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Showing posts with label PARIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PARIS. Show all posts
15.1.16
STEVE MCQUEEN | MARIAN GOODMAN
1.10.15
ASIA NOW | PARIS ASIAN ART FAIR
| Chen Wei, Night Paris, 2015. Archival inkjet print, 150 x 187.5 cm. © The artist and Leo Xu Projects. |
ASIA NOW – Paris Asian Art Fair | |||
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3.4.15
CAROL RAMA | MUSEE D'ART MODERNE PARIS
LA PASSION SELON CAROL RAMA
03 APRIL - 12 JULY 2015
The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is presenting France's first retrospective devoted to Italian artist Carol Rama. Long sidelined by art history and the feminist movement, Rama's work ranges through all the avant-garde movements of the 20th century while defying any pigeonholing. The ferocity of an oeuvre oscillating between abstraction and figuration calls on us to take a fresh look at official art currents and established categories
This is a hybrid oeuvre in which subject and medium coalesce, from mouth/watercolour to penis-breast/rubber and eye/bricolage. A seeming jumble of themes and materials, Rama's different series in fact come together as a coherent whole, tackling notions like madness, fetishism, ordure, abjectness, pleasure, animality and death.
Born into a traditional Catholic bourgeois family in Turin in 1918, this self-taught artist has said, 'I've never needed a model for my painting; the sense of sin is my teacher.' Beginning with the early 1930s watercolours that caused censorship clashes, she developed a distinctive visual system at odds with normative, male-dominated modernism. In 1950 her work took an abstract turn, moving towards a personal, organic vision of Concrete Art. Twenty years later she began using strips cut from bicycle tyres as sensual, minimalist 'image material'. In 1980 she reverted to figuration with watercolours painted on architectural illustrations. Her most recent major series, dating from the 2000s, takes its inspiration from mucca pazza (mad cow disease) and consists of provocative rubber compositions that could be termed 'queer Arte Povera'.
Despite a solitary, eccentric existence far removed from movements and the fashionable, Rama has always mixed with artists and intellectuals, among them Carlo Mollino, Edoardo Sanguineti, Lea Vergine, Man Ray, Pasolini and Andy Warhol. She now appears as a figure crucial to any understanding of the representational changes in the art of the 20th century. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, she was shown there again in 2013, and her work has become the focus of intense interest on the part of museums, art historians and other artists.
Exhibition concieved by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP), organized by the MACBA and coproduced with PARIS MUSÉES / MAMVP, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (IMMA) and GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.
Exhibition concieved by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP), organized by the MACBA and coproduced with PARIS MUSÉES / MAMVP, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (IMMA) and GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.
#ExpoCarolRama
Curator : Anne Dressen
12.6.11
ANISH KAPOOR | LEVIATHAN
Inside the belly of the beast
Anish Kapoor’s installation Leviathan opens at the Grand Palais in Paris
PARIS. Anish Kapoor today unveils his largest and most ambitious sculpture to date. Leviathan is a gigantic installation made from 18 tonnes of PVC, which fills the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris and encompasses 13,500 sq. m of space.
The huge biomorphic form consists of four connected orbs supported not by a steel skeleton but with air, which is pumped continuously into the structure.
Visitors to the Grand Palais will first use a revolving door to enter inside the belly of Kapoor’s beast. This is a vast, soaring chamber bathed in red light, which the artist says he hopes has a “cathedral-like quality”.
From here visitors exit to see Leviathan from the outside for the first time. “The exterior appears to bear no relation to the interior yet they co-exist simultaneously. That’s what the work is about,” says Kapoor.
Although the Indian-born British artist is not known for thinking small, he says the challenges of making Leviathan were unprecedented. The first was to cope with the light which floods through the Grand Palais’ glass ceilings. “The light is the killer. It’s almost brighter inside than it is outside. It crushes things. The thing is to try and reverse it.”
To do this, Kapoor chose “a very dark membrane” but he says he didn’t know what this would look like on a giant scale until the work was erected. “We only had one shot to get it right,” says Kapoor, adding that he and his crew took a week to install the work.
A known perfectionist, Kapoor says the work was designed down to the last millimetre. “The tailoring is perfect,” he says. “It has to be. Otherwise there would be wrinkles. There are no wrinkles,” he says adding that the computer design for Leviathan was done in England, the PVC was cut in Germany, it was stitched together in Italy and a Czech crew installed it in Paris.
Although Kapoor used the very latest technology to build Leviathan, he says his intention was to create a form that is “primal” in its appearance. “Part of my inspiration is Stanley Kubrick [the director whose films include ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’],” he says, adding that abstract art is able to find the “expressive force of primary forms”.
Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture as their annual Monumenta exhibition, the sculpture cost €3m to manufacture.
Kapoor has dedicated Leviathan to the imprisoned artist Ai Weiwei who has not been seen or heard from since he was detained by Chinese authorities in early April. Describing Ai’s imprisonment as “barbaric”, Kapoor said he believes the art world should do more to campaign for his release. “Perhaps all museums and galleries should be closed for a day...some such campaign needs to form itself.”
Leviathan is on display at the Grand Palais until 23 June.
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