Michaël Borremans‘s drawings, paintings, and films present an evocative combination of solemn-looking characters, unusual close-ups, and unsettling still lifes. There is a theatrical dimension to his works, which are highly staged and ambiguous, just as his complex and open-ended scenes lend themselves to conflicting moods at once nostalgic, darkly comical, disturbing, and grotesque. His paintings display a concentrated dialogue with previous art historical epochs, yet their unconventional compositions and curious narratives defy expectations and lend them an indefinable yet universal character. Borremans was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. In 1996, he received his M.F.A. from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst, Campus St. Lucas, in Ghent. LINK bawag-foundation
@ Smithsonian Books
Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen: A Culinary View of Lincoln’s Life and Times, coming from Smithsonian Books Feb. 4, is a culinary biography that lets readers see the everyday life of President Abraham Lincoln. Midwestern cook and food historian Rae Katherine Eighmey uncovers authentic 19th-century recipes in period cookbooks and researches Lincoln’s grocery bills in Springfield ledgers to discover the foods that were cooked in his home. She solves riddles such as what type of barbecue could be served to thousands at political rallies when paper plates and napkins did not exist, and what gingerbread recipe could have been Lincoln’s childhood favorite when few families owned cookie cutters. LINK newsdesk smithsonian
@ Zwijndrecht
The municipality of Zwijndrecht is in his stomach with residents made portraits of King Willem-Alexander. In December, the city held a competition in which people were called to King Willem Alexander in the form of a portrait. The winning portrait would get a spot on the wall in the council chamber. LINK zwijndrecht (in Dutch)
Armco
@ Figge von Rosen Galerie
February 1 - March 29, 2014
Koen van den Broek is one of Belgium’s leading painters. He has exhibited widely, including a major retrospective at SMAK in Ghent, 2010. The work bears strong affinities to European painting, while at the same time inhabiting the landscape of America's open spaces and the language of American abstraction. LINK koenvandenbroek
Ellen Rodenberg, Kees Koomen, and Maarten Schepers @ Buro Rotterdam
performances from: Topp&Dubio, Kees Koomen and Frans van Lent
EX-MÊKH is the name for the collaboration of visual artists Ellen Rodenberg, Maarten Schepers and Kees Koomen. These artists all have their individual professional practices as an artist but next to that they show their works in their mutual contexts and they try to develop a relation with the spaces in which exhibitions are held. Point of departure for the making of an exhibition is the physical and social nature of the exhibition space. Since 2006 these artists organized twelve exhibitions under the name EX-MÊKH. The exhibitions varied from an intense happening during one evening to a series of short exhibitions within a month. Depending on the specific nature of the venue and the subject of the exhibition visual artists, musicians, writers and designers were invited to participate. LINK (ex)-Mêkh
Bring Your own Beamer
Edinburgh | 2014
31 | 01 | 14
Archive: BYOB meets the First Bos en Lommer DuoDisco in a Church Amsterdam 2013
BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer is a one-night exhibition inviting different artists from around the country to transform Edinburgh College of Art’s Sculpture Court into a dynamic and enveloping multi-sensory spectacle of moving image, digital art, performance art, sound art and music. BYOB is a commentary on the modern world which often generates overwhelming situations in which one is surrounded by a multiplicity of undulating, fluctuating, pulsating, digitised visuals and information. The exhibition format has been enacted by Rafaël Rozendaal and has been created worldwide since 2010. LINK byobworldwide
Ivan Vasilyevich Klyun, (born Aug. 20, [Sept. 1, New Style], 1873, Bolshiye Gorki village, Vladimir province, Russia - died Dec. 13, 1943, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Russian artist and art theorist who was noted for his association with Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich and for his formulation of a theory of colour in painting. Klyun was born into a peasant family. As a young man he studied drawing on his own accord while he earned a living as a bookkeeper. From 1902 to 1907 he attended the studio of Fyodor Rerberg in Moscow, where he became friends with Malevich. During these years he also attended an artist’s studio and took classes in Anatoly Bolshakov’s art school. From 1908 to 1911 Klyun’s work was influenced by the Lithuanian Symbolist painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, and he was drawn to Art Nouveau. In 1913 he turned to Cubism, and some of his best Cubist work dates from 1914 - 5: Gramophone and Ozonator (both 1914) and the relief Landscape Rushing By (1915). Between 1913 and 1917, he participated in most of the important avant-garde exhibitions. A major landmark for Klyun was the “0,10” exhibition in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) during the winter of 1915 - 16, where he exhibited Cubist and nonobjective sculpture (including Cubist at Her Dressing Table, 1915, presumed destroyed). Influenced by Malevich, Klyun in 1916 created his first Suprematist compositions, and in 1917 he created a series of one-, two-, and three-coloured Suprematist works. He became a member of Malevich’s Supremus Group. LINK britannica
@ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
19 Oct 2013 - 2 Feb 2014
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, with selections from the Khardzhiev and Costakis collections, the largest survey in twenty years devoted to the work of the Russian avant-garde pioneer Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). LINK stedelijk museum ams
