Saturday, December 28, 2013

Sven Kroner

Sven Kroner is German artist creating monumental dramatic landscapes. There is clearly a link here to the german romantic tradition of David Caspar Friedrich and others. In almost every piece the world is portrayed as a vast and mysterious place, in which the human presence seems tenuous at best, barely hanging on to the rough skin of this planet. Kroner's work reminds us of this, and that our ultimate success may still be short-lived. The scale and force of nature remains far beyond our control, even our full understanding. LINK svenkroner

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Brut Deluxe

@ Kurfürstendamm 
Photo: Miguel de Guzman

Three light installations were realised on Kurfürstendamm: the first, a huge light dome with a diameter of 7,5m, at Joachimstaler Platz, the second consisting of five big three-dimensional light cubes at the crossing with Uhlandstrasse, and the third, an artificial lanscape build of 50 light shrubs, at the crossing with Knesebeckstrasse. What all three installations have in common is that we want to achieve an atmospheric effect with them. Rather than typical decorations that represent Christmas through objects or symbols that are contemplated from the outside, we want to create a space that can be entered and experienced. LINK brutdeluxe

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Santa

Santa Claus is generally depicted as a portly, joyous, white-bearded man sometimes with spectacles wearing a red coat with white collar and cuffs, white-cuffed red trousers, and black leather belt and boots and who carries a bag full of gifts for children. Images of him rarely have a beard with no moustache. This image became popular in the United States and Canada in the 19th century due to the significant influence of the 1823 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and of caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Nast. This image has been maintained and reinforced through song, radio, television, children's books and films. LINK

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Petra

Wonder in the Desert 
@ The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden 
9 October 2013 until 23 March 2014


A spectacular exhibition on Petra, Jordan’s hidden desert city. Petra, capital city of the ancient Nabataean people, is one of the wonders of the ancient world. With its monumental structures, temples, royal tombs and luxurious villas all hewn from the red rock, Petra is among the world’s finest in cultural history and archaeology. 
LINK Rijksmuseum van Oudheden

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The artist in the time of hopelessness

The newest Polish art 
@ Awangarda BWA Gallery Wrocław

7 December 2013 - 19 January 2014

Nowadays the word 'curator' sounds terrible. It's associated with judicial supervision and authority. Whereas originally the word 'curator' meant a friend, an advisor, someone who tries to help. That's more the way I imagine the role of an exhibition curator. I've been dealing with art for 30 years and to tell the truth I haven't met many curators who understood their part properly. Most often it's just a formal function, the true encounter between an artist and a curator doesn't take place. Maybe this time we'll manage to change that," Zbigniew Libera wrote in the invitation to the Masters' Atelier—an artistic subversion, the father of Polish critical art and now the curator of a project under his name. The exhibition The Artist in the time of hopelessness. The newest Polish art was created over the period of one year as a process—a process during which the meetings of the artists and the curator, personal conversations, phone calls, emails and negotiations with the institution and all its limitations were the daily bread. Everything was aimed at making the artists' actions and problems, indicated by them, the real subject of this cooperation. LINK Awangarda BWA Gallery Wrocław

Monday, December 16, 2013

Bunker 599

Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances

A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. The design thereby opens up the minuscule interior of one of NDW’s 700 bunkers, the insides of which are normally cut off from view completely. In addition, a long wooden boardwalk cuts through the extremely heavy construction. It leads visitors to a flooded area and to the footpaths of the adjacent natural reserve. The pier and the piles supporting it remind them that the water surrounding them is not caused by e.g. the removal of sand but rather is a shallow water plain characteristic of the inundations in times of war. LINK

Sunday, December 15, 2013

George Widener

A self-taught artist and a calendar savant, Widener creates mixed-media works on paper that give aesthetic, visible form to complex calculations based on dates and historical events the sinking of the Titanic is one of his favorites. The artist often uses found paper, or a support composed of layers of tea-stained paper napkins, to apply ink and paint upon. His drawings feature simple palettes, sophisticated patterning, and bold compositions of dates and imagery, which transcend centuries of time and the history of art. Widener sometimes likens himself to a “time traveler." LINK

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Comics! 200 years of Dutch cartoon

@ Meermanno
till January 12, 2014

This autumn Museum  Meermanno experience for the whole family the world of comics. The exhibition is for young and old and deals with many comic forms, such as strips with animals, heroes, girls, war comics, advertising, comics, illegal spending, political comics, family trip, current strips, educational comics and the latest digital forms of comics. The exhibition is chronological. In the first room, the visitor penny prints, sees precursors of the strip, in the last room of the most recent examples: interactive cartoons that the viewer can influence themselves on the screen. LINK Meermanno

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Smallest Printing Company


The latest project of The Letterproeftuin. A mobile printing installation for small posters and books. Since 2013. Part of the International Poster and Graphic Design Festival Chaumont 2013. This project is made possible with the great help and expertise of;
Lara De Greef, Druma, Roco-Ets, Wessel van Offeren, Fieke van Berkom, LATU Werkhanden, Van Son Ink. LINK

