STUDIO-ONLINE

Averroé, 1967 © Giulio Paolini

In connection with Moderna Museet’s 50th Anniversary in 2008, three exhibitions will focus on cultural ‘hotspots’ around the world in the 60’s: Rio de Janeiro, Milan/Turin and Los Angeles. The idea is to explore the period when Moderna Museet was created from an international perspective, by featuring a representative selection of works of art, architecture, design, literature, film and music never before shown together in Sweden.

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Time & Place: Milan/Turin, 1958-1968 investi­gates a decisive moment in Italian art, focusing on these two cities as emblematic places of birth for a new identity. The exhibition explores the shift from the ‘Infor­male’ to the Arte povera, in a unique selection which gives a contemporary reflection of the period.

Proposing a radically new perspective, Time & Place: Milan/Turin, 1958-1968 is intended to concentrate on issues developed by this environment, such as the mo­nochrome, the zero degree of signs, and the tabula rasa of conceptual practice.

The Italian avant-garde was recognized, already in the 1960s, by former Moderna Museet director Pontus Hultén, who acknowledged the leading roles held by Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, who in 1967 presented a solo show at Moderna Museet.

In the first section, the exhibition presents the situation ‘beyond the Informale’, with the birth of Italian experiences, internationally known, of formal and chromatic re­duction, through the use of monochrome and the conception of space in researches beyond the surface: next to Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, artists such as Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Gianni Colombo, Agostino Bonalumi, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Nigro, Rodolfo Aricò are represented.

The second part of the exhibition has a documentary tone, presenting the moment of artistic transition from Milan to Turin, reconstructing seminal events and exhibiting sculptural objects, photographs, invitation cards, catalogues from the period. This section will also explore the importance of the new sculpture as object, presenting, among others, Manzoni’s Linee (Lines) and Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), sculptu­res by Fausto Melotti and Lucio Fontana, works by Vincenzo Agnetti and Gastone Novelli together with pieces by Valerio Adami, Enrico Baj, and Lucio del Pezzo.

The third part features artworks which anticipate and conflate the developments of Arte povera, an approach based on incorporating unconventional materials with a prevailing conceptual dimension. This is a crucial moment when the frame of refe­rence is moved from post-war Milan to the pulsating social reality of Turin, which sees the emergence of future masters such as Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro, Miche­langelo Pistoletto, Mario and Marisa Merz, Gianni Piacentino, Carolrama, Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo, Giorgio Griffa, Paolo Icaro and others.

In connection with the exhibition, Moderna Museet will also host a programme of films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and other Ita­lian film-makers.
Curator: Luca Massimo Barbero, Venice, Italy.

Project curator: Cecilia Widenheim, Moderna Museet.

Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 5195 5279
Website: www.modernamuseet.se

Man and Woman, 2006, Silkscreen, drawing ink, watercolour.

Something Unexpected Gallery presents Secret Worlds, a solo exhibition of recent works by the Lithuanian artist Jurgita Gerlikaite.

Jurgita Gerlikaite eagerly took over the endless possibilities of the digital techniques. They let her continue and develop the experiments she has been performing through the years within more traditional graphic genre as woodcut and photogravure. All these experiments are related to the human world of imagination, also the visual and cognitive challenge of it. By the refined aesthetic means of the art piece we are attracted or, better to say, seduced into the world, where beside the fantastic surface basic human experiences of good and evil hides. Last but not least, the artist tackles such conceptions and terms as sin, evil, light, darkness, decline, resurrection, which we are forced to be related to, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the existential plan.

It is claimed that the new digital techniques either are too simple and shallow. Jurgita Gerlikaite’s compositions prove the opposite. In her hands the digital process transforms from means for playful experiment into a place for existential and metaphysical contemplations not losing a thing of the absolutely visual excitation. By this double grasp of aesthetic excitation and cognitive depth Jurgita Gerlikaite’s graphical art pieces are extremely exciting and competent. (Tom Jørgensen, Bachelor in Art History, art writer and author).

