Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, who became Emperor Ferdinand I in 1835, commissioned the leading watercolourists of his day to create a “picture book” of the major towns and most scenic regions in the Austrian Empire and neighbouring lands. The project was carried out from 1833 until 1848 when, at the end of that Year of Revolution, Emperor Ferdinand was forced to abdicate.  

The Albertina owns 226 of the more than 300 large, boldly illustrative views in this panorama of Austrian watercolour painting, the finest of which are by Jakob and Rudolf von Alt

The Tropicália movement developed around the highly conceptual art of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica and incorporated music (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil), film (Glauber Rocha), and poetry (Augusto + Haroldo de Campos). Though the movement did not explicitly fall into line with the orthodox Left, its energy and vitality, the pleasure in shrill spectacles, and the increasing emphasis on participatory art were mainly directed against the oppressive years of Brazil’s military regime.

The exhibition presents a historical cross-section of the variety of works brought forth in that short summer of anarchy in the arts and reveals the creative impulse prompted by Tropicália in the production of contemporary Brazilian artists such as Rivane Neuenschwander or Ernesto Neto.

Artists:

Artur Barrio, Augusto & Haroldo de Campos, Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Cao Guimarães, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Décio Pignatari, Glauber Rocha

On the occasion of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels  presents El Greco: Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900, an exhibition of over 40 works by El Greco.

El Greco (1541 – 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect who lived in the period of the Spanish Renaissance. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, he became known in Italy as El Greco ("The Greek").

There is little documentary evidence about his background and early years. He began his career in a local artistic workshop in Crete that specialised in the production of icons. Crete at this time came under the control of the Republic of Venice , which led to an intensive artistic exchange. Many Greek artists travelled to Venice ; El Greco set out to try his luck there in 1567. In 1570 he moved to Rome , where he worked for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. In 1572 he was admitted to the Roman academy for painters, the Accademia di San Luca, and probably established a studio of his own, producing his first commissioned works. 

During his stay in Italy his painting style developed under the influence of Mannerism and the Venetian Renaissance. Michelangelo and Raphael were already dead, but their example left little scope for innovation and was oppressive for young artists. El Greco, however, determined to leave his own mark, stood up for his individual ideas, vision, and style. This attitude made him controversial: although he was a respected artist, he also came in for a lot of criticism. 

In 1577 El Greco moved to Toledo in Spain , where he was to live and work until his death. It was in Toledo that he received a number of his most important commissions and painted his most celebrated paintings. The years from 1596 to 1614 were a golden age for El Greco and his studio. He was at the height of his powers and carried out major commissions for a variety of religious institutions, such as the altarpiece for the Colegio de la Encarnación in Madrid . He remained active until his death in 1614.

Universally regarded today as one of the founders of the Spanish School of painting, El Greco has not, however, always enjoyed that lofty status: despite his successful career, his dramatic, expressionist style was viewed with mixed feelings by his contemporaries. Tastes, moreover, changed around the time of his death in 1614: Europe fell under the spell of the naturalism of the Caravaggesque style, which sought to depict reality as it was and was thus poles apart from El Greco's unique Mannerist talent. After his death El Greco's work soon went out of fashion and fell into obscurity. His art was suddenly rejected as old-fashioned.

Things only changed in the early 20th century, when the modern artistic avant-garde restored his reputation. This rediscovery was due to three key figures of the Spanish cultural scene of the time: the art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío (who published a monograph devoted to El Greco in 1908), the Marqués de Vega Inclán (who established a museum in his honour in Toledo in 1910), and the photographer Mariano Moreno.

El Greco: Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900, curated by Ana Carmen Lavín Berdonces and José Redondo Cuesta, highlights the key role these three individuals played in the re-evaluation of El Greco's work around 1900. The exhibition also looks at the workings of his studio and offers a fascinating overview of El Greco's artistic development via a selection of outstanding paintings, including the Lágrimas de San Pedro and the stunning El Expolio. The highlight of the exhibition is El Greco's final series, El Apostolado (the twelve apostles), his artistic testament.

