Enrique Martínez Celaya working on his MAM exhibition

MIAMO ART MUSEUM

November 2, 2007 – January 13, 2008
New Work Gallery

Enrique Martínez Celaya works in a variety of media, including painting, photography, sculpture and installation. He is perhaps best known for his large-scale paintings made from tar and other materials. Influenced by the writings of poets and philosophers, these rich and brooding paintings suggest deep feelings of loneliness, yearning and desire for connection. Generally stripped down in imagery, but dense in execution, Celaya’s atmospheric paintings are both highly expressive yet strangely mute. For his exhibition at MAM, Cuban-born Enrique Martínez Celaya will create a group of five large-scale oil-and-wax paintings inspired in part by the poems of Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, which will explore issues of exile and nomadism.

The exhibition is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by Assistant Director for Programs/Senior Curator Peter Boswell as part of New Work, a series of projects by leading contemporary artists. It is supported by the Funding Arts Network and MAM’s Annual Exhibition Fund.

SOURCE:

http://www.miamiartmuseum.org/exhibitions-07-11-2-nomad.asp

Martinez Celaya Bio:

http://www.martinezcelaya.com/index.html

PINTA New York Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary

Thursday, November 10th 6:00pm – 9:00pm: VIP Opening. By invitation only. Friday, November 11th 2:00pm – 8:00pm Saturday, November 12th 12:00pm – 8:00pm Sunday, November 13th 12:00pm – 7:00pm Press: Carolina Ledezma, carolina@pintaart.com www.pintaart.com

This year PINTA, the Latin American fair of modern and contemporary art will have a brand new look when it opens its doors in New York from November 10th to the 13th. Our new location at 7 West 34th Street at 5th Avenue will accommodate fifty galleries and projects from the United States, Latin America and Europe. For the fifth year in a row, New York will see some of the best modern art, including works by masters of painting and sculpture from Latin America such as Fernando Botero, Rufino Tamayo, Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta; even as geometric abstraction, concrete art, and conceptual art from the 1970s and 1980s that have been our signature since the first edition of the fair in 2007. PINTA will also offer visitors the best of the most current and contemporary artistic production of the region.

Participating galleries

The presence of the United States at the fair has always been the strongest. This year we will again host seventeen galleries from New York, Miami, San Antonio and other cities. The vibrant current state of Brazilian art will also have an important participation with six galleries from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, as well as with two individual works that will be presented within the art projects curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.

Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela will also be significantly represented in this fair. Spanish galleries will also use PINTA as their port of entry to the cultural capital of America. According to Director Diego Costa Peuser: “This year we want to reinforce the concept of a boutique fair with proposals and presentations of the highest quality.”

Guest artist: Antonio Manuel Antonio Manuel (1947), one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s, will be the guest artist at this edition of the fair. Manuel’s work is characterized by innovative artistic resources and a markedly political message. On November 9th, at Americas Society, there will be a guided tour of theexhibition “Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent!”, curated by Claudia Calirman and Gabriela Rangel. This is the fifth year of an uninterrupted collaboration between the Americas Society and PINTA.

Art projects curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

The fair will include a section of artists’ projects selected by Italian art critic Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. In his career in the art world, Crivelli has been curator of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and of the Volta Contemporary Art Fair (Basel, Switzerland), as well as a juror on multiple international prizes. On this occasion he will present works by Claudio Perna (Venezuela), Eder Santos (Brazil), Faivovich & Goldberg (Argentina), Fernanda Gomes (Brazil), Iván Candeo (Venezuela), Jonathan Hernández (Mexico), Lygia Pape (Brazil), Patricio Larrambebere (Argentina) and Rómulo Aguerre (Uruguay).

Museum Acquisitions Program

PINTA 2011 will continue with what has become its “trademark”: the unique and highly prized Museum Acquisitions Program. This program has already invested more than USD $800,000, half of which was provided by PINTA. More than fifty works of art have been purchased since 2007 to be part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, among others.

Institutional Director Mauro Herlitzka, said: “This year PINTA has invited the Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to participe in this matching fund.”