Jurgita Gerlikaite received BA in Art History and Theory in Vilnius Art Academy (Lithuania), studied printmaking and intaglio in Icelandic College of Arts & Crafts (Reykjavik, Iceland), Digital Imaging and Photopolymer film in The Printmakers’ Experimentarium with Henrik Bøegh in Copenhagen (Denmark). Now she is studying for her MA degree in UNESCO Cultural Management and Cultural Policy in Vilnius Art Academy.

Artist’s Reception with music and refreshments:
Saturday, March 15, 6 – 8 PM
Sunday, March 16, 2 – 4 PM

Something Unexpected Art Gallery
152 Main street,
Nyack, NY 10960
Phone: 845 358 1196
Website: www.something-unexpected.com

Les 23 et 24 février sera inauguré le Mémorial de l’internement et de la déportation. Créé par la Ville de Compiègne autour des 3 bâtiments préservés du camp de Royallieu, le Mémorial de l’internement et de la déportation sera un lieu de mémoire, un lieu d’histoire et un lieu d’exposition.

Dans la mémoire commune des deux guerres mondiales, Compiègne évoque la signature des armistices de 1918 et de 1940. Hitler avait personnellement tenu à imposer aux Français l’humiliation de reconnaître leur défaite là-même où, 22 ans plus tôt, ces derniers étaient les vainqueurs. Mais Compiègne a également abrité sur le site de Royallieu le seul camp d’internement français placé dès le début sous l’autorité de l’armée allemande. La plupart des 45 000 internés n’y ont fait que transiter, avant d’être déportés massivement vers les camps nazis de concentration et d’extermination. Ces internés du camp de Royallieu formaient une population assez composite, tant par leurs nationalités que par les raisons de leur arrestation. C’était surtout des prisonniers politiques et des résistants, mais également des internés civils (Russes, Américains, etc .) et des juifs. C’est d’ailleurs de Compiègne, en mars 1942, que le premier convoi part de France, conduisant un millier de juifs vers Auschwitz-Birkenau. Entre 1942 et 1944, une trentaine de convois quitteront le « Frontstalag 122 ».

La caserne militaire de Royallieu, créée en 1913, s’étendait jusqu’à 2006 sur 16 hectares. En 1939, elle sert d’hôpital d’évacuation puis se transforme en juin 1940 en camp où l’armée allemande rassemble des soldats français et britanniques faits prisonniers. En 1941, le « Frontstalag 122 » interne des prisonniers politiques et constitue une réserve d’otages. C’est sur cet ancien camp, dont 3 bâtiments sur 25 ont été conservés, que le Mémorial est aujourd’hui créé. Il permet alors de comprendre comment les Allemands sont passés d’une politique de répression, marquée par les exécutions d’otages, à une politique de déportation.

Les documents d’archives présentés dans le parcours proviennent des autorités allemandes et françaises ainsi que des internés : lettres manuscrites, documents administratifs, photographies, projections, témoignages sonores.

Le Mémorial a été créé par la ville de Compiègne,
en partenariat avec l’État, le département de l’Oise,
la région Picardie, la Fondation du Patrimoine,
la Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations,
et sous l’égide de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation.

Architecture, scénographie et ingénierie
ont été conçues par un groupement de maîtrise d’œuvre :

Jean-Jacques Raynaud, architectes, mandataire du groupement
Siretec, ingénierie bâtiment
Malice Images, conception et réalisation de la scénographie audiovisuelle
LM communiquer, graphistes
Raymond Belle, éclairagiste
Paysage et Lumière, paysagistes
LTA économistes de la construction
AVLS, acousticiens
Didier Ghislain, perspectives

Le parcours historique a été composé par l’historien Christian Delage, qui a également choisi les films qui s’y inscrivent.

