Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam
Sanne Sannes: Darkness and Light
Dates: 30 Oct 09 - 9 Dec 09
Categories: Photography
Address: Keizergracht 609 Amsterdam 1017
Tel: +31 (0)20 551 6500 Website
Rijksmuseum
Hendrick Avercamp: the Little Ice Age
Dates: 20 Nov 09 - 15 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Jan Luijkenstraat 1 Amsterdam 107 ZD
Tel: +31 (0)20 674 7000 Website
Forty-five of Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings and drawings have been assembled for this show of chaotic and bustling winter scenes of people enjoying the frozen rivers and canals that came to typify 17th-century Dutch winter landscapes. The 20 paintings on show are supplemented by 25 of Avercamp’s drawings, the works having been loaned by such museums as the National Gallery, London, the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is the first to be devoted to Avercamp’s works. After studying with the Danish portrait painter Pieter Isaacks (1569-1625) in Amsterdam, Avercamp (1585-1634) moved to Kampen in 1608 where his winter scenes found great popularity. This exhibition, however, also includes works that shed light on other more surprising areas of his oeuvre. The drawings on show include summer landscape studies, depictions of 17th-century workers and costume sketches that often appear in subsequent paintings. These less well known graphic works show Avercamp, say the show’s organisers, at his “most varied and adventurous”. The show, which travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington (21 March-5 July 2010), is accompanied by the publication of Hendrick Avercamp, Master of the Ice Scene, edited by Pieter Roelofs, and published by Nieuw Amsterdam (€29.95). The museum is launching a special programme for deaf and hard of hearing visitors to coincide with the exhibition. Hendrick Avercamp was himself deaf and mute.
Winter Landscape with Skaters (detail), about 1608.
Van Gogh Museum
Van Gogh’s Letters: the Artist Speaks
Dates: 9 Oct 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Paulus Potterstraat 7 Amsterdam 1070 CX
Tel: +31 (0)20 570 5200 Website
This exhibition celebrates the publication of definitive, six-volume edition of the artist’s correspondence (see p49). The Van Gogh Museum is marking the book launch by showing 120 letters, nearly all from the family collection. These are rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons, and never have so many been on show before. Three recently acquired letters with sketches addressed to Van Gogh’s artist friend Emile Bernard are being lent by the Morgan Library in New York. Presented in the museum’s original Rietveld building, the letters are shown alongside paintings from the permanent collection. Altogether there are 340 artworks, including The Potato Eaters and The Bedroom. Light levels will be lowered for the works on paper, with the paintings spotlit, giving a different feel to a museum that is normally filled with daylight. The display of letters will also flow over into the print gallery. Some of the letters include small drawings (above). Once Van Gogh became a full-time artist he would make rough sketches of his pictures to show his brother Theo what he was working on. The letters, mostly in Dutch and French, provide an intimate and revealing account of his development as an artist. Another show (with almost completely different artworks) will be presented at the Royal Academy, London (“The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters”), from 23 January- 18 April 2010. Martin Bailey
Blanton Museum of Art
Dates: 1 Nov 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Photography
Address: University of Texas at Austin Austin 78712-1205
Tel: +1 512 471 7324 Website
Hamburger Kunsthalle
Drawn with Light: Carl Blechen’s Amalfi Sketchbook
Dates: 30 Oct 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Glockengiesserwall Hamburg D-20095
Tel: +49 (0)40 428 131 200 Website
Kunstraum Innsbruck
Dates: 7 Nov 09 - 19 Dec 09
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Maria Theresien Str. 34, Arkadenhof Innsbruck A-6020
Tel: +43-512-584000 Website
German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai’s work is concerned with scientific experiments involving sound, light and space. The main presentation is four 2009 works from the “Aoyama Space” series. The name derives from a photographic studio in Tokyo’s Aoyama district, in which there is a concave room designed to create a seemingly endless space. Nicolai’s “Aoyama Space” works act as scaled down models of imaginary room installations, replicating the curved edges of the studio. In each case, a box is illuminated by a light triggered by specially composed electronic sounds. Also on show are 48 prints from the “Fades Stills” series of 2006, the images taken from his “Fades” video and sound installation, in which beams of white light are projected to create a light sculpture that moves in synch with the sound. Nicolai is also showing another installation work involving sound, Invertone, 2007. Two loudspeakers emit white noise in a room whose walls are coated with sound-absorbing acoustic foam. If the viewer stands directly between the two speakers, the soundwaves erase each other, but at all other points in the room the sound can be heard. The show, curated by Kunstraum Innsbruck director Stefan Bidner and Innsbruck artist Christoph Hinterhuber, has been staged in collaboration with the Innsbruck organisation Medien Kunst Tirol. On 7 November, Nicolai will be performing under his musician identity, Alva Noto, with a live sound and video event at the Innsbruck venue Max Events and Culture. Rosie Spencer
