 Anselm Kiefer, West-Eastern Divan, 2010, 2 sets of 27 panels, oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, brambles, resin-coated ferns, lead, dried flowers, sunflowers, charcoal, chalk on canvas in metal and glass frames, each 190 x 140cm (75 x 55 in). | |
TEL AVIV.- An extraordinary selection of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental paintings, sculptures, woodcuts and installations on themes of Jewish history and mysticism, chosen predominantly from the artist’s own collection, are presented as the inaugural special exhibition in the new Herta and Paul Amir Building of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Opened to the public on November 2, 2011, in the building’s dramatic 9,000-square-foot gallery for special exhibitions, Shevirat Ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels) features five new sculptures from the artist’s Les femmes d'Antiquité (Women of Antiquity) series; five new monumental, mixed-media paintings; three more recent paintings from Kiefer’s own collection, and another two from private collections; three large new woodcuts, each measuring approximately 2 x 3 meters (6.5 x 9.8 feet); a version of the large-scale installation West-Eastern Divan; and a new installation, Shevirat Ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels), to be specially created by the artist on site. Shevirat Ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels) has been organized by the late Professor Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in collaboration with Anselm Kiefer. The exhibition will remain on view through April 15, 2012 in the new 195,000-square-foot Herta and Paul Amir Building, designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen. A landmark addition to the main complex of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art—the leading museum of modern and contemporary art in Israel—the Amir Building provides large, well-proportioned galleries for temporary exhibitions and works from the permanent collection (principally Israeli art, architecture and design, prints and drawings, and photography) within a spectacular, continually unfolding public space. “Anselm Kiefer is among the most important artists in the world today,” Mordechai Omer wrote, “one whose bold confrontations with the history and myths of his native Germany have been enriched by his profound engagement with the Hebrew Bible and Jewish traditions. It is an honor to collaborate with him in this unique exploration of his Jewish themes—an exhibition that can be experienced only here in our astonishing new building and that testifies to both the special character and the international scope of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.” Among the subjects addressed in the works in Shevirat Ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels) are the stories of biblical figures such as Cain and Abel, Noah and Samson; the Kabbalistic ideas of the “tree of Sephirot” (or emanations of God) and the shattering of a formerly unified world (shevirat ha-kelim, or Breaking of the Vessels); Isaac Abravanel, the 15th-century Biblical scholar and statesman who was forced from Spain in the expulsion of 1492; and Paul Celan, the Romanian-born, German-language Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust and was one of the first in the post-war era to write about these experiences. Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. From 1993, he lived and worked near the Cevennes (Gard) in Barjac, France; since 2007 he is based in Paris. After studying law, and Romance languages and literature, he devoted himself entirely to painting. He attended the School of Fine Arts at Freiburg in the Breisgau district and the Art Academy (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) in Karlsruhe (under Profs. Peter Dreher and Horst Antes), while maintaining contact with Joseph Beuys. His work has been shown in and collected by major museums throughout the world. Recent major exhibitions include a retrospective at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2005), traveling to the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and SF MOMA; an extensive survey of recent work at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007); and the commission to create a huge, site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings for the inaugural Monumenta at the Grand Palais, Paris (2007). Also in 2007, Kiefer became the first living artist since Georges Braque (in 1953) to have a permanent installation at the Louvre. In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) at the Opéra National in Paris. Kiefer’s connection with Jewish heritage and Israel was recognized in 1990 when he was awarded the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts. He used the entirety of the $100,000 prize money to establish the Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship for young Israeli artists. Anselm Kiefer lives and works in France. |
 Walton Ford, I don't like to look at him, Jack (2011). Watercolor mounted on aluminum panel, 108 x 144 x 7/8 inches (274.3 x 365.8 x 2.2 cm). Photo by Christopher Burke © Walton Ford, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery. | |
