Israeli artist Ruven Kuperman opens exhibition at Kit Schulte Contemporary Art

BERLIN.- Kit Schulte Contemporary Art announces an exhibition by Israeli artist Ruven Kuperman to the Berlin audience. In New Mythologies, Kuperman attempts to connect japanese elements of tradition and culture with a heroic contemporary imagery, based on the old and new testament. Ruven Kuperman, Pets, 2011. Color pencils on paper, 110 x 150 cm. Kuperman’s recent works on paper are large-format drawings with colored pencil, inspired by the japanese woodcuts of the Edo period, especial ly by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Kuperman searches for [...]

Celebrities and unknowns alike star in presentation of nearly forty rarely or never-seen Andy Warhol Polaroids

BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archivepresents Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240. The exhibition features a selection of Warhol’s Polaroid portraits drawn from an extraordinary gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to the museum. From 1970 to 1987, Warhol, armed with his Polaroid Big Shot camera, captured a wide range of individuals—the royalty, rock stars, executives, artists, patrons of the arts, and athletes who epitomized seventies and eighties high society, but [...]

Kunsthalle Zurich announces opening date in new permanent home in the Lowenbrau art complex

ZURICH.- The Kunsthalle Zürich will re-open to the public in its new permanent home in the Löwenbräu art complex in Zurich on 10 June 2012 with the special exhibition, Looking Back for the Future. Since it was founded in 1985, the Kunsthalle Zürich has established itself as one of Europe’s most influential art institutions, helping to define the direction of contemporary art. Having moved to a series of different venues in its early years, the Kunsthalle has been based in the Löwenbräu [...]

Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda presents exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof

BERLIN.- Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has conceived an exhibition for theHamburger Bahnhof that, for the first time, compositionally unites the two symmetrical halls on the upper level of the museum’s east and west wings. The exhibition’s title “db” (abbr. for decibel) refers to this symmetry while simultaneously indicating the complementary relationship between the two exhibition spaces. Ikeda has designed the white room and the black room as counterparts, not only physically (brightness, color), but also conceptually and perceptually. The [...]

Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition explores van Gogh’s deep immersion into nature

PHILADELPHIA, PA.- “I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his sister, Wilhemina, in July of 1889. An artist of exceptional intensity, not only in his use of color and exuberant application of paint but also in his personal life, van Gogh was powerfully and passionately drawn to nature. From 1886, when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris, to [...]

Newly renovated and freshly installed 19th-Century French galleries reopen at National Gallery of Art

WASHINGTON, DC.- Following a two-year renovation, the galleries devoted to impressionism and post-impressionism in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art reopened to the public on January 28, 2012. Among the greatest collections in the world of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the Gallery’s later 19th-century French paintings returned to public view in a freshly conceived installation design. “The Gallery’s French impressionist and post-impressionist holdings, comprising nearly 400 paintings, are among the most prized in the [...]

LACMA presents first international survey of women Surrealist artists in North America

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. Co-organized by LACMA and the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City, In Wonderland is the first large-scale international survey of women surrealist artists in North America. Past surveys of surrealism have either largely excluded female artists or minimized their contributions. This landmark exhibition highlights the significant role of women surrealists who were active in these [...]

Dixon exhibit features European masterpieces including Rembrandt, Rubens and more

MEMPHIS, TN.- The Dixon Gallery and Gardens is presenting an exhibition of more than 70 major works by master painters Rembrandt, Rubens, Tiepolo, Gainsborough, Hogarth and others from the renowned collection of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. On view through April 15, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Golden Age of Painting illustrates how the tremendous changes in religion, science, and politics coupled with economic growth in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to a golden age of painting. [...]

American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and their circle opens at the Neuberger Museum

PURCHASE, NY.- From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, many of America’s most inventive and important artists, including Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Adolph Gottlieb, forged their identities, dramatically transforming conceptions of what a painting or sculpture could be. A group linked by friendship and common aspirations, many had shared experiences in the classes of influential Czech Cubist Jan Matulka at the Art Students League and in the Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. [...]

Art Institute becomes first U.S. museum to receive grant from Government of India

CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago announced that the Government of India has given a major grant to the Art Institute in support of a new professional exchange program between India and the museum. The Vivekananda Memorial Program for Museum Excellence –the first grant ever made by the Indian government to an American art museum–honors Swami Vivekananda, who gave one of the most important speeches in modern religious history at what is now the Art Institute on September 11, 1893. On [...]

First exhibition to explore Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s legacy opens at the National Gallery of Art

WASHINGTON (AP).- An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art will showcase its rich holdings of works on paper by the Italian baroque master Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–1664), as well as works by his contemporaries and followers. On view in the Gallery’s West Building from January 29 to July 8, 2012, The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione suggests, for the first time, the complex sources of his style such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Claude Lorrain, as well as its importance for [...]

Academy Award-winning visual artist Eiko Ishioka has died at age 73 of pancreatic cancer

NEW YORK (AP).- Eiko Ishioka, a bold, Academy Award-winning visual artist whose surreal and sensual costumes were worn by Broadway actors, Olympic athletes, Cirque du Soleil performers and movie stars like Jennifer Lopez, has died in Tokyo. She was 73. Her studio manager, Tracy Roberts, said Thursday that the designer died of pancreatic cancer. Ishioka, who also worked in advertising and other graphic arts, won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Costume Design for the film “Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’” directed by [...]

Miki Kratsman presents exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Musem of Castille and Leon

LEON.- The entire body of Miki Kratsman’s work (Argentina, 1959; Israeli citizen since 1971) is centred on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and it unfolds between the vicissitudes and circumstances of the daily life of the Palestinian people, shaped by displacement, constant siege, and the systematic occupation that they have undergone for more than sixty years. Kratsman’s photography shows before the public the consequences of a devastated reality—a destroyed territory of ravaged or abandoned buildings and desolate fields—behind which one recognizes a politics [...]

58th Annual Winter Antiques Show in New York finishes first week with strong sales

NEW YORK, NY.- The Winter Antiques Show finished its first week with strong sales and interest among buyers, including established collectors, design professionals and first-time buyers. Sales were robust across all disciplines, including Americana, antiquities, and 20th century fine and decorative arts. All net proceeds from sponsors, special events, and ticket sales support East Side House Settlement, a non-profit in the South Bronx providing social services to community residents. Among the 20th c. works purchased were a remarkable series of three untitled [...]

First Belgian solo exhibition of Armenian-born artist Armen Eloyan at Tim Van Laere Gallery

ANTWERP.- Tim Van Laere Gallery presents Day by Day Part II, the first Belgian solo exhibition of Armenian-born artist Armen Eloyan. In Armen Eloyan’s impasto paintings a wonderful pathos, brutality, sensuality and a sense for the grotesque all coexist in some post-disaster condition. Eloyan creates a mood, and this mood, this state of mind echoes throughout the exhibition. Most canvases have enigmatic titles like The Light called „Day“, and the Darkness called „Night“ and Jekaterina Jekaterina, but are populated by a familiar [...]