For more information:

http://www.pintaart.com/

Oct 30,2011

Once again ArtBo stood out as one of the best art fairs in Latin America. 57 international galleries participated in the fair, with 33 representing ten Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Leon Tovar Gallery from New York and Durban Segnini from Miami presented impeccable works by renowned Latin American masters of the abstract geometric tradition, including Argentinean Julio Le Parc and  Leon Ferrari; Venezuelan artists Carlos Cruz Diez and Jesús Soto, and Colombians Edgard Negret and Ramirez Villamizar.

Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuela) 1975

The most prominent established figures were undoubtedly Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and Guillermo Kuitca from Argentina, who were both represented by Colombian Galeria La Cometa. The gallery exhibited a beautiful work from Muniz’s Rebus series and one of Kuitca’s famous mattresses.

Jesus Soto, Guillermo Kuitca and Vik Muniz. Galeria La Cometa.

Federico Uribe presented a work made from pencils, books, which was the most impressive work in the entire art fair, and which garnered most attention from the public. Priscilla Monge presented a number of works from her blackboard series with the Paris gallery Mor – Champeteir. Gaston Ugalde also presented one of the most impressive works in the fair; his conceptualist work was made with coca leaves, which he used to create the Coca Cola symbol. Ugalde, Bolivia’s most prominent conceptual artist, also presented a series of amazing photographs about Bolivian culture.

Federico Uribe. "Conocimiento" 2011

Gaston Ugalde "Coke"

Gaston Ugalde

Miguel Ángel Rojas from Colombia also presented an important artwork made using coca leaves. Oscar Muñoz presented works dealing with memories; Carlos Garaicoa, who is represented by Elba Benitez (Madrid), also showed amazing works dealing with memory, in which he reconstructed aspects of Havana, Cuba, while Alexander Apóstol presented his series Modernidad Tropical. Liliana Porter, represented by Galeria Ruth Benzacar, showed her caricature works that depict common human activities in ironic scenarios. Gabriel de la Mora, represented by Siccardi Gallery, showed an amazing work made using synthetic hair, as well as a work composed of photo memories, shown by Parisian gallery Mor–Charpentier.

Carlos Garaicoa, Cuba. Elba Benitez Gallery

Liliana Porter at Ruth Benzacar

Gabriel de la Mora. Galeria Mor-Champentier

Magdalena Fernández presented a geometrical abstract piece of video art, which was one of the works that received most interest from curators and art collectors.  Antonio Caro, one of the early latin americans conceptual artists from the 70s who is best known as the Visual Guerrilla Colombia, showed his work Colombia (written in the style of Coca Cola’s branding), which offers a visual explanation of his country’s submissive attitude to capitalism. Among the most noteworthy young and emerging artists was Julieta Aranda from Mexico, who makes installations that deal with the concept of the time, alluding to the present and future. The works available for sale are photographs that record these installations and performances.

Magdalena Fernandez. Faria-Fabregas Gallery

Antonio Caro "Colombia". Galeria Casas Reigner

Julieta Aranda “There has been a miscalculation”

Juan Pablo Garza and Rafael Serrano (both Venezuelan) gave an interesting twist to photography through their attention to detail and environmental research that uses art as its vehicle and medium. Other outstanding artists were Miler Lagos (Colombia), Daniel Santiago Salguero (Chile), Adriana Salazar (Colombia), Sonia Falcon (Bolivia) who showed an amazing video art installation that enraptured the public with a mystic view of the world that revealed a divine pulse that remains forever hidden from profane eyes.

Juan Pablo Garza (Venezuela). Oficina #1

Adriana Salazar

Rafael Serrano

Sonia Falcon

Enrique Jezik, What comes from outside is reinforced from within, 2008. Acción - intervención realizada en MeetFactory, Praga.

Over two decades, marked by their relocation from Argentina to Mexico in 1990, Enrique Jezik (Cordoba, Argentina, 1961) has deployed a complex work ofexploring the power structures and devices, surveillance, repression, control and violence, from within polymorphic practice of contemporary sculpture. For EnriqueJezik, the sculpture is a way of thinking to power and violence as a stubbornaction on the matter of bodies. His performances, videos and specific interventions that involve tactics that range from the use of bullets to writing in Braille, testify to a historical period where the means of destruction and controltechnologies create the spaces, metaphors, devices and paths policy.