Mémorial de l’internement et de la déportation, Camp de Royallieu
2 bis avenue des Martyrs de la Liberté
60200 Compiègne
Tél. : +33 (0)3 44 96 37 00
Website: memorial.compiegne.fr

Alain Martinez is a young Cuban artist living and working in Bejucal, a small town in Havana province. His works have been shown in exhibitions in Chile, Germany and Spain. Recently, he took part in an exhibition in Havana in support of ‘World Aids Day’: CuidArte: Erotic Art, where his work was shown alongside that of other well-known Cuban artists, including Adigio Benitez, Roberto Fabelo, Nelson Dominguez, Choco, and Arturo Montoto.

Alain’s art is firmly rooted in the artistic traditions of Latin America – of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. He absorbed European expressionism and recreated it in the context of local tradition. In doing so, he followed the path of Latin America’s leading painters, including the great Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam.

In the early decades of the 20th century, expressionism was adopted with enthusiasm by nationalist-minded artists who quickly realised that it could be fused with local ‘Indian’ culture to create a new Latin American art-form. The 1920s and 1930s, in particular, saw the flowering of this indigenismo. Soon, Latin expressionism – often leaning towards surrealism – became the leading art form throughout the continent.

Alain Martinez continues to work within this tradition.

During the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Cuba experienced severe hardships – economic and social – which were reflected in the work of Cuban artists. Many of them, including some of the most prominent, left the country and achieved success abroad. A new generation came to the fore as the economy recovered, but their art had changed, influenced by international trends such as conceptualism. Alain, however, working in Bejucal, pursued his own path.

Alain’s paintings exude a passion unusual even for Cuban art. At first you see the flamboyant colour, the festive dance. Then the darker mood emerges, the despair, the furtive sexual longings. Key to these paintings is the mask motif, the disguise. It tells you that nothing here is what it seems. A critic writing in El Habanero of Martinez’s solo exhibition in Cuba last October, remarked on his “figurative expressionism” and his “extraordinary dramatic force”.

Many of his pictures suggest a narrative, but he insists that he doesn’t tell stories. “My paintings are moments, ephemeral situations that were significant for me. But I’d rather not tell a story – maybe just insinuate it. I’m pleased if some of my memories are framed and hanging from the wall, subject to whatever interpretations they might suggest.”

This exhibition is the first showing of Martinez’s work in the UK. The artist will be coming to London from Cuba.

The Chanbers Gallery
23 Long Lane,
London EC1A 9HL
Telephome: 0207 778 1600
Website: www.thechambersgallery.co.uk

Andrew McAttee will be launching his much anticipated riotous new work in his solo show Anti-Gravity at the FORSTER Gallery.

The highly collectable artist’s work delicately balances dreamy otherworldly landscapes with his trademark psychedelic palette in vast pop art canvases that will dominate the east London gallery. The vivid and dazzling explosions of colour and light inherent in the works reflect his desire to project pure optimism – as an alternative to the gritty realism of modern life. McAttee’s comic-strip pop art landscapes burst forth with abstract shapes and intense colours, demonstrating street art sensibilities like blended colour and line, imbuing his work with a distinctive graffiti aesthetic.

McAttee has commented: “My aim is to provide the viewer with a colourful riot of gravity-less forms set in highly-layered, seemingly endless space with a sense of ambiguity, humour and celebration.

“Anti-Gravity is to draw attention to the weightless nature of a lot of modern art from Andy Warhol’s Silver Balloons or Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings. I also wanted to suggest the opposing of a negative force while highlighting the celestial aspects of my work and in doing so, to say something about not being held down.”

Having made his mark as prominent graffiti street artist STET, McAttee has been fusing his spray can talent and urban style with fine art training since completing his degree from Central St Martins in 1995 – making the transition from street to gallery with his first solo show taking place in 2003.

His work draws on a wide range of sources including other graffiti art, comic book graphics, pop art and abstract expressionism.

