Installation view.

November 1 – December 12, 2011

Curated by Olivier Berggruen.

To be held at Dickinson in New York from 1 November until 21 December 2011.

The exhibition will emphasize the articulation and shift between concretist and neo-concretist art.

Drawing on loans from major collections and Institutions, it will be the first time that an exhibition in New York will show a comprehensive survey of material from the late Fifties and early Sixties in Brazil.

The show will illustrate how the geometric, purist aesthetic inherited from Europe is then reexamined and bent, either from the inside or through the margins.

The show will include works by key Brazilian artists from that period:

Helio Oiticica
Lygia Clark
Lygia Pape
Willys de Castro
Mira Schendel
Judith Lauand
Aluisio Carvao
Raymundo Colares
Geraldo de Barros
Ivan Serpa
and others.

In his capacity as Associate Curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Olivier Berggruen has organized such large-scale exhibitions as Matisse: Drawing with Scissors (2003), Yves Klein (2005) and Picasso and the Theatre (2006-7). This is his first collaboration with Dickinson.

Dickinson are agents and dealers in fine art, with Galleries in London, New York and Berlin. Dealing in Fine Art ranging from medieval through to contemporary, Dickinson exhibits at the TEFAF (Maastricht) Masterpiece (London) and PAD (London) art fairs. As well as presenting wide-ranging gallery exhibitions, Dickinson is the world’s leading specialist in private treaty sales.

Anthony McCall, Meeting you Halfway II, 2010

May 10 – June 18, 2011

Luciana Brito Galeria presents the first solo exhibition in Brazil of works by Anthony McCall. Conceived as a retrospective, this exhibition of the artist’s earlier and more recent works is accompanied by a bilingual (Portuguese/English) catalogue featuring more than one hundred images and excerpts from several essays and interviews with Anthony McCall from the last decade—all unpublished in Portuguese—as well as an essay by exhibition curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.

The groundbreaking film Line Describing a Cone (1973), originally shot in 16mm and very recently recreated digitally by McCall (Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 2010) will be shown in both its versions, alongside other celebrated works such as Landscape for Fire (16 mm film, 1972), Five Minute Drawing (1974/2007), and one of the artist’s most recent solid-light films titled Meeting You Halfway (II) (2010). The exhibition will also include a large series of schemes and scores for performances, drawings and prints.

Widely known for his film-based installations that emphasize the sculptural quality of light in dark environments, Anthony McCall gained public recognition in the early 1970s, conceiving and producing large-scale performances based on the carefully planned lighting of small fires in rural areas, often involving a large number of participants over long periods of time (the Fire Cycle series). In 1973, after moving from London to New York, Anthony McCall began the series of “solid-light films”, which rank among the most radical and original approaches to film-making in the way they blur the boundaries between different media, as for example cinema, sculpture, installation, relational art, etc. In 2003, following a period of about two decades in which he refrained from producing art, the artist began a new series of solid-light films, taking advantage of digital technology to create extremely complex patterns that were previously unconceivable. At present, Anthony McCall is working on a series of public commissions (in the UK, New Zealand and USA) to be dedicated by 2012.

Anthony McCall took part in countless solo and group exhibitions in major museums and cultural institutions in Europe and the USA, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, Portugal), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Documenta (Kassel, Germany), among many others. His works integrate major collections worldwide, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate (London, England), among others. Anthony McCall received the Special Exhibition 2006 Award by the International Association of Art Critics, in Germany.

December 3, 2010 – January 14, 2011

For its inaugural exhibition, Arevalo Gallery presents From Absolute to Minimal a group exhibition featuring works by Post-War Latin American artists and their international counterparts all of whose work was defined by the ultimate search for the Absolute.

It was through Kazimir Malevich’s search for an artistic expression void of representation that the quest for the absolute was first conceived. In the search for such, the most elemental form, the square, became the focal point of his manifesto. From there the incorporation of geometry and a constant search for the sublime ensued.

From the rebel causes championed by Theo van Doesburg to the esoteric aesthetic introspections of Mondrian, the concern for total dematerialization became their mission. This reflected their need for art to evolve towards a more pure manifestation of the human spirit.

For their first exhibit, Arevalo Gallery identifies those Latin American and International artists that best expressed this quest for the absolute, and in doing so, led to an art form void even of the absolute itself. From Concretismo, through Constructivismo and ending in Minimalismo, all the movements that embraced Modernism in Latin America are represented in this exhibition.

Highlights of the exhibition include a primordial work of Joaquin Torres Garcia from his Paris period (1929), a Josef Albers created immediately after his retirement from Black Mountain College (1959) and appropriately titled “Michoacán” and perhaps the most important artwork of Carmelo Arden Quin exhibited in his first MADI exhibition in Uruguay (1946). Movements such as the Brazilian Concrete and Neoconcrete, Argentinean Arte Nuevo and Arte Generativo, Group Zero and Minimalism are also represented.

Historically relevant works by Jesus Raphael Soto (1969), Carlos Cruz-Diez (1966), Gego (1981), Luis Tomasello (1969), César Paternosto (1967), Asis (1959), Gregorio Vardanega (1950), Mathias Goeritz (1957), and Ivan Serpa (1953) are just some of the artworks representing the avant-garde movements of Latin American Modernism.

Adding to it, works by Joseph Albers, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, Sol Lewitt, and Walter Leblanc among others, complement the International phase of our the exhibition.

Arevalo Gallery has been established for the promotion of 20th Century Latin American and International art, and to gain a greater understanding of the relationships between modern art movements and their influence on Contemporary Art.

November 13, 2010 – January 29, 2011

Marta Chilindrón
Marta Chilindrón creates small networks where every element plays a part to achieve an intricate whole. Each piece is a small system governed by its own rules. She focuses on a continuity that has no beginning or end, where geometry is used to organize and simplify our chaotic universe.

Her first solo show at the Gallery will feature a group of new works inspired by early memories of childhood games and geometry lessons. The changing color combinations and the ever altering forms add an element of surprise to these ludic, masterful sculptures.

Marta Chilindrón was born in BA, Argentina in 1951, grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay, and has lived in New York since 1969.