Obstruct, destroy, conceal deployed for the first time an overview of the works and projects of an artist who has been a crucial piece of the story of contemporary Mexican art. Organized into six sections that relate to concepts of the devices and operations areas of violence (obstruction, destruction, concealment, the enemy’s body, the theater of operations, and sacrificial constructivism), the sample coversthe territory of objects and images forces that has shaped Jezik reflecting on the symbolic relationship and technical devices sculpture domination.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Jezik Enrique is recipient of the “National System of Art Creators” 2010, the National Fund for Culture and the Art

Source:

http://www.muac.unam.mx/webpage/ver_exposicion.php?id_exposicion=33

For more information about artist:

http://www.enriquejezik.com/

Damien Hirst's work "Mother and Child Divided"

A cow and a calf cut in half float in a tank full of formaldehyde.

This spectacle of attraction and repulsion occupies a central space in the pavilioin of the Bienal of São Paulo, at Ibirapuera.

The Britain Damien Hirst is the artist behind this literal nature-death.

His visual excesses guided a generation of “blockbuster” North Americans chosen for the exhibition “In the Name of the Artists” which celebrates 60 years of the Sao Paulo Bienal as a way to heat it up for its 30th edition, which will happen only in 2012.

In recent decades, the production from names like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney left behind the classical notion of artists in their Spartan studios.

They became celebrities, stretching that 15 minutes of fame so propagated by Andy Warhol.

The flirtation with the entertainment industry has become, in certain cases, marriage: Koons was married to the former Italian porn star Cicciolina, and Barney shares his life with the Icelandic singer Björk.

Their bank accounts are also worthy of stars. In the midst of the global financial cataclysm of 2008, Hirst sold R$500 million in work at an auction in London, one of the epicenters of the credit crisis.

The same year, a sculpture by Koons was sold for R$48 million and Sherman set a record with a photograph sold for R$7 million.

“It is true that these artists have enormous visibility,” says Gunnar Kvaran, curator of the Norwegian museum Astrup Fearnley, which loaned the works in the exposition. “They are like Warhol’s grandchildren who have entered the ‘star system’.”

In the show it is possible to understand how this happened.

In one painting, Koons has oral sex with Cicciolina, Sherman does a self portrait as a breast-feeding Virgin Mary and Prince reinvents the cowboy of the Marlboro commercials.

All have appropriated fragments of visual, pop and erudite culture to articulate images as seductive and eccentric as their own personalities.

EMERGING ONES

Less flashy, the show also has established artists who have walked more esthetically subtle paths.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban living in the US, explores autobiographical issues in installations that dialogue with minimalism, like a big rug made of candy wrapped in blue cellophane.

Architectural issues and desolate and empty spaces are in a video by Doug Aitken, an artist who has already shown a series of shorts on the front of MOMA in New York.

Shirin Neshat, an Iranian based in Manhattan, also creates more sober video installations, in which she discusses the plight of women in Iran and invents utopian fantasies to highlight the contradictions of the Muslim world.

In the younger and no less controversial aisle of America, artists like Nate Lowman, Paul Chan, Frank Benson, Dan Colen and Terence Koh, a Chinese living in New York, reinvent notions of sculpture and video art in works critical of North American hegemony in the world and of the country’s consumerism.

Among the most controversial, Koh, famous for being a friend off the pop star Lady Gaga, has already even sold his own excrement wrapped in gold and is not shy about using sperm and other secretions as material for his compositions.

In the commemorative show, he exhibits two sculptures covered in gold and glitter, built with bees and the head of a baboon.

Translated by DAVE WOLIN

Damien Hirst's work "Mother and Child Divided"

Marco Maggi, Installation View, "Radical Optimism", NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia, 2011

MARCO MAGGI | Radical Optimism
NC-arte
Carrera 5 no. 26b-77
La Macarena, Bogotá, COLOMBIA
October 22 – December 17, 2011

Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Radical Optimism,” a project by gallery artist Marco Maggi, at NC-arte in Bogotá, Colombia. The show opens on Saturday October 22 at 11 a.m., and will remain open until December 17.

NC-arte is a foundation dedicated to the appreciation and development of the visual arts in Colombia. Its mission is to promote, research and contextualize contemporary art through exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects.

In “Radical Optimism” Maggi fills the gallery atrium with a column over ten meters high, covered with yellow Post-its. Around this illuminated tower, a labyrinth of reams of colored paper extends across the floor. Atop these stacks of paper are delicate and enigmatic paper cuts, transforming them almost into architectural models. The back wall is filled by a large assemblage of white envelopes, also modified by the artist.