Recent commissions have seen McAttee work with brands ranging from Benson & Hedges, Nike, Heavenly Records (for the Little Ones, touring with Kaiser Chiefs) and fashion designer Antonio Berardi, amongst others. Press includes a review in Time Out, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and the Intergalactic Times.

An extended catalogue is being published which includes an in-depth interview with Dazed and Confused Art Editor Francesca Gavin and a critical text written by Ben Cranfield, art historian.

Andrew McAttee studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s, London, graduating in 1995. Since graduating in 1995 he has had numerous exhibitions including solo shows Yeah, Yeah, Yeah 2007 (FORSTER), Off the Wall 2003 (thecentralhouse) and Suck it and See 1997 (Elms Lesters). FORSTER has exhibited McAttee’s work internationally including in Basel, New York and Miami.

FORSTER Gallery
1 Chapel Place
Rivington Street
London EC2A 3DQ
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7739 7572
Website: www.forstergallery.com/

Russian and Ukrainian Impressionist art of the later 20th century shines with vitality and optimism. Alongside the industrial landscapes are intimate observations of everyday life. Easy flowing brushwork moulds a romantic and energetic world, compensating for the daily hardships of the time.

Over 100 artworks- oils, watercolours, prints and drawings are on display at the Chambers Gallery for the whole of February.

Artists on show include G.Shyshko, R.Shusterman, V.Zhugan, L.Kudryavtzev, K. Lomykin, V.Litvinienko, P.Magro, O.Voloshinov, M.Roiter amongst many others.

The Chambers Gallery
23 Long Lane,
London EC1A 9HL
Telephone: 0207 778 1600
Website: www.chambersandpartners.co.uk

Adan Neate, ‘Fragile’ Self Portrait 2007

When Adam Neate was still an unknown artist leaving his painted cardboard works out on the street, he wrote to Ron English in New York to say how much he admired his work.

For the first time, THE ADAM AND RON SHOW brings together these two urban art painters, both masters of their own style, in a major heavyweight show at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms.

The exhibition will include a 50’ site-specific painting by Ron English, recreating Picasso’s Guernica. Over the past few years, Ron has created dozens of versions of Picasso’s masterpiece, transforming the original Spanish civilian characters into Disney characters, Peanuts characters, soccer players, schoolchildren, and many others. As part of this series he painted the world’s largest version of Guernica at the Station Museum in Houston, being one foot longer and one foot wider than Picasso’s original and featuring schoolchildren playacting the violent scene of the original.

Ron English, Brown Cow Girl

Adam Neate is a fearless painter who is constantly experimenting with styles and techniques, and continually pushing forward with his work. Paintings selected for this forthcoming show will demonstrate how he is mastering the mediums of both cardboard and canvas, with complex layering and bold use of paint. As well as a series of his coveted self portraits, the show will include a collection of his narrative, social documentary paintings. His fluid brush strokes, and impeccable line are apparent in both his two dimensional pieces and his multi-layered three dimensional works.

Adam Neate’s extraordinary development in the past 12 months has not gone unnoticed by international collectors, and his works are contended by major collectors and celebrities and lauded by international critics. Neate’s work has recently sold impressively at both Sotheby’s and Bonham’s auction houses, exceeding original estimates up to tenfold.

Adam Neate
ADAM NEATE first came to the public’s attention by bounteously leaving thousands of his paintings on the street of London, for people to take, or leave, at will. Since then he has rapidly become Britain’s most exciting young artist and a much heralded painter at the forefront of a radical new movement in contemporary art.

Whilst the world is sitting up and taking notice of a host of emerging urban/ graffiti artists - Neate is a street artist with a difference. His work is technically expert and has won him acknowledgement from Tate, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery.

Last August, Adam’s first one man show at Elms Lesters, the sell-out exhibition entitled PAINTINGS. POTS and PRINTS demonstrated his masterful use of different materials, garnering global interest; Adam’s works have been included in major auctions of Contemporary and Urban Art in the past months.

