Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now

Round_Midnight_Maurizio_Anzeri

Maurizio Anzeri, Round Midnight

Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now brings together the audacious best of contemporary art straight from London’s internationally acclaimed Saatchi Gallery – arguably the biggest influence on contemporary British art over the past 25 years. It features groundbreaking works that challenge conventional artistic sensibilities, created by more than forty of the new generation of daring British contemporary artists.

Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples (detail)_clunie_reid

Clunie Reid, Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples

www.artgallery.sa.gov.au

The Color of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art

portrait of GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

On view now at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art features 350 works by leading Surrealist artists, including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Leonora Carrington, Brassaï, André Masson, Man Ray, Edith Rimmington, Wifredo Lam and many others. On view until September 25, 2011 www.vanartgallery.ca.bc

AMIE DICKE: Infinitely Suffering Thing

Dissolving floors of memory, 2007

Artist Amie Dicke, from Rotterdam, transforms magazine pictures into intriguing works of art and so much more. On view now at the Venice Bienalle see close to 27 gallons of foundation get dumped and sprayed over an environ specially constructed by the artist. 

Detail Destruction of Memory, Infinitely Suffering Thing, 2008

Violent Contradiction, 2008

Effacement, 2008

Infallible, Close-Up

"One hundred liters of foundation (make-up) is going to be sprayed automatically by spray-guns that hang above an interior I have set up in the middle of the industrial environment of the former AkzoNobel factory. This room mirrors my private memories. Most of the objects which I have (re-)used would normally be thrown away, but some stuff just tends to stay, because you keep carrying them with you either mentally or physically. In a way they have become physical reminders of our inability to let go of life. The many layers of foundation will cover up the original colors or patterns of the objects and eventually the whole room will be in one tone, concealed under a thick layer of foundation, like a strange make-up. The interior will be changed into a skin colored "flesh", like a radical makeover that will turn the dead objects into a self-portrait."

www.amiedicke.com

Overpainting in Twentieth Century Press Photography

Before the invention of photoshop in 1991, it was commonplace for press agencies and the photographic departments of newspapers and magazines to enhance, crop and embellish their press photographs prior to publication. An upcoming exhibition, entitled Overworked: Overpainting in Twentieth Century Press Photography,  at Flash Projects UK explores the ways in which photographs were worked-over in paint, gouache, watercolour and pencil prior to their publication, challenging the veracity of the image.

www.flash-projects.co.uk

FLUXUS and the Essential Questions of Life

Ben Vautier, Let's Fuck

It could be said that John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "bed-in" for peace movement was the ultimate expression of Fluxus performance art. Yoko One is of course one of the most famous of the Fluxus artists.  John Lennon actually met Yoko at a Fluxus performance and fell in love that very night. The Fluxists are sort of like modern Dadaists.  Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, a major traveling exhibition based on the Hood Museum of Art’s George Maciunas Memorial Collection of Fluxus art, is "designed for visitors to experience the radical and influential cultural development that was Fluxus, and maybe learn something about themselves along the way." Fluxus was an international network of artists, composers, and designers that emerged as an art (or ―anti-art‖) phenomenon in the early 1960s and was noted for blurring the boundaries between art and life. The Hood’s exhibition runs from April 16 through August 7, 2011.  www.hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu

Man Ray and Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism

From 1929 to 1932, Man Ray and Lee Miller -- two giants of the European Surrealism movement -- lived together in Paris, first as teacher and student, and later as lovers. Their mercurial relationship resulted in some of the most powerful work of each artist's career, and helped shape the course of modern art. Combining rare vintage photographs, paintings, sculpture and drawings, a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, tells the story of the artists' brief but intense association and reveals the nature of their creative partnership. On view from June 11 to December 4, 2011. www.pem.org

[LAST DAYS] Marilyn Minter Retrospective in Hamburg

MarilynMinter_ChewingGreen

Marilyn Minter, Chewing Green, 2008 C-Print

In Marilyn Minter’s work, pride of place goes to the complex relationship between body, photography and painting. Here, Minter exposes all our cultural inhibitions in dealing with sexuality and desire, the hyperrealist shots of high-gloss surfaces and sections of the body are both seductive and irritating at once. In the fragmented representation of lips, eyes, mouths and necks, decadence confronts beauty and the pitfalls of glamour collide with the fascination it exerts. Minter’s voyeuristic hallucinations seem both tempting and dangerous. Beauty here proves to be a brittle construct in which sensuality and self-destruction are two sides of the same coin; flesh, yearning, sexuality and gender models are revealed to be commercial products. For the first time, the oeuvre of US artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) is the subject of an extensive exhibition in Germany. On view until June 12. www.sammlung-falckenberg.de

[FIRST LOOK] LINDSAY LOHAN - A RICHARD PHILLIPS FILM

Gagosian Gallery announces Lindsay Lohan, Richard Phillips' first short film. In his 90-second motion portrait of Lindsay Lohan, Phillips draws on the conventions of his painting that explore the legacies of classical portraiture in relation to the mediated representations of contemporary popular culture. Richard Phillips' Lindsay Lohan will be included in "Commercial Break," presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 - 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

RICHARD PRINCE, first solo exhibition in Asia

richard-prince-untitled-girlfriend-1993

Since the late 1970s, Prince has been mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment. Working in the tear-sheet department at TIME/LIFE in New York, he took magazine ads for jewelry, furniture, fashion, and cigarettes, and gave them new potency by cropping, removing ad copy from the images, reshooting black and white images on color film, and configuring them in generic groups. With these “rephotographs”, he redefined the artistic act and its related concepts of authorship, ownership, and the aura of the image. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he has crafted a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures but that is unquestionably his own.

richard_prince_cowboy

An exhibition, that opened yesterday at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong, explores the role and representation of women in the male imaginary and in American culture, a principal theme in Prince’s oeuvre since the outset of his career and one that is charged with ambiguity and provocation. By locating, appropriating, and manipulating popular depictions of feminine types – from the aloof fashion model and the glamorous celebrity to the fetishistic nurse and the bold biker girlfriend - Prince explores how visual definitions of gender form in popular culture through repetition and reiteration. Gleaned from a variety of highbrow, lowbrow, and subcultural sources, Prince’s women abound with a diversity of stereotyped erotic appeal.

