About Arabesque (2011)
For her digital book commissioned by D’ORO D’ART, Birnbaum reworked her 2011 installation into a unique vertically-oriented format. The integrated sound and image together retrace the problematic love and artistic relationship of Robert and Clara Schumann. Birnbaum brought together selections from YouTube videos of the abundance of performances of Robert Schumann’s Arabesque Opus 18 contrasted with a sole example of Clara Schumann’s Romanze 1, Opus 11. Birnbaum juxtaposed these clips with still images, morphing into one another, taken from the 1947 film about the Schumanns, Song of Love, which tellingly features only Robert Schumann’s Arabesque Opus 18.
About the D’ORO D’ART Project
With its fifty-year history, video art is celebrated as an audiovisual, time-based category that gives artists the opportunity to articulate ideas of great relevance. Salvatore Giorgio Dino, founder and CEO of the D’ORO Collection, and the experts at D’ORO D’ART project were determined to produce an artwork that combines the highest level of bookmaking craftsmanship with contemporary masterpieces of video art, a field that unites art and technology. The curatorial team, Valentino Catricalà and Barbara London, chose the work of an important pioneer of video art, Dara Birnbaum, for her commitment to the genre's dynamic history and to the hybridity of contemporary art practice.
The D’ORO D’ART project is a unique collaboration between the D’ORO Collection, fine art book publishers based in Rome, and Marian Goodman Gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery based in New York, Paris and London.
About Dara Birnbaum
Dara Birnbaum is a New York-based artist who is heralded for her mastery of video installation and for manipulation of television footage. She received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; a B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute; and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research, New York. Birnbaum's pioneering video, media, and installation work has, over the past four decades, addressed the ideological and the aesthetic characters of mass media imagery, making it fundamental to our understanding of the history of media art.
Later this year, Birnbaum will open two major survey exhibitions: the retrospective “Reaction” at the Hessel Museum at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (25 June – 27 November 2022) and “Journey” at the Miller ICA, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA (19 August – 13 November 2022), which will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Her work is currently on view in “From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest in the Kramlich Collection” at the Manetti Shrem Museum at the University of California, Davis.
Birnbaum’s work has been widely exhibited: at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); at National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); at Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); at South London Gallery, UK (2011); at the Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium (2009) for major retrospectives; at Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu (2009); at Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006) for a retrospective; and at The Jewish Museum, New York (2003). Her work was also exhibited at Documenta 7, 8, and 9.
In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art created “The Birnbaum Award” in the artist’s honor.
About Barbara London
Barbara London is a New York-based curator and writer, who founded the video-media exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. Her recent projects include the podcast series "Barbara London Calling," the book Video Art/The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020), and the exhibition Seeing Sound (Independent Curators International), 2021-2026.
About Valentino Catricalà
Valentino Catricalà (Ph.D) is a scholar and contemporary art curator. He is currently the curator of SODA Gallery in Manchester and lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is also the director of the Art Section of the Maker Faire-The European Edition at Paris Sony CS Lab.
About Salvatore Giorgio Dino
Salvatore Giorgio Dino is the CEO of the D’ORO Collection Publishing House, founded in the 2000s. He revamped the business which his family had originally established in 1965, with the firm intention to ensure its continuity. D’ORO Collection Publishing House has its headquarters and renowned artisan workshops along Via Appia Antica in the very heart of Rome, where deep historical roots still imbue and influence the creation of the books.