Palais des Beaux-Arts

rue Royale 10

1000 Brussels

The Vancouver Art Gallery has commissioned a large-scale site-specific installation by artist Ken Lum for display at the recently finished space, "Offsite" during the 2010 Winter Games. The artist's large sculptural work includes three scale replicas of squatters' shacks that once populated North Vancouver's shoreline.

Titled from shangri-la to shangri-la, Lum's rustic cabins resemble those of the Maplewood Mudflats squatters' community. Located along North Vancouver's intertidal zone from the early 20th century until 1971, this improvised village was home to a number of artists, writers and activists. For his project, Lum has recreated the homes of renowned writer Malcolm Lowry, artist Tom Burrows and Greenpeace leader Dr. Paul Spong. Propped up on stilts over the surface of the Offsite reflecting pool, the huts strike a sharp contrast with the surrounding downtown architecture. Located at the foot of the Shangri-La Hotel, Vancouver's tallest building at the busy intersection of Thurlow and West Georgia Streets, these dissimilar structures evoke the character of the mudflat community and draw attention to the rapid advance of urban development in the Lower Mainland.

The work of Vancouver artist Ken Lum questions the relationship between modernism, mass culture and everyday experience, often blurring the boundaries separating high art and popular culture. Over the past twenty years, Lum's work has been presented in solo exhibitions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He has also represented Canada at the Istanbul Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and Documenta.

Visceral Bodies presents the work of contemporary artists who investigate the human form, tracing artistic responses to scientific and medical innovations over the past two decades. Presented in conjunction with Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, the two exhibitions trace the considerable history of artists using the body as a subject of physiological and anatomical study. The contemporary artists included in Visceral Bodies underscore how cultural perceptions of the human body have shifted from an anatomical fact to a perpetually evolving and increasingly artificial or fragmented form.

Artists such as Gabriel de la Mora, Wim Delvoye, Valie Export and Mona Hatoum borrow the tools of medical imaging to exteriorize what is internal. The exhibition also presents work by artists who imagine a fantastical future where the body has become fragmented and mutated.

Head On is an exhibition about visual collision and the engaging effects it produces. Exhibiting artists include Chen Hanfeng, Chen Qingqing, Gade, Han Qing, Island6, Jiang Weitao, Li Peng, Li Xiaofeng, Niu An, Qu Fengguo, Ren Hongwei, Shi Zhongying, Tao Hongjing, Tsewang Tashi, Wang Yuping, Zhang Liyu, Zhang Zhaohui, Zhou Jirong

At right: The Tibetan youths of Tsewang Tashi, a new talent from Tibet, confront the viewer instantly with their intense gazes and shimmering skins in hues of rose and lavender.

The focus of the exhibition is Van Gogh's correspondence.

Over 35 original letters, rarely exhibited to the public due to their fragility, will be on display, together with around 65 paintings and 30 drawings that express the principal themes to be found within the correspondence.

This major exhibition, inspired by Paul Gilroy's seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.

From the influences of African art on the Modernist forms of artists like Picasso, to the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Chris Ofili, the exhibition will map out visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has arisen from the journeys made by people of Black African descent.

Divided into seven chronological chapters, from early twentieth century avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around 'Post-Black' art, this exhibition opens up an alternative transatlantic reading of Modernism and its impact on contemporary culture for a new generation.

According to the curatorial statement of Demonology: "Throughout the ages magical and spiritual systems developed organically but also, of course, suffered extreme subjugation and suppression. Monotheistic religions appropriated, banished, persecuted and condemned in order to subdue the threat of age old beliefs. In 1484 Pope Innocent III issued a Papal Bull that denounced witchcraft, declaring that witches were harming fertility by associating with demons. Soon afterwards Malleus Maleficarum was published and became the bible of the inquisitors, hammer of the witches. The horned Hunter God and other deities were demonised, newly cast by the church as malevolent and malicious, and the end game was in place. An omnipotent religion had strangled a set of traditions as old as man himself, and the Gods of the old religion became the Devil of the new."

