Jérôme Bel: Pichet Klunchun and Myself at Marian Goodman Gallery Paris

January 20-February 18, 2012

Recorded performance by Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun
January 20-February 18, 2012
Screenings from Tuesday to Saturday at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm
First screening Friday, January 20, 6.15 pm
Duration: 105’

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present, for the first time, the work of the French choreographer Jérôme Bel. We will be showing his recorded performance, Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2005).

Read More

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Neue Nationalgalerie

February 12 - May 13, 2012

Gerhard Richter, beyond a doubt the most famous German artist of his generation, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on 9 February 2012. To mark the occasion, the New National Gallery in Berlin is holding a sweeping retrospective of his work, in conjunction with Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Gerhard Richter, beyond a doubt the most famous German artist of his generation, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on 9 February 2012. To mark the occasion, the New National Gallery in Berlin is holding a sweeping retrospective of his work, in conjunction with Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Around 150 paintings from all periods of the artist's extensive oeuvre, carefully selected together with the artist himself, offer visitors a profound insight into his stylistically and thematically diverse body of work. Several canvases that have long been accepted into the modern canon, such as Ema (1966), the nude descending the stairs, and Betty (1988), whose head is turned away from the viewer, are combined here with rarely seen works and a few that have never been on display before. Key works from a particular period, group or series are placed alongside works that either stand out on their own or pre-echo later developments. Structured for the most part chronologically, the exhibition's dramaturgical flow centres around a dialogue, running over decades, held between abstraction and figuration; a dialogue that can be traced all the way back to the very first painting in Richter's catalogue raisonné, Table from 1962.

The exhibition demonstrates how the artist's rigorous and unrelentingly versatile inquiry into the medium of painting has led to consistent transgressions of its traditions and definitions. The idea of the picture as a surface, as a window, as a view onto a scene leads to Richter's exploration of mirrors and panes of glass, marking the culmination of his probing of the possibilities of depiction. At this point in the show, the works form a unique interplay with the building itself. Richter's panes of glass, glass screens and his astoundingly mimetic cloud and window paintings strike up a playful and charming dialogue with Mies van der Rohe's architecture of glass and steel. The Berlin show will also feature a unique highlight: for the express purpose of the exhibition, Gerhard Richter has completed Version I of his abstract, aleatoric work 4900 Colours which, at a length of over 200 metres, will encompass the entire exhibition.

The exhibition has been made possible by the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie.

CHANTAL AKERMAN: Too Far, Too Close at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen

February 10 - June 12, 2012

The M HKA is holding the very first large-scale retrospective of the Belgian film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman, who has now lived in Paris for many years. It is also the first time her work has been shown in Belgium since her exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 1995. Akerman is one of the most influential film-makers of her generation and has long been a feminist icon. She was able to establish this reputation with her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Since the mid-nineties, however, she has also been increasingly active as an artist, and her film and video installations have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta 11 and elsewhere. The exhibition at the M HKA will focus mainly on this latter aspect of her work and will be accompanied by an ambitious monograph.

Gerhard Richter. Atlas

February 4 - April 22, 2012

An exhibition from the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in cooperation with the Lenbachhaus, München

Gerhard Richter’s ATLAS merits a special place within his oeuvre as a whole. It not only forms the basis of his entire work as a painter but is also an autonomous artwork in its own right.

By 1964, Richter had collected a vast amount of pictorial source material for his painting, first keeping it in drawers and portfolios. Five years later he began to sift through this material with a critical eye, grouping the individual photographs, reproductions and sketches into different themes and pasting them onto separate panels. Richter then soon recognized the intrinsic artistic quality of these collections of source material and, in 1972, framed the panels and exhibited them at the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title ATLAS. Meanwhile this repository of source material has grown from its original 343 panels to its present 783, with more than 8,000 individual motifs.

ATLAS may be seen as an accompaniment, commentary and extension of the entire oeuvre of Gerhard Richter, for it also develops its own perspectives and poses its own questions. ATLAS is Richter’s reflection not only on his own work but also on the everyday world of images that he himself has documented photographically in their thousands. “I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,” Richter wrote in 1986. This photographed, yet and seemingly inexhaustible flood of images has afforded Richter a concentrated, ready accessibility of motifs for his future works. Indeed, for some of his paintings, he has been able to draw upon old motifs in his ATLAS, some of them dating back more than a decade.

Jeff Wall at Pinchuk Art Centre

February 4 - April 1, 2012

Tacita Dean Exhibition at the Norton Museum

Feb. 3, 2012 - May 6, 2012

The Norton Museum’s exhibition of work by Tacita Dean will focus exclusively on her “photo-based” artworks produced over the past two decades. Born in Canterbury, England in 1965, and now based in Berlin, Dean initially studied to be painter. Now, the 16 mm film camera defines much of her artistic practice with the still camera image also playing an important role in her career. Spare, sublime, and separated from conventional photographic practice, Dean’s photo-based works are nonetheless dependent upon the found and often authorless image. It is this two-fold impression of time and place embracing fact and fiction that pervades Dean’s work in the Norton exhibition. With paint, drawings, or hand-written text added to these images, Dean distances herself from conventional photography while embracing the photographic image. The end result, like her films, is artwork that is as elusive as it is captivating.

