STUDIO-ONLINE

Franz West
The Ego and the Id

The Ego and the Id is internationally acclaimed artist Franz West’s newest and largest aluminum sculpture to date. Soaring 20 feet high, the piece consists of two similar but distinct, brightly colored, looping abstract forms, one bubble gum pink and the other alternating blocks of blue, green, orange, and yellow. Each of the forms curve up at the bottom creating stools that invite passersby to stop, take a seat, and directly engage with the artwork. The sculpture is only truly complete once the viewer interacts with the work. The Ego and the Id is consistent with the artist’s overarching desire to produce sociable environments for viewing art using his signature combination of whimsy and monumentality.

Created specifically for West’s first comprehensive American retrospective this past fall at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Ego and the Id borrows its name from one of Sigmund Freud’s best known texts, in which he explores the ego’s battle with three forces: the id, the super-ego, and the outside world. Removing the gallery walls heightens the connection between West’s work and Freud’s work, allowing these forces to intermingle with the streets of New York City as a backdrop.

Franz West began his career in mid-1960s Vienna during the height of a local movement called Actionism. His earliest sculptures, performances, and collages were a reaction to this movement, in which artists engaged in displays of radical public behavior intended to shake up art-world passivity. In the early 1970s, West began making a series of small, portable sculptures called “Adaptives” (”Paßstücke”). The Ego and the Id is in many ways an oversized version of an “Adaptive.” The sculpture also directly relates to the artist’s furniture installations, which transform galleries, museums, and public spaces into lounge-like environments. West has described the correlation between his plaster objects and furniture installations as a way to put dreams on earth; “The Adaptives would be the dream and the chairs and tables would be the Earth.”

About Franz West

Franz West lives and works in Vienna, where he was born in 1947. He has exhibited internationally for more than three decades in galleries and museums, and at major festivals including Documenta IX (1992) and Documenta X (1997), Kassel, Germany; Sculpture Projects in Münster (1997); and the Venice Biennale (1988, 1993, 1997, 2003, 2007). His first major American retrospective, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008, debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2008), and then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009). His work has been exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, New York (2008); Gagosian Gallery, London (2006); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2003); and Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2001). He had a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997.

Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park
East 60th Street & 5th Ave.
New York, NY
Web: www.publicartfund.org

VIEW EXHIBITION

For thirty years artist Kim Abeles has worked to raise social consciousness through her art. Her boundless appetite seeks new and inspired connections among art, science, and technology. Here she finds awkward truths within the American landscape: flaws in contemporary mores, the struggles between our needs and the needs of the environment in urban L.A., in America and across the globe.

She brings to bear extensive empirical research, informed feministic views and ethnographic sensibilities. Her use of different materials and of complex technical processes entailed in her creations achieves such works thick with content and shaped by deep curiosity.

Common subjects and concerns are re-shaped and re-created into inspired art. She states: “I will figure out a process to do a piece if that process or material seems just the right thing for that. There is a language in the materials and this is part of how the dialogue proceeds, a dialogue between material and me and the final created piece.” Abeles’s early background in craft-making, in biography, and in the translation of complex thought to Dada-inspired image has earned her respect and an international reputation.

Her work forms part of a greater collection, including: the Museum of Contemporary Art, the United States Information Agency, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is archived in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Publication Design Collection of the Smithsonian. She has been shown throughout the United States and in galleries and museums in Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. She represented the United States in both /Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam/ (1992) and/ Cultural Centre of Berchem,/ Antwerp (1993).

Video interview by Veronica Aberham

You can see additional works and current and upcoming exhibition by going to: www.kimabeles.com

Special thanks to Los Angles-based guitarist/singer/songwriter Stephen Costantino for the use of his song “Silent Heart” in our video introduction. His personal experience through words and music always inspires him to keep learning more about himself and to create songs to share with others…” www.myspace.com/wirthwhile999

Special thanks to Allen Ferro for his support with visual effects.