Chilindron has recently completed a 200 ft long public work for the 2010 Lodz Biennale. She has shown in New York City at: PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, the Clock Tower Gallery, Cecilia de Torres Gallery, Exit Art, among others. In Europe her work was seen at Dot Galerie, Geneva, Switzerland, and Kapel Central, Nijmegen, Netherlands. In South America her work was featured at the Centro Cultural Recoleta and Museo del Grabado in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay; the Instituto Brazil Estados Unidos, and Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporanea, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as Art Fairs: ARCO Madrid, Spain; Art Basel Miami Beach, USA; ArteBA Buenos Aires, Argentina; SParte São Paulo, Brasil.

Chilindrón was a member of the National Studio Program at PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art; awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant; received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and an award from Anonymous Was A Woman. Her works are in the collections of the Jack Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas; El Museo del Barrio, NYC; CIFO, Miami; the State University of New York; Fonds d’Art Contemporain de Ville de Geneve, Switzerland; & private collections internationally. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Nexus, New York Arts, Flash Art, Atlantica Internacional Revista de las Artes, Artnet.com, Review, Point of contact, El Nuevo Herald (Miami), Tribuna de Impresa, Veja Rio, O Globo (Brazil), Artmagazine.cc.

Henrique Oliveira
Henrique Oliveira is a painter who has developed 3-dimensional installations based on painterly concepts. The results achieved point out the blur between the traditional separation of mediums: sculpture, architecture and painting. “Made from fragments of plywood found in the streets, the work was born out of the open possibilities that modern painting brought to its medium, thereby allowing the identification of aesthetic qualities on the world’s weary surfaces. This idea gave me room to apply wood on three-dimensional structures, analogous to paint on canvas.”

The notion of a fragmented surface is both present in his canvases as well as in his sculptures. “The time I spend to collage the wooden slivers functions as a de-acceleration of the liquid chaos of traditional pictorial formats; which, in turn, renders its fluidity to the movement of my 3-dimensional pieces.”

Working with wood laminates made him realize that painting is a language capable of re-inventing itself, and is also a concept that can be applied to other forms of organizing the world. “In the History of Art, Cities have always constituted a theme for representation. As we begin thinking and accepting non-representational art, the urban fabric shall become a physical foundation whereby an image is materialized.”

In his first exhibition at Alejandra von Hartz, Henrique Oliveira presents “Three Dimensional” paintings, created by a process of collage work of wood laminates that spread over the walls of the Gallery. At the same time, he presents his acrylic paintings on canvas, rendering visible the idea of the collage as a technique to occupy space while also constructing images.

Henrique Oliveira, was born in Ourinhos, Brazil, 1973, moving to São Paulo in 1990, where he lives and works. He graduated in fine arts and received M.A. at USP (University of São Paulo). Focusing on painting as his main medium since 1996, in 2003 he started working also with site-specific installations made of plywood and veneer collected from streets of São Paulo. Among the main exhibitions he has participated is the 29ª Bienal de São Paulo, 2010. In 2009 he had his first solo show abroad, Tapumes at Rice Gallery, Houston, USA. He has been to many collective exhibitions since the 90´s, among the most recent ones are the IX Bienal Femsa Monterrey, Mexico, 2009; Something from Nothing in the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, USA, 2008; Seja Marginal Seja Herói – Gallerie Vallois/Serossi, Paris, France, 2008; Futuro do Presente, Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007. He has received grants and has been awarded with prizes such as Prêmio CNI/SESI Marcantonio Vilaça for visual arts, Brazil, 2009 and Smithsonian Artist Reasearch Fellowship – Washington DC, USA, 2008.

View of Robert Swain’s studio, NYC

October 23 – December 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the solo exhibition Robert Swain: Primary Research.  This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will focus on his life-long investigation into color sensation.

In 1969, Robert began developing his own color system, the centerpiece of which is a 30-part hue (color) circle.  When joined with the attributes of value (the lightness or darkness of a color) and saturation (the pureness of a color), his system grew exponentially over the following decades to now include 4,896 distinct parts.

Robert Swain: Primary Research will feature an array of material facets from his color inquiry, including a 30-part hue circle painting, original hand-painted and numbered color charts from the early 1970s, jars of premixed and color-calibrated acrylic paint from his exhaustive paint library, a suite of portfolios containing digital inkjet prints serving as color studies for potential paintings, a set of small brushstroke painting studies, as well as other related ephemera including color chips, mixing spoons, and more.  The exhibition will also include two paintings spanning 30 years: a grid painting entitled Untitled 801 (1978, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches) and a brushstroke painting entitled Untitled 9-25-8 x 13-25-7 x 23-25-6 x 27-25-6 (2010, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches).

Regarding the development of his color system, Robert states “I became interested in color in the early 1960s.  There wasn’t a great deal of written information about it, but I work intuitively.  I started to look at color and to make charts and experimental work trying to understand the phenomenology of color.  I don’t look at the work as being objective.  I simply look at it as a way of trying to get into the subject matter of color and to understand it through experience.  And all of this was done visually.  It wasn’t done mathematically.  It wasn’t done in some kind of progression.  It was simply done by painting color charts, looking at them, and deciding in that moment of looking if they were correct or not.”

About his increasing interest in color over the years, he continues, “One thing that fascinates me about color is that each individual color has its own connotation, which can be perceived as emotional or can affect you in some particular way.  One of the things I strive for is to try to bring out the uniqueness of color itself as an expressive force.  Color is involved with radiant energy.  It’s not passive, and in that sense, when you look at color, it’s actually transferring energy into your physical self.  One of the things you try to do is isolate some kind of vehicle, some kind of configuration that allows color to speak of itself and for itself.”

ROBERT SWAIN
Robert Swain is one of the most influential artists of his generation.  He was born in Austin, Texas, in 1940, and grew up in Arlington, Virginia.  During high school in the late 1950s, he spent his summers in Guatemala and Nicaragua working on the Pan-American Highway.  He attended The American University in Washington, DC, where he later received a BA in Fine Art in 1964.  During his undergraduate studies, he spent two years in Madrid, Spain, studying at the University of Madrid. In 1964, he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and worked as a studio assistant to the American Modernist painter Karl Knaths.  Robert moved to NYC in 1965 where he permanently settled in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.

In 1966 Robert began his first color-based work followed a year later by his first work utilizing the grid.  He participated in his first group exhibition, Light and Line, organized by John Baldwin at the legendary Park Place Gallery in NYC in 1967.  That same year he met Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith who became his close friend and mentor for many years.  In 1969, Robert began to develop his own color system, a project that continues until today.

