Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Artist: John Currin


Blond Angle

Dimensions: diam.: 16 in.

Medium: oil on canvas

Creation Date: 2001

On View

At Indianapolis Museum of Art

Friday, February 4, 2011

MOVING SENDAK’S WALL


Maurice Sendak painted this mural in the New York apartment of his friends the Chertoffs. The family donated the mural (and plaster) to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia; through April, the public can watch repairs in progress.

Maurice Sendak has almost never applied his signature toothy creatures to walls, but in 1961 he gave a mural to friends, Lionel and Roslyn Chertoff, on Central Park West in New York. In their apartment, he spent months filling a bedroom wall with costumed children leading birds and circus animals. He inscribed the names of the Chertoffs’ children, Larry and Nina, on a parasol wound around a lion’s tail.

Three years ago the family donated the mural to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which owns about 10,000 of Mr. Sendak’s works. The Chertoff painting, still attached to 1,000 pounds of Manhattan plaster, has been mounted on an aluminum-reinforced wall at the museum’s Sendak gallery.

Through April, the public can watch repairs in progress for two hours on Wednesdays (about 1 to 2 p.m. and 6 to 7 p.m.). Milner & Carr Conservation will patch cracks, remove patches of whitewash and fill in lost details. Mr. Sendak is scheduled to complete the work.

“We’re hoping there’s some tiny little thing that he’ll add a flourish to, maybe one little blade of missing grass,” said Catherine L. Myers, a senior conservator at Milner & Carr.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Beautiful Views of Planet Earth





Loreena McKennitt - Night Ride Across the Caucasus

I found this at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJQoF-hamHg

Saturday, January 29, 2011

MONUMENTAL

Dec 3, 2010 - Feb 24, 2011




Chimta by Subodh Gupta



Chicago, Illinois: Monumental: A Show of Epic Proportions at Walsh Gallery

Monumental exhibits 15 contemporary Asian and Asian American artists whose works share--whether in painting, sculpture, installation or photography--a love of the grand. These artists pushed the boundaries of scale to create works of a monumental nature. Often embedded in these works were the ideas of historical commentary, whether of a personal narrative or global nature. These large-scale pieces were created by artists from China, India, Korea and Indonesia, including Yue Minjun, Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Rong Rong and inri, Zhang Dali, Chen Wenbo, Zhu Wei, Kim Joon, Han Seok Hyun, Ravinder Reddy, the Gao Brothers and Heri Dono. The show also includes works by Chicago artists Indira Johnson and Von Kommanivanh. The opening reception is Friday Dec. 3 from 5:00 - 8:00 pm. The exhibit runs until February 24, 2011.

Monumental is primarily a collection show of founder Julie Walsh, which means that the pieces in this exhibit not only talk about history, but are also historical themselves. These are early works by some of the biggest names in the industry that Ms. Walsh purchased before Chinese art and Indian art had been discovered in a global sense. Works in the exhibit fall into three primary categories: current events, personal narrative, and specific historical events.




Personal History

Subodh Gupta's large scale oval installation called Chimta is made up entirely of stainless steel tongs which were made in India. In this work Mr. Gupta helps expose some of the clichés of India as he deftly explores the question of just how "Indian" contemporary Indian art needs to be. He takes the most mundane object and converts it into an assemblage of massive proportions.

Referencing African and Egyptian sculpture, Ravinder Reddy's gold leaf covered six-foot fiberglass bust Tara is at once a portrait of a contemporary deity and a tribute to that which endures in art over time. Mr. Reddy feels that what endures is woman's strength of character. His sculptures are created from sketches of women that he sees in his hometown in Southern India.

Past History

The Gao Brothers' comical icon Miss Mao is a seven-foot silver painted statue of Mao Zedong as a woman, including both Mao's distinctive wart and full breasts.

Atul Dodiya's nine by six-foot shop shutter called E.T. is composed of multiple layers. On the outside of the shutter is a painting of a grand historical moment when Einstein met Rabindranath Tagore in India. The outside of the shutter represents the great ideals of how India could be. When the shutter is lifted it reveals a painting of a surreal landscape with a skeletal scribe on top of an airplane dropping either food packages or bombs on a desolate landscape with a few houses.

Monumental delivers an array of historically impressive works through scale or context. Works by the artists in Monumental have been seen in important biennials around the world as well as in exhibits in major international museums.


WALSH GALLERY
118 N. Peoria St 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60607

T-SA 10:30-5:30
p 312.829.3312
f 312.829.3316

info@walshgallery.com
www.walshgallery.com

Saturday, January 22, 2011

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.