Larry Clark: Tulsa

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Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver presents an exhibition of vintage gelatin silver prints by photographer Larry Clark. The series of photographs on display graphically documents Clark’s exploration of the underworld of drug use, sex and violence in his hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma from 1963 to 1971. Clark first gained notoriety when these images were compiled as a photo essay in his independently published 1971 book Tulsa. Now regarded as a classic photography project, Tulsa has been acclaimed as a powerful and highly personal social documentary, still emulated by art and fashion photographers alike—a reputation due in no small part to its enduring capacity to shock. The sleazy and poignant aspects of the lives portrayed draws the viewer into a prurient and compassionate relationship with the images. On view until October 30.

RICHARD HAMILTON 1922 - 2011

British artist Richard Hamilton died yesterday London. His most well know artwork, a collage entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, is considered one of the earliest examples of pop art. The above work, entitled Swingeing London 67, was a response after his his art dealer Robert Fraser was arrested and imprisoned for the possession of heroin. On 12 February 1967 the police raided a party at the Sussex farmhouse of Keith Richards where they found evidence of the consumption of various drugs. On 27 June 1967, Fraser and Mick Jagger were found guilty of the possession of illegal drugs. The following day the two men were handcuffed to each other and driven to court in a police van, where they were sentenced to six months and three months respectively. After the defence lawyer’s appeal, Jagger’s sentence was reduced to a fine but Fraser’s appeal was rejected and he spent four months in jail. The painting is derived from a press clipping.  Richard Hamilton was preparing for a major traveling retrospective before he died.

Speaking in Tongues

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was born in Staten Island, NY and came to Los Angeles with his parents when he was four years old. In 1955 he founded the small but influential mail art publication Semina – a brilliant, loose-leaf compilation of the most advanced artists and poets of his time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jess (Collins) to name a few. Today, Berman is best known for his Verifax collages, softly sepia-colored works created with a forerunner of the photocopy machine. Influenced by surrealism, assemblage, and contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, Berman produced multi-layered works that combined the picture of a hand-held transistor radio with images culled from newspapers and popular magazines. An exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, entitled Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. This exhibition is concurrent with the Pacific Standard Time showing across Los Angeles in an en masse celebration of the Los Angeles art scene. Speaking in Tongues will on view October 2 to January 22, 2012. 

Plugged In

Daniele Buetti is a Swiss artist working in photography, video, sound, drawing, light box, sculpture, and digitally assisted work. Buetti makes use of advertising tools to expose the frailty of popular culture, explore our perceptions of beauty, and reveal the omnipotence of the media in our society. In Buetti’s works, beautiful colors and figures merge with light reveal unspoken feelings of ambivalence and despair, asking what function the role of media plays in the formationof identity, and questioning whether society can form identity without the media’s influence. Buetti uses light to attract the viewer in the same seductive way that the media uses beauty, forcing us to realize the inherent manipulation.Jenkins Johnson Gallery is presents Plugged In, a group exhibition of forward-thinking artists working with the electronic arts. All of the artists, including Buetti, Jeremy Bert,  and Andrew Bovasso, take contemporary approaches to their conceptual missions and use non-traditional media. Plugged in opens September 15 and runs through October 29.

Icons of the Invisible

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As part of the Pacific Standard time art exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Fowler Museum at UCLA presents Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo. Since the late 1960s, Oscar Castillo has documented the Chicano community in Los Angeles, from major political events to cultural practices to the work of muralists and painters. This exhibition will present rarely seen photographs from 1969-1980 exploring major themes (social movement, cultural heritage, urban environment, and everyday barrio life) and approaches (photojournalism, portraiture, art photography) that have guided Castillo’s work. Complementing the concurrent exhibition on Chicano art groups, Mapping Another L.A., the exhibition will provide another level of contextualization of L.A. history during this pivotal period. Icons of the Invisible will be on view from September 25 to February 26, 2012.