"Demonology is a call to investigate and embrace this other, lost world, and in some ways draw parallels between the practices of art and magic: creativity, instinct, flux, becoming, myth, imagination, individualism and the workings of the great unconscious standing against prescribed and immutable doctrine. Magic, beasts, curses, apparitions and the after-life; all can be found here in paint, pencil, collage, video, ceramic, photography and performance. "

Participating artists:

Jonathan Baldock, Sebastian Gögel, James Jessop, Jasper Joffe, Alexis Milne, Alex Gene Morrison, Claire Pestaille, Moritz Schleime, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark , Erik Tidemann, Danny Treacy

Guns and Roses, Guido Mocafico's second solo UK exhibition, unites two bodies of work; Guns dating from 2006 - 2008 and Roses, 2009. These two distinct, large format, colour series are examples of the many varied bodies of Mocafico's work including Movement, Medusa, Serpens and Dutch Old Masters, which have helped him gain international acclaim as one of today's most prominent still life photographic artists.

Guns concentrates on the beauty and technical feat of the man made object, remenicent of Mocafico's Movement series; delighting in the sleek design and functionality of the weapons which are in themselves works of art set against black backgrounds. 'I do not like violence but cannot deny that these machines are real and a part of life, they are symbolic - particularly during this time of war.' Mocafico. The viewer is encouraged to look beyond their raw, often destructive reality and consider the beauty of their design. 'Each gun takes on a life of its own; here I find poetry meeting technology.'

Roses adopts a striking nobility inwhich Mocafico presents order, yet an elegant simplicity with his painstakingly arranged boquets photographed from above. Origionally inspired to create this body of work when he saw Renoir's Bouquet dans une Loge at Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris, Mocafico describes it as simple, beautiful and organic, with a twist. 'This work has a dark edge - the roses are red and bloody, they conjour passion, mystery and verge on the scary.'

Combined, the two series Guns and Roses, raise interesting parallels; technology versus the natural, war versus love, fear versus pleasure - but in both, Mocafico examins mans intervention with nature.

Of Italian descent, Mocafico was born in Switzerland and currently lives and works in Paris. Mocafico has exhibited internationally in both individual and group exhibitions; his work is in the collections of France's Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Musée de la Publicité, Paris. Foremost a specialist in still life, Mocafico has brought his unique perspective to campaigns for Gucci, Dior, Clinique and Armani which have been published in numerous international magazines.

The title for Ceri Hand Gallery's inaugural 2010 exhibition is taken from the song "Spasticus Autisticus," penned by Ian Dury of the band Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

A launching off point for an exhibition that underscores the oddball, frankly abnormal and "special" (as in "Special Olympics" special) qualities of artists' pursuits, Spasticus Artisticus explores the outsize freedom inherited by those who deliberately select a life devoted to exploring objects and ideas for which there is zero use value. The exhibition—made up of the work of an appropriately large and not at all representative international collection of artist/collaborators—purposely turns its back on the success model recently adopted by rafts of artists around the world.

Participating artists:

Jota Castro (FR/PE), Andres Bedoya (BO), The Bruce High Quality Foundation (USA), Graham Dolphin (UK), Rainer Ganahl (AT), Kate Gilmore (USA), Goldiechiari (IT), S. Mark Gubb (UK), Patrick Hamilton (CL), Ciprian Homorodean (RO), Simona Homorodean (RO), Rebecca Lennon (UK), Alban Muja (KO), Abigail Reynolds (UK), Guy Richards Smit (USA), Mauro Vignando (IT), Charlie Woolley (UK)

The exhibition is arranged over five themes with works selected from the last 150 years. The Portrait shows the evolution of self-representation; The Family explores close bonds and relationships through early hand-painted and contemporary portraits; The Body Politic charts political moments, movements and campaigns; The Performance focuses on the golden age of Bollywood, circus performers and artistic practices that engage with masquerade; while The Street looks at the built environment, social documentary and street photography.
 
Over 70 photographers including Pushpamala N., Rashid Rana, Dayanita Singh, Raghubir Singh, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Rashid Talukder, Ayesha Vellani and Munem Wasif are presented in the show, with works drawn from important collections of historic photography, including the influential Alkazi Collection, Delhi and the Drik Archive, Dhaka.

Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais
3, avenue Général Eisenhower
Paris 75008

First seen at the Emirates Palace Hotel in
Abu Dhabi, The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nasser D Khalili Collection comprises nearly 500 objects and includes a number of works that have never been exhibited before, such as a detailed panoramic watercolour of Mecca, painted in 1843, which is the earliest known visual record of the Holy City.

The show presents both the religious and secular arts of Islam, through a series of themes that include: the development of the arts associated with manuscripts of the Holy Qur’an, especially calligraphy; arts associated with pilgrimage; everyday and treasury objects; miniature painting; and carpets and textiles. Other groups of objects will focus on the talismanic use of verses of the Holy Qur’an; science in the service of religion; horsemanship; falconry; and interaction with Europe, among others.

A fully illustrated catalogue, published in Arabic and English accompanies the exhibition and a symposium, a series of lectures and other educational programmes are also planned.

The Nasser D Khalili Collection of Islamic art comprises some 20,000 works and is the largest and most comprehensive in the world, encompassing the entire history of Islamic art from its beginnings in the 7th century until the present day. The entire Collection is being published under the auspices of the Khalili Family Trust and will comprise 31 volumes in total, 17 of which are already available.

This exhibition brings together more than 200 vintage prints by some forty-odd photographers who worked in Paris between 1920 and 1939 as well as original documents from the time (magazines, books, etc.). The French capital became a forum for photographers from many different countries and backgrounds. French photographers such as Jacques-André Boiffard, Florence Henri, Maurice Tabard, Roger Schall, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Emmanuel Sougez, Pierre Boucher and René Zuber, to name but a few, rubbed shoulders with foreign artists who had become adoptive Parisians by affinity or necessity, notably the Germans Germaine Krull, Erwin Blumenfeld, Marianne Breslauer and Ilse Bing, the Hungarians Ergy Landau, André Kertész, Rogi André, André Steiner, François Kollar, Gisèle Freund and Brassaï, the Russians Hoyningen-Huene and Rudomine, the Americans Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, the Belgian Raoul Ubac and the Lithuanian Moses Vorobeichic (known as Moï Ver).

Historian Christian Bouqueret, the author of numerous thematic books on the history of photography such as Surrealist Photography, Des années folles aux années noires, la nouvelle vision en France, Histoire de la photographie en images as well as studies of Laure Albin-Guillot, Raoul Ubac, Germaine Krull, Roger Parry, René Zuber and Jean Moral, acts as the curator of his own collection.

Le Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris
France

This show features a selection of portraits, mythological allegories and depictions of the Virgin – altogether some eighty works by Botticelli, his workshop and his contemporaries.

Initially trained as a goldsmith and then apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, next to Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and the Pollaiuolo brothers, ranks among the most successful painters in Florence in the second half of the quattrocento. From 1470 on, he received prestigious public commissions and made a name for himself as a painter of large altarpieces. Throughout his life, Botticelli was in the ruling Medici family’s and their supporters’ good graces. Fulfilling their wishes for innovative decorative paintings, the master could not only rely on his knowledge of Florentine traditions and of ancient art, but also on definite suggestions and concepts from the circle of humanists gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici. Held in equally high esteem as both a panel and a fresco painter, Botticelli enjoyed a high standing beyond his native Florence and was thus one of the artists summoned to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481.

A wide-ranging selection of magnificent and historically important works of art brings to life the fascinating history and art of the Byzantine empire. The exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of the 'Byzantine millenium' which began with the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great in 324 AD and ended with the conquest of the city by the Ottomans in 1453. The exhibition focuses on the period of Byzantium's greatest glory from the time of Justinian I (527–565) to the sacking of Constantinople at the hands of Christian crusaders in 1204.

More than 400 loans from European and American museums – precious ivories, spectacular icons and manuscripts, architectural fragments, sculptures and everyday objects – are presented in their original contexts. Digitally reconstructed sites (e.g. Constantinople or Ephesus) address key questions about the Byzantine state, its art, culture, society and economy and offer visitors an unprecedented insight into everyday life in the Byzantine empire.