Aoyama Space no.2, 2009
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon (MU
Ugo Rondinone: the Night of Lead
Dates: 11 Jul 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 Leon 24008
Tel: +34 987 09 00 00 Website
Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone’s only museum show of 2009 is also his solo debut in Spain. Curated by Augustín Pérez Rubio, Musac’s acting director, the show encompasses many aspects of Rondinone’s eclectic practice—with sculpture, painting, video, collage and installation—and consists of more than 50 objects arranged across five rooms. “He’s never shown anything in Spain, so that’s why it’s such a huge presentation,” Mr Rubio told The Art Newspaper. The overriding theme is of fantasy, poetry and ritual, and the exhibition begins with an installation of six ancient olive trees, painted white. This is a new version of Get Up Girl a Sun is Running the World shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale when Rondinone represented Switzerland with Urs Fischer. Because of the generous scale of Musac’s exhibition spaces, the trees reach up to 4.5 metres in height, compared to the three-metre forms in Venice. In the centre a giant sculpture of a light bulb hangs from the ceiling, and strong white light fills the room to create the sensation of “white night”, says Mr Rubio. In another room Rondinone is showing his Star paintings, a brand new series of 13 works, all around 4x3 metres. “He wants to install them altogether as a tribute to Rothko’s chapel,” Mr Rubio told TAN. “Each painting is like a cosmos, showing the stars by night. He wanted to create the feeling of night and loneliness, and in the middle of the room is the sculpture of a clown lying on the floor. For Ugo, the idea of the clown is somebody who looks human but is also a creation. You never know if it’s a man or a woman—it’s like a human being in process.” In the final room is Still.Life (John’s Fireplace), a 2008 installation showing a replica of US poet John Giorno’s fireplace from his apartment in New York. Poetry is a strong influence: the show weaves together disparate elements that build up poetic layers of symbolism and personal narrative, at times menacing, at times more dreamlike. On a different register, one of Rondinone’s bright rainbow sculptures, Hell, Yes!, 2001, adorns the façade of the New Museum, New York, until 19 July. Rosie Spencer
Get Up Girl a Sun is Running the World
Hayward Gallery
Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting
Dates: 14 Oct 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70)
Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road London SE1 8XX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7921 0813 Website
“Each piece cultivates its own labyrinth that you can enter in to, if you were to spend a little time thinking about it.” So says Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff, but it’s not a sentence you would immediately associate with the minimal paintings of Ed Ruscha. Rugoff says that through his experience of curating this autumn’s exhibition, he has discovered “layers and layers” to these “deceptively simple-looking” paintings. “The more you think about them, the more you can spin out all sorts of references and resonances that these works are setting into play,” he told The Art Newspaper. The show of 78 works, many of which haven’t been shown before in the UK, celebrates 50 years since Ruscha first made paintings that he would include in his “official body of work”. “These were works that he made when he was still a student, but works that he feels could represent him,” says Rugoff. Ruscha started out in the late 1950s looking at print media, magazines and books, which led to his focus on words, but treating words as objects or images rather than carriers of linguistic meaning. He became interested in the graphic potential of words and the ambiguity of communication. “One thing Ed often says is that he associates the word, because of the way it unfurls horizontally, with landscape,” Rugoff says. “He is taking a very broad definition of what landscape might be. Unless you’re painting people, which is something he doesn’t do, all painting might be related to landscape.” Ruscha has also been very influenced by film, particularly widescreen formats such as cinemascope. Often the proportions of his work reflect this way of framing the world, with pieces that are four or fives times as wide as they are high. “It’s about a type of look, a scanning look,” says Rugoff. “It’s not a static look at one object that’s fixed in place, it’s about a landscape you might be driving through. It’s very much a product of car culture, a reflection on that.” But there is also a fascination with the sublime in Ruscha’s work, images of majestic snow-covered mountains, fiery sunsets or rays of light, a recurring motif in his paintings. “He’s very interested in ideas of grandeur, and how even when these have become clichés, they still awaken certain yearnings in us, we’re still susceptible to them,” says Rugoff. Following this exhibition, the gallery will be closed until May 2010 for renovations. The show travels to Haus der Kunst, Munich (12 February-2 May 2010) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 May-5 September 2010).R.S.
