted surfaces. Her signature shapes are abstract, with references to things in the real world. Drawing on a range of sources, from the humble to the majestic, von Rydingsvard's work is recognized for its great psychological force and powerful physical presence. In wall sculptures such as Untitled (Spoon Shovel) (1991-1992) and Finger Spoon (2007), the artist lends a dignity to works resembling familiar household items; while the initially strange Maglownica (1995), a tall, bumpy cedar plank sheathed in cow intestines, turns out to have similar, personal associations. A maglownica is an object traditionally used by Polish farmwomen to soften sheets with a rubbing motion after washing. Von Rydingsvard's most enduring form is the bowl, which may appear as a shallow or towering form, and may alternately evoke nourishment, domesticity, the body, a simple enclosure, or a mountain, among other references. The exhibition includes the five undulating bowls that make up Krasawica II (1998-2001), Ukrainian for beautiful young woman, whose overall shape conveys a fluid sense of movement and vitality despite its substantial, weighty volume; as well as the large, low basin, ringed with bulbous, stuffed-intestinal forms, whose primal, physical gravity recalls the Ocean Floor (1996). The exhibition is organized by SculptureCenter and guest-curated by Helaine Posner.

After the New York presentation, the exhibition will travel to the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (May 16 - August 28,2011); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (September 23, 2011 - March 25, 2012) and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami (April 18 - August 4, 2012).

About the Artist

Ursula von Rydingsvard's first solo exhibition was presented in New York in 1975 and she has been exhibiting her work in museums and galleries internationally ever since. Her sculpture is included in the permanent collections of over thirty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Detroit Institute of Arts. Major permanent commissions of her work are view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; the Bloomberg Building, New York; and the Queens Family Courthouse, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.

Artist: Mariele Neudecker's - proposal

German artist Mariele Neudecker’s design, It’s Never Too Late and You Can’t Go Back, is a fictional mountainscape sculpture

It’s Never Too Late And You Can’t Go Back is elevated above the Plinth and represents a fictional mountainscape. It is ‘specific in its dramatically modelled detail’ and if viewed from above reveals the flipped and reversed shape of Britain. From below, the map is the right way around and more familiar. The juxtaposition of different views shifts the observer’s perception of the mountain from majestic and generic landscape to territorial space.

Historically mountains represent monumentality, conquest, glory, ownership. In turn, the sentiments frequently attached to landscapes have often served as reminders of our more fragile, human, moral and mortal positions in the grandest considerations of the sublime.

Artist biography

Born in 1965 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Mariele Neudecker lives and works in Bristol. Neudecker uses a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, film and photography. Her practice investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural world, focusing particularly on landscape representations within the Northern European Romantic tradition and notions of the Sublime. Central to the work is the human interest and relationship to landscape and its images used metaphorically for human psychology.

Mariele Neudecker has shown widely internationally, notably in Biennales in Japan, Australia and Singapore, also solo shows in Ikon Gallery, Tate StIves and Tate Britain. This year Mariele Neudecker has presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, won the Ludwig Gies Preis for her participation at Triennale Fellbach 2010 (Germany), made a new commission for Extraordinary Measures, Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has been invited to spend three month at the Headlands Centre for the Arts, San Francisco (USA). She is represented by gallery Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/index.html

Elmgreen & Dragset and Katharina Fritsch chosen for Fourth Plinth commissions

London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, has announced the winning artists of the next two commissions for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.

Scheduled for unveiling in 2012, Elmgreen & Dragset’s Powerless Structures, Fig.101 portrays a boy, ridding his rocking horse, cast in bronze. In the context of the iconography of Trafalgar Square the boy is elevated to the status of a historical hero. The work is intended to celebrate the heroism of growing up, gently questioning the tradition for monuments predicated on military victory or defeat. Here, there is not yet a history to commemorate—only a future to hope for.

Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn / Cock will be installed on the Fourth Plinth in 2013, showcasing a giant cockerel in ultramarine blue. Surrounded by Trafalgar Square’s genteel Georgian architecture, its unnatural scale and bold color aims to render the situation unreal in an effort to bring a sense of hallucination and uncertainty to the context.

The selection was made by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group chaired by Ekow Eshun. Ekow Eshun said: "Elmgreen and Dragset and Katherina Fritsch are distinguished artists with major international reputations. Their selection further underlines the importance and reputation of the Fourth Plinth as the most significant public art commission in Britain. Both have created imaginative and arresting artworks that fully respond to the uniqueness of their location and I can't wait to see their sculptures in Trafalgar Square in 2012 and 2013."

Trafalgar Square is a square in central London, England. With its position in the heart of London, it is a tourist attraction, and one of the most famous squares in the United Ki

ngdom and the world. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. Statues and sculptures are on display in the square, including a fourth plinth displaying changing pieces of contemporary art. The square is also used as a location for political demonstrations and community gatherings, such as the celebration of New Year's Eve in London.