The sole continental venue of this exhibition, the show brings together over 250 magnificent objects from India's royal collections, many seen in Europe for the first time. The exhibition includes three thrones, a silver gilt howdah, gem-encrusted weapons, court paintings, photographs, Indian turban jewels and jewellery commissioned from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels in the 20th century.

The exhibition covers the period from the 18th century, when the great era of the maharajas began, to the end of the Raj (British rule) in 1947. It shows the changing role of the maharajas in an historical and social context and look at how their patronage of the arts both in India and Europe resulted in splendid and beautiful commissions designed to enhance royal status and identity.

The maharajas were also patrons of the emerging European avant-garde. The show includes modernist furniture commissioned by the maharaja of Indore for his palace in the 1930s and architectural designs for the Umaid Bhawan palace, an Art deco style residence commissioned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur.

The photographs of the artist, who was born in 1979, are often described as romantic, mystical and even sometimes as profound and mysterious. F.C. Gundlach, the doyen of German photography, is a firm advocate of Andreas Muehe. He curates the exhibition in cooperation with Camera Work.

F.C. Gundlach already early on praised the exceptional consequence of Andreas Muehe’s work: “In his so far short career, Andreas Muehe, who was born in former Karl-Marx-Stadt, has created a work of an exceptional consequence. His use of camera technique is virtuosic; he arranges complex and sophisticated lighting concepts, and has worked for the most significant magazines within the span of only a few years. He stages his portraits and group pictures, for which he predominantly uses a large-format camera, with greatest detail. The people who are portrayed trust him, and their individuality, unapologetically candid and close, rises from the pictures.”

The exhibited portraits – reduced to and focused on the  essentials – show artists and actors like Markus Luepertz, Jonas Burgert, Daniel Bruehl, or Hannah Herzsprung but also writers or politicians such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or George Bush, Helmut Kohl and Michail Gorbatschow.

This is an exhibition presenting a selection of 145 works by 57 artists from 15 private collections in Germany, France and Switzerland.

Why Curious? The exhibition hopes to throw into sharp relief the key questions that have shaped contemporary art and provides a glimpse of the art to come. Central to the narrative is the question how art responds to the current political, social and private reality. What unites all the artists presented in Curious? - the majority of whom were born in the 1960s and 70s - is that they develop their work on the basis of clear concepts and strategies. 

The artists follow two main lines of enquiry that come to the fore in this exhibition. One gives rise to a radical paring down of form and a minimalist use of material, in which narrative is the result of the form, material and structure of the work; the other favours clearly legible figuration, the broad use of narrative devices and does not shy away from shocking or irritating imagery.

In view of the global cultural competition that marks the beginning of the 21st century, this new series of exhibitions at the Art and Exhibition Hall examines the potential relationship between public museums and private collections.

Collections:

About Change Collection
Boros Collection
Evergreen Collection, Berlin
Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg
Antoine de Galbert Foundation, La Maison Rouge
Gensollen Collection, Marseille
Goetz Collection
Haubrok Collection
KiCo Collection
Paul Maenz Collection, Berlin
Olbricht Collection

Private Collection, Cologne
Ellen and Michael Ringier Collection, Switzerland
Schürmann Collection
Julia Stoschek Foundation e.V.

Artists:

Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Heike Baranowsky, Hubert Becker, Karla Black, John Bock, Carol Bove, Birgit Brenner, Anthony Burdin, Patty Chang, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Hanne Darboven, Nathalie Djurberg, Cheryl Donegan, Sam Durant, Marcel Dzama, Cao Fei, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Richard Fleischer, Ceal Floyer, Gelitin/Gelatin, General Idea, Wade Guyton, Philippe Halsmann, Diango Hernandez, Hannah Höch, Pierre Joseph, William Kentridge, Kitty Kraus, Michael Kunze, Alicja Kwade, Lisa Lapinski, Mark Leckey, Daniel Lergon, Kris Martin, Lucy McKenzie, Alex McQuilkin, Lorna Macintyre, Mathieu Mercier, Hans Niehus, Paulina Oslowska, Roman Ondák, Pavel Pepperstein, Raymond Pettibon, Peter Piller, Seth Price, Thomas Scheibitz, Tino Sehgal, Katja Strunz, Vibeke Tandberg, Mathilde ter Heijne, Mario Garcia Torres, Jens Ullrich, Kelley Walker, Cathy Wilkes, Johannes Wohnseifer, Aaron Young

Charlottenburg, Altes Schloss
Spandauer Damm 10-22
14059 Berlin
Germany

One of the most revered painters of his generation, this exhibition (first seen at the Tate Liverpool)  brings together the largest selection of the artist’s work to date. Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Dalí, Auerbach, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer. Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque and heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat.