Standard Station, 1966
National Gallery
Dates: 18 Nov 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Trafalgar Square London WC2 5DN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7747 2885 Website
The Hoerengracht (Whore’s Canal) is a dark, intricate, large-scale installation work by US artists Ed Kienholz (1927-94) and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz (b1943). The piece, made between 1983 and 1988, has been shown in venues around the world since 1989, but never before in London. The walk-through installation, which evokes Amsterdam’s Red Light District through a series of dense assemblages, is staged in the National Gallery’s Sunley Room, a temporary exhibition space that holds a series of contemporary shows that connect with the permanent collection of the museum. In this case the work is being shown in relation to 17th-century Dutch paintings, including Jan Steen’s Interior of an Inn, 1665-70, and Pieter de Hooch’s A Musical Party in a Courtyard, 1677. “This connection is important,” Colin Wiggins, curator of the exhibition, told The Art Newspaper. “The National Gallery collection ends at 1900. For a younger audience, this can make the collection seem remote and inaccessible. Contemporary exhibitions that show the connection between the old and the new help to bridge that gap and can help to introduce a younger audience to the richness of the collection.” Wiggins believes that the Sunley Room is the perfect location for such shows as it is “right in the centre of the National Gallery, sandwiched between Velázquez and the Italian Renaissance. We don’t want to show contemporary work, for example, in a back corridor disconnected from the collection,” he said. “The National Gallery is a living collection and continues to inspire today’s art. It is not a collection of old dead fossils.” The last major Kienholz show in London was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1971. “Since then this city has been strangely neglectful,” said Wiggins. We all know about Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock and Warhol, but I have become convinced that Kienholz is similarly one of the defining names of the 20th century.” The show is supported by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
Wallace Collection
No Love Lost: New Paintings by Damian Hirst
Dates: 14 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Hertford House, Manchester Square London W1M 6BN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7563 9500 Website
Damien Hirst has returned to painting his own paintings, showing a new series of 25 works created between 2006 and 2008, “No Love Lost”, within the lavish surroundings of the Wallace Collection. Hirst’s love of skulls and butterflies shows no signs of abating in this series of memento mori works, with pieces such as the triptych The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, 2008, depicting skulls suspended within webs of faint white lines on dark backgrounds, one with a menacing shark’s jaw in the centre. Another, Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies, 2008, shows a still life of roses in a vase, with butterflies radiating outwards, again interweaved within a network of faint lines, while a vibrant lemon punctuates the darkness in Skull with Ashtray and Lemon, 2006/07 (above). All have a prominent blue palette—the series was originally titled “The Blue Paintings”. “Showing Damien Hirst’s work at the Wallace Collection presents an opportunity for our regular visitors to see our collections in a different light—passing from our galleries of 17th- and 18th-century works to one of contemporary painting,” says Wallace Collection director Rosalind Savill. “Naturally there will be a lot of interest in this new work resulting in many visitors coming to the collection for the first time.” The two upper galleries where Hirst’s work will be shown have been closed as part of the museum’s ongoing refurbishment programme, so no works will need to be displaced. The galleries will be hung with French silks matching the wall coverings in the Oval Drawing Room, “ensuring the galleries are an extension of the intimate, luxurious atmosphere of the Wallace Collection”, says Savill. Hirst clearly relishes the chance to validate this new vein within such a rich art historical setting. “I like Ruskin’s idea of art, that there’s an unbroken line all the way back to the cavemen, and we are just the most recent additions,” he states, in typically grand fashion. Rosie Spencer
Kunstmuseum Luzern
Dates: 24 Oct 09 - 7 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Europaplatz 1 Lucerne CH-6002
Tel: +41 (0)41 226 7800 Website
Biennale de Lyon
Dates: 16 Sep 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Biennials
Address: Various Venues Lyon
Tel: Website
For the tenth Biennale de Lyon the Paris and San Francisco-based curator and critic Hou Hanru has focused on the opposing notions of spectacle and the everyday in our society, a theme, he feels, that has a particular resonance at this time. “This biennale happens at a time of financial and economic crisis, but it’s also about questioning the profound roots of the social system that we are in,” he told The Art Newspaper. “I was looking how to put these two opposing notions together to create new energy and new dynamics.” Hou, who is director of exhibitions and public programmes and chair of exhibition and museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, curated the 2007 Istanbul Biennale, and lived in France for 16 years before moving to the US in 1990. The works of nearly 60 international artists (see below) are on display in a variety of venues across the city of Lyons and surrounding areas, and arranged in four main chapters across four