Robert has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for more than 40 years.  His paintings have been including in countless landmark exhibitions.  He participated in the seminal exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1968.  The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais, Paris, France; Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland; and The Tate Gallery, London, England.  Robert exhibited in The Structure of Color curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, in 1971.  In 1974, he mounted his first solo museum exhibition at The Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, New York.  In 1974, he participated in Color as Language curated by Kynaston McShine and organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled throughout Central and South America, including to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.  His work was also twice included in the Corcoran Biennial at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1969, 1998).

Robert’s work is represented in nearly 300 public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Everson Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, among others.  He has completed major commissions for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, American Republic Insurance Company, Schering Laboratories, Harris Bank, Travenol Laboratories, Tupperware World Headquarters, and the University of Buffalo.  He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1989), New York State Council on the Arts, and the City University of New York.

In addition to his artistic work, Robert has taught in the Department of Art at Hunter College since 1968, where he has influenced and mentored countless generations of artists.  For his teaching, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1998.

Robert is also currently the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain curated by Gabriele Evertz at Hunter College Times Square Gallery located at 450 W. 41^st Street, NYC.  The exhibition dates are October 7 – November 13, 2010.  The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with texts by Gabriele Evertz, Professor of Art, Hunter College; William Agee, Professor of Art History, Hunter College; and artist and MINUS SPACE founder Matthew Deleget.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artist Gabriele Evertz for her incredible assistance with this exhibition. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Robert Swain: Hunter College Times Square Gallery & MINUS SPACE, by Stephen Maine, Art in America, February 2011
Robert Swain at Hunter College and MINUS SPACE, The Kalm Report, December 6, 2010
Gallery Chronicle: On “Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain, 1967–2010” at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery, by James Panero, The New Criterion, November 2010

September 8 – October 9, 2010

My fundamental problem is the exercise of freedom, taking into account what I already am and that which I have been transformed into by my work.’ Lygia Clark

One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988) transformed the practice of geometric abstraction with a profound belief in art as interaction. This, the first solo exhibition devoted to Clark’s work in the UK since the 1960s, offers a unique insight into her creative processes by focussing on studies, maquettes and unique sculptures, presenting a range of some of Clark’s most iconic early pieces. Through a range of works on paper, models and sculptures rendered in a diverse range of materials, the exhibition plots how Clark worked her way along a fascinating trajectory, from the rationalistic art of geometric painting to a practice focussed on the abstract interactive object, pointing finally towards a conception of art as immersive, subjective experience that animated the latter half of her career.

The earliest works in the exhibition, a series of works on paper in the Concretist tradition, illustrate the indebtedness of Clark’s early practice to the abstract traditions of Modernism that had come to be assimilated into Brazilian culture in the 1940s. Lygia Clark began making art in 1947, and the early drawings and gouaches reveal a growing confidence and the beginnings of her interrogation of geometric abstraction as a viable, meaningful aesthetic. Two graphite and gouache works from 1952, from the Planos em Superficie Modulada (Modulated Surface Planes) series, represent the artist’s original investigations into the interplay between line and colour in the construction of pictorial space, yet as this series progressed the works became bolder, simpler and more radical in their composition.

The later wall-based works, beginning with the 1954 unique collage Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame), evince a growing dissatisfaction with the conventions of Concretism, the heir to European neo-plasticism, with the inviolate flatness and containment of the work that this tradition entailed. Clark’s frustration grew as the Planos em Superficie Modulada developed, and by 1958 they had become chromatically starker, often monochrome collages of card and wood, as Clark became convinced that optical ingenuity was not enough to bridge the gulf between artwork and viewer that she had come to believe was imperative. Finally in 1959 Clark felt she had reached the limits of classical geometric abstraction as she entered a new, vital phase of her career. As she wrote in 1960, ‘the plane arbitrarily marks off the limits of a space, giving humanity an entirely false and rational idea of its own reality. From this are derived the opposing concepts of high and low, front and back – exactly what contributes to the destruction in humankind of the feeling of wholeness…The square took on a magical meaning when the artist understood it as carrying a total vision of the universe. But the plane is dead.’

The rupture in Clark’s practice, as she abandoned drawing and collage in favour of interactive sculptures, such as the Bichos (Animals) and the Estruturas de caixas de fósforus (Matchbox Structures) that could be handled by the (be)holder, was rooted in her belief that art had to engage the viewer with more intimacy and totality than traditional conceptions of painting, and indeed sculpture, allowed. Extending her powerful sensitivity to the impact of art on spectators/participants, Clark developed an innovative denial of the passive engagement between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, and so made things that were meant to be touched, twisted, worn and weathered. The Bicho (1960) sculptures are among the most famous types of these works, representing as they do Clark’s early experiments with abstraction literally coming off the wall and landing in the hands of anyone who encountered her art. As Clark wrote in 1960, these works were called ‘animals’, ‘due to their fundamentally organic character…also, the hinge connecting the planes made me think of a dorsal spine. The arrangement of the metal plates determines the Bicho’s position, which at first glance seems limitless. When I am asked how many movements the Bicho can execute, I reply, “I have no idea, nor do you – but the Bicho knows….” Each Bicho is an organic entity that only reveals itself totally within its internal expressive time…It’s a living organism, an essentially active work. A total, existential integration is established between it and you. A passive attitude is impossible between you and the Bicho, either on its part or on yours.’

The Estruturas de caixas de fósforus (1964) similarly express Clark’s demand that artworks provoke more than a mere aesthetic response from the viewer. What Clark was developing was a notion of psychological engagement and transformation as the raison d’être of art, yet she still sought to pursue these ideas through the formal idioms of geometric abstraction. The matchboxes, small, delicate and intriguing, and susceptible to manipulation at will by the viewer, were a different experimental attempt by Clark to heighten the perceiving subject’s sense of their own subjectivity, and were also among the last such art objects ever made by Clark. Although, like the Bichos, these works existed to excite the viewer through the infinitely variable configurations and arrangements of the boxes made possible by moving and manoeuvring the different elements, they nonetheless retained, through their geometric composition, the possibility still of being passively regarded and contemplated as sculpture in a classical, non-tactile sense. From the late 1960s Clark came to focus on work that was concerned entirely with phenomenological and therapeutic propositions, and characterised by immersive interactive experiences which were thereby freed of any particular formal or visual conventions. The body of work gathered in the exhibition thereby offers a survey of the essential early exploratory journey made by Clark as she pushed abstraction to the limits of what it could achieve in redrawing the frontiers of the artistic encounter, and building that elusive bridge between object and subject, art and life.

