The New Hieroglyphic Language of Light and Time

New Mexico, USA, 1975

Ernst Haas was one of those rare photographers of the 20th century imbued with a certain poetical sensibility.   Born in Vienna in 1921, Haas almost went into medicine, but his artistic inclinations led him to photography.  Haas was soon invited into the famous Magnum photo agency, the first invitation by the agency's founder's Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour.  Haas, like William Eggleston, was one of the first adopters of color photography and is largely credited with changing the medium as an artform altogether.  Ernst Haas was also profoundly prolific, traveling the world for assignments for magazines, but along the way he was building a personal portfolio of images the world has never seen – until now. Color Correction, a recently published monograph, exhibits a collection of never before seen photographs that are considered "far more edgy, loose, complex and ambiguous," and that Haas believed – in his own lifetime – people just wouldn't understand. 

New Mexico, USA, 1975

On Photography: Philosophy by Haas

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature. Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure. We can write the chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos. Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent....the camera....

In every arts there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe. As knowers we are like the scientist relating through logical determination. As feelers, we are like poets relating the unrelated through intuition. As believers, we are only accepting our human limitations. The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work. One cannot photograph art. One can only live it in the unity of his vision, we well as in the breadth of his humanity, vitality, and understanding....

There is no formula – only man with his conscience speaking, writing, and singing in the new hieroglyphic language of light and time.

Text by Ernst Haas

Intro Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Color Correction by Ernst Haas (Steidl) 

Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico

[LIQUIDATED] ZEVS Solo Show in Tokyo

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Venerable French street art mainstay ZEVS' first solo show will open in Tokyo at Art Statements Gallery this September 2 and will be on view until September 23.  ZEVS twisted, dripping logos and corporate iconography is obvious statement unto itself and have become as recognizable as the logos themselves. 3-2-12 Ebisu-minami Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0022, Japan

Berlinde De Bruyckere and John Currin in Montreal

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left: John Currin, Deauville right: John Currin, The Dane

DHC/ART in Montreal presents two concurrent solo exhibitions by acclaimed Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere and American painter John Currin - "two leading international figurative artists working in a virtuosic, old masterly tradition yet testing and expanding the parameters of their respective disciplines." On view until November 13. www.dhc-art.org

Dalí: Mind of a Genius

The aphrodisiac telephone by Salvador Dali

SINGAPORE: Explore over 250 artworks which highlight the creativeness of Dalí across different mediums, including bronze sculptures, rare graphics, furniture, gold jewelry and crystal pieces in three themed areas – Femininity and Sensuality, Religion and Mythology, Dreams and Fantasy. Highlights include Dance of Time I (Dalí's famous representation of melted clocks), Woman Aflame (sculpture uniting two of Dalí's obsessions - drawers and fire), Spellbound (a huge painting featured in Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name) and the Mae West Lips Sofa (inspired by actress Mae West's sensual lips). Now on view at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore until October 11. 

Ingrid Calame at the Edinburg Art Festival

Calame’s paintings and drawings all begin with Calame tracing marks, stains and cracks on the ground. She then combines, layers and retraces the tracings before transforming them into drawings in coloured pencil or pure pigment and paintings in enamel or, more recently, oil paint. The works that result from this singular process are beautiful and intelligent abstractions. Displayed in a gallery, they retain their connection with the world outside at several removes, exerting an oddly insistent presence. Ingrid Calame's solo show is now on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburg until October 9.

[MOMENTO MORI] Chalkboard Skulls

Momento mori and momento to pick up the milk, some things are better said written on a human skull. Chicago-based artists and designers Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap's matt colored plastic chalkboard skulls should replace post-it notes all together. www.iamhome.us

All Hail Kimiko Yoshida

Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity....Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.....

Text by Kimiko Yoshida

LYNDA BENGLIS Retrospective at the MOCA Los Angeles

This is Lynda Benglis' first retrospective in 20 years–this one held at the MOCA Los Angeles.This travelling exhibition spans the range of Lynda Benglis's career, including her early wax paintings, her brightly colored poured latex works, the Torsos and Knots series from the 1970s, and her recent experiments with plastics, cast glass, paper, and gold leaf. It features a number of rarely exhibited historic works, including Phantom (1971), a dramatic polyurethane installation consisting of five monumental sculptures that glow in the dark, and the installation Primary Structures (Paula's Props), first shown in 1975. Alongside her sculptural output, Benglis created a radical body of work in video, photography, and media interventions that explore notions of power, gender relations, and role-playing. These works function in tandem with her sculpture to offer a pointed critique of sculptural machismo and suggest a fluid awareness of gender and artistic identity. They also contribute to an understanding of the artist's objects as simultaneously temporal and physically present, intuitive, and psychologically charged. On view until October 10 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. 

