newsfromliverpool201107

a fictitious or mythical sailing spot, conventionally depicted as beautiful and with long flowing historically golden vibe. This is Liverpool! Two-and-a-half hours, by train, from London, it is situated in northwestern England, in Lancashire, on the eastern side of the mouth of the Mersey River. Liverpool is known for being a major port, with a strong palate, sweet feeling, and dark red color, which also characterizes the fortified wine originally from Portugal, typically drunk as a dessert wine, Port. This great metropolis is an aperture, an opening in to the large and densely populated technological and commercial creature, named contemporary society, made of unloads and uploads.

newsfromlondon201107

a form in which a given passage appears in a particular edition of a text.

newsfromlondon201107

High Voltage, Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 July 2011, at Victoria Park London

London Street Photography - a maze of images

Since the nineteen-century street photographs are at the heart of our understanding of the contemporary public space, as a diverse and dynamic humanly-build maze. Images characterised by «element of chance», by the multiplicity of subjects produce as a computer program seen on a television screen or any other display screen. It is when the shutter caught «a fortunate encounter, a fleeting expression, a momentary juxtaposition, capturing and ever-changing city.» Despite of the image’s democratisation and the growing digitalisation of visual culture, it has become, increasingly, more difficult to photograph the pubic space; for instance, banks, or, just, children playing in the streets. First because human law legally protects their image; and, second, it has also become even more difficult to find kids playing in the public space, since they tend to stay more constrained to their private space, within the walls of an electronically impulse video game. Though, this continuous area, which is free, available, contains small sets of points having some specified structure.

newsfromlondon201107

«Broadway Market on Saturdays is a kaleidoscope of tastes and cultures: stalls, shops, pubs, restaurants and cafes offering some of the best food and most original clothing in London all crammed into a little East End street between the Regent’s Canal and London Fields» [...]

newsfromlondon201107

Following a lead from an art consultant about some art spaces in London worth seeing, the only thing I do manage to do was to bump my eyes into closed doors. Expect two! In here I've got more into tasting something unique.

«Wolfgang Tillman's exhibition space, Between Bridges, where he consistently shows interesting artists ranging from the painting nun Sister Corita to Jenny Holzer. Or Auto Italia, a former car mechanic's workshop that artists have taken over to put on performances, exhibitions, and club nights. A wonderfully obscure place is Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc., a mix between wonder chamber, curio collection, and gallery.» And an atmospheric curator run gallery in his living room, iMT.

Joan Miró ladders

Curated by Marko Daniel, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape retrospective shows the most staggering work conceived by the Catalan artist. His inventive identity is set against planes of color laid-out in thirteen rooms across Tate Modern fourth floor. With each series entitled to its own room, the first of them explore Miró's commitment to his native Catalonia. An auto-portrait developed by displacing archetypal figures in to simple arrangement of signs – as is the case with The Head of a Catalan Peasant (1925) –, and the juxtaposition of unrelated objects, in Animated Landscapes (1926-7), for instance. Whereas the middle section reflect Miró’s new pictorial language. The first rooms in this section may suggest a withdrawal from the harsh realities of the world, the atmosphere of uncertainty arousing from his exile in France in late 1936 and «the terrifying years of the Spanish Civil War». The furious abstract painting on masonite (1936) are one example and The Constellations (1940-1) series's another imagery. While the later rooms epitomize Miro’s conflicting tendencies towards political engagement and his inner escape into creativity. The body of work conceived during this phase reflect the artist greater confidence in the balance he established between recognition on the international stage and inner exile at Mont-roig, in Catalonia. Finally, «the final section looks at the last years of Franco’s rule», when his painting «capture the tireless energy of creativity», challenging the dying regime that was animating the intellectual circles in Spain, in the late sixties. But, particularly revealing, is the American Abstract Expressionism influence in Miró's work that are shown in the central rooms. Four vast triptychs (1961-2, 1968 and 1973) mark the artist immersion into a new chromatic creation of space.