Lygia Clark was born in Belo Horizonte in 1920 and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. A central figure in the flourishing of Brazilian culture in the 1950s and 1960s, she was one of key personalities associated with the Grupo Frente (formed in 1953) and the Neo-Concretist manifesto (1959), and also worked extensively in Europe as an artist and teacher. Important solo and group exhibitions during her lifetime included the early São Paulo Biennials (1953, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1967), the Second Pilot Show of Kinetic Work, curated by Guy Brett at the Signals Gallery in 1962, Mouvement II at the Galerie Denise René in Paris in 1964, and a retrospective at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Important posthumous exhibitions included a major retrospective at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1997; travelled to museums in Marseille, Porto, Brussels and Rio de Janeiro); The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel at LA MOCA, Los Angeles (1999); The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now at SFMOMA, San Francisco (2008); and Elles@CentrePompidou at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2009).

Work by Clark will also be featured in MOVE: Choreographing You at London’s Hayward Gallery in October 2010.

This exhibition is the third exhibition in Alison Jacques Gallery’s 2010 season, following Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke, to re-present a pioneer woman artist to UK audiences, and to provoke and revive discussion around a supremely influential and perennially relevant, yet often unjustly neglected figure in contemporary art.

Rubem Ludolf, Untitled, 2004
Oil on canvas
80 x 100 cm

Considered one of the top names in Brazilian neoconcretism, painter, architect and landscaper Rubem Ludolf died aged 78 on Monday, July 26, in Rio de Janeiro. Victim of an aneurysm in the aorta, the artist was admitted for ten days in the Samaritan Hospital.

Self-taught in the early career in the mid-1950s, Ludolf was a student of Ivan Serpa Free Course in Painting from the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). Along with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Aluisio Coal, he joined the Grupo Frente, looking for creative freedom and experimentation in different languages of geometry and colors. With the group, attended the 3rd International Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1955, returning to the show in five editions between 1959 and 1973, receiving the Purchase Award in 1967.

Among his most recent exhibitions are individual in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, the gallery Berenice Arvan, in Sao Paulo in 2005. In early 2010, the Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro had a retrospective celebrating 60 years of career Ludolf.

On account of death, the exhibition “Dialogues” opened in the presence of the artist on the last day on June 9 Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (SP), was extended until July 31. (source: UOL)

Work by Emmanuel Van der Meulen

June 26 – July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the first installment of the Brussels, Belgium-based Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art’s (CCNOA) most recent initiative 30/30 – Image Archive Project (IAP).

Conceived by artist and CCNOA Chief Curator/Artistic Director Tilman, the exhibition will feature a diverse group of small works by 9 international artists, including Delphine Deguislage (Belgium), Clemens Hollerer (Austria), Atsuo Hukuda (Japan), Andrew Huston (USA), Camila Oliveira-Fairclough (Brazil/United Kingdom), Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (France), Emmanuel Van der Meulen (France), Jan Maarten Voskuil (The Netherlands), and Lars Wolter (Germany).

With 30/30-IAP, CCNOA seeks to establish a collective collection that will showcase the mesmerizing breadth and depth of approaches reductive artists are currently pursuing on the international level.  The project’s title refers to the size restriction for all works to be included in CCNOA’s emerging registry, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm.  This will enable CCNOA to easily travel the project worldwide (museum in a suitcase).

30/30-IAP is administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with artists CCNOA has collaborated with over  the past 12 years, as well as newly invited artists from around the globe.  CCNOA is currently planning forthcoming 30/30-IAP exhibitions at artist-run venues in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand,  and the United States.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Paul Henry Ramirez, BLACKOUT (installation view), 2010
Mural, paintings, relief, furniture & lighting
A Centennial Commission, Newark Museum, NJ
Photograph by Raymond Adams

Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Reception 6-7pm, Program 7-8pm

Free, pre-registration required.
Call 973.596.6550 or e-mail: rsvp@newarkmuseum.org

Newark Museum
Billy Johnson Auditorium
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.newarkmuseum.org
directions

Matthew Deleget will moderate a discussion with an international group of contemporary artists including Lenora de Barros, Paul Henry Ramirez and Don Voisine. The artists will talk about the legacy of constructivist abstract art as it relates to their work and explore why abstraction continues to be a vital mode of expression.

This panel discussion is presented in honor of Elizabeth Brady Richards.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract artist, curator and writer. He is the director of MINUS SPACE, a gallery and web site project devoted to reductive art in Brooklyn, New York.

Lenora de Barros is a poet and visual artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, whose work includes video, poetic performance, photography and sound installation. Having exhibited throughout Brazil and abroad, she is interested in exploring the abstract visual, aural and material signs of language.

Paul Henry Ramirez is a US artist noted for his signature style of fleshy and pop-inspired abstraction. BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation in which he has transformed the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court with abstract, biomorphic forms and playful, bold color.

Don Voisine is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn, New York. President of the New York-based American Abstract Artists group that was founded in 1936, he works with a visual vocabulary of pared-down geometric form to explore the possibilities of visual space within abstraction.

RELATED EXHIBITIONS
On view through 05.23.2010

Constructive Spirit
Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s – 50s
Constructive Spirit investigates the formative geometric abstract art movements of Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. This exhibition is the first to explore the conceptual connections and exchanges that existed between abstract artists from South and North America. Featured are more than 90 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films drawn from the collection of the Newark Museum, along with loans from public and private collections and galleries across both continents. Artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Alejandro Otero, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

BLACKOUT
A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation that allows viewers to experience painting as an environment that one can enter. Using the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court as his canvas, Ramirez employs his signature curvaceous biomorphic forms amidst a profusion of pop-inspired colors in dialogue with the Court’s distinctive Beaux-Arts architecture. BLACKOUT is the fourth and final commissioned project initiated to celebrate the Museum’s Centennial year.

For more information, please visit www.newarkmuseum.org.