PABLO PICASSO, Ecuyère, 1970, Pen and black ink on paper

“Black on Paper” heralds the expansion of Olyvia Oriental, a gallery specialising in contemporary Chinese and Asian art, into Western modern and contemporary art. To emphasize this extra dimension of the gallery, it will be re launched as Olyvia Fine Art. The exhibition includes drawings by modern and contemporary masters, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Christo, Alexander Calder and Keith Haring.

L’écuyère (illustrated) was originally part of an important sketchbook of thirty Picasso drawings, which was subsequently split up. As Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, has observed, “Old age is the principal theme of these dazzling drawings, in which the sardonic artist allegorizes ruefully but never self-pityingly the humiliating plight of an eighty-nine year old lothario with a burnt-out libido. The resultant images are dream images. As in a dream, everything - time, place, identity-is in a state of flux. Especially relevant to this sketchbook is the fact that at the age of fourteen, Picasso took as his first mistress an equestrienne called Rosita del Oro, and that, a lifetime later, she reappears in different guises, first of all in his prints and then, as here, in his drawings. …(In L’écuyère) Rosita has aged into an over-made-up virago, who does the splits while berating a craven-looking Picasso for failing to clean up the circus ring with his broom.”

Also included will be a Salvador Dali, Composition Au Cygne et a l’Elephant (1947), which is linked to a project of collaboration with Walt Disney in 1945, and works by Henri Matisse from the 1940s and Marc Chagall in the 1950s.

Since 2005, Olyvia Kwok’s name had been synonymous with the Chinese art boom in the West. As she says, “I am interested in emerging markets and I saw an opportunity to bring little known Chinese contemporary artists into the international arena and this has been highly successful. Four years later, it is usual to see Chinese art in the major contemporary art galleries and, whilst I will continue to focus on this, I am looking to find other areas where I can see growth. I see a demand from China for modern and post war Western masters, specifically from Chinese bankers and museums. It seems to me that a slightly subdued market is an ideal time in which to appeal to new collectors, as well as established connoisseurs.”

Whilst much less expensive than oil paintings, drawings can take the viewer closer to the mind and working methods of the artist, providing a stepping stone to collecting modern art. At the last Impressionist and Modern art sales in London modern drawings proved exceptionally sought after in spite of the current economic crisis.

Olyvia Fine Art
17 Ryder Street
St. James’s
London SW1Y 6PY
Phone: + 44 (0)20 7925 2986
Web: www.olyviafineart.com

Photographs by Tenzing Paljor

Tenzing Paljor initiated the Vanishing Himalaya project in 2007 and traveled through the Indian Himalaya documenting the tradition and cultural heritage, a journey he describes as a ‘pilgrimage’.  Over the course of six months, he traveled through dramatic and desolate landscapes in the remote regions of Ladakh, Zanskar, Spiti, Kinnaur, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, documenting the people who live in harsh environments where the Tibetan Buddhist way of life is still preserved.

The exhibition serves as a symbolic journey of a Tibetan exile and conveys through photographs a celebration of the many facets of life in the Indian Himalaya that are uniquely Tibetan.  It also expresses the inherent union of culture and way of life across the Himalaya. The Vanishing Himalaya project seeks to document and archive Himalayan and Tibetan cultural heritage at a time of acute change and radical transformation.

Tenzing Paljor, a self taught Tibetan photographer, has had solo exhibitions in India and Afghanistan.  He was awarded the Rowell Fund for Tibet, a photography grant on India and Nepal Himalayas for two consecutive years from 2006 to 2008.  He is currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Tibet House
22 West 15th Street,
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212.807.0563
Web: www.tibethouse.org

Nasreen Mohamedi: Untitled, Undated.  Pen, pencil and ink on paper
(49.5cm x 69 cm) Courtesy Glenbarra Art Museum Collection, Japan

Solo exhibition of work by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi. Her diary pages, drawings and photographs combine Western influences such as Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich with Islamic architectural forms and a South Asian sensibility, resulting in an intensely personal body of work.

