Emily Kame Kngwarreye at TNAC Tokyo

Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye
May 28, 2008 - July 28, 2008
The National Art Center, Tokyo
7-22-2 Roppongi Minato-ku

Left: Summer Awelye I, 1991
Synthetic polymer paint of canvas, 302.0 x 136.8 cm
Private Collection © Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Licensed Viscopy 07
Courtesy Estate of the Artist and TNAC Tokyo

From the gallery's press release:
"Emily Kngwarreye is one of the most important abstract painters of the 20th century and one of the most significant artists that Australia has ever produced. Emily was born into Australia’s Aboriginal community, an Indigenous people that has inhabited the Australian continent for about fifty thousand years, long before the federation of the Australian nation. Throughout their history, Aboriginal people have used various forms of dynamic artistic expression, including body marking and sand paintings, to reflect their unique perception of the world. Although Aboriginal art has often been classified as tribal or primitive art, Emily’s strikingly modern and beautifully innovative works were created in an environment far away from the influence of the Western Art tradition. Her works have been featured in more than 100 exhibitions over the last decade and they are housed in collections around the world. In 1997, Emily’s works were exhibited at the Venice Biennale and visitors from all over the world were deeply impressed by the richness of her art. As modern art, Emily’s works transcend the Aboriginal art genre and now, more than ten years after her passing, they are highly acclaimed and recognized throughout the world. Emily first began working on canvas in her late seventies and she produced between three thousand to four thousand works in the eight years prior to her death. This exhibition gathers over 100 selected works from her oeuvre and it is the first major retrospective exhibition of Emily’s works ever held outside Australia. Emily’s genius was nurtured in the Australian outback and her world provides a wealth of inspiration. We hope that this exhibition will be an opportunity for visitors to learn more about the extraordinary legacy of Emily’s innovative combination of Aboriginal tradition and modern art."

Australia's greatest abstract painter, bar none.

後で会おう

Latino Visions: Juan Muñoz Retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao

Tate Modern, London
until April 27

Guggenheim Bilbao
27 May - 28 Sep 2008

Left: Juan Muñoz
Many Times (detail), 1999
Private collection © The estate of Juan Muñoz
Photo © Musée De Grenoble, Jean Luc Lacroix

LF caught this excellent retrospective of the late, great Madrileño at the Tate before it closed, and it would be well worth a detour to Bilbao if you find yourself in the 'hood.
All the work is stupendously good and was impressively mounted in the Tate Modern's austere and soaring spaces.
The work reproduced here ('Many Times', 1999) is one of those rare installations that LF considers a total knockout - a (gallery opening?) moment is frozen in time, yet to walk among the hundreds of cloned little grey oriental men is to participate in an extraordinary, almost living tableau. Funny, disturbing, profound.

Hasta luego

Louise Bourgeois: from Pompidou to Guggenheim NY

Pompidou Cenre, Paris
Until 2 June

Solomon H Guggenheim Museum
New York
22 June - 28 September

If you haven't caught this majestic survey of 'La Maitresse' at Tate Modern or the Pompidou, you may have to catch it in the USA. It closes in Paris o 2 June and moves to the Guggenheim NY from 22 June (then on to LA and Washington into 2009).

What's to say, except to quote an earlier LF rave:

"The wonder of Louise Bourgeois is that her practice is steadfastly personal, refuses to indulge in facile art-historical or social references, yet sits at the hip pinnacle of late 20th century art, and she is revered as one of the most important 'feminist' artists of her age. This upper-class frenchwoman (who is reputed not to have left her New York apartment for a decade) has for sixty years pursued her intensely idiosyncatic work with single-minded purpose, producing extraordinary sculptural tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, distilling her simple materials into objects of archetypal power."

The retrospective is not too vast, but features most of the the major sculptures, many of the most important 'Cells', important recent work with fabric, and a large component of works on paper.

Go see.

A toute a l'heure.

The Art of the Possible

An occasional series on political art in the public domain.

"Politics is the art of the possible"
Otto Von Bismarck, 1867

Left: Poster sighted at Venice Beach markets, California
Photo © Le Flaneur, May 2008

A visit to Santa Fe, USA

LF got to spend a little time in Santa Fe, New Mexico in May, and was impressed by the sheer volume of art in a city of only 80,000 people. You could in fact describe SF as an 'Art Town' - it has been a magnet for artists since the turn of the century, and with Georgia O'Keefe's legacy, and many revered artists such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle living in the 'hood, its' 'hot art' status is perhaps not so surprising. LF was fortunate while there to visit one of the great private American collections (privacy requires that it remains nameless, but there is a picture, left), situated in an extraordinary glass box high in the hills overlooking the Rio Grande valley. The presence (at least part of the time) of many well-heeled collectors, and the dry, clean desert air, is undoubtedly another reason why art thrives there. And it's a hell of a long way from Washington.

As well as some 400 commercial galleries (a lot of them showing tourist crap, admittedly) the city centre boasts the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts (20th century Southwestern American art), and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (contemporary Native American fine art). Museum Hill, a few miles southeast of the city, features the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the truly fascinating Museum of International Folk Art (the world’s largest collection of folk art, no less), The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (contemporary and traditional Native American art) and The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. That's quite a haul for a little town.

In addition SITE Santa Fe, a well-regarded non-profit artspace, provides a year-round program of exhibitions, including the annual (sic) biennial, details below.