According to Guillermo Ovalle, Director of NC-arte, Maggi has created a serene space of uncertainty using his “vocabulary made of every day life office supplies.” He continues: “The paths to walk around the paper reams pose several questions: Where do these pathways lead? How does the labyrinth work? Are these the foundations of a building that was never built? There is a sense of ritual as you walk through the piece that mysteriously keeps us within the path, turning corners, turning around, and even avoiding jumping over the reams, and thus respecting the marked limits.”

Marco Maggi has said that “When I understand: I talk; when I understand less: I write; and when I don’t understand: I draw or cut small pieces of paper. My only goal is to make time visible in a world where paying attention turns out to be shocking and delicacy is considered as a subversive activity.”

For more information on this exhibition, please visit www.ncearte.org or email info@sicardi.com.

Lygia Clark, Bicho (Animal, or Beast), aluminum, 22 x 26 in, 1962

Lygia Clark (Belo Horizonte, October 23, 1920 – Rio de Janeiro, April 25, 1988) was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement. Even with the changes in how she approached her artwork, she did not stray far from her Constructivist roots. Along with Brazilian artists Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Pape and poet Ferreira Gullar, Clark co-founded the Neo-Concretist art movement. The Neo-Concretists believed that art ought to be subjective and organic. Throughout her career trajectory, Clark discovered ways for museum goers (who would later be referred to as “participants”) to interact with her art works. She sought to redefine the relationship between art and society. Clark’s works dealt with inner life and feelings.

In 1920, Lygia Clark was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais Brazil. Clark became an artist in 1947. In this year, she moved to Rio de Janeiro to study with Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.^[1] Between 1950-52, she studied with Léger and Arpad Szenes in Paris. In 1953, she became one of the founding members of Rio’s Frente group of artists. In 1957, Clark participated in Rio de Janeiro‘s first National Concrete Art Exhibition.^[1] This would be one of Clark’s frequent trips to Brazil in order to exhibit her artwork.

In the first decade of her career, Clark devoted her time to painting and sculpture. In the early 1970s, Clark taught art at the Sorbonne. During this time, Clark also explored the idea of sensory perception through her art. Her art became a multisensory experience in which the spectator became an active participant. Between 1979 and 1988, Clark moved more toward art therapy than actually creating new works. She used her art therapy to treat psychotic and mildly disturbed patients. Clark returned to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1977. In 1988, she died of a heart attack in her home.^[1]

Some critics say her artwork pre-aged the modern digital information era. Her later works were more abstract and holistic with a focus on psychotherapy and healing.

VIDEO http://youtu.be/7Cq2OVD7dvA

ENHIBITIONS

1959 – Bienal, São Paulo

1960 – Venice Biennale, Venice

1960 - Konkrete Kunst, Zürich

1961 – Bienal, São Paulo

1962 – Venice Biennale, Venice

1963 – Bienal, São Paulo

1964 – Signals Gallery, London

1964 - Mouvement II, Paris

1965 – Signals Gallery, London

1965 – Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro

1967 – Bienal, São Paulo

1968 – Retrospective, Venice Biennale, Venice

1986 – Retrospective (with Hélio Oiticica), Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro

1987 – Retrospective, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

1997 - Documenta, Kassel

2000 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

2001 - Brazil: Body and Soul, New York, Guggenheim Museum

2001 – 7th International Istanbul Biennial – Sala especial, Istanbul

2002 - Brazil: Body and Soul, Guggenheim Museum, New York

2003 - Pulse: Art, Healing and Transformation, ICA, Boston,

2004 – Pensamento Mudo, Dan Galeria

2004 - Artists’ Favourites, ICA – London

2005 - 50 Jahre/Years DOCUMENTA: 1955-2005, Kunsthalle Fridericiaum Kassel

2005 - Lygia Clark, da obra ao acontecimento: somos o molde, a você cabe o sopro…, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes

2005 - Tropicália: a revolution in Brazilian Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

2006 – Barbican, London

2006 - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, SP, Brasil

2006-07 – Bronx Museum of the Art, New York

2007 - WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles

2010 - elles@centrepompidou, the Pompidou Centre, Paris

TEXT SOURCE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_Clark

September 10 – October 22, 2011

Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce its forthcoming exhibi- tion, Two Different Tomorrows, a major new sculptural installation by Leandro Erlich. The opening will take place on friday, septem- ber 9th, from 6pm until 8pm. The artist will be present.