Born in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1937, Mohamedi created a highly developed language from the 1950s to the 1980s. Early drawings often suggest plants and trees, before the artist focused on creating variations around the grid format; later works present free-floating geometric forms that evoke futuristic, mechanical or architectural devices.

These abstract forms were often developed in intricately detailed diaries, written throughout the artist’s life, where the written word morphs into personalised symbols, grids and diagonals. The artist traces or weaves regular patterns in her drawings, as if mapping a pulse or internal flow onto external phenomena. Her tightly cropped photographs seek out elemental forms such as the repetitive patterns found in the sea or landscapes as well as in the constructed world, in architecture and urban design.

Mohamedi studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London in the 1950s and travelled in Europe before returning to India in 1958. As well as familiarity with artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, she brought knowledge of Russian Suprematism, British Constructivism and American Abstraction to bear on her own South Asian references, from Sufism to the Progressive Artists Group founded by F.N. Souza in Mumbai. She died in Kihim, India in 1990.

Mohamedi was one of the major discoveries at Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007), but her work remains surprisingly overlooked and her important position in the Modernist canon is still being affirmed.

This exhibition is an expanded version of Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes - Reflections on Indian Modernism curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, and organized and initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo.

Preview:  Friday 4 September 18.00-20.00

Milton Keynes Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard
Central Milton Keynes
MK9 3QA

Phone: 01908 676 900
Web: www.mk-g.org/

Mariella Bisson
Working onsite in watercolor and gouache on paper, Mariella Bisson has adeptly captured waterfall imagery of the Catskill Mountain Region. The force of this new body of work lies in her ability to present the representational in more abstracted terms and allow the viewer to see water seemingly spill from the page.

Meredith Rosier
Working in pastel, conte crayon and ink on paper, Meredith Rosier tenders only hints of landscape and figure. The gaze of this series offers the viewer a domain of visual illumination where presence and trace govern her work. Each image seems to beautifully metamorphose into the next.

Reception for the Artists: Saturday August 22, 5 - 7 p.m.

Chace-Randall Gallery
49 Main Street, Andes, NY
Phone: 845.676.4901
Web: www.chacerandallgallery.com/

In her exhibition at Persistence Works this Autumn, Sheffield based artist A.Rosemary Watson will explore the complexities and fragmented nature of memory.

The exhibition attempts to capture the elusive impressions on the senses of sight, sound, smell and touch of those moments of intense experience that are the essence of memory, as they are constantly reshaped and reformed by the interpretation of individuals and to false or ‘mis-memory.

With reference to a specific area of the east coast of England, she looks towards nature as a metaphor for the shifting and multi-layered patterns of memory, in which experiences, wishful beliefs, imagination, hard facts and dreams blur and blend over time into a personalised version of history.

The exhibition, featuring painting, drawing, photographic images and video, references the intersection of land, sea and sky in its constant state of physical and visual flux, subjected to change by the actions of man and the natural forces of erosion and deposition and ebb and flow over time.

Individual works within the exhibition include small oil paintings encased in acrylic boxes forming a visual diary altered and distorted by reflections and light; a series of black and white photographic based images representing traces of experiences retained in the memory, and a silent video of images filtered through the memory, focusing attention on the silence of (the) infinite visual spaces and capturing the hypnotic effect of the moving image.

As part of Off The Shelf, Sheffield’s annual festival of reading and writing, the artist will also exhibit an archive of drawing, painting and photography in the form of an evolving library of bookworks exhibited on a library trolley creating/forming a visual record of the artist’s reflections and contemplations.

Through her work, the artists raises the question,
is it remembered, was it imagined or was it experienced?

Evening event: Friday 2 October 6.30-8.30pm

Yorkshire Artspace: Persistence Works,
21 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS
Phone: 0114 2761769
Web: www.artspace.org.uk

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

“I didn’t understand any of this. All I did was pick up the stone and throw.”