The exhibition, which includes over sixty paintings, sculpture and several new works, will be arranged to reveal the artist’s diverse painterly strategies and preoccupations.

Glenn Brown was born in Hexam in 1966. From 1984 to 1992 he studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education and then trained at Goldsmith’s College. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000.

The Hugh Lane is now acknowledged as the world centre for studies on Francis Bacon. The exhibition will features a full exploration of Bacon's studio items and artifacts alongside a wide selection of his paintings borrowed from museums and private collections all over the world. Over 500 photographs, books, drawings, and interventions on paper from the studio are on display to the public and for the first time a scientific study of Bacon's slashed canvases  form part of the show.

Co-curated by Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison, the exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that presents important new research on the artist.

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty is one of the major European cultural events of 2009. The exhibition will tour to Compton Verney, Warwickshire, England, in 2010. Admission is free.

According to the most authoritative accounts, the fifth centenary of the death of Zorzi da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto 1477/78 – Venice 1510), occurs in 2010 and Castelfranco Veneto, the birthplace of the great artist and home to one of his most important works (the famous Castelfranco Altarpiece) as well as to one of the very few frescos attributed to Giorgione (Frieze of the Liberal and Mechanical Arts), is staging a wide-ranging exhibition in collaboration with the Veneto Region, which has set up the Regional Committee for the Fifth Centenary of the Death of Giorgione.

The  survey at the Museo Casa Giorgione enables visitors to admire the masterpieces from the first phase in Giorgione's career, alongside those by artists he was in contact with during his short life,  including Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Costa, Carpaccio, Perugino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma the Elder,  Leonardo, Raphael and Titian.

Major national and international museums have contributed in homage to the great master from Castelfranco Veneto: among others, the State Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, the Uffizi of Florence, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana of Milan, the Louvre of Paris, and the National Gallery of London.

This exhibition, curated by Eduardo Cicelyn and Mario Codognato, explores the similitudes between the cultural themes that are representative of the beginning of the new century and those that made the visual imagination of the Baroque Age so powerful and grandiose. Barock investigates issues that permeated the XVII century and are still distinctive of our time, showing how the typical themes of the Baroque culture of the 17th century have been revived by contemporary artists.

The revolutionary scientific and technological discoveries that day after day challenge established certainties and habits; the great religious zeal that led to the fundamentalism, the obscurantism and to clashes between civilizations which produced unprecedented slaughters: the disorientation of contemporary imagination then appears to be caused by ideological conflicts and tragic experiences for issues that are not very different from those that shaped the century of Galileo Galilei and of the Counter-Reformation. The most obvious similitude between the artists featured in the exhibition and the Baroque Masters lies in the "sensational" images they use, images that aim at striking the senses, at being extreme in their violence, in their sensuality, in their frankness, that do not fit in any category and escape definition.

For example, in Worker (at left), Giulia Piscitelli (b. 1965, Napoli) endows an ancient symbol of the Memento Mori --- closely related in Naples to the traditional cult of the dead --- with a concrete and immediate presence through a tangible object at the Baroque cloister of the Charterhouse of San Martino.

The show features 28 artists: Adel Abdessemed, Micol Assaël, Matthew Barney, Domenico Bianchi, Bianco - Valente, Antonio Biasiucci, Keren Cytter, Mircea Cantor, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Claire Fontaine, Lara Favaretto, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Shirin Neshat, Carsten Nicolai, ORLAN, Philippe Parreno, Giulia Piscitelli, Michal Rovner, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sislej Xhafa.