Waltercio Caldas, Installation view of Dinamo (detail) and Shade

March 6 – April 24, 2010

The Christopher Grimes Gallery presents new work by Brazilian artist, Waltercio Caldas. Since his last solo exhibition at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in 2005, Caldas has had solo exhibitions at premier international institutions, including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain, and the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2007, he was included in Robert Storr’s exhibition, ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense’ during the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today. Inspired by geometric abstraction and working in a diverse array of materials – each situation determining the media – Caldas’ work articulates the tenuous relationship between the architectural space and those who occupy it. From a distance, one sees an abstract pattern of lines intersecting areas of color. However, upon closer inspection, one discovers that the lines are not as rigid as they first appeared – swaying slightly with the air current in the room. These materials allow him to sculpt the surrounding negative space. In the words of one critic: “The work insists persistently upon being a border. It further insists upon reducing the border it is. It wants to erase its outlines, its very constitution.”

In a similar fashion, the artists’ drawings and stainless steel wall constructions explore ideas of experience and perception within a formal dialogue by using thread to lead the eye from one point to another. They allude to perspective space that is not wholly present creating, what Caldas says is “a maximum presence from the least amount of material.”

Waltercio Caldas lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has shown extensively internationally since the 1960′s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art, São Paulo, and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others, and also represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include the Blanton Art Museum, Texas and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

His work is included in numerous permanent collections; some of which include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen, Kassel, the Chase Manhattan Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo.

February 7 – April 11, 2010

For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Max Bense, ZKM will present an exhibition showing his international impact on the fine arts and literature, which can be compared to that of Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan. The exhibition, which carries forth the ZKM series “Philosophy and Art,” presents Bense as poet and author, scholar of the arts and literature, as well as exhibition curator and publicist.

Bense, who was active in Stuttgart from 1949 until his death in 1990, propagated an aesthetic of “technical existence” in Germany of the post-war era, which antedated by decades the media-theoretical turn in literature and the humanities that occurred in the 1980s. His thoughts on literature and art were part of a comprehensive philosophical picture of the world that showed a natural-science and “technical reality” of civilization and was aimed against German post-war culture’s romantic and mythologizing trends. Already back then, Bense established a concept of culture that—in the Enlightenment tradition—included the intellectual history of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Max Bense, who was born on 7 February 1910 in Strassbourg, studied physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, and received his PhD in 1937 with a thesis on “Quantum mechanics and existential relativity.” He first worked as a physicist for I.G. Farben in Leverkusen. After his war duties, Bense pursued an invitation from the University of Jena. But he already fled to West Germany in 1948 and was appointed first as visiting professor in 1949 and then as professor of philosophy and the philosophy of science in 1950 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He also taught at the HfG Ulm, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and in Rio de Janeiro.

Bense began pursuing his literary and artistic tendencies as publicist and radio playwright during his studies. In Stuttgart, he also began to organize exhibitions, first at the Galerie Gänsheide beginning in 1957, then at the study galleries he founded at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. He wrote about numerous fine artists and poets, among others, about Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Alberto Giacometti, Almir Mavignier, Henri Michaux, Mira Schendel, and Paul Wunderlich as well as Alfred Andersch, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his exhibitions and essays, Bense also created other forums for the arts: i.e., by founding the magazine “Augenblick” (1955) and “reihe rot,” 1960, which he and Elisabeth Walther edited, which published, among others Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Diter Rot. At the same time, beginning with semiotics and news technology, beginning in the mid-1950s he developed an “information aesthetics” that influenced concrete and kinetic artists throughout Europe and made him one of the seminal theorists of the pioneering era of European computer art.

The exhibition with publications by Max Bense and prints, paintings, and sculptures by artists that were important to Max Bense, or were influenced by him, is supplemented with manuscripts and photos, as well as recordings of his radio plays and television appearances. They show the philosopher and his view of “art in an artificial world” (1956).

Artists in the exhibition:
Kurd Alsleben, Max Bill, Hannelore Busse, Pierre Charbonnier, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Bruno Giorgi, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Harig, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Josef Hirsal, Oskar Holweck, Hugo Jamin, Ernst Jandl, Hiroshi Kawano, Reinhold Köhler, Harry Kramer, Kurt Kranz, Theo Lutz, Aloisio Magalhaes, Georges Mathieu, Almir Mavignier, Hansjörg Meyer, Henri Michaux, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Günter Neusel, Heinz Pfahler, Décio Pignatari, Uli Pohl, Francis Ponge, Diter Rot, Bernhard Sandfort, Mira Schendel, Anton Stankowski, Karel Trinkewitz, Timm Ulrichs, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Oswald Wiener, Emmett Williams, Wols, Paul Wunderlich, and Dolf Zillmann

Curated by Margit Rosen, Jens Lutz, Miriam Stürner, and Peter Weibel

Helio Oiticica
Vermelho cortando o branco, 1958
Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 cm
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Projeto Helio Oiticica

November 19, 2009 – February 21, 2010

Haus Konstruktiv completes its exhibition programme for 2009 with the presentation of one of the most significant collections of Brazilian Concrete-Constructive art: “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” showcases for the first time in Europe “The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”. Although individual works from Mr. Adolpho Leirner (born, 1935 in São Paulo) have been shown frequently in the past years, this will be the first time the entire Adolpho Leirner collection is exhibited outside of Brazil or the United States. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the MFAH, which owns the Adolpho Leirner collection since 2007.

The Leirner Collection comprehensively documents how starting in the early 1950s, artists from the Brazilian avant-garde assimilated and contested the tenets of international Con-structivism, developing a unique Concrete-Constructive art. “Collecting is like a love affair. It means making discoveries in a huge game of hide-and-seek. Each and every one of these discoveries represents an important part of my life,” says the passionate collector Leirner. Painstakingly assembled since the late 1950s, the collection includes works that trace the beginnings of non-figurative art by artists such as Cícero Dias (1907–2003) and Samson Flexor (1907–1971), as well as works by members of “Grupo ruptura”, “Grupo frente” and Neo-Concretismo in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The latter of which include such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), rediscovered in recent years by the international art world and honoured with large solo exhibitions.

“Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” will enable a broad public to gain fascinating and informative insights into the development of Concrete-Constructive art in Brazil, while sim-ultaneously revealing so far little-known cross-connections and artistic dialogues with Swiss concrete art.

The exhibition directly ties in with Haus Konstruktiv’s incorporation of art history initiated with the grand jubilee exhibition “max bill 100″ (winter 2008/09): the reconstruction of the first Bill retrospective from 1951 in São Paulo already showed how the artistic exchange between concrete artists working in Europe and Brazil intensified from the 1950s onwards with Max Bill as a central figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, is the major publication Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the MFAH. Edited by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (distributed by Yale University Press), the volume assesses the research of avant-garde artists and groups of Concrete and Neoconcrete tendencies in post-War Brazilian art, and generates updated frameworks and new lines of investigation for the interpretation of these interrelated ten-dencies. It comprises of thirteen essays that were commissioned by a group of distinguis-hed artists, critics, and scholars from Brazil and the United States. The publication was designed by the noted Brazilian designer and artist Alexandre Wollner.

