Friday, April 30, 2010

Kolumba - art museum of the Archbishopric of Cologne



















Designed by Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Rainer Weitschies, Kolumba the Art Museum of the Archbishopric of Cologne is another must-see museum for visitors to the city. The building, which has developed in smooth transition from the remains of the late-Gothic ruins of St Kolumba, includes a suite of elegant spaces, many flooded with natural light, that are used for exhibitions combining religious artefacts with contemporary art across a range of media.

The current exhibition, Bequest, documents the traces of human existence that have been recorded in documents, everyday objects and in works of art. At the same time the exhibition makes a theme of the value of remembrance and our responsibility in dealing with our historical legacy. This is illustrated in one of the most striking displays in the exhibition that combines Jannis Kounellis' Tragedia civile (Civil tragedy) with wedding photographs of the 19th and 20th century and two 15th century Copes.
Images: Jannis Kounellis, Tragedia civile (1975), gold-leaf wall, coat-stand, hat,coat, oil lamp; 189 Wedding Photographs of the 19th and 20th century; and Two Copes, 15th century flat stitch embroidery on a gold ground, original blue velvet from Genoa with pomegranate pattern

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Gallery Weekend Berlin



Gallery Weekend Berlin features 40 galleries, 40 opening over 3 days and nights from 30 April to 2 May 2010. The lineup of exhibitions includes Measuring Potentials, a group show curated by Marc Gloede and featuring work by Dane Mitchell.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project







Curated by Maud Page, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project is the second of GoMA's country- specific exhibitions focusing on the Brisbane art museum's contemporary collections. The exhibition "explores a particularly rich dark vein that recurs in New Zealand Contemporary art and cinema. Psychological unease pervades many of the works in the exhibition with humour, parody and poetic subtlety among the strategies used by artist across generations and genres." From the GoMA website

Unnerved includes Gavin Hipkins' The Homely, which has been described as a post-colonial gothic novel. Through a cinematic run of 80 images, which are often slightly blurry and filled with the colours of a dreamscape, Hipkins re-presents monuments and memorials of Australia and New Zealand nationalism with fragmented glimpses of domestic interiors and museum dioramas. He also says: "Although New Zealand has an international reputation for being clean, green and beautiful (a mythology that New Zealanders often call on to represent ourselves) it is the treatment and conquest of nature as an adventure playground that interests me with this project". 
Images: images from Gavin Hipkins' series The Homely

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Kunst-Station St Peter, Cologne










Founded in 1987 by Friedheim Mennekes, the Kunst-Station at Cologne's Jesuit Church of St Peter has been a haven for contemporary art installations by artists such as Christian Boltanski, James Lee Byars, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. The current project at the Kunst-Station is by Motoi Yamamoto.
Images (from the top): Cologne's Jesuit Church of St Peter, Motoi Yamamoto installing his work, and previous installations by Barbara Kruger (detail) and Martin Creed.

Monday, April 26, 2010

When in Cologne







Created for the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral, Gerhard Richter's stained glass window is a must-see work for visitors to Cologne. The original window was destroyed during World War II and had been replaced with plain glass. Inspired by Richter's 1974 painting 4096 Farben, the window consists of 11,500 hand-blown glass squares in 72 different colours. Echoing the colours of surrounding windows, Richter's illuminated abstraction blends a modernist aesthetic with the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of the cathedral.
Images: Gerhard Richter's window (details) in the Cologne Cathedral

Phantom limb construction sites: final week


Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites closes on Saturday 1 May 2010.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Art Cologone: Day 3



















Hye Rim Lee at Venice Projects

Sign of the times


The homepage for Art Brussels features the following message: Art Brussels will take place as programmed. In spite of the ash cloud only 6% of the galleries may have problems to reach Brussels in time.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Deitch on keepers v sellers


Long time dealer and art world dealmaker Jeffrey Deitch (soon to become director of LAMoCA) has spoken out on art speculators, at the same time putting a spin on the role of art dealers saying their job is to place art with good collectors - ie high-profile collectors who hold onto work, often gifting it to art museums. He says: "People laugh at this whole notion of us saying that we 'place' work instead of selling it. But in fact that's what we try to do. We want the work to go to people who are as serious about the works as we are."

Deitch's comments come in the wake of an $8m federal lawsuit filed by Craig Robins, a Miami collector claiming compensatory and punitive damages from David Zwirner. Robins says he is on a blacklist because the artist whose work he sold under a so-called confidential agreement with Zwirner now views him as a speculator. You can read more about the Robins/Zwirner lawsuit here.
Image: Jeffrey Deitch

Art Cologne vernissage










Art Cologne was launched yesterday with a preview followed by the vernissage. While the closure of Europe's airports put an end to the travel plans of many US collectors, there was a big turnout of European collectors. Director Daniel Hug's plan to "return Art Cologne to its former glory" appears to be on track, despite the eruption of the Eyjfallajokul volcano.