[ART] DAVID NOONAN

The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis is currently organizing the first solo presentation of the work of London-based Australian artist David Noonan in an American museum. Since emerging in the early 2000s, Noonan has developed an international reputation for works that incorporate photographic imagery of costumed performers, groups of figures from utopian collectives, and other elements of theater and stagecraft in collaged, painterly, or sculptural formats. In doing so, he encourages us to consider how documentary images of events and happenings might be transformed into fiction, while suggesting the significant roles that theatricality and performance have played in our recent cultural history. This exhibition will present a survey of recent works in a variety of media as well as numerous new works created especially for this presentation at CAM. The main gallery spaces will feature examples of large-scale works featuring evocative photographic images from various sources such as books about experimental theater or puppetry, as well as Japanese textile designs, all screen-printed onto different fabrics which are layered and stitched together. Noonan’s process of creating these works gives the images a shadowy sense of mystery, while the layering of the figurative and abstract imagery creates a tension between abstraction and representation. The exhibition is set to open on September 9 and will run until January 8. www.camstl.org

David Mach DIE HARDER

David Mach, Die Harder, Courtesy of the Artist

LONDON – David Mach, famed for his dynamic large scale collages, sculptures and bold installations, launches his major new project to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011 with the installation of a massive coathanger crucifixion figure, suspended from steel supports, outside St Giles Church in Edinburgh. This is the first of four coat hanger crucifixion figures, including a contemporary sculptural version of Calvary, which will be displayed in the exhibition at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre in the summer of 2011. Central to the project will be a large-scale limited edition artist’s version of the King James Bible. Various elements from the project – collages and coathanger sculptures -will be on show throughout the UK in the coming year.

The late LUCIAN FREUD & DAVID DAWSON in Beijing

The current exhibition at Faurschou Gallery in Beijing presents British painter Lucian Freud and his assistant David Dawson, who is himself a painter and a photographer. The exhibition juxtaposes one of Lucian Freud’s principal works – the masterpiece David & Eli (2003-4) – with ten photographs taken by David Dawson at Lucian Freud’s studio between 2004 -2006, giving us a unique glimpse into the every-day life of one the late great artist. On view until August 14, www.faurschou.com

[ART] In The Labyrinth

The exhibition by Àngels Ribé at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, covers a period of her production from 1969 to 1984. This period is particularly significant for it marks the appearance of a new aesthetic model that would have a fundamental influence on the creation of new ways of conceiving the artistic practice. The associative and symbolic functions of art are renegotiated: the artwork ceases to be an autonomous entity, as was the norm in the modernist tradition, and its meaning becomes dependent on an interchange with the spectator. In this way, the ambiguity and the multiplicity of references and readings that are an intrinsic part of the work of art are revealed. Àngels Ribé, having begun her artistic career at that time and within those parameters, consolidated a language of her own that has continued until today through various supports and media.  In the labyrinth. Àngels Ribé, 1969-1984 in on view until October 23. www.macba.cat

Richard Phillips: Point of Purchase

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"My pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty - that's always been a thread in my work."  - Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips' tongue in cheek, slightly pornographic, gritty, but oxymoronically glossy paintings have made him an artist among elite of pop art's Mount Olympus that includes the like of Evelyne Axell  and pop art's Zeus Andy Warhol. Richard Phillips was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1962 and now lives and works in New York.  On view for another week at John McWhinnie bookstore in East Hampton, NY is Point of Purchase, "the first full-scale presentation of [Richard Phillips'] commercial interventions." John McWhinnie: "Phillips extends his brand of artmaking into the non-gallery world, colonizing commercial space, manipulating products and displays, from album covers and posters to designer handbags and beach towels." On view until August 8 www.johnmcwhinnie.com

Drawn Blank: Bob Dylan to Show Paintings at the Gagosian

Gagosian: "A committed visual artist, Bob Dylan has only recently begun to exhibit his works publicly. Firstly, a collection of multi-media watercolors and gouaches, The Drawn Blank Series, was exhibited in Germany’s Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in autumn 2007. His latest works on acrylic and canvas, The Brazil Series, are currently on exhibit at The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen." Bob Dylan is set to exhibit artwork at the Gagosian Gallery this September.

Sigmar Polke: Photoworks

Leo Koenig Inc. (NYC), in collaboration with Winckler Fine Arts, Berlin, presents the opening of "Sigmar Polke: Photoworks 1964-2000". "Widely acknowledged as one of the most important creative forces to emerge from post World War II Europe, Sigmar Polke was an artist of incredible unpredictability. From the very beginning, and throughout his career, Polke resisted the idea of an identifying “signature.” In his practice, the artist incorporated techniques borrowed from mass marketing and commercial realms into a proscenium of images that overlap and resonate over time.  Over the course of his life, Polke made thousands of photographs and the selection of works for this exhibition keenly highlights the integral role that photography had played in the artist’s larger oeuvre.  Also included is an eerie selection of photographs taken at the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, and a series of photograms in which Polke experimented with, among other untried techniques, the effects of radioactive materials on the photographic process. On view until September 3 at Leo Koenig NYC. www.leokoenig.com

[source: fashion copious]

THE ROAD OF HOPE - YOKO ONO

Photo: Annie Leibovitz

Congratulations to Yoko Ono who is the winner of the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her efforts in spreading world peace.  An awards ceremony is scheduled together with an exhibition commemorating the presentation of the award to Yoko Ono at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. "It is greatly anticipated that this commemorative exhibition will help communicate, from Hiroshima to the world, the messages of Yoko Ono that are rich with the inspiration of the abolition of nuclear weapons and the creation of a world without war, and it is thought that the exhibition will have a great effect on garnering attention to this Hiroshima Art Prize across the globe." The 8th Hiroshima Art Prize: THE ROAD OF HOPE - YOKO ONO 2011,  Saturday July 30th to Sunday October 16. www.hcmca.cf.city.hiroshima.jp