Frank Standish “Wheeler” Burden III, San Francisco, 1988

The first objective for readers of The Little Book is to forget about understanding the “how” of Selden Edwards’s madcap time-travel adventure, which transports former rock ‘n’ roll Woodstock veteran and baseball legend Wheeler Burden from his home in San Francisco in the late 1980s to Vienna a century earlier. As Wheeler’s life in Vienna unfolds, Edwards provides glimpses of other times and places–Paris and London during and between the two world wars–as well as fortuitous meetings with great minds from the past. Not surprisingly, it took Edwards more than 30 years to bring his audacious enterprise to fruition. In an author’s note closing the novel, Edwards states that as he wrote, expanded and refined the manuscript, “real historical events began weaving their way into the plot I was inventing as I went…over time, more and more real-life events began to dominate the background of my story.”

Considering the grand scope of this novel, its title provides an apt note of irony in keeping with the tone of the narrative. There is nothing “little” about the plot, its legendary characters or the startling (but uncannily convincing) revelations of personal history that confront Wheeler at nearly every turn. Because Edwards brought in so much history to paint a vivid portrait of Vienna in 1897, readers will have no trouble suspending disbelief. In fact, most likely they will buy The Little Book hook, line and sinker.

Having experienced fame from early childhood, Wheeler has retired from public life. The Burden legend runs deep, weighing as a heavy “burden” on the boy’s shoulders; his father, Dilly Burden, who died soon after Wheeler’s birth, was a sports idol and pivotal figure in bringing World War II to a close. As “Rouge Gorge,” Dilly worked with the Resistance Movement in France and spied for the Allies. During his prep school years, Dilly broke sports records, graduated at the top of his class and gave a graduation speech that would be quoted each subsequent year. A stiff and stern rule keeper from a prominent New England family, Dilly’s father was among the first Americans to participate in the Olympic Games.

The women in their lives offer Dilly and Wheeler relief from traditional expectations, an exacting lineage and adoring public. In markedly different but complementary ways, Dilly’s mother, “Weezie,” and wife, Flora, encourage his impulsive, liberty-loving side, as they do with Wheeler as he matures. Another critical influence for father and son is Arnauld Esterhazy, known to the boys who attend St. Gregory’s School in Boston as “the Haze.” A transplant from Vienna, Esterhazy began teaching at St. Greg’s before World War I. He returned to Vienna to participated in the war and fared poorly, then returned to St. Greg’s and became a monumental figure to those in his classes. When young Wheeler travels east from his home in California to attend the school at Weezie’s request, Esterhazy has his work cut out for him. Intentionally, Flora has raised the boy without the constraints that, she feels, crippled her husband, Dilly, and led to his death in the name of duty and honor.

Friend and mentor, Esterhazy’s most important contribution to the Burdens’s education (and to Edwards’s plot) was his lengthy and enlivening discussions of Viennese life and culture when the city was a crucible for the modern movement in art, music, literature and philosophy. Vienna circa 1897 was the home of the Jung Wien, or Young Vienna, the sons of middle-class industrialists and bankers who worked hard, made fortunes and funded the building of the Ringstrasse during a 40-year burgeoning of creative and intellectual life. Not interested in business and drawn to cafe society, they preferred days filled with discussions of aesthetics and philosophical principals and nights spent sampling the best high-brow entertainment that Europe had to offer.

Some of the characters that Wheeler meets in Vienna are based on real people, while others come directly from a roll call of the most famous men of the modern age: Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and Samuel Clemmens, now known to the world as Mark Twain. In his author’s note, Edwards explains that the character of Egon Wickstein is based in part on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Admirers and scholars of fin de siècle Vienna will delight in Edwards’s deft weavings of Mahler’s music, Secessionist paintings, Freudian philosophy and volatile political realities into the narrative.

