translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
English summaries October 20 - November 2
Galerie Elisabeth und Klaus Thoman
curated by_ Max Hollein: Little Nemo
03.10.2014 - 08.11.2014
By Margareta Sandhofer
It's a bold endeavour to completely paper out the two large rooms of the Galerie Thoman with comics. For the topic "The Century of the Bed" in the context of curated by_vienna, Max Hollein drew on 24 cartoons published in the USA as "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay at the beginning of the 20th century. Here, the surreal dream sequences of little Nemo can be followed in an enlarged format.
Included in this exhibition are works by Erwin Wurm, Bruno Gironcoli, Julia Bornefeld and Franz West.
In actual fact, Hollein curated two exhibitions in the Galerie Thoman: by setting a historic example of the topic Century of the Bed in the adjacent gallery with just two pieces of art - with Walter Pichler’s Schlafsaal (Dormitory) (1968) and Hans Hollein’s (Max’s father) Freudcouch (1984). In his work, a bed is one of Walter Pichler’s most important motives. The Schlafsaal, which consists of three especially equipped beds covered with silk, attempts to show that society can be influenced and formed by art, architecture and design. At that time, these were utopian ideas which have now become reality. Integrating a world receiver (Weltempfänger) into the mattress is remarkably real – in those days it was a vision and today its precarious reality.
The final element in the equation is Little Nemo's story. The bed is a surrogate for sleep, the positioning of unusual circumstances and as a resource of creative ideas, traumas and hopeful cogitations.
Galerie Elisabeth und Klaus Thoman
1010 Vienna, Seilerstätte 7
Tel: + 43 1 512 08 40
email: galerie@galeriethoman.com
www.galeriethoman.com
Opening hours: Tue - Fri 12-18 hours, Sat 11-16 hours
Alte Pinakothek
Canaletto - Bernardo Bellotto paints Europe
17.10.2014 to 18.01.2015
By Matthias Kampmann
The carriage and six leans right into the curve. The passenger must be a special man. Is it the centrifugal force that is almost making him tumble out? It looks rather comically like it. The viewer is looking at the scene from the window of the "Jüdenhof". The view roves over the Dresdner Neumarkt . In the background, one sees the Church of Our Lady, completed six years ago in 1743. The square looks to be large and wide. The person who is almost having the accident is the commissioner, the Great Elector and King of Poland, August III. A painted joke? Hardly. One asks oneself how such a picture was perceived in the years 1749/52, the time when the picture was created by Bernardo Bellotto. Welcome to the age of enlightenment. From an Italian point of view, it was subtly entertaining.
It's one of these wonderful little stories about art that is associated with the work of the Venetian verduta and landscape painter. In the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, one can pursue further anecdotes and above all research with the aid of an artistic personality who is, admittedly, represented in every important collection but who in Germany has never been so extensively and thoroughly documented. Bernardo Bellotto, who – like his uncle Antonio Canal – is also called Canaletto, lived from 1722 to 1780. One sometimes thinks that verduta, i.e. painted cityscapes, are merely documents of topography or geography. These filigree pictures by an Antonio Canal or a Francesco Guardi, which show every little mullion and transom, every broken tile, were ultimately created in a time when there was no photography. Naturally, it should be documented how a city looked. But the appearances are deceptive. This is proven by this fantastic exhibition with well over 65 paintings, etchings and drawings.
Bellotto was a composer of exceptional rank. He used the camera obscura with nonchalant naturalness and joined hybrid perspectives with several vanishing points so that one got the impression of a true world even though the objects pictured in these compositions are purely fictitious. Squares become larger, rivers wider. For those familiar with the settings, more light falls unnaturally.
Up to now, Bernardo Bellotto was not familiar to many - that's past history thanks to this stupendous exhibition with contributions from the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum.
Old Pinakothek
80333 Munich, Barer Straße 27
Tel: +49 (0)89 23805 216
www.pinakothek.de/alte-pinakothek
Opening hours: Tue from 10 to 20 hours, Wed to Sat from 10 to 18 hours. Closed Mondays.