museums and public spaces in an interactive way to create what Hou describes as an “urban experience” that reflects the dynamism of the themes of spectacle and everyday. “ You go into a space and it’s like you walk through a city. You will bump into the work of artists who are working on different chapters that somehow try to transform everyday objects.” “The Magic of Things” focuses on artists who transform such objects, situations and environments, “Celebrating the Drift” explores urban spaces inspired by the situationist strategy of “drifting” (dérive), and “Another World” is Possible” consists of works that envision new social orders and alternative models of living in an age of globalisation. The fourth section, “Living Together”, which is mainly housed within the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, “reactivates” works from the collection, or which have been exhibited in the museum in the past, to create a platform for discussion within different communities. “I feel a museum is not only a place for conservation and display,” says Hou. “It is about opening its memory up to the public.” For instance, the Paris-based Turkish artist Sarkis is reshowing, with new elements, the central part of his 2002 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, L’Ouverture, in which air is blown into the gallery through a ventilation system scattering pieces of newspapers from around the world. A series of conferences, happenings, readings and dance and musical events will then take place in this space while the ventilation system is closed down. Linked to “Living Together” is a related section, “Veduta”, in which three artists or groups of artists have been invited to take residence in the Lyons suburbs to make new works with the involvement of the largely immigrant inhabitants that will be shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Eko Nogroho will create puppet shows with local youths, collective Bik Van der Pol builds a floating platform over a lake for discussions and leisure activities, and French artist Robert Milin, who is making ten light boxes featuring sentences from inhabitants talking about their dreams and desires. About half of the works are new commissions, including a film by Maria Thereza Alves, an installation by Jimmie Durham, two large site specific installations by Pedro Cabrita Reis, a performance piece by Istanbul artist Ha Za Vu Zu and wall drawings by Dan Perjovschi. Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made, shown in the Shanghai Gallery of Art last year, is a reconstruction of a Shanghai shop of everyday household objects. The artist has invited magicians and acrobats to perform with the objects, which are then reclassified and stored within the shop. The four main strands of the biennale are shown in two converted warehouses—La Sucriére, the flagship venue of the biennale since 2003, and the Bichat Warehouse, an 800 sq. m former arsenal that is being used for the first time, which houses a single work, a neon drawing by Pedro Cabrita Reis—and the Bullukian Foundation, as well as the city’s Renzo Piano-designed Museum of Contemporary Art. But the city as a whole embraces the event; interventions planned for the city’s streets include a whole series of large-scale murals by San Francisco-based Rigo 23. The biennale is not just the tenth in Lyons, but the first after a trio of themed trilogies, so was there pressure on Hou to mark this edition in some way? “The number is not that important but it’s a conjunction of different elements: the number, the timing and the momentum of now,” he said. “I don’t pretend to have the ambition to say this [biennale] will be a revolution...but I think that it is an interesting opportunity for us to think what a biennial, or even in the wider sense a cultural institution, should do in our times” explains the Chinese curator. James Hobbs
Sarkis, Le Monde est Illisible, Mon Coeur Si, installation view at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyons in 2002
Quirinale—Scuderie Papali
Rome: the Painting of an Empire
Dates: 24 Sep 09 - 17 Jun 10
Categories: Curious
Address: via XXIV Maggio, 16 Rome 00187
Tel: +39 (0)6 696 271 Website
The Roman tradition of painting is explored is this comprehensive display which features about 100 works dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD—from 49 BC when Caesar emerged as the absolute ruler of Rome to the period after the death of the last emperor of the Eastern and Western Empire, Theodosius I. The display includes unprecedented loans from major encyclopaedic and archaeological collections in Italy, Germany, Egypt, Switzerland and the UK. Curated by Eugenio La Rocca, Serena Ensoli and Stefano Tortorella, the show aims to dispel the myth that Roman painting is merely a continuation of the Greek tradition by showing that it is innovative and wholly unique to its culture. It also illustrates the continuity of the Roman tradition from the Renaissance onwards, by showing how ancient Roman works influenced artists such as Raphael. As time has largely washed the paint from the remains of ancient Rome, we tend to forget that it was once a colourful metropolis. Frescos, mosaics and paintings on clay, wood and glass have been assembled to show the vibrancy of the Empire. The show is organised into five sections: “Light and Shade”, “Deceptive Walls”, “Ancient Pinacothèques”, “The City Speaks” and “From the Rediscovery of the Domus Aurea to the Grotesque”. These sections show landscapes, portraits, mythological scenes, still-lifes, stage décor, erotic images and scenes of daily life originally found in shops as well as wealthy and more modest residences. The paintings are displayed in rooms designed by theatre and opera designer Luca Ronconi. E.S.