His gallery pieces, the majority of which are still painted on cardboard, have immediacy and a raw energy, through the use of aerosols, marker pens, and acrylic and gloss paints.

Ron English
RON ENGLISH first hijacked billboards when he was an art student as a way of displaying his art to as many people as possible – it was later that he realised he could make political statements by the same means. Since then Ron has ‘pirated’ or ‘liberated’ over one thousand billboards, replacing existing advertisements with his own hand-painted “subvertisements.” getting his own socio-political messages across. He is recognised as the father of AGIT-POP, a hybrid of Pop Art that is fuelled by a more personal, hands-on socially responsible attitude.

His gallery works on canvas contain an equally biting commentary whilst being flawlessly painted in a hyper-real style, loaded with the iconography of his generation.

His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and his work is included in prominent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York; few of them were also featured in Morgan Spurlock’s film ‘SUPER SIZE ME”.

His film “POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English” was released in 2006.

Elms Lesters Painting Rooms
1-3-5 Flitcroft Street
London WC2H 8DH
Phone: +44 207 836 6747
Website: www.elmslesters.co.uk/

Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin have been working together for over twenty years, painting studies and comments on the subject of Nature. This new body of paintings is primarily concerned with the environment and issues related to global warming.Stepanek and Maslin’s most recent work addresses the subject of humankind’s paradoxical relationship to its natural environment. In the moment when climate change denial has finally crumbled, the paintings have gained a great poignancy. Since the 1980’s scientific research has left no doubt about the consequences of human carbon dioxide output upon the environment. Stepanek and Maslin have followed this research with keen interest and it has found expression in their images in a variety of forms.

Last year the horizon line returned to Stepanek and Maslin’s work. A passing glimpse might register the paintings as conventional landscapes, but when the viewer lingers a moment longer they are quickly caught up in a mass of visual subterfuge. This is not a horizon line stretching serenely from one edge of the canvas to another, confirming the human’s place in the world. Instead the viewer is confronted with segmented landscapes, divided by bold verticals of tree trunks, which invade the foreground and split the canvas into a series of “frames”, each containing disparate scenes of nature. At times the segments are nominally linked, at others they disregard visual sense and convention, the horizon jumping from one level to another as the length of the painting is traversed.

The nature portrayed is still beautiful in its individual elements, nothing is ugly or shocking. The images are not “catastrophic” (a term now used with pornographic abandon when referring to climate). Yet the paintings are disturbing because of their quirkiness and restlessness, the viewer is left trying to piece together some sense, attempting to retrieve harmony and order.

Common with their work of the 1990’s and beyond, the paintings remain an uninhabitated stage. Indeed it is from the absence of humanity that they derive part of their tension. It is the viewer who must create the story; the artists have simply provided the set. There are different paths and ways within the new works, which enable a variety of scenarios and outcomes. The observer is left to decide on the direction, to face the choice of which path to follow and risk taking the wrong track.

The compositions appear photographic or computer manipulated, “cut and paste” comes to mind, but while the paintings are constructed from an array of images, which Stepanek and Maslin have photographed themselves, the computer doesn’t play a role. The paintings are composed on the canvas, built up from individual elements to create a complete image. Each element finds its place in an ongoing process of decision making between the artists in front of the canvas. They reiterate that the reworking of images is an artistic process with hundreds of years of history, not the result of the recent development of computer software.

The artists create a painted space where it is difficult to judge in which moment, or state, we stand. It is neither the ideal paradise nor the post-human order. Using simple compositional devices they create a familiar yet chaotic world, a vision simultaneously utopic and dystopic, manouevering between culture and nature, asking to what degree these opposites are mutually dependent.

We live in a world in which natural beauty is idealised and revered, and concurrently neglected and extinguished. The consequence of our actions, of our indifference, is becoming forever more foreseeable and unpredictable. Stepanek and Maslin’s paintings are a reminder of all that we should strive to keep when we find ourselves in a process of rapid loss.