Startgalerie im MUSA
Tomasz Vollmann - Growing
09.10.2014 to 06.11.2014
By Wolfgang Pichler
This very radical show demonstrates particularly impressively that important positions can also be shown again. Because what the artist, born 1984, stages here, namely the sale of his entire material property, was already implemented in a similar form by Florian Slotawa in 2002. Nonetheless, such actions are particularly important in an ever-increasingly spinning consumer society and therefore to be welcomed at all costs. But in Tomasz Vollmann's case, the fact is less impressive that he is offering his possessions for sale lock, stock and barrel, but much more the awareness of how astonishingly frugally this person already lives: no furniture, no crockery, a scooter self-made from a branch, sleeping accommodation made from a pink camping mat. When one looks in peace and quiet at all the accurately positioned and mounted objects in the gallery, one becomes aware of the dominance of purposeless things commonly displayed as art. Here is an impressive example that one can live contentedly with extremely little materialistic possessions and without one's own apartment, beyond religion and asceticism. Here, it's the conscious handling of things that surround us that fascinate us most. The radical reflection of oneself, which is otherwise only to be found in spiritual contexts, here becomes actual art behind the objects. However, such an approach really fails through the fact that there have to be other people who provide all these things whose possession is relinquished here. Getting this impression makes this show exciting and points out that, foremost, we are social beings.
However, as is often the case, the real flaw is that this concept is not explained here and thus not clear to the public. For the casual visitor, the exhibition remains a collection of objects which are up for sale. The fact that some objects have their own inimitable allure and function wonderfully as independent art works makes this exhibition commendable.
Stargalerie im MUSA
1010 Wien, Felderstraße 6-8, beside the Town Hall
Tel: +43 (0)1 4000 8400
E-mail: musa@musa.at
www.musa.at
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Fri: 11:00 - 18:00; Thu 11:00 - 20:00; Sat 11:00 - 16:00 hours
Künstlerhaus Bremen
Armando Andrade Tudela – Nomadism begins at home
27.09.2014 – 30. 11. 2014
By Raimar Stange
For the program accompanying her first 12 months in office, the new artistic head of the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Fanny Gonella, has chosen the motto “artistic production in process”. In line with this motto, Armando Andrade Tudela conceptualised his exhibition “Nomadism begins at home”. It is Tudela’s main aim to research the possibilities of transposing the aesthetics of object-like art into the time-based medium of film. Central to the exhibition of the Peruvian concept artist are three films: „Eli Origin de la Contalbildad“, 2014, „Nomadism Begins at Home (Diptychon),“2014, und „5 Estaciones“, 2014. All of the films were created especially for this exhibition, all on 16mm and all in the style of a documentary, but with a touch of poetic ambiguity. And there is one more thing they all have in common: they can be viewed as an artistic instruction manual.
One example is Tuledas short, film “El Origin de la Contalbildad” (1 minute and 30 seconds) in which two of Tudelas assistants exchange white cubic plaster and black ceramic moulds: a ceramic for a plaster mould – moments such as value and circulation are reduced to their minimal form. The question as to who in this swap is the object and who is the subject remains unanswered: are the two assistants taking action or does the shape of the two objects determine the happening? In any case, here we can follow a procedural dialogue between a human with an object, a human with a human, and an object with an object – all in the sense of Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things”.
In the film “Nomadism Begins at Home”, a young man carries a construction pole with a red plastic bag in a series of different ways. It is remarkable how the artist is able to create artistic qualities with these actually rather succinct goings-on. If nothing else, this is achieved by the decisive colour scheme – blue jacket, red bag, green background – and the precise composition of the young man’s movements. A worthwhile exhibition!
Künstlerhaus Bremen
29199 Bremen, Am Deich 68 / 69
Tel: +49 421 508 598
Fax: +49 421 508 305
email: buero@kuenstlerhausbremen.de
www.kuenstlerhausbremen.de
Opening hours: Wed - Sun 14-19 hours
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