LOOK&LISTEN: avril 2011

valerie brennan

http://www.valeriebrennan.com/

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective / press release

Richard Serra, Taraval Beach, 1977
Paintstick on Belgian linen, Shown installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
Whitney Biennial, Collection of the artist, Richard Serra © 2010 Artist Rights Society (ARS),
New York

Photo: BeVan Davies

March 2, 2012 – June 10, 2012

The first-ever retrospective of the artist’s drawings, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, will be the first major one-person exhibition organized by the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center.

Though his sculptures have been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, Richard Serra’s drawings – crucial to his work for more than forty years – have never received a critical overview. This exhibition of works, drawn from major European and American public and private collections, will trace Serra’s investigation of drawing as an activity both independent of and linked to his sculptural practice. Organized chronologically, it will address significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale, and will culminate with new, never-before-exhibited large-scale works.

In the early 1970s Serra drew on paper primarily with ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon, using such sketches to explore form and perceptual relations between an envisioned sculpture and the viewer. Over the years they evolved into autonomous works of art, bold forms created with black paintstick that exploded beyond the boundaries of the paper support.

In the mid 1970s, Serra made the first of his monumentally scaled Installation Drawings, bringing radical scale and technique to an architectural context. Working on site, he attached Belgian linen directly to the wall and with vigorous and repetitive gestures applied paintstick that had been melted down and recast in large, heavy blocks.

Over the last twenty-five years Serra has continued to invent new drawing techniques. In the late 1980s he explored how to further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal and vertical compositions. In his most recent work he has embarked on numerous series with a remarkable variety of surface effects.

Serra is among a significant group of artists whose transformative work irrevocably changed the practice and definition of modernist drawing, and challenged drawing’s role in the traditional hierarchy of media.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, is organized by curators Bernice Rose, Michelle White and Gary Garrels and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring several original, scholarly texts.

The exhibition will travel to
The Metropolitan Museum of Art April 13 - August 28, 2011,
followed by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art October 15, 2011- January 16, 2012.

This exhibition is generously supported by Laura and John Arnold, National Endowment for the Arts, Sotheby’s, Eddie Allen and Chinhui Juhn, the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation, Paul and Janet Hobby, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Four Seasons Hotel Houston, Clare Casademont and Michael Metz, Invesco, Janie C. Lee and David B. Warren, eEvents Group LLC, Scott and Judy Nyquist, Michael Zilkha, and the City of Houston.
The Menil Collection would also like to thank Gagosian Gallery for graciously providing funds toward the production of the accompanying catalogue.

http://www.menil.org/exhibitions/RichardSerraDrawinginRetrospect.php

claudioadami @ Patrick Heide / press release

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present “Ora, ad allora" (translated “now, by then”), the first solo exhibition in the UK of Italian artist claudioadami. As part of a series of three exhibitions featuring artists that work with systematic drawing defined by a conceptual approach, claudioadami is the second artist after David Connearn, to be followed by gallery artist Isabel Albrecht at the beginning of June.

‘Ora, ad allora’ gives an overview of claudioadami’s practice over the past decade and highlights his concept of writing as drawing and its relevance as a medium to register the transcience of time.As part of a series of three exhibitions featuring artists that work with systematic drawing defined by a conceptual approach, claudioadami is the second artist after David Connearn, to be followed by gallery artist Isabel Albrecht at the beginning of June.
‘Ora, ad allora’ gives an overview of claudioadami’s practice over the past decade and highlights his concept of writing as drawing and its relevance as a medium to register the transcience of time.

claudioadami has been dedicated to his drawing project since the early 80’s, when he started to transcribe texts by Samuel Beckett. Almost every day since, claudioadami covers white surfaces in regular minute black writings, line by line, its scripture leaning to the right. claudioadami then overwrites his sentences so many times that the words as such disappear to become a succession of frayed and densely scribbled thick black bands.Since abandoning Beckett, Adami writes down whatever thoughts come to his head: daily tasks, poems, streams of consciousness, anything. He then dissolves these thoughts by overwriting them to a stage beyond recognition.
The meaning of the words, the narrative gives way to an abstract representation. The communication becomes obsolete.
His scribblings translate random thoughts that evolve into an obsessive, repetitive gesture emanating the fascination of the trickling movement in an hourglasses or the ceaseless rolling motion of the sea.

The London exhibition features a wide spectrum of works on paper from 2000 up to today, ranging from notebooks and notepads with daily recordings of his scribblings on individually dated single pages, to medium and larger formats with whole weeks and months of Adami’s mark-making on single or successive pages.
In the main gallery space claudioadami’s most time intensive installation, ’Campionario’, will be on display. The result of an ongoing project of over three years (2000-2003), the installation is composed of card and aluminium boxes of different sizes and shapes, each labelled with a start and an end date, every box containing various time segments of claudioadami’s tracings.

claudioadami, the artist’s name in one word, is not just a formal choice. It is a manifesto of his intention to describe the radical and essential message of his art and his existence. A continuum where art and life, now and then, space and time perfectly coincide and coexist.

claudioadami was born in Città di Castello (Italy) in 1951. He exhibited widely in Italy, in particular at the Mart museum in Rovererto and MACRO in Rome, where he lives and works.