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978 - 2010 at Museu Serralves

October 29 - February 26, 2012

Life-sized images of tourists enraptured by art, intimate family portraits, epic panoramas of colossal technology projects and quiet pictures of empty streets, are all in this survey of German artist Thomas Struth, one of the most important photographers of the late 20th century.

Picturing subjects as diverse as places of worship, jungles and research laboratories, Struth once compared the space shuttle programme to the construction of the medieval cathedrals. His photographs reveal the cultural, psychological and historical undercurrents beneath the surface of modernity.

Tracing the architectural history of ordinary city streets Struth also charts the increasing uniformity of global development. While people are absent from his street scenes of Düsseldorf, Naples or New York, they take centre stage in his family portraits and his iconic museum photographs showing spectators lost in devotional gaze before works of art and architecture. In sharp contrast, his Paradise series captures impenetrable forests void of any trace of human intervention.

This exhibition spans early black and white prints to recent colour photographs that are up to 4 metres long. These include images of sites at the cutting edge of technology such as the Space Centre on Cape Canaveral. Their overwhelming scale evokes an industrial sublime; built by us, yet chillingly inhuman, these structures encapsulate the great contradictions of progress.

A film combining rare footage of Struth on location and working in the studio provides an insightful portrait of this pioneering artist.

Lothar Baumgarten: Evening of Time – Señores Naturales Yanomami at the Museum Folkwang

November 26, 2011 – May 27, 2012

At the end of the 1970s, Lothar Baumgarten was living among the Yãnomãmi of the upper Orinoco, in the forests of the watershed between Venezuela and Brazil. For 18 months he shared day-to-day life with the Indians from Kashorawë and Yapitawë-theri, two Yãnomãmi communities which had become too small to defend themselves against their increasingly aggressive neighbours. Baumgarten came into contact with these semi-nomadic groups after they had moved closer to the Orinoco and together began to build their large Shapono and lay out extensive plantations. He accompanied this group of 84 Yãnomãmi, a hunting and gathering tribe, during their daily activities: visiting other Shapono for festive rituals, time-consuming maintenance of their political alliances, boat building, something they had only recently learned, the daily rituals of the shamans and revenge attacks against old and new neighbours. Through a latent development of trade among the Yãnomãmi, very soon the need developed for a give and take that Baumgarten included in his collection – shown in part here for the first time – from the first objects to extensive portfolios. The ethnological objects he received in exchange for other objects while there and an unexpectedly extensive amount of drawings of Yãnomãmi on paper, as well as extensive audio and video documentation are accompanied in this presentation by photographic sequences which make tangible the intense closeness of the unknown he lived through. We see no purchased or staged photos, but rather the immediacy of the intimate because, in spite of all strangeness, human contact is obviously part of their nature.

The exhibition speaks of an outreach, of meeting and exchange in a period only thirty years ago. It tries to provide an image of a society whose sensitivities and existence depends on our understanding of its imperatives.

This exception donation by the Baumgarten/Sugai collection to the Museum Folkwang Foundation in 2010 graphically opens and continues a dialogue, begun by Karl Ernst Osthaus, the museum’s founder, between ancient and non-European art through its coherence and range as well as in its artistic and art historical appraisal.

For more information about this show, please click here for a direct link to the museum website.

Dara Birnbaum Receives 2011 AWAW Award

Anonymous Was A Woman announced today the ten artists selected to receive the Foundation’s sixteenth annual awards. The grant enables women, over 45 years of age and at a critical juncture in their lives or careers, to continue to grow and pursue their work.

The name of the grant program, Anonymous Was A Woman, refers to a line in Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own. As the name implies, the nominators and those associated with the program are unnamed.

To date, 161 women have received the award. Each year, an outstanding group of distinguished women – art historians, curators, writers and previous winners – serve as nominators.

William Kentridge: Five Themes at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture

Opens September 29, 2011

The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean at Turbine Hall

October 11, 2011 – March 11, 2012

Tacita Dean will be the next artist to create a commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall as part of the Unilever Series.

Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin, best known for her use of film. Dean’s films act as portraits or depictions rather than conventional cinematic storytelling, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement. Her static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly. Other works have attempted to reconstruct events from memory, such as an infamous thwarted attempt to circumnavigate the world.

Dean’s interest in the cinematic also extends to her work in other media. The Russian Ending 2001 borrows its title from the early Danish cinema tradition of making two alternate endings for a film: one happy for the American market and one tragic for the Russian market. In this work, Dean annotated postcards of catastrophes with director's notes.

Many of Dean’s works show the ways in which architecture can be transformed by the camera's lens. Craneway Event 2009 follows the choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and his dance company rehearsing in a former Ford assembly plant, built of glass and steel and overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Dean’s film allows the ever-changing light of this environment to fall in rhythm with the dancers’ movements.

Dean will be making a new commission especially designed to respond to the architecture of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. The Unilever Series has become renowned as one of the most exciting and impressive contemporary art exhibitions in London each year and will be free to view.

Anri Sala wins Absolut Art Award 2011

Anri Sala has been announced as winner of the ABSOLUT ART AWARD 2011. The video artist deals with themes of history and memory, using inventive narrative structures to question the realities of modernity.

The jury’s citation reads: “Anri Sala’s work offers a unique way of looking at the world that combines reflection on history, memories, and consciousness of the instant, with an absolute awareness of presence and disappearance. He possesses a special talent for precise and subtle displays, and a unique ability to conceive installations and architectural proposals including sound, image, sculpture, film and live performances.”