Helio Oiticica, Metaesquema 167, 1956
Gouache on board, 16 x 16 1/8 inches

December 17 – February 6, 2010

Drawings, 1954–58 brings together over twenty rare works by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), a pioneer in Modernism and multi-disciplinary practice whose works-on-paper have not yet been exhibited independently. The exhibition features works from the artist’s three major drawing series: Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 will be on view at Galerie Lelong from December 17, 2009, to February 6, 2010.

Oiticica’s works form a bridge between painting and sculpture; furthermore, they connect the Modernist utopia of the 1950s with the more fractured period of social and political tensions of the 1960s and ’70s. His revolutionary performances, sculptures, and installations—-most notably, the series Parangolé, Bilateral, Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief), Bólide, and Penetrável (Penetrable)—-outline a cohesive, sustained investigation of color and abstraction as a framework for spatial experience. The delineation of architecture in two dimensions is most visible in his drawings.

From 1955 to 1956, Oiticica was associated with Grupo Frente, a group of avant-garde artists including Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Though Oiticica was still a teenager and the youngest member of the group, his Grupo Frente drawings demonstrated an intuitive response to color matched with rigorous discipline-—a distinctiveness that would remain until his last works. The Sêcos (1956–57) establish Oiticica’s engagement with space as structure; in these he used color more economically, concentrating on symmetry and asymmetry. Years later, Oiticica’s Penetrables would make tangible the spatial relationships that are hinted at in the drawings. In the Metaesquemas (1957–58), with which viewers may be most familiar, he layers color in sharp precision, suspending the forms in a space that is perceived beyond the drawings’ borders.

The timing of the exhibition is made poignant by a tragic event: on October 17, 2009, a fire broke out at the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, including the storage facility where Oiticica’s works were kept. Though initial reports of the damages were devastating, it has since been deemed that a number of works can be restored. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 allows the public unique access to the visionary basis of Oiticica’s groundbreaking work.

February 17 – May 23, 2010

The first exhibition to bring together South American and US geometric abstraction, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s features more than 90 works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Constructive Spirit examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films. Featured artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

Constructive Spirit includes many never-before-seen works from the Newark Museum’s preeminent collection of US art, as well as major loans from acclaimed private and public collections and galleries across both continents.

Complementing the exhibition are related programs and events. On Saturday, April 10 from 10 am to 5 pm the Newark Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will present an international symposium that will offer new perspectives on South American and US abstract artists including John Ferren, Juan Melé, Charles Biederman, Gego, Josef Albers and Lygia Pape. Other related programs include a lecture series, gallery talks and family events. For information, click here.

Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s is accompanied by a major publication of the same name that will be available February 2010 at the Newark Museum Shop. Fully illustrated and co-published by Pomegranate Press, it features seven essays that place North and South American abstraction in dialogue. Authors include Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O’Hare and Cecilia de Torres. The 196-page publication will be available in hardcover for $39.95. Call 973-596-6696 to pre-order your copy today.

Photo: O Globo

From ArtForum.com
O Globo’s Eduardo Fradkin reports that more than a thousand works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica (1937–1980) were destroyed Friday in a fire at the house of his brother, César Oiticica, in Rio de Janeiro. His brother was responsible for the artist’s collection; he estimates that 90 percent of the collection he held was lost. In 2007, the Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston staged major exhibitions of Oiticica’s work. The fire also destroyed all the pictures and film negatives in the house made by José Oiticica, Helio and César’s father and an important Brazilian photographer.

From Wikipedia
On October 16, 2009, a fire destroyed about two thousand works by the artist – about 90% of the whole collection that was held at the residence of his brother César Oiticica in the neighborhood of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. In addition to paintings and the famous “Parangoles”, the artist’s archive material including drawings, notes, documentaries and books were stored in the collection. “I wanted to die together with the works. After the death of Hélio in 1980, I was responsible for the collection. It is very sad! I have no doubt, the only victim of this terrible fire was the Brazilian Culture,” said Cesar Oiticica. The fire took three hours to bring under control. Key works such as Bólides and Parangolés, including some shown at the 2007 Tate retrospective, were lost. The cause of the fire is unknown. The building was equipped with fire alarms and other safety systems. Brazilian Tourism Minister, Jandira Feghali, called for an investigation into the causes of the fire and whether any works can be recovered. The works were stored in Cesar Oiticica’s house following a dispute over money and the adequacy of storage facilities at the Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica. The works were uninsured due to the cost. Cesar Oiticica later discussed the possibility of reconstructing some of the works but ruled out reconstruction of the Parangolés.

From O Globo (translated using Google Translate)
RIO – A fire at the family home of artist, painter and sculptor Helio Oiticica late on this Friday, the Botanical Garden, South Zone, destroyed 90% of the collection of works of art from the artist, one of the founders of the movement neoconcretist. According to the architect Cesar Oiticica, 70, brother of Helio, about two thousand pieces of the artist, who died in the 1980s, were burned, a loss estimated at U.S. $ 200 million. No one was injured, but the cause of the fire are still unknown.

Municipal Secretary of Culture, Jandira Feghali, laments the destruction of works. According to Caesar, the fire started around 22h. He said he dined with woman and a group of friends when he felt a strong smell of burning. Fire Humaitá the barracks were called to extinguish the flames. Shaken, Caesar said that 90% of the collection of the brother – estimated at 200 million dollars – was destroyed by fire.

What is the justification that we find a tragedy like this? Regretted architect. It was the greatest tragedy that could happen to the Brazilian culture. Without doubt, the only victim of this tragedy was the Brazilian culture.

The architect, however, ruled out an arson. According César Oiticica, the studio had control of humidity and temperature maintenance works, and present alarms and anti-fire. Lieutenant Corps
Yuri Manso Firefighters said the flames consumed the works quickly. Also according to the official, only a technical opinion is that you can discover the cause of the fire.

According to César Oiticica, the works were destroyed by fire tables documentaries and books. Works established as Bólides and Parangolés – the first manifestation environmental conference involving covers, tents, banners and Mangueira samba dancers, the show Opinion 65 – were also destroyed. Only saved the jobs that were stored on CDs and computer in the house. All photographic collection of the artist’s father, the renowned José Oiticica Filho, also would have been lost in the fire.