On view until July 16, 2011 www.gagosian.com

untitled-girlfriend-1993-rp7571-1_richard_prince

The Erotic World of Harri Peccinotti

harry_peccinotti_sandvich

Harri Peccinotti, who is nearly eighty years old and looks almost exactly like a wizard, is most well known for his erotic images of women–often cropped and close up focusing in on the delicious details, instead of giving away the whole picture. Peccinotti also has the distinction of shooting the Pirelli calendar two years in a row and is oft credited with upping its raunch factor to the level it stands today. This June 14 marks the opening of an exhibit at the Tethys gallery in Florence, Italy–the exhibition will run until July 4 2011. www.tethysgallery.com

[Blood Bath] The Art of Hermann Nitsch

In the Denver-MCA  through the end of May are the “relicts” (relics) of one of Nitsch’s abreactive performances, enacted to liberate the repressive drives in himself and participants in his “aktions.” Instead of film, however, these are Schuttbilder paintings (poured) composed of animal blood and pigment, capturing the gestures and off-body splatters of the original performance.

Part Artaud’s idea of psychoanalytical cure through certain abject formations of theatre, part Golden Bough-type worship and slaughtering of Dionysius, Nitsch’s work is about the trace of an event, not the finished painting. Drips, clots, spatters and smears all attest to a “relic” of a non-repeatable memory or aktion. But the frenzy of the performance is always dictated by the frame: the Nietzschean reintegration of primal and social. This is repeated again in the museum’s display: in the center are a number of Catholic vestments perfectly pressed and placed upon vestibules. But on the walls is the bloodwork, surrounding the repressed pagaentry of transubstantiation, recalling the pagan roots of Christianity, when the blood was never reduced to wine.

Bloodlines: Paintings by Hermann Nitsch is on view at the MCA in Denver until May 29. www.mcadenver.org

Text by Dreux Moreland for Pas Un Autre

[Craft, Utility and Luxury] Serum Versus Venom

Serum Versus Venom (SVSV), which was created in 2003, as a "interconnectedness of craft, utility and luxury" is re-launching after several years in hiatus. SVSV is built on a philosophy called Futurecraft - an "ideological framework for creating high and sustainable value in an over-saturated consumer landscape by colliding elements of hype modernity with traditional product development philosophies, techniques and values." www.serumvenom.com

[OPENING] Nancy Grossman: Heads

"They speak to the malice and subservience of both psychology and worldly conflict. Though the works are often rendered blind and mute, they still allude to the role of the silent witness amid cruelty and disorder." MoMA PS1 in New York presents Nancy Grossman: Heads, a solo exhibition that focuses on the artist's evocative head sculptures. On view May 22, 2011 - August 15 www.ps1.org

Shunga: Erotic Art in a Comparative Context

Series: The Prelude to Desire, 1799, Utamaro

It was a time when Japan was ruled by military dictators called Shoguns and much of the East was just large swaths of bucolic countryside, with flowing grass, and a certain mysticism you can only associate with "the Orient."  For centuries it was like this. Seemingly perfect and serene. The artistic output from this time is extremely recognizable: ornate woodcuts painted on scrolls, called ukiyo-e, that depicted the quotidien routine of Japanese life: work, play, love, theater, history, and  pleasure.  Shunga, a Japanese form of erotic art, that most think was deemed immoral, but was actually morally accepted, was common and many artists, without risking their reputations, dipped their pens in this type of ink. It was all the same–work and sex–it still followed a classifiable aesthetic of the quotidien. It begs the question–what did you do last night?

Series: The Prelude to Desire, 1799, Utamaro

This weekend, the University of London's School of Oriental and African studies will hold a workshop and a list of speakers on the topic of Shunga art.  Talks are ranging and include introductions on the history of Shunga art  to how to present and curate Shunga art. The talks are free and is being held at the Brunei Gallery May 20 and 21.  www.soas.ac.uk/

Marc Swanson: The Second Story

Marc Swanson, Untitled Boxer, 2010

Marc Swanson constructs sculptures out of found iconographic sources, from taxidermy to tattoos, fabricating them from culturally-loaded materials so that the resulting sculptures in both form and content reveal the conspicuous constructedness of our personas in the modern mediated world. For example, taxidermy forms relating to his own father’s fantasy of an outdoorsy hunter’s life—one his dad never really lived but simulated—are overlaid with the glittered mirrored surfaces associated with the demimonde of the after-midnight nightclub world the artist inhabited for many years.

Marc Swanson, Untitled Black Fighting Bucks, 2009

Swanson’s allusions often refer simultaneously to both the austere, rarefied, and serious history of minimal art and the legacy of cheesy metal and self-consciously decadent glam rock bands. In stating the equal importance of both in his work, Swanson makes viewers aware of the complex negotiations between high and low culture in everyone’s lives. An exhibition, curated by Bill Arning, Director, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston opens this July. Marc Swanson: The Second Story–July 2 to October 9, 2011, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston–www.carmh.org