Public art has always been surrounded by debate. This came to a head as three sculptures by British contemporary artists were temporarily placed on the empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, which had remained unoccupied for 158 years.

Designed in 1832 by Charles Barry, the square was always intended to give "scope and encouragement to sculptural work of a high class" and to give "distinctive and artistic character to the square." This aspiration was again addressed with the commissioning of new pieces of sculpture to be placed on the plinth.

The project was the brainchild of Prue Leith, who in her role as Deputy Chairman of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, began to seek out ideas about what should be done to enliven the fourth plinth and to put it to good use. She also looked for sponsorship for the fourth plinth project. The foundation's way forward was to fund the project in the manner of its own commissioning process - the provision of funds to realise the works for exhibition and which would ultimately be sold. The project took place from July 1999 and ran until May 2001.

The first sculpture to occupy the plinth was Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo: Behold the Man, installed in July 1999. A life-size figure in white marble resin standing at one end of the giant plinth, it portrayed Christ at the moment he was handed over to the crowds by Pontius Pilate. Wallinger stated, "Trafalgar Square has a tradition of being a place for crowds and it seemed to me to be the perfect context for this statue". Amidst the proud military Victorian heroes, the clean-shaven figure, with hands bound behind him and eyes downcast, portrayed an air of intense vulnerability, deliberately dwarfed by his formidable central London surroundings.

The second sculpture to be placed on the plinth, beside Nelson atop his 172 foot column, was Bill Woodrow's Regardless of History, installed in March 2000. This is the largest and most complex bronze sculpture ever undertaken by Woodrow, a great idea for a big civic sculpture. It is now installed in the sculpture park in Goodwood and looking for a good home. Cast in 130 pieces and weighing eleven and a half tonnes, the epic Regardless of History continued to spur on the debate about what should permanently occupy the plinth.

The third piece for the plinth was Rachel Whiteread's Monument. The transparency of the inverted cast of the plinth resulted in, as Whiteread stated, it "sometimes being present, sometimes being ephemeral, depending on the quality of daylight and the weather."

The Fourth Plinth Programme is funded by the Mayor of London with support from Arts Council England and sees new artworks being selected for the vacant plinth in a rolling program of new commissions.

www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/

Artist: Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington and the Lincoln Sculptures

When we lived in Bethel this is how the Lincoln sculpture looked in the downtown I always loved looking at it. Then when we moved to the mid-west and stumbled upon it again in Illinois I now think of it as something I was supposed to see and remember.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (March 10, 1876 – October 4 ,1973) was a prolific and innovative American sculptor. She was a master of naturalistic animal sculpture. Particularly noted for her equestrian statues she was active over a period of 70 years.

Huntington is recognized as one of America's finest animaliers, whose naturalistic works helped to bridge the gap between the traditional styles of the 1800s and the abstract styles of the mid-twentieth century. Her prominence also enabled other female artists to succeed. Her innovations in technique and display, as exhibited through her aluminum statues in Brookgreen Gardens, guarantee her place in the annals of art history.

During the 1940s and 1950s, she was increasingly distressed by modern art and what she considered a tasteless machine age. However, despite widespread public interest in abstract sculpture, Mrs. Huntington continued to win recognition and awards. She did her last equestrian statue when she was 91.

Huntington, along with her husband, Archer Milton Huntington, helped found nearly 20 museums and wildlife preserves as well as America's first sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009, the 2006 Springfield City Ornament depicts Abraham Lincoln:On the Prairie, the sculpture at the entrance to New Salem where he lived as a young man. The sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington portrays young Abe on horseback, reading a law book. Springfield artist Stan Squires interpreted the statue for the ornament design, silhouetting Lincoln and his horse between wisps of prairie grass and a split-rail fence.

The Public Warhol in a Public Square

Although winter hasn’t even started, there is already a lineup of public art projects scheduled for New York this spring. The Public Art Fund will be installing three sculpture exhibitions: at Union Square, City Hall Park and Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.

“These aren’t site-specific installations; they are site-responsive,” said Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, the nonprofit organization that presents art around the city. “They are all linked because they use New York City as a context.”

Perhaps the most surprising will be a 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture of Andy Warhol in Union Square (March 30 to Oct. 2). This will be only the second time the Public Art Fund has installed art there: the last project was “Woman’s Work” in 1993, the artist Rhonda Roland Shearer’s eight bronze sculptures of women scrubbing toilets, vacuuming and shopping for groceries while clutching squirming children to their bosoms.

But the New York artist Rob Pruitt chose this bustling area for the Warhol sculpture, called “The Andy Monument.” He had a particular corner in mind, at 17th Street and Broadway, just outside the building that once housed Warhol’s Factory. The sculpture depicts Warhol as he looked in the 1970s, in his signature fright wig, blue jeans and a tweed jacket. He is posed with a camera around his neck, carrying a shopping bag full of issues of Interview magazine, the publication he helped found.