Purdy Hicks Gallery
65 Hopton Street
London
SE1 9GZ
Telephone: 44 207 401 9229
Website: www.purdyhicks.com

Jolly and sinister in just about equal measure, Marisol Malatesta’s artwork can often resemble the traditional Peruvian Ekeko dolls which were an inspiration for I’m Not Pregnant. Not only are Malatesta’s drawings and paintings characterized by an unpolished vibrancy typical of the South American dolls, with their wide-mouthed cartoonishness, but also many of the works bear a tangible connection with Peruvian folklore and antiquity. Indeed, the geometric designs present in several sketches directly invoke the ziggurats and ancient monuments of the Inca Empire.

Malatesta’s work references the disciplines of architecture and archaeology in its incorporation of the monumental and the mythic, but also examines the discourses of colonialism and phallocentrism which underpin them. Perhaps the simplest but also the most apposite description of the work comes from the artists herself – “cheerful characters in weird scenarios”.

Having inspired this show, it is only fitting that an Ekeko doll should form its key component. The main exhibition space is focused towards a new sculpture of a self-portrait Ekeko doll, NAME OF PIECE (Malatesta’s first significant work in this medium). The sculpture is surrounded by a number of sketches and paintings which are exhibited together here for the first time.

The smaller anteroom presents Malatesta’s smaller sketches and drawings, and is inspired by archival black rooms in museums. These pieces highlight the artist’s exploration of archaeology and invite the viewer to engage with her work as part of this ongoing dialogue.

Born in Peru, Marisol Malatesta completed her fine art MA at Byam Shaw in 2003. She has exhibited in shows around the UK, including Did You Feed the Duck? at Former Nylon Gallery in 2003 and Tertulia at the University of the Arts Gallery in 2005, and in Peru (Spinning Stories Project at the Forum Gallery in Lima). Malatesta was recently selected for the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize 2007, exhibiting in the Jerwood Space (London), The BayArt Gallery (Cardiff) and the Lowry (Manchester). She lives and works in London.

Meals & SUVs
First floor
295- 297 Haggerston Road,
Dalston,
London,
E8 4EN
Telephone: 07817406098
Website: www.mealsandsuvs.co.uk

“ If I couldn’t draw, I don’t know what I’d do.
Drawing is my life.”

Andy has spent the past 25 years working in Advertising and Design. He has won many coveted awards for his work which includes some memorable campaigns for Nat West with the ‘Piggies’ and the fruit drink, ‘UmBongo!.’

During his working life he has also delved into the world of film, directing commercials, party political broadcasts for the launch of the Green Party and the odd pop video, he was also commissioned to write a children’s film.
However Andy sees himself predominately as a conceptual thinker, a scribbler of ideas and currently works for some of the UK’s top brands, with his creative team at “Us”, creating and designing new products and business ideas.

His working life in the creative field has always been mirrored by his passion for painting and drawing. He say’s it’s what keeps him sane. He has exhibited locally to his home in North London and more recently at the Tapestry Gallery in Soho along with artistic friends. This display of his work at The Coningsby Gallery is the first exhibition he has done on his own.

The work on display features a collection of paintings entitled ‘Elements of the Universe’, inspired by climatic changes to our planet and the poetic justice of nature. They are based on the imbalance we have caused in our world, derived through our lack of care, which creates the difference between beauty and destruction.

The apt titles are there to make us all think twice.

Alongside this are Andy’s nudes and still life works in charcoal, a medium he enjoys because of it’s raw nature. He say’s, “With charcoal you can’t hide, it is totally unforgiving, it either works or it doesn’t, there’s no going back.”

The Coningsby Gallery
30, Tottenham Street,
London. W1T 4RJ.
Telephone: ++44 (0)20 7636 1064
Website: www.coningsbygallery.com