«No. 341, 26 Apr. 2009. Inglewood, Queensland, Australia» (24 European Rabbits)

On one level the exhibition A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, by Taryn Simon (1975, N.Y.), showing at Tate Modern (London), let us perceive, in one hand, the heterogeneous bloodiness and related stories of eighteen distinctive archetypical ‘chapters’ from Brazil, Germany, Kenya, Philippines, and many other countries from different continents; on the other hand, those portraits make an homogenous world network of external forces of territories, power and circumstances. The subject documented is presented by means of clean and classical portraits arranged in a linear form. Next to it, a central panel constructs narratives and contextualizes details – names, places, date and professions. On the right, are Simon’s visual booknotes – a mosaïque of photograph of VHS tapes, ID cards, graphic novels, medals, land ownership certificates, letters, etc. making evidence. While, on another level, this work territorializes the space existing between text and image, order and disorder. This world research and recording is a strategy for the production of knowledge. In where art is interrogating the social and cultural ideas of its time. Although with globalisation increasingly more people get to the same message, on a local level, what they do with it, is completely different.

newsfromlondon201107

Robert Capa (1913 – 1954)
American Soldier Landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day" (Normandy, 6 June 1944)

«Capa shot two rolls of film in just an hour and a half on the Normandy beaches on D-Day before returning to Portsmouth and sending them to the London office of Life magazine. In the rush to get them into the next issue, the 72 negatives were put in an overheated drying cabinet. All but eleven were ruined but these somewhat blurred negatives produced the most memorable photographs of the allied landing.»

Silver gelatin print, 1970, from original negative. 28 x 36 cm. Hungarian Museum of Photography, Kecskemét, 2002.88

(text taken from the Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century - Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi exhibition' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, July 2011)

newsfromlondon201107

«Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like

You say black I say white
You say bark I say bite (...)»

(by Queen)

newsfromlondon201107

Martin Munkácsi (1896 – 1963)
Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika (c. 1930)

«Despite its traditional title, this photography was probably taken on Liberia's Atlantic coast. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson saw it in the photography annual Das Deutsch Lichtbild in 1932 and later said, 'It is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks... It is only that one photograph which influenced me.'»

Silver gelatin print, 1994, from original negative. 35.5 x 27.5 cm. Hungarian Museum of Photography, Kecskemét. © Estate of Martin Munkácsi, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

(text taken from the Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century - Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi exhibition' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, July 2011)

«Oi Peter, I k-k-kan see your house from here!»

Space always puts in evidence the cracks in the whole, that which is marked as a territorial unity. The Chapman brother’s just gave us that opportunity to meddle in-between one another, with this new exhibition at White Cube. While with The Milk of Human Weakness series, at Hoxton Square, we, the public, as a reflecting mass of individuals, are suggested to take a moment and reflect in communion in front of home made altars, with mutated statues into flesh-eating creatures, to suffer in the interests of someone or something else. Whereas with the SS clothed figures, at Mason’s Yard, we are invited to participate in an awesome spectacle of visual feast while engaging in misconduct behaviour derived from degenerative art. The spatial circumstances are that when the last days are upon us we just look aroused at the gardens of earthly delights. With searing wit and energy we meddle to the space in-between both religion and morality, and became a sheathe extremist right wing that ware white robes and hoods’ and a free spirit hippie.

At White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square, until September 17th 2001

newsfromlondon201107

Most of the times we get in the right train and leave at the right station;

Sometimes, we, just, don't leave at the stop we're suppose to leave, and we're lead to another completely new station.

Paradise, Family Portraits and Museum Photographs

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978 – 2010 is an anthological exhibition that puts in evidence some of the main themes that have been explored by the German photographer Thomas Struth (1954) during his career. Displayed on a classical form along three room the selection of photographic images (colour and black & white), conceived over the past three decades, encompass recurrent themes, such as the central perspectives of empty city streets, the reflection on the different function of art in a increasingly secular society through crowded museums, or the formal similarities between family portraits in different cultures around the world. However, central to this exhibitions is the Paradise series. More related with the self than with the other these «dense screens of vegetation void of any sign of human interference» were taken in tropical rainforests. This installation surrounding the observer become a strange axiom to a more recollect series of images of interior spaces and urban views, to the iconoclastic images usually focused on culture and place.

At Whitechapel Art Gallery, until September 16th 2011

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 by Peter Zumthor

A tranquil haven for rest and reflection around a hortus conclusus, a hidden inner garden.

«Sex is something we can do, it is free!»

I raised my eyes and I see a room full of tapestries, blankets that accomplish a great deal more than the pornography of images that at first sight looks to encompass Tracy Emin's work. In her body of work, at one level, the centrality of vision of contemporary social media and also the visual world production of meaning is surrogated by textuality; at another level I recognise that pieces like the neon’s and the video's work as simultaneous anchors to an entire range of analyses and interpretations of the psychic dynamics of spectatorship, or, as Tracey Emin says, “Now I am dancing! When I start to dance, people start to clap.” In today’s world meaning circulate visually, in addition to orally and textually. Most of the pictures, shown at the exhibition, convey signs to «illuminate emotions, memories, feelings and ideas in graphic messages, sentences and poems», like her dad, ex-lovers, pregnancy or just about sex. Together with her own lived traumas these are some of the questions explored by Tracy Emin’s art. Recurring themes that take the form of a critique of the binary logic in relation to a system of negative differentiation. Love is What You Want, showing at the Hayward Gallery (until August 29th), establishes and maintains an individual aesthetic value.