“It’s conceived as a classical monument although it’s very contemporary,” Mr. Baume said. “It’s a real public Andy from the period where he would stand in Union Square giving out the magazines.”

By contrast, the London-based sculptor Eva Rothschild has claimed the plaza at the entrance to Central Park for a delicate work that she said would take “the form of a multidirectional arch.” The piece, which will be on view March 1 to Aug. 28, will rise nearly 20 feet and spill over the center of the plaza. Fashioned from red, green and black steel tubing four inches in diameter, it will echo the branches of trees in the park and be, as Ms. Rothschild put it, “another gateway between two different worlds of urban experience.”

Back downtown, in City Hall Park, more than 20 sculptures by Sol LeWitt will be installed from May 25 through Dec. 2. LeWitt, who died in 2007, was known for his Minimalist geometric work, and Mr. Baume has assembled large-scale pieces dating from the 1960s through 2006, including many that will be seen in this country for the first time. They will come from private collections and museums both here and abroad.

“There hasn’t been a career overview of his structures,” Mr. Baume said.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 25, 2010 - New York Times

Artist Portfolio - Pamela Ayres

Artist: Pam Ayres - Installation at Michigan Legacy Art Park 2010

The Water Brought the Trees, July 2010 - July 2011

Michigan Legacy Art Park, Thompsonville, MI

A site specific project for Michigan Legacy Art Park in Thompsonville, Michigan. The project involves using naturally felled branches and broken young trees that have been cleared and discarded. I am be shaving off areas of the old bark and exposing the smooth wood underneath. The installation will be shaped into boat like sculpture with branches protruding through the structure so that it hovers above the ground at about eye level. I am using simple building materials and methods to put the work together such and latching with wire and then covering the heavy wire with natural fibered rope.

http://www.michlegacyartpark.org/news_detail.asp?ID=28

Artist: Pam Ayres - Natural Competence - Rock Island, IL

Petah Coyne: Everthing That Rises Must Converge

MASS MOCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
NORTH ADAMS, MA
Through May 1 2011
Curated by Denise Markonish

Petah Coyne, Untitled #1240 (Black Cloud), 2007–2008, taxidermy birds, silk flowers, silk/rayon velvet, plaster statuary, feathers, wax, cables, cable nuts, paint, plaster, metal, felt, pearl-headed hat pins, pigment, thread, wood, vinyl, dimensions variable. Untitled # 1240 (Black Cloud) courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY

Unlike many contemporary artists who focus on social or media-related issues, Petah Coyne imbues her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Her sculptures convey an inherent tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death. Coyne's work seems Victorian in its combination of an overloaded refinement with a distinctly decadent and morbid undercurrent. Her innovative use of materials includes dead fish, mud, sticks, black sand, old car parts, wax, satin ribbons, artificial flowers and birds, birdcages, and most recently, taxidermy animals, Madonna statues, and horsehair.

A selection of Coyne's recent work along with two new works are on view at MASS MoCA. Viewers are transported when entering the galleries, baroque works delicately combining taxidermy birds and dripping with wax rise up from the floor and chandelier-type sculptures descend from the ceiling, taking full advantage of the multiple vantage point of MASS MoCA's triple height gallery space. This exhibition particularly focuses on works from the last 10 years including selections from Coyne's series based on Dante's Inferno, such as Untitled #1180 (Beatrice) which transforms Dante's love into a monumental sculpture of black wax covered flowers with the most subtle color breaking through, velvet and various taxidermy birds diving in and out of the towering form. Galleries filled with white wax sculptures are adjacent to the black works -- these pale, ghostly images call forth Victorian lace and at the same time the frailty of life. Some of Coyne's ghostly photographs featuring blurred figures of children and Buddhist monks are also on view.

Petah Coyne was born in Oklahoma City in 1953. She lives and works in New York and New Jersey. Solo exhibitions include Vermilion Fog at Galerie LeLong, NY; Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Petah Coyne: Hairworks Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH. Selected group exhibitions include Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY, the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Uncontained, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Material Actions, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. Coyne�s work is in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and many more.

This exhibition is made possible by the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust, Galerie Lelong, McBride & Associates Architects, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Additional support provided by Dennis Braddock and Janice Niemi, Carol and William Browne, Linda and Ronald F. Daitz, Pamela and Robert Goergen, Jane and Leonard Korman, Anita Laudone and Colin Harley, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Kari McCabe and Nate McBride, Kate and Hans Morris, Sam and Martha Peterson, Elizabeth Ryan, and Stone Ridge Orchard.

Images from the Brooklyn Museum Show - https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/1033/Petah_Coyne%3A_Untitled_Installation/image/5886/community/posse/tab/photos/right-tab/talk/