Thaweesak Srithongdee: Bruised

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Thaweesak Srithongdee "War"
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Thaweesak Srithongdee: left "Sex" right "Love"

Thaweesak Srithongdee, or Lolay as he is commonly known, is a thirty year old artist from Thailand.  His style echoes the influence of Surrealism and Pop Art. Lolay is a keen observer of people, their physical and mental characteristics. Having previously engineered a spurious race of Adonic, pectoral defined, super-beings that played with perceptions of body image Lolay expands his fascination with the human condition to question our existence and ultimate survival. Bruises and scars bear the physical trace of individual fallibility, but they also provoke assumptions as to the history and determiners behind such inflictions. A selection of Lolay's work will be on view at an exhibition, entitled Bruised, the Thavibu Gallery in Bangkok, Thailand from September 17 to October 15.

GUY BOURDIN, An Introduction

Sadist, genius, artist, monster – call him what you will – Guy Bourdin's titillating images changed fashion photography forever. A new book by Phaidon makes a small, but generous introduction to the work of Guy Bourdin with an introductory essay by Alison Gingeras that provides a fresh perspective on Bourdin’s life and work, including his considerable influence on the world of commercial and fine art photography.

Andy Warhol's Headlines

The first exhibition to fully examine the works that Andy Warhol created on the theme of news headlines will premiere at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 25, 2011, to January 2, 2012. Warhol: Headlines will define and present some 80 works—paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, film, video, and television—based largely on the tabloid news, revealing the artist's career-long obsession with the sensational side of contemporary media. Source materials for the art will be presented for comparison, demonstrating the ways in which Warhol cropped, altered, obscured, and reoriented the original texts and images, underscoring his role as both editor and author. After Washington, the exhibition will be on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt from February 11 to May 13, 2012.

AOI KOTSUHIROI: Exotic Regrets Chapter IV

"Her hair filled her mouth sometimes, it was the time when nothing should say. She had her two horns in each hand, to hear the heart of the animals. And when the sound of the bones told her something, she came to restrain her tears...." Aoi Kotsuhiroi

Aoi Kotsuhiroi releases the fourth chapter of her brilliant sartorial epic entitled Exotic Regrets. A beautiful, rare breed indeed – part designer, part poet, part mystic – Kotsuhiroi's new chapter is full of "objects of the cold" that are perfect for fall.  Kotsuhiroi is currently part of a group exhibition held at the Some/Things Secret Space in Paris. The exhibition – & He Went to the Sea in his Carriage & Horses – is inspired by the life and work of Raimondo Di Sangro – Prince of San Sevro, alchemist, scientist, magician, and heretic.  The exhibition will be on view until the end of Paris fashion week.  

JENNY SAVILLE: Continuum

(Flesh) is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive. – Jenny Saville

Fascinated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities that the materiality of the human body offers, Saville remits a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. In the compelling Stare paintings she renders the contours and features of the face and the nuances of skin texture and color in strokes both bold and meticulous. Enlarging the facial features of her human subjects to a vast scale and rendering them in layer upon layer of paint, she imbues in them with a sense of mass and weight that is almost sculptural and at times wholly abstract. Intense pinks, reds, and blues erupt through pale skin tones, disclosing the internal workings of the painting like the flesh and blood of a living organism.  Jenny Saville, who was born in Cambridge, England, will be having her first solo U.S. museum exhibition at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida later this year. And this september 15 the Gagosian Gallery in New York presents an exhibition, entitled Continuum, of recent paintings and drawings by Jenny Saville.




























    
  


  

  


  


  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        Joy-Art: Ladislav Sutnar
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    




  




The Czech-American designer Ladislav Sutnar (1897—1976) created many internationally-acclaimed design icons. At the age of 65, he delved into painting. Now on view at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, U.S. Venus is the first independent exhibition of Sutnar’s art in forty years and presents his paintings of female nudes never shown before. Sutnar called these works Venus and exhibited them under the label Joy-Art. In this art manifesto, he formulated his concept of art for the 21st century – as vigorous, humanistic and joyful. His geometric figures rendered in contrasting colors reflect American painting of the time, namely Pop Art. U.S. Venus is on view until October 8. 



