Mummy portrait of a young woman on wood, Egyptian, 100-130 AD
Sara Hilden Art Museum
Dates: 12 Sep 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Särkänniemi Tampere 33230
Tel: +358 3 2143134 Website
Albertina Graphische Sammlung
Dates: 10 Sep 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Impressionism
Address: Albertinaplatz 1 Vienna 1010
Tel: +43 (0)1 534 83-555 Website
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Charles the Bold: Splendour and Fall of the Last Duke of Burgundy
Dates: 15 Sep 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Maria Theresien-Platz Vienna A-1010
Tel: +43 (0)1 525 240 Website
The favourite impresa or heraldic emblem of Charles the Bold was a device showing the flint, steel and flames. With hindsight, this piece of armorial self-promotion ironically summarises the duke’s essential weakness, rather than the power and energy he intended it to project. The English and German translations of his posthumous epithet “le Téméraire”—“the Bold”, “der Kühne”—fail to convey the harmonics of the French: foolhardy, rash or overreaching, as well as brave and daring. Sparks flying from steel and stone can set fires that run out of control as well as provide heat and light. Charles’s reign brought the Duchy of Burgundy to its white-heat culmination as one of the most brilliant, aesthetically refined European courts of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and finally to cinders and dust with his ignominious death on the battlefield of Nancy. The four Valois Dukes of Burgundy, a branch of the French royal house, built up their territories from the accession of Philip the Bold (“le Hardi”) in 1363 by inheritance, marriage, conquest and purchase. Over four generations, their territories expanded from an area of about a 100-mile radius around Dijon and Besançon to a state that also included all of present-day Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and most of north-eastern France. Until Charles the Bold, the dukes had—not without dollops of good luck—advantageously manipulated their geographical position between France, the Holy Roman Empire and England (for example, Charles married Mary of York, the sister of Edward IV, to whom Charles had made massive loans, thus binding England to Burgundy with ties of marriage and money). The dukes were also lavish patrons of the arts, none more so than Charles’s father, Philip the Good (1396-1464) as well as Charles himself. This exhibition, having been seen in Bern and Bruges, places intimately connected with Charles’s death and life, now comes to its final stage in the city most closely associated with the heirs to the bulk of the Burgundian wealth and power, the Habsburgs. On show are some of the most magnificent works created for the court of Charles the Bold (1433-77), who reigned from his father’s death in 1467. It features paintings by artists patronised by the Burgundian dukes, most notably Roger van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck, textiles including Arras and Tournai tapestries, embroideries, vestments, court costumes and other luxury fabrics, and arms and armour (some tailor-made for Charles). Also included is metalwork and jewellery by Parisian, Bruges and Augsburg goldsmiths, among which are several precious gold chains with jewelled and enamelled pendants of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded by Charles’s father in 1430. A highlight is the reliquary of St Lambert’s finger presented by the figure of Charles the Bold in his Milanese parade armour, supported by his patron, St George (Charles belonged to the Order of the Garter)—modelled on the figure of the same from Van Eyck’s Van der Paele altarpiece. The reliquary had been commissioned by Charles in 1467 and presented by him to the cathedral in Liège in 1471. Illuminated manuscripts (including Charles’s Book of Hours from the Getty) and other documents, medals and medallions, tableware, plate and ceramics round out the display. The show is divided into six sections covering: Burgundian court culture; political administration and trade in the mid-15th century; objects directly related to Charles the Bold and Margaret of York; materials relating to the ceremonies of the meeting of the Emperor Frederick III and Charles in Trier in 1473; Charles’s ill-judged gamble on a war with the Swiss Confederation, 1474-77, which brought the break-up of the Valois hegemony with Charles’s death on the battlefield where, plundered, his naked corpse, ravaged by wolves, was later found (one of his favourite jewels, “The Three Brothers”, a setting of three rubies and three diamonds that was looted, eventually found its way into the hands of Elizabeth I, who prized it highly and is shown wearing it in Nicholas Hilliard’s The Ermine Portrait, 1585); and, finally, the Habsburg heritage (Charles’s daughter, Mary, married Maximilian I, bringing the Low Countries into the Habsburg sway). The exhibition’s extremely well and intelligently designed catalogue has an English edition published by Mercatorfonds (£45, $80 hb ISBN 9789 061538592). Donald Lee
Reliquary of St Lambert’s finger
National Gallery of Art (NGA)
The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900
Dates: 1 Oct 09 - 18 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue Northwest Washington 20565
Tel: +1 202 737 4215 Website
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