Starting from the fundamental exhibition organised in Zurich, Berlin and Munich in 1997, Boecklin, De Chirico, Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse and the essays written by Wieland Schmied and David Sylvester towards the end of the Seventies, this exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.

De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes. Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the heroes of Surrealism.

This phase of his work – the so-called metaphysical painting – lasted up to around 1918. Subsequently De Chirico changed direction. He wanted to become a classicist – and almost succeeded.

Forty years ago, in May 1969, the special squad of the Carabinieri assigned to the protection of the cultural heritage was set up, which then in 1975 became functionally answerable to the newly-established Ministry for the Cultural Heritage.

The exhibition, set up in the Sala Bianca of the Pitti Palace, is devoted in particular to sacred art, and hence to paintings and objects stolen from churches and convents, and sometimes museums, but in all cases works on sacred subjects or objects of liturgical use. Consequently this tends to bring to light how, for many different reasons, sites of worship tend to be exposed to the risk of theft and damage and how over time the squad of the Carabinieri specialised in this sector has set its resources and competence at the service of the Church and its enormous artistic heritage.

What the selected works have in common, first and foremost, is the very high “quality”, illustrating how even unrivalled masterpieces, which one would think are immune to all risk, have over time been involved in more or less sensational robberies.

As well as being arranged in chronological order, the works are also divided up into panels, canvases, sculptures and works of applied art, illustrating how the thefts have indiscriminately affected different genres. Another criterion of selection could be defined as “geographical”, since because the work of the special squad of the Carabinieri covers the entire country, the works on display too ought to represent all the different Regions of Italy.

The roots of the artistic path of Indian artist Sheba Chhachhi (1958, Harar, Ethiopia, lives and works in New Delhi), lie in the complexity of India, a vast country in which ancient traditions mingle with the contemporary world, where wealth and poverty face off across a territory permeated by profound religious spirituality.

Chhachhi’s initial approach, in the 1980s, made use of photography, later enhanced by the use of texts, salvaged objects and sculpture. The themes addressed range from mythical and social consideration of the human body (especially the female body) to ecological pollution and urban transformation, through continuous reference to antique iconography.

For several years now the artist has been working on a project connected with a new medium of artistic expression, that of light boxes, in which images flow with a cinematic effect, depicting the myths and symbols of the Indian tradition.

Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co.
Via Pontaccio, 19  
20121 Milano
Italia

Centrale Montemartini
via Ostiense 106
00154 Roma

"Karczeb" denotes a tree trunk with roots still in the ground that is very hard to remove. It is also a local name for a group of people inhabiting the Podlasie region of Poland who live according to the rhythm of nature and in close relationship with the land. Adam Pańczuk watched and documented this unique bond and approach to life over the years and created a series of  portraits. There is a story that goes far beyond the frame of every picture. The work has the air of magic realism. It also offers an alternative to the stereotypical view of the Polish countryside.

Adam Pańczuk (1978) was born in Biała Podlaska and currently lives in Warsaw. In his work he travels to wherever he finds an interesting subject. With his projects Pańczuk seems to be asking questions, at the same time directly and metaphorically, about identity, consciousness and attitude towards life of the people he meets along the way. Pańczuk is the recipient of several awards notably the Magnum Expression Award, Sony World Photography Awards, and PHotoEspana (PHE) OjodePez Award for Human Values, Grand Press Photo.

Fifty years after the opening of the acclaimed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao celebrates this iconic building's golden anniversary by presenting Frank Lloyd Wright, the largest and most comprehensive exhibition that Europe has ever dedicated to one of the greatest architectural geniuses of the 20th century. 

The 50th anniversary exhibition brings together 64 projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures. Presented on the spiral ramps of Wright’s museum through a range of media—including more than 200 original Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, many of which are on view to the public for the first time, as well as newly commissioned models and digital animations—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward illuminates Wright’s pioneering concepts of space and reveals the architect’s continuing relevance to contemporary design.

During his 72-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function are inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.