“Lucky Number Seven"
SITE Santa Fe Biennial
June 22-October 26 2008

Photo: Herbert Lotz, 2005, courtesy Site Santa Fe

David Ebony writes in Art & America:
Organized by independent curator Lance Fung, this year’s SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the seventh installment, promises to be full of surprises. The list of the 27 participating artists from around the world, recently released to the press, has already raised eyebrows in the art world, as it is almost completely devoid of familiar names. In a departure from conventional biennial procedures that routinely tap art stars to move tickets, Fung, operating with an approximately $800,000 budget, decided to focus exclusively on emerging artists. And, as with “The Snow Show,” for which Fung paired artists and architects to create collaborative projects in Finnish Lapland (2004) and at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the Santa Fe exhibition will be a team effort. Rather than selecting the artists directly, he asked numerous nonprofit, international contemporary art institutions to suggest one or two artists to be included in the show. From these candidates he chose 27 artists nominated by 18 institutions; these institutions will act as co-curatorial partners in the endeavor. Among those on board are Hiroshi Fuji, selected by Japan’s Art Tower Mito; Bharti Kher, chosen by England’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; Piero Golia, proposed by Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Sibony, submitted by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. In another unusual move, at a time when many artists have their works fabricated, Fung requires that all the artists create their pieces by hand in Santa Fe. Working in a variety of mediums, and each allotted a $7,500 budget, the artists are obliged to come to New Mexico at least three weeks in advance of the exhibition and produce works either within the SITE Santa Fe building or off-site. For that purpose, Fung has enlisted the architecture team Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to redesign SITE’s interior especially for the biennial.

The model for their distinctive scheme, featuring a series of ramps and zigzagging galleries, was recently unveiled in Santa Fe. In a move to counter the hypercommercialism of today’s art world, Fung requires that no artist accept funding from a commercial gallery for the SITE work. He underscores the specificity of the event by also stipulating that none of the works can be sold after the exhibition, and all are to be destroyed. His unorthodox approach to the biennial has raised some concerns among SITE’s board members. However, Laura Steward Heon, SITE’s director and chief curator, who chose Fung as the organizer, told A.i.A. that part of SITE’s mission is to take risks, and that the biennial, relatively modest in scale, presents the opportunity to innovate. Although the format might seem to invite chaos, much about the work the artists will produce in Santa Fe is known from their proposals. Still, it seems that more than a little positive musing on the laws of chance will be part of the event, and it’s not for nothing that Fung has titled the show “Lucky Number Seven."

Vale Bob

Robert Milton Ernst Rauschenberg
October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008

Goya in times of war at the Prado, Madrid

Goya en tiempos de guerra (Goya in times of war)
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
until 13 July 2008

Left: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid: the executions on Principe Pio hill, 1814
Oil on Canvas
268 cm x 347 cm

This must be the most comprehensive survey ever of the great master's ouevre, appropriately mounted at the museum that holds many of his greatest works. The 'pieces de resistance' are the two great canvases of the 2nd and 3rd of May 1808 (see 3rd May left) which have been cleaned and restored, however the exhibition is vast, and features almost 200 works by the artist, and is part of the program commemorating the bicentenary of the start of the Spanish War of Independence in 1808. It includes more than 65 paintings loaned from other institutions and private collections, including 'Majas on the Balcony' and 'Portrait of the Marchioness of Montehermoso', both from private collections; 'Friar Pedro de Zaldivia clubs Maragato the Bandit' from The Art Institute of Chicago; 'The Capture of Christ from Toledo Cathedral', and a group of nine works loaned by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

Brooding, bloody and pessimistic, Goya grapples with the dark heart of Spain. While LF doesn't warm to all Goya's painting, the etchings (and even better, studies on paper for the etchings) are a visual treat. Our absolute absolute standout painting is the small self-portrait painted late in his life (1815) - see left - an uncompromising masterpiece.

Postscript: Goya's Black brother - the Australian connection
Abstract of a paper presented by Professor Ian Howard (College of Fine Arts. University of New South Wales)
NORTH AND SOUTH – THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANTON GOYA 1748-1828
'Art and re-enactment’ Conference, Australian National University, Canberra, 5-7 June 2007

Goya’s twin brother, Anton, was born black. In 1748 Spain this meant he was destined to an entirely different life than that of his famous artist sibling. Banished from the family home in Saragossa, at a young age he was shanghaied to a life at sea. In his early twenties he sailed with Cook into the Pacific, in his thirties he dumped tea into Boston Harbour. At 42 he fortuitously jumped ship from La Perouse’s Astrolabe at Botany Bay. Possessing in a rough sort of way, the artistic talents of his brother, he quickly established himself as the painter of Port Jackson which brought him unwanted attention, leading to an early return to the northern hemisphere. In Paris, turning fifty, he saw Louis XVI guillotined and Napoleon seize power. Returning to his native Spain, he was again dragooned to sea, this time with the combined French and Spanish fleet moored at Cadiz. At 59, he was the oldest sailor to survive the Battle of Trafalgar. At the subsequent Spanish uprising against the French, galvanised on the third of May, 1808, the twin brothers, now in their early sixties and unknown to each other, met briefly, for the first and only time.
Records of Anton Goya’s extraordinary life, led variously in each hemisphere of the globe between 1748 and 1828 is being pieced together from historical records and the extant art works he produced, which are now being uncovered, surprisingly, in China.
Although this presentation will concentrate on the emerging story of Anton’s life, it is anticipated that the final work will take the form of a narrative, an exhibition and video documentary.

Interesting or what?

Hasta luego