    
  


  

  


  


  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        [UPCOMING] David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    




  


David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers: Drawings on iPhones and iPads will be on view at the Royal Ontario Museum this October. "The Institute for Contemporary Culture presents the North American debut of this cutting-edge exhibition, which reveals David Hockney’s extraordinary use of this novel new artistic medium and its impact on shaping visual culture today. Hockney is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, and Fresh Flowers is his first major show in Canada in over two decades. The exhibition features approximately 200 iPhone and iPad drawings displayed on 20 iPod Touches and 20 iPads." On view October 8 until January 1, 2012.



























    
  


  

  


  


  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        [MILAN] Boschi Di Stefano Private Collection
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    




  
The Casa-Museo Boschi Di Stefano houses a small yet amazing collection of over 200 works that were acquired over the course of the lives of the patrons Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano. A trip through the house is well worth one's time with Marussig, Campigli, Manzoni and Mirandi covering the walls. Casa-Museo Boschi Di Stefano. Via G. Jan, 15 - 20129 Milano, Italia. Text by Lily Harris



























    
  


  

  


  


  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        William Etty: Art and Controversy
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    










































 

  
  
    


      

      
        

          
        
        

        
          
            
          

            

                
                
                
                
                
                
                
                

            

          

        
          
        

        
          
          

            
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William Etty: Dawn of Love, 1828
William Etty's art divided public opinion during the first half of the nineteenth century more than that of any other British artist, with the possible exception of Turner. During his 40-year career he produced a wide variety of landscapes and portraits, but is most famous for his repeated use of the female nude. Many believed that the splendor of his richly colored canvases was designed to disguise his underlying preoccupation with titillating forms of bodily display. Etty was repeatedly encouraged to 'turn from his wicked ways' and make his art 'fit for decent company'. At the same time, one critic declared Etty to be 'the greatest of all our history painters'. Another said the brilliancy of his colors were almost 'too much for human eyes to dwell upon'. He was described as the natural heir of the Old Masters; as 'rivaling Rubens and the great Venetians on their own ground'. An exhibition, entitled William Etty: Art and Controversy, at the York Art Gallery includes more than 100 of Etty's works from Tate, the Royal Academy, the Royal Collection, Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Southampton Art Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery, as well as many works from York Art Gallery. On view until January 22, 2012.



























    
  


  

  


  


  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        The Persistence of Collage
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    










































 

  
  
    


      

      
        

          
        
        

        
          
            
          

            

                
                
                
                
                
                
                
                

            

          

        
          
        

        
          
          

            
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Linder: Detail of Untitled, 1978.
The new Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Transmitter/Receiver traces some of the uses of collage in British art from the first influences of the Parisian avant-garde, in the early work of Ben Nicholson and British Surrealists Eileen Agar and Roland Penrose, through to present day practitioners such as Steve Claydon, David Noonan and Idris Khan. Bringing together over 50 works it includes traditional collage on paper, alongside painting, sculpture, film and slide projections, all drawn from the Arts Council Collection. Transmitter/Receiver: The Persistence of Collage is now on view at its first stop at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the UK until November 6.



























    
  


  

  


  


  





  






  

  


  

  

    

      
        Under the Big Black Sun
      
    

    

      
    

  


  

  
    










































 

  
  
    


      

      
        

          
        
        

        
          
            
          

            

                
                
                
                
                
                
                
                

            

          

        
          
        

        
          
          

            
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Film still from experimental filmmaker Bruce Connor's Marilyn Times Five.  As part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, MOCA Los Angeles will present Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from October 1, 2011 – featuring works by more than 130 artists, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey to examine the exceptional diversity of art practices in California during the mid- to late 1970s.