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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Burrell Collection
Working with Tapestries
Dates: 1 Jul 09 - 30 Jun 10
Categories: Working with Tapestries
Decorative
Address: Pollock Country Park, 2060 Pollokshaws Road Glasgow G41 1AT
Tel: +44 (0)141 287 2550 Website
London, United Kingdom
National Gallery
Kienholz: the Hoerengracht
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.
Los Angeles, USA
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Grand Avenue
Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years
Dates: 15 Nov 09 - 3 May 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles 90012
Tel: +1 213 621 1749 Website
When MoCA’s dire financial straits were revealed last year—the endowment drained from $20m to about $7m—many thought the much-loved Los Angeles institution would have to shut down or merge with another museum. But this month, following the announcement that fundraising efforts had resulted in $60m for the museum (including the $30m founding chairman and life trustee Eli Broad promised last year to save the institution), MoCA opens a 30th anniversary show celebrating the collection.
More than 500 works will be on view in the largest long-term display of the museum’s permanent holdings, installed in both its Grand Avenue home and its outpost The Geffen Contemporary, which has been closed since last year’s emergency cutbacks. Organised chronologically, the exhibition covers major contemporary movements and artists from 1939 to the present and demonstrates the scope of MoCA’s collection. “We’ve had plans for the 30th anniversary show for many years but it became larger when support from the Broad Foundation allowed us to open up both facilities, at Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary. It went from being a large exhibition to the largest we’ve ever done. The last time we had a show installed across both venues was for the opening of the Isozaki building on Grand Ave and that was over 20 years ago,” says MoCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, who has organised the show.
Highlights include post-war works such as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1949, but the real strength lies in the selection of more recent contemporary work. This includes in-depth holdings of works by Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, among others, and MoCA’s long-time commitment to collecting the work of California artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Laura Owens, Raymond Pettibon, Charles Ray and Jason Rhoades. “Los Angeles artists are part of the DNA of MoCA. They helped found it,” says Schimmel.
MoCA is also hosting a weekend of special events including a gala party to raise for money for the museum lead by gala chairs Maria Arena Bell and Eli Broad, and honorary chairs Larry Gagosian and Dasha Zhukova. Artist Francesco Vezzoli has created a new performance work starring pop singer Lady Gaga and dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet. Entitled “Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again)”, the piece will be performed for the first and only time at the gala and has been commissioned by Gagosian Gallery and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow.
A comprehensive catalogue of MoCA’s collection and history was finished before the economic downturn, and Schimmel says: “That book was my bible for organising this exhibition.” Titled after a Baldessari work from the collection, This Is Not To Be Looked At: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles features works by more than 150 artists from the museum. Above, Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979
Manchester, United Kingdom
Whitworth Art Gallery
The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock
Dates: 19 Sep 09 - 13 Dec 09
Categories: Modern (1900-1945)
Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Oxford Road Manchester M15 6ER
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 7450 Website
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