The title of the exhibition grew from a conversation with the gallery in which the Argentine-born Erlich, while traveling in Asia, became confused about the “tomorrow” in his time zone and the “tomor- row” in the gallery’s time zone. Ironically, this sense of shifting real- ities is among the artist’s central preoccupations.

Two Different Tomorrows, Erlich’s most ambitious exhibition to date, will include four new sculptures that center on the elevator. Stripped of their function and context, these elevators highlight the narrative potential of the ordinary. As viewers inhabit and observe the instal-

lations, they create their own stories, finding answers to Erlich’s visual questions. Elevators are, in Erlich’s words, “a functional object, but one in which life seems to be suspended parenthetically. Recorded voices and music may in- tervene to ease the discomfort of the ride, but we cannot avoid ourselves in such a space and so experience the Sartrean room of the self. We are no one, nowhere, anyone, anyplace.”

Confounding logic and defying the laws of physics, Two Different Tomorrows presents us with multiple scenes: a maze of elevator banks becomes a tunnel of reflection; an elevator stuck between floors invokes an impossible space; and a working elevator door provides a portal to another world, opening and closing to reveal people filmed in an actual elevator in Tokyo. The largest of the works is a 50-foot long elevator shaft turned on its horizontal axis. Instead of plunging down the elevator shaft, viewers will walk down the “side” of the interior wall towards the elevator car. As viewers pass horizontally through a vertical passageway, they will find themselves deposited into the main gallery, un- sure of which end is up.

An architect of the uncertain, Erlich creates spaces with fluid and unstable boundaries. Before we even try to make sense of the image, we sense the uncanny. A single change (up is down, inside is out) can be enough to upset the seem- ingly normal situation, collapsing and exposing our reality as counterfeit. Through this transgression of limits, the artist undermines certain absolutes and the institutions that reinforce them.

Erlich draws inspiration from his literary Argentinian forebear, Jorge Luis Borges, but references to the world of film also appear frequently in his work; Erlich makes no secret of his admiration for directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Luis Buñel and David Lynch, whom, he argues, “have used the everyday as a stage for creating a fictional world obtained through the psychological subversion of everyday spaces.”

Between 1998 and 1999, Erlich took part in the Core Program, an artist residency at the MFA in Houston, and came to the attention of the art world at a young age. In 2001 he was invited to represent his country in the 49th Venice Biennale. He then participated in the Biennials of Istanbul (2001), Shanghai (2002) and São Paulo (2004). He has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (2000) and the 1st Busan Biennale, Korea (2002). He was part of La Nuit Blanche de Paris (2004), the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (2006), and the exhibitionTwo Different Tomorrows, cont.

Notre histoire at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2006, among others. In 2008, his installation La Torre was exhibited at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and he showed his acclaimed Swimming Pool at MoMA P.S. 1 the same year. Currently his work can be seen in Paris-Delhi-Bombay at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through September 19, 2011.

Erlich’s works are included in several private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris; 21st Century Mu- seum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; MACRO, Rome; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Fonds Na- tional d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris.

For press inquiries, please contact Maureen Bray at 212.239.1181 or via email at maureen@skny.com. For sales in- quiries, please contact Cécile Panzieri at 212.239.1181 or via email at cecile@skny.com. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 11am to 6pm and Saturday from 10am to 6pm.

For more info:

www.skny.com

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile in 1956. He attended Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura, Santiago (1979) and Universidad de Chile, Santiago (1981). In installations, photographs, film, and community-based projects, Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations. Subjects addressed in his work include the holocaust in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States. Many of Jaar’s works are extended meditations or elegies, including “Muxima” (2006)—a video that portrays and contrasts the oil economy and extreme poverty of Angola—and “The Gramsci Trilogy” (2004-05)—a series of installations dedicated to the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Jaar has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2000); a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1987); and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). He has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1999); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992). Jaar emigrated from Chile in 1981, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His exhibition at Fundación Telefonica Chile, Santiago (2006) is his first in his native country in twenty-five years. Jaar lives and works in New York.

For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Alfredo Jaar’s Web Site |  Galerie Lelong, New York
Alfredo Jaar on the Art21 blog