NEW YORK, N.Y.- Paul Kasmin Gallery presents an exhibition of nine new, large-scale watercolor paintings by Walton Ford, on view for the first time, at 293 Tenth Avenue. The most monumental watercolors that Ford has painted to date, three of the works measure approximately 9 x 12 feet on a single sheet of paper. These nine paintings are grouped into two series of work: one comprising three portraits of King Kong; and the other six meditations on a passage from the memoirs of the ornithologist John James Audubon (1785- 1851). Both series were painted in 2011, and are consistent with Ford’s practice of expanding the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting. The first series, presenting three huge portraits of King Kong, is based on the 1933 movie co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. As Ford explains, “The depression era Kong was misshapen, not modeled on any living ape. He has an odd, ugly, shifting charisma like Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or Bogart. Naturally, his woman screamed in terror. She continued screaming throughout their time together. The grief of the original Kong is the grief of the unloved, and like Humbert Humbert or Frankenstein, the grief of the unlovable. In 1933, Fay Wray says words that would break any suitor's heart. She shrinks from the chained Kong and tells her human lover, ‘I don't like to look at him...’ Since Kong is a Hollywood tough guy, he covers up his heartbreak with violence and anger. These paintings are about Kong's heartbreak. I wanted to reveal the monster's grief, his enormous sadness, the sorrow that the original Kong kept hidden from view.” Ford’s second series, which depicts a monkey capturing and strangling a parrot, was inspired by an unsettling passage from Audobon’s memoirs. Describing a childhood memory, Audobon writes: “…My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a full-grown male of a very large species. One morning, while the servants were engaged in arranging the room I was in, ‘Pretty Polly’ was asking for her breakfast as usual, ‘Du pain au lait pour le perroquet Mignonne,’ the man of the woods probably thought the bird presuming upon his rights in the scale of nature; be this as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure. The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who for some reason preferred the monkey to the parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was tranquillized, the monkey was forever afterward chained, and Mignonne buried with all the pomp of a cherished lost one. This made, as I have said, a very deep impression on my youthful mind.” Life-sized and impeccably detailed, Ford’s watercolors connote an old-master style, reminiscent of nineteenth-century artists’ portrayals of nature and animals. With exceptional accuracy, the paintings convey the artist’s art-historical and scientific knowledge, while also suggesting analogies between the past and the present day. They illuminate the strange, savage moments that occur at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. While human figures rarely appear in Ford’s paintings, their presence is always implied. Although monkeys, parrots and King Kong are the protagonists of the paintings, they exist only in the context of stories created and controlled by human beings. Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960, and lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His work is included in a number of collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of Ford’s work was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida in 2007. Last year, Ford’s midcareer retrospective traveled from the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart in Berlin (January 23–May 24, 2010), to the Albertina in Vienna (June 8–October 3rd, 2010), and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (November 12, 2010 March 6, 2011). Taschen books has issued three editions of his large-format monograph, Pancha Tantra.  Walton Ford, "Du Pain au Lait pour le Perroquet Mignonne," 2011. Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper, 59 5/8 x 40 3/4 inches, 151.4 x 103.5 cm © Walton Ford, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery. |
 Pollock’s Untitled drypoint and engraving, circa 1944-45 brought $102,000. | |
NEW YORK, NY.- Swann Galleries’ auction of Atelier 17, Abstract Expressionism & The New York School on Thursday, October 27 offered approximately 140 prints and other works by Stanley William Hayter and the artists he taught and inspired through his work at the Paris Atelier, and later in New York. Prints by Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning sold for record prices, and the sale’s top lot was a circa 1944-45 Untitled drypoint and engraving by Jackson Pollock, printed by Gabor Peterdi and inscribed “2nd proof 1967,” which brought $102,000, making it the most expensive Pollock print ever sold. A second impression of the same work, one of 50 produced for the MoMA, sold for $19,200. Other highlights of the Atelier 17 sale were Willem de Kooning’s Quatre Lithographies, color lithograph, 1986, a record $19,200; Robert Motherwell’s The Red Queen, color aquatint and lift-ground etching and collage, 1989, and Orange Lyric, color aquatint and carborundum, 1989, both of which set records at $22,800 and $20,400 respectively; as well as Max Ernst’s Le Sonneur / Carte de l’Océan, color etching and embossing, 1950, and Stanley W. Hayter’s Unstable Woman, color engraving, soft-ground etching, scorper and screenprint on Japan paper, circa 1946-47, $7,800 each. The day before, Swann offered an excellent assortment of Old Master through Modern Prints, which saw record prices for works by Rembrandt, Whistler and Picasso. |
The world is changing, so is photography!