newsfromlisbon201107

We've both left home at the same time. We've both left Lisbon on the same day. But my luggage went to Paris, while I went to a different place. For our happiness we've meet, a couple of days later, in London.

newsfromguincho201107

Sand
Sea
Sky
Sun
And a widely distribute large scaly blue and white mushroom, used to give shade projected by the sun
[after July 2007]

newsfromnevereverland201107

Momentos de alegría y ilusión viernes por la noche na lezíria do Ribatejo.
São momentos de celebração e intimidade!
É a condição principal e indispensável para existir e estar na companhia da família.
Que belo presente. Obrigado!!!

Breath in, breath out, breath in, ...

O corpo de trabalho desenvolvido originalmente, em 2010, para o Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concórdia (Bamberg, Alemanha), por João Leonardo (1974, Odemira) explora os resíduos do consumo contínuo e repetido de um vício, neste caso, do tabaco. A exposição encontra-se dividida em dois conjuntos: o primeiro conjunto, a fazer lembrar uma popular exposição com corpos dilacerados, fragmentados e fatiados. Definitivamente antagónico à perspectiva exacerbada, reflexa de uma sociedade puritana contemporânea em que a causa de todas as nossos doenças é o tabaco e o acto de fumar, o segundo conjunto é o de maior maturidade conceptual. As séries como Cigarette Filter Collection e Cigarette Paper Collection ou Calendar #24 e Prana evidenciam um trabalho mais elaborado. Neste conjunto, Leonardo, desenvolve e apresenta-nos uma exploração etnográfica, de cariz social, sobre as necessidades e dependências humanas. Uma indução sobre o sistema de ordenação do caos que governa a condição humana. O artista resgata, colecciona, separa, cataloga e reintroduz vários fragmentos encontrados na ruína do mundo. Cada espécime resgatado induz para a individualidade particular da sujeição aos vícios naturais que se impõem socialmente. Como o simples acto de respirar, o artísta recupera fragmentos de cigarros, beatas, cinza, caixas de cigarros de uma forma desmedida enquanto nos impõe o cheiro petrificado do tabaco.

One Hundred and Six Columns, Four Head and One Table, em exposição na galeria 111 (Lisboa) até 30 de Julho de 2011.

Long loan makes Barcelona a Matta-Clark centre

BARCELONA. The collector Harold Berg has agreed to lend “indefinitely” a cache of photographs, taken by US artist Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s, to the Museu d’Art Contermporani Barcelona (Macba).

The loan consists of 46 images documenting Matta-Clark’s the famous “building cuts”, including Splitting, 1974 (above). The photographs, formerly known as the Bex archive, were acquired by Berg from Florent Bex, the director of the International Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp.

The collection joins the 17 Matta-Clark works Macba already owns (13 videos, two photographs and two photocollages). Thus means the museum now holds one of the largest Matta-Clark collections in Europe, along with the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. An exhibition of Matta-Clark’s works, including those loaned by Berg, is due to open at Macba at the end of 2012.

Meanwhile, the Barcelona museum is currently negotiating the acquisition of 7,000 volumes from the late Catalan poet Joan Brossa’s library. Macba is in discussion with the Fundació Brossa and the city of Barcelona over the possible acquisition, which also includes 40,000 items, including letters, object poems, visual poems and installations.

The Fundación Brossa has been forced to sell the volumes and archive of the poet’s work owing to the harsh financial climate. One of the foundation great endeavours has always been that Brossa‘s work should not be dispersed.

Earlier this year, Macba accepted a loan of 80,000 photographs, taken by Xavier Miserachs, between 1954 and 1998, for a renewable 25 years period. Other recent loans include 800 pieces by the English-American collective, Art & Language, loaned by the French art collector Philippe Méaille for a period of five years (The Art Newspaper, May, p.20).

Published at Museums (20), The Art Newspaper - International edition Vol. XX No. 226, July/August 2011

Thyssen in Catalonia

The project to build the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Centre for Catalan Painting in Sant Feliu de Guíxols was unanimously approved by the city council in May. The project on Spain's Costa Brava is the latest regional offshoot of the baroness's galleries. It has a construction budget of €1.5m and will be housed in a converted cork factory. On show will be a collection of 19th- and 20th-century Catalan paintings, which is currently housed in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

Published at Museums (14), The Art Newspaper - International edition Vol. XX No. 226, July/August 2011