Considered one of the most revolutionary artists of his time, Hélio Oiticica born in Rio de Janeiro in July 1937. He died in March 1980, after suffer a stroke. Along with names like Lygia Clark, Amilcar de Castro and Ferreira Gullar, Helio neoconcretist participated in the movement and had works exhibited in internationally.

Among his best known works are the Parangolés (sort of covers colorful art to be worn) and penetrable (facilities). He is the author of the known phrase “Seja marginal, be a hero,” he wrote in a banner over a picture of a dealer killed a newspaper published in Rio in 1968 during the dictatorship, and was a major underlying the Tropicalia movement with his work “Tropicalia.”

The artist lived in New From 1970 to 1978, Oiticica lived in New York, where Information participated in the fair, held at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).  In 1981, a year after his death – on March 22, 1980 – was created in Rio de January Project Hélio Oiticica, to preserve the artist’s work. The Secretariat City of Culture created the River Arts Center Hélio Oiticica in 1996.

For the director of the Bolsa de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Jones Bergamin, the greatest legacy of
Oiticica were his projects and notes. - The problem is that his works are scattered in private collections and museums around the world, but their designs were all here. The artistic value is much larger than the financial. It is an incalculable loss – said in Bergamin interview Globonews.

Cildo Meireles, Red Shift I: Impregnation (detail) 1967-1984
Collection Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporanea,
Minas Gerais, Brazil

July 4, 2009 – January 10, 2010

The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MuAC) is pleased to announce the opening of Cildo Meireles, the first extensive presentation of the artist’s work, both in Europe and America.

The MuAC, which is located within the Cultural Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, will be the only venue in America to host this major survey of Cildo Meireles’ work, a unique event that should place Mexico as a major destination for the contemporary art scene during the next few months.

The Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (b. 1948) is widely recognized as one of the leaders in the international development of conceptual art. Revealing how he is particularly fascinated by scale, the works range from an object in the form of a small ring to an installation covering 225 square meters, while also bringing together several of Meireles’ iconic, immersive installations.

Meireles has made some of the most philosophically brilliant, politically telling and aesthetically seductive works in recent art. Since the late 1960s he has created sculptures and installations, which involve an element of participation. His deep interest in the relationship between the sensorial and the cerebral, the body and the mind, is now seen as one of the defining characteristics of the post-war Brazilian avant-garde, out of which Meireles emerged with his early works at the end of the 1960s. He has remained loyal to these origins, and to a political and ethical viewpoint formed outside the so-called cultures of plenty.

Early work in the exhibition includes Meireles’ Arte física from 1969, reflections about distance and borders in relation to the vast land of Brazil. His Condensado series features small works that demonstrate that the potency of an artwork is not restricted to its size. The artist further explores space and scale in his drawing series, Espaços Virtuais: Cantos 1967-8. Meireles’ celebrated Insertions into Ideological Circuits 1970, by which he devised a method to disseminate messages of protest under the military dictatorship in Brazil, and his Zero Dollar/Zero Cruzeiro project 1978-84 and 1974-78, are also exhibited together with smaller-scale philosophical objects dealing with questions of perception such as Oscura luz 1982.

Among the highlights are several large-scale installations. These include Através 1983-9, a labyrinth of barriers that the viewer is invited to navigate, and at the heart of which shines a vast ball of crumpled cellophane. Another is Desvio para o Vermelho 1967-84, an all-red apartment filled entirely with red objects leading through a darkened corridor to a room with a pool of red liquid on the floor and a sink running with red water, loaned from Collection Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil. Babel 2001, a gigantic tower of more than 800 radios, all tuned at low volume, forms a startling yet complex contemporary take on the mythical tower of the world’s languages. The exhibition ends with Volatile 1980-94/2008, a multi-sensory environment through which visitors are invited to walk, playing with our response to danger, real or imagined.

The exhibition is curated by writer and curator, Guy Brett and Vicente Todolí, Director Tate Modern, with Amy Dickson, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Throughout the duration, the MuAC will organize a series of parallel activities, ranging from a full program of lectures, to a film cycle devoted to the Brazilian avant-garde of the sixties and seventies.

Mira Schendel, Untitled- ‘Notebook’ series’, c. 1970
Letraset on paper, 22.5 x 22.5 x 7cm

June 2 – July 11, 2009

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of monotypes and other works from the Estate of the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (b. 1919, Zurich d. 1988, São Paulo). This two-part exhibition encompasses an in-depth survey of the artist’s works and includes seminal drawings from the 1960s and paintings, objects and collages from the 1950s to the 1980s. This group of oil transfer drawings on thin Japanese paper, known collectively as ‘monotypes,’ have never been shown before.

This exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery coincides with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (5 April – 15 July 2009), entitled ‘Tangled Alphabets,’ which focuses on the work of Mira Schendel and León Ferrari and cements their position as two of the leading exponents of Latin American Modernism.

Born in Europe in 1919, Mira Schendel is an artist whose life and art were shaped by the tumultuous events that broke apart communities on the Continent leading up to the War. Her Jewish parentage and Catholic education contributed to her profoundly spiritual and philosophical approach to her art making. Displaced by fascist persecution in Italy, Schendel eventually immigrated to Brazil leaving behind her family. Participating in the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951, Schendel soon found herself among the intellectual elite and began to show her work frequently. Her early paintings, in dense tones and textured surfaces, stood apart from the prevailing Concretist movement and suggested dissatisfaction with pictorial means. In life, Schendel was an avid reader and continued correspondence with poets, philosophers and theologians throughout Brazil and Europe. It was in the 1960s that her work began to incorporate language, albeit silently, and it eventually became a crucial part of her formal vocabulary.

The ‘monotypes,’ produced in 1960s and shown here, were extremely experimental at the time. They were made by applying talcum powder to one side of a piece of Japanese tissue paper and laying this paper onto a pre-oiled glass sheet. Schendel then ‘drew’ with various instruments including her fingers by applying pressure to the unoiled side. The process created an emotive line that almost felt like part of the paper and allowed Schendel to respond gesturally and calligraphically to the material. These graphic marks, letters and blotches resulted in extraordinarily beautiful and poetic two-sided drawings which Schendel insisted be shown suspended and encased between two sheets of glass.