This large-scale Snow Drawing piece was created by San Francisco-based artist Sonja Hinrichsen with the help of generous assistance of 5 volunteers on Rabbit Ears Pass, Colorado. Her work is like a snow version of Amazing Sand Drawings on California Beaches by Jim Denevan. It’s amazing how many hours were spent creating something so big yet impermanent as these drawings. “I’m not so into making art that lasts,” “The world is saturated with manmade projects. I don’t think I need to add more things to the planet.” On the other hand, Sonja’s work is not as impermanent as it seems. Eventually the snow will melt, but the pictures are here to stay. LINK
Antje Hanebeck (born in Braunschweig in 1968), master-class graduate at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and currently assistant professor at the Chair of Photography, proves to be an unusual chronicler of contemporary urban phenomena. The subject of architectural innovation, encompassing as it does buildings celebrated in our era which at the same time mirror the logistics specific to them, informs on an elemental plane the aesthetic research conducted by the author in that it is the red thread running through her oeuvre. Photographs of architecture are legion and go back to the beginnings of the medium; however, Hanebeck is not concerned with the documentary approach. On the contrary, she uses her motif as the starting-point for complex aesthetic reflection, which is transformed into image through, and by the agency of, photography. LINK antjehanebeck
Katja Mater's (1979, the Netherlands) work originates from a meta-perspective and confronts the possibilities and impossibilities of photography. Rather than documenting frozen moments in time, she records the numerous ways we can look at and think about photographic images. She turns the medium on itself, and in doing so, disturbs its status of accuracy. Instead of looking through photography as a transparent medium, Mater's work makes you look at photography itself. By visualizing areas in which technique yields images different from human perception she shows the intangible character of the medium, using photography as a creating rather than a documenting medium. LINK
“STREETS: Mapping and Connecting Young Creative Scenes in Europe”
Participants/Artists: Farah Rahman (Den Haag, NL), Steven van Lummel (Den Haag, NL), Conni Funkel (Erfurt, DE), Luise Limprecht (Leipzig, DE), Nikola Varenica (Vukovar, CRO), Zoran Bogdanovic Zox (Brčko, BiH), Béatrice André (FR/MKD), Michel Assier-Andrrieu (Beloey) (FR/UK), Giusy Chierchia (IT/NL), Nemanja Belić (VR/RS), Ivica Stošić (VR/RS), Milena Tošić (VR/RS), Marko Stamenković aka Mars (VR/RS), Slavoljub Slave Simonović (VR/RS) LINK vimeo
@ Stedelijk Museum
Islands in the Storm, 1990
Weiner began his career as an artist as a very young man at the height of Abstract Expressionism. His debut public work/exhibition was at the age of 19, with what he called Cratering Piece. An action piece, the work consisted of explosives set to ignite simultaneously in the four corners of a field in Marin County, California. That work, as Weiner later developed his practice as a painter, became an epiphany for the turning point in his career. His work in the early 1960s included six years of making explosions in the landscape of California to create craters as individual sculptures. He is also known during his early work for creating gestures described in simple statements leading to the ambiguity of whether the artwork was the gesture or the statement describing the gesture: e.g."Two minutes of spray paint directly on the floor.." or " A 36" x 36" removal of lathing or support wall..." (both 1968). In 1968, when Sol LeWitt came up with his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Weiner formulated his "Declaration of Intent" (1968):
1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.
Weiner created his first book Statements in 1968, a small 64-page paperback with texts describing projects. Published by The Louis Kellner Foundation and Seth Siegelaub, "Statements" is considered one of the seminal conceptual artist's books of the era. Since the early 1970s, wall installations have been Weiner's primary medium, and he has shown at the Leo Castelli gallery. LINK Stedelijk
@ FOAM
An international jury at Photokina 1963 voted William Klein one of the 30 most important photographers in the medium\'s history. He became famous in Europe immediately upon publication of his strikingly intense book of photographs, Life Is Good for You in New York - William Klein Trance Witness Revels, for which he won the Prix Nadar in 1956. Klein\'s visual language made an asset out of accident, graininess, blur, and distortion. He has described his work as \"a crash course in what was not to be done in photography.\" Klein employed a wide-angle lens, fast film, and novel framing and printing procedures to make images in a fragmented, anarchic mode that emphasized raw immediacy and highlighted the photographer\'s presence in the scene. LINK foam
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
@ 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
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
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
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
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
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
@ 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
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
@ 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)
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
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
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
@ 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)
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
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