The exhibition of claudioadami at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is staged in collaboration and exchange with Studio d’Arte Contemporanea Casagrande in Rome, which is currently hosting the exhibition ‘Deflection’ featuring works of gallery artist Hans Kotter.

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art

www.patrickheide.com

Paper A-Z / Sue Scott Gallery

Sue Scott Gallery is pleased to announce Paper A-Z, opening March 16th, and running through April 22, 2011. Featuring more than seventy five established, mid-career and emerging artists from around the country, this exhibition showcases multidisciplinary approaches to works on paper that examine and celebrate this basic language of the artistic process. “A-Z” implies linearity, but the heart of the show is a constellation of parts that drifts off the alphabet, a collection of phonemes—gaffs, folds, stutters, perfect pronunciations and alliterations.

Drawing naturally emerges from an immediate relationship of the artist's hand with the instrument or medium. This arrangement can invite risk and produce spontaneous and often unintentional results. This is drawing’s clearest articulation: the serif ‘a’ of the alphabet. This exhibition also looks beyond this customary notion of drawing, while preserving the traditional support of paper - experimental prints, collage, paper construction, hanging paper sculptures, cast paper and books. The show considers the role of paper, not only as a vehicle of mediums, but as a medium itself.

Rachelle Agundes, Olive Ayhens, Glen Baldridge, Brian Belott, Kristopher Benedict, Sadie Benning, Ben Berlow, Willie Birch, Robert Bordo, Katherine Bowling, Robert Brinker, Kadar Brock, Melissa Brown, Brendan Cass, Amanda Church, Carol Cole, Ian Cooper, Nick Cortese, Carl D'Alvia, Shoshana Dentz, Jessica Dickinson, Lesley Dill, Kim Dorland, Franklin Evans, Amy Feldman, Theresa Friess, Jackie Gendel, Josephine Halvorson, Jane Hammond, Jonathan Hartshorn, Daniel Heidkamp, Fredrik Hofwander, Lisa Hoke, Katie Holten, Sharon Horvath, Grant Huang, Jason Jagel, Ezra Johnson, Mary Jones, Pam Joseph, David Kramer, Peter LaBier, Sylvan Lionni, Noah Lyon, Stephen Maine, Linda Matalon, Sarah Mattes, Doreen McCarthy, Suzanne McClelland, Tom McGrath, Kirsi Mikkola, Malcolm Morley, Lucas Moran, Carrie Moyer, Rob Nadeau, John Newman, Todd Norsten, Matthew Northridge, Thomas Nozkowski, Toshi Oka, Paul Pagk, Mr. Peanut Man, Debra Pearlman, Sheila Pepe, Gary Petersen, Halsey Rodman, Sherman Sam, Sara Sanders, Katia Santibanez, David Scanavino, David Shapiro, James Siena, Kiki Smith, Jane South, Pat Steir, Barbara Takenaga, Craig Taylor, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Webster, Stephen Westfall, Roger White, Letha Wilson, Tamara Zahaykevich and Michael Zahn.

http://www.suescottgallery.com/exhibitions/view/paper-a-z

ky anderson

one of my favorite painters, here is ky :
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2011/04/ky-anderson.html
enjoy!

Six memos for the next millennium By Italo Calvino / Lightness

Similarly to Greek philosopher Heraclitus, for Italo Calvino, Lightness is the flexible; the weightless; the mobile; the connective; vectors as distinct from structures. Italo Calvino explored Lightness in the first of his Six Memos For The Next Millennium. He saw Lightness as an important aspect of post-modern society and existence that should be celebrated; he, like Heraclitus, never viewed Lightness as negative, indeed he never ascribed any evaluative content to it.
Calvino keenly explores the borderline between lightness and the superficial; he posits that a contemplative lightness may make light-heartnedness seem heavy and dim; the pursuit of lightness as a reaction to the dutifulness of life.
Calvino emphasises that he does not intend to exclude or to define as inferior the opposite, as for example light/heavy, quick/slow; instant deduction is not necessarily better than well-considered thought, the case may be even contrary. It simply communicates something which is only emblematic of lightness. The balance or tension between the two 'poles' is an important aspect.
In Six Memos he says that "It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with `bits' in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits."

+ read more wiki

+ read the book at google book

Olivier Filippi

for a long time now i am carrying this notion that the drawing act is actually the first recording act, since it saves traces of movement in a certain space in a certain time. visiting the last salon du dessin contemporain in Paris @ the AL/MA gallery booth, i so this series of drawings by Olivier Filippi that looked fresh to me, in a way that recognizes the possible relationships between drawing and movement.

http://o.filippi.free.fr/

Cary Smith

http://www.featureinc.com/artist_pages/smith_artistpg.html

Richard Tuttle

Host Arne Glimcher talks with artist Richard Tuttle in his New York studio. Richard Tuttle, a prolific postminimalist, has been a favorite of serious art collectors and an "artist's artist" since he first showed at the Betty Parsons gallery in the mid-1960s. As Richard opens up to Arne, he discusses the serendipity of his career, the dichotomy in his work between humility and grandeur, and his belief that artists never truly understand their own work.