Also included in this exhibition is a single rare example of the ‘Objetos Gráficos’ of the late 1960s. Similar in technique to the monotypes, though much larger in scale, this beautiful object is painted in deep red and is peppered with symbols and markings on top and inside the acrylic sheets. Installed in front of a window with natural daylight, the layering of texture and gesture within slowly unfolds. Critic Rodrigo Naves states: “superimposition, transparency, and space were all parts of these works, and the galaxies and constellations of their arrangements reinstated the tension… in a wider, perhaps even cosmic setting, transposing to a superhuman scale the interplay of chaos and meaning.”

Other important objects such as ‘notebooks’ and ‘discs’ from the 1960s and early 1970s are also shown here. In this period Schendel began to dispense with her own touch and turned to commercial materials, such as ‘Letraset’ and acrylic. Synthesising the formal experimentation with the ‘monotypes,’ this body of work continued to embrace spiritual ideas of ‘the other side’ of transparency, a place where other worlds and other forms of materiality existed. The notebooks consist of pages of different coloured sheets of paper, patterned with holes and Letraset printing and bound together at one corner so that the layers spin out and expand in one dimension. Similarly, the round ‘discs’ are also made from acrylic sheets sandwiched together. They encase flurries of Letraset letters and symbols, which are legible but untranslatable compositions. Here too, language is seen as a sort of cosmic dust, inchoate and infinite.

Representing Schendel’s late career is an important work from the ‘Sarrafos’ series. These paintings expressed the conclusion of her experiment in line and form. Unlike the exhaustive workings of the ‘monotypes,’ the ‘Sarrafos’ articulate a Zen-like distillation of her ideas and pursuit of the void. Here, the mute white monochromatic paintings with their protruding forms rupture the pictoral space and deny the plane and surface of the painting. Schendel’s experiment in language ultimately concludes in the impossibility of utterance but in the purity of gesture alone.

Work by Cildo Meireles

From The Art Newspaper, June 6, 2009:

Exhibitions axed as recession bites:
US worst hit as sponsorship withdrawn and endowment wealth shrinks
By Jason Edward Kaufman and Martin Bailey

“An Art News paper survey suggests that a growing number of exhibitions are being cancelled because of the recession. We have identified over 20 important shows that have been axed (or, in a few cases, postponed) later this year or in 2010.

Our list almost certainly represents the tip of the iceberg. Many venues have not yet published their 2010 programme, and some unannounced shows that had been provisionally scheduled are being quietly dropped. Decisions may have been influenced by a number of factors, but according to our research financial concerns were key.

The situation seems considerably worse in North America than in Europe. This is probably because North American museums are much more dependent on private sponsorship and endowments—particularly hit by the recession—while Euro pean institutions receive more government funding.

Among the worst-hit institutions is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), with at least three major shows being lost. In August it was to have presented “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, coming from New York’s International Center of Photography, where it was shown last year. This has now been cancelled.

In November, an exhibition on Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles was due to come to Lacma after first showing at Tate Modern in October 2008 and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (where it closed in April). The entire North American tour has been cancelled, including presentations at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (originally scheduled for June) and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (in March 2010).

Meanwhile, a retrospective on the Armenian-born Ameri can artist Arshile Gorky who died in 1948 had been scheduled for Lacma in June 2010, but has been dropped. Organ ised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (opening October 2009), Tate Modern is now the only other venue for the exhibition (spring 2010).

In some cases, late moves have been made to rescue shows. Tate Britain had long planned a major exhibition on Zoffany for autumn 2010. Earlier this year it was dropped, partly because of its financial viability in the present economic circumstances.

The Royal Academy has now stepped in and has taken the show for spring 2012. It is notable that the Academy felt it could make the project viable, despite Tate’s concerns.
Tate Britain, therefore, has a gap in its programme, and plans are being considered to extend its yet-to-be-announced Henry Moore exhibition. This large show will look at the sculptor’s place in modern art, supported with loans from the Henry Moore Foundation.  The proposal is to extend it from a normal three-month run to six months.

Even if it is mainly American museums that are cancelling shows, this can directly impact on European institutions, in the case of touring exhibitions. Presenting an exhibition at several venues spreads costs or brings in a fee to the originating museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum is touring “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, which was due to have been presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February 2010. This has now been cancelled. V&A director Mark Jones told us that “we have seen some cancellations of our travelling exhibitions, and it would be foolish to pretend there are no problems”.

Another example is the French 19th-century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, which opens at the Getty in late 2010 and will then be presented at the Musée d’Orsay in early 2011. The showing at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum in spring 2010 has been cancelled. Walters’ director Gary Vikan said that the show would have resulted in a net loss of $300,000. “In normal times, we could have lived with that,” he said.

Shows cancelled or postponed
• Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, “Jean-Léon Gérôme”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Subversion of the Images: Surrealism and Photography”, spring 2010, cancelled
• Chicago, Field Museum, “Lucy’s Legacy: the Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”, planned for 2009-10, dropped
• Denver, Denver Art Museum, “Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library”, July-September 2009, cancelled
• Honolulu, Contemporary Art Museum, “Japan Fantastic” (11 contemporary artists), December 2009-March 2010, cancelled
• Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Cildo Meireles”, June-September 2009, cancelled
• Kansas City, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer”, February-May 2009, cancelled
• London, Tate Britain, “Johann Zoffany”, autumn 2010, cancelled and moved to Royal Academy
• Los Angeles, Getty Museum, “Franz Messerschmidt”, September 2009-January 2010, postponed
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, August-November 2009, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Cildo Meireles”, November 2009-February 2010, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Arshile Gorky: a Retrospective”, June-September 2010, cancelled
• Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Donald Saff and the Art of Collaboration”, September 2009-January 2010, cancelled
• New York, Metropolitan Museum, “Duncan Phyfe: America’s Legendary Cabinetmaker”, January-April 2010, postponed
• Paris, Centre Pompidou, Indian contemporary art, 2010, postponed to 2011
• Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, “The Kingdom of Aragon” (15th-century Spanish painting), spring 2010, postponed to 2011
• Reykjavík, National Gallery of Iceland, “Off the Beaten Track: Violence, Women and Art”, September-December 2009, cancelled
• Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, “Cildo Meireles”, March-June 2010, cancelled
• Vienna, Albertina, “Jörg Immendorff”, October 2009-January 2010, cancelled “

May 28 – June 27, 2009