Even more astounding than his encounters with Freud and a young Adolf Hitler, Wheeler meets Dilly, transported in time, and Weezie, legitimately there in her own age. But Edwards’s command of his material is complete. Few readers will trip on the “how” because the “why” is so intriguing. As Dilly and Wheeler discover truths behind the Burden legend, everything they’ve known and believed to be true about the world, their families and themselves is questioned. Weezie’s epiphanies are even more telling of Freud’s theories; her experience in Vienna frees her for a future in which she becomes a catalyst for major events in Mahler’s, Freud’s and Esterhazy’s careers. Of the many reasons to devour Edwards’s tour de force, Weezie’s story stands out. Like her creator, Weezie realized a grand vision over many decades, quietly, behind the scenes. As she pulled the strings, a master plan emerged and the pieces perfectly fell into place.

In this show Jonathan will be presenting a number of images of young children ‘infected’ by images of consumerism and vulnerability. Some of their faces have logos etched into their skin, while others are dripping with blood. There is a discord between the apparent ‘sweetness’ of the young faces and the disquieting markings that become more evident on further inspection. The effect is subtly disturbing.

Jonathan’s artistic concerns have centered around depicting the vulnerability of children. For him contemporary society is too obsessively reliant on consumerism, to the extent that we are all victims of it. Either we are on the ‘spend, spend, spend’ treadmill or we are off it - being exploited across the world into poverty by low wages, producing the goods the rest of us want. For him the primary victims of this acquisitive culture are children, who he sees as being most exposed to its crassness and cruelty and who are largely without choice.

Jonathan Darby has that special quality so many young artists lack - the ability to communicate his ideas clearly through the images he produces. The term accessible springs to mind, but not at all in the patronising way of ‘dumbing down’ to seek out a wider audience. Jonathan’s work remains bold and challenging.

He studied Fine Art at Central St Martin’s college where he graduated in 2008. Since then, he has been busy with a number of group shows across London to great acclaim. His work ‘The Prisoners’ based on the Katte Kollwitz piece of the same name, was selected as one of the top 5 in the curator choice category in the Noise Festival 2008. His first solo show, at Signal Gallery, should establish his name firmly on the London art scene.

Private View 17th September 2009

Signal Gallery
96 Curtain Road,
London EC2A 3AA
Phone: 07766057212
Web: www.signalgallery.com

VIEW EXHIBITION

Patricia Correia’s passion for the arts started in the late 1970s when she was marketing the glass art designs of her brother Steven Correia. Her innovative marketing approaches created a new American market for contemporary decorative art and spearheaded the movement of luxury glass art found at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Harrods, and Cartier. Within a few years Correia Art Glass (CAG) became a multi-million dollar business with wide presence, and attained respectability in decorative arts evidenced in permanent collections including the Smithsonian Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the White House.

The Patricia Correia Gallery opened in Santa Monica in 1991. She represented both emerging and established artists for the next over 18 years, including Patssi Valdez, John Valadez, Ann Chamberlin, Llyn Foulkes, Richard Godfrey, and Gronk. She fondly reflects, “I started the gallery with this beautiful thought of promoting art and artists, and as you get into the business, you realize there are many more facets than that. That’s the ground breaker, and then it goes from there.” When asked to what she attributed her many successes, she replied, “I always had a natural instinct to sell. In all honesty, it is my passion: I’m passionate about the arts and in making a difference by helping both artist and collector and, so, creating a world with more communication.”

Now more than ever, it is important for artists to understand and to find avenues into the the art market. The art world is comprised of many genres, many levels, many institutions and many connections. The artist needs to grasp how these are structured to be successful. Patricia Correia shares her wide experience and many insights, and outlines the different paths an artist may take when seeking representation. Patricia explains, “You have to sell to survive. I know a lot of artists think commercialism is an ugly word, but, once you put that out there on the block, it is commercial. You, the artist, put it out there for critique, for review, for the pleasure and purposes of others. And these others have opinions and you need have to realize: that is commercial, period.”

Special thanks to New York City-based singer and songwriter Frank Bango and Richy Vesecky for allowing the use of the song, You Always Begin by Saying Goodbye, from the album, The Sweet Songs of Decay. www.frankbango.com.

Video interview by Veronica Aberham

For more information on Correia Art Glass go to www.correiaartglass.com