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Willi Baumeister

@ Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

During his apprenticeship as a decorative painter Willi Baumeister already visited evening classes at the Stuttgart "Kunstakademie". From 1909 to 1912 he attended Adolf Hölzel's composition class where he first met the later "Bauhaus" painter Oskar Schlemmer who was to become a life-long friend. 
In 1919-20 he produced his first "Mauerbilder", panels with a wall-like relief structure - created by adding sand and putty to the paint - and cubist forms. These works brought about Baumeister's international breakthrough. In 1928 the Frankfurt "Städelschule" appointed the artist to run the applied arts, typography and fabric printing class. Willi Baumeister joined the "Cercle Carré" in 1930 and in 1931 he became a member of "Abstraction Création". During the "Third Reich" Baumeister was banned as a "degenerate" artist and rarely showed himself in public. During the war Baumeister wrote the book "Das Unbekannte in der Kunst" (The Unknown in Art) which was first published in 1947. During these years as a "degenerate artist" he spent his time studying prehistoric and Oriental art, which was to provide him with the motifs for his "Eidos" pictures and "Ideogrammes".
 He resumed teaching after the war when he accepted a post at the "Kunstakademie" in Stuttgart. With his extensive oeuvre and his art-theoretic publications Willi Baumeister is considered one of the most important modern German artists. LINK Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (in German)

Saturday, December 07, 2013

Paint Tubes

by Nendo 
Photo: Ayao Yamazaki

Almost six years have passed since Nendo’s “sweet” collaboration with patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu which dazzled us with ingeniously conceived chocolate-pencils, not to mention the unique pencil sharpener used to grate chocolate shavings onto Tsujiguchi’s desserts. Following on from these delectable creations, Japanese based studio Nendo recently designed a limited quantity of chocolate-paints for the Seibu Department Store in Japan. They describe their new creation as a ''...design that combines the childhood excitement of opening a new box of paints and the thrill of opening a box of chocolates you’ve been given unexpectedly.'' LINK Nendo

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Sɪntər'klaːs 2

LINK

Sɪntər'klaːs

Sinterklaas [sɪntər'klaːs] (or more formally Sint Nicolaas or Sint Nikolaas; Saint Nicolas in French; Sankt Nikolaus in German) is a traditional winter holiday figure still celebrated today in the Low Countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as French Flanders and Artois. He is also well known in territories of the former Dutch Empire, including Aruba, Suriname, Curaçao, Bonaire, and Indonesia. He is one of the sources of the holiday figure of Santa Claus in North America. LINK Sinterklaas

Piotr Uklański

ESL 
@ Bass Museum of Art

Emerging in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Piotr Uklański has created an expansive and provocative body of work that defies categorization. He has engaged with nearly all forms of visual media including installation, large-scale paper reliefs, tie-dye paintings, fiber art, resin paintings, photography, performance and a feature-length film, Summer Love. English as a Second Language or ESL is the unifying concept for this in-depth exploration of Uklański’s protean work. While the title directly references Uklański’s own immigrant status in America, the broad scope of his work addresses more than the themes of identity politics.  Instead, Uklański proposes ESL as an interpretative metaphor for his art practice. This exhibition highlights the relationship between a non-native speaker’s accent and idiosyncratic aesthetics, often found in Uklański’s “meta-painting” practice. LINK guggenheim

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Billboard

@ Museumpark
DPhoto

The Museumpark is divided into four zones: a paved zone, a romantic zone with trees and a pedestrian bridge, an asphalted city zone for events, and a well-tended orchard. The car park designed by Paul de Ruiter uses split levels and lots of glass for a light, spacious and transparent look. The water reservoir prevents flooding in the city centre during heavy rainfall. 

Designed by: Rem Koolhaas, Yves Brunier (1988- 1993, 2011) / Paul de Ruiter (2005-2010). LINK architectenweb (in Dutch)

Sunday, December 01, 2013

Amelie von Wulffen 

Am kühlen Tisch

@ Portikus 
November 30, 2013 - February 2, 2014


Portikus is presenting an exhibition by Amelie von Wulffen, showing recent paintings, a slideshow of her latest comic, and a group of painted chairs. It has only happened on rare occasions that this variety of media, which is deeply rooted in von Wulffen's practice, has been exhibited in this way. The exhibition becomes somewhat of a prototype for the different genres in which the artist operates. The main gallery space introduces a group of new paintings. Mainly large canvases in cool blue hues, they portray the great European painters of the 19th and 20th century, the wake of modernity: Gustave Caillebotte, Max Beckmann, Goya, and van Gogh. Von Wulffen spent the last years returning to books, studying illustrations of French, Dutch, and German paintings from this era. Apart from amateur techniques such as batik, silk painting, dipping lacquer, appliqués (like sand or seashells), or the quick spatula technique, which can be associated with current times, there is nothing in these paintings that actually depicts the contemporary world. LINK Portikus