Highlights of Frank Lloyd Wright include newly created three-dimensional scale models that examine the internal mechanics of functional space in relation to exterior form in a variety of Wright’s projects. Among these are an exploded version of the Herbert Jacobs House (Madison, Wisconsin, 1937); a mirrored model for Unity Temple; and a sectional model of Beth Sholom Synagogue (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1953). Large-scale models of unrealized urban schemes for projects, including his Plan for Greater Baghdad (1957), the Crystal City for Washington, D.C. (1940), and the Pittsburgh Point Civic Center (1947), provide insight into Wright’s visions for the landscapes of the city. The models were developed by Michael Kennedy of New York–based Kennedy Fabrications Inc., which specializes in architectural models and prototyping, and Situ Studio, a Brooklyn-based firm focused on research, design, and fabrication.

Frank Lloyd Wright is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue published by Skira/Rizzoli.

Based in Santa Monica, California since the 1960s, John Baldessari (b. 1931) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Making his name as a pioneer of conceptual art in the 1960s with his text and image paintings, he shocked the art world when he announced in a newspaper that he was cremating all the artworks he had produced between 1953 and 1966. He then turned his attention to photographic works often incorporating found film stills, trawling dumpsters for discarded material from which he created his famous photo-compositions

Over 130 works, some of them little known, review the main concerns of John Baldessari who has recently been awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2009). With humour and irony, his work dissects the ideas behind artistic practice and questions the accepted historical rules for making art. Fascinated by language and its meaning, he has never lost his interest in the relation between the visual and words. The combination of film, photography and painting is also a key element in his art. The exhibition opens with the early paintings that survived the Cremation Project (in 1970 he burnt all his work earlier than 1966, an action with which he wanted to celebrate his death as a painter, and from the ashes, kept in an urn in the form of a book, the Cremation Project emerged, a symbol of his artistic rebirth), followed by his photography-and-text works, including the combined photographs he took in the eighties from the extensive use of archive images from old films, the irregular, painted over works of the nineties and video. The exhibition concludes with his most recent works.

After Barcelona, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

The exhibition Dutch Painters in the Prado has been organised in conjunction with the publication of the fi rst catalogue of the collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings in the Museo del Prado. The exhibition brings together a sizeable group of works from this practically unknown collection, which has barely been displayed in the galleries of the Museum since the 1940s.  

The term Dutch Painting refers to the works produced in the Northern United Provinces, which became an independent nation following the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1579, while the Southern United Provinces (Flanders) remained under Spanish rule. The Northern Provinces numbered even, of which Holland was the largest. Its capital, Amsterdam, was the economic engine behind this new nation, which became one of the leading European powers over the course of the 17th century. Its powerful mercantile, middle class promoted a highly active process of cultural development and used painting as the primary vehicle for an affi rmation of this new national identity.

Under the title Pre-Columbian Funerary Art, the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona exhibits a series of pieces that are representative of the main cultures present in the areas of Mesoamerica, Centro-America and the Andes, before the arrival of any Europeans and the subsequent as well as abrupt culture upheaval that this entailed.

Most of the objects on show were conceived and used as part of the funerary equipment that accompanied the deceased to their tombs. This protected and privileged space made possible the preservation of very fragile pieces, such as those created in ceramic, that despite the long time passed are still in an impeccable state even nowadays.

At the same time, the exhibition approaches the biographical profile of Carmen Tórtola Valencia, an artist whose creative work as a dancer was inspired by her exotic feeling and by the mystery of ancient civilizations.

As an art collector, Tórtola Valencia gathered a number of Pre-Columbian objects that today form part of the Collection of Pre-Columbian Art of the Clos Archaeological Foundation. All in all, the collection comprises 200 carefully chosen pieces that were compiled over twenty five years.

This is the first exhibition on Wyndham Lewis (Amherst, Nova Scotia, 1882 - London, 1957) to be presented in Spain and the most comprehensive to be organised since the retrospective organised by the Tate Gallery in 1956, one year before his death. More than 150 works of art and 60 of Lewis's publications offer a complete survey of the artistic and literary output of this multi-faceted and controversial artist who was one of the key figures within international modernism of the first half of the 20th century.

In 1914 Lewis founded Vorticism, the only British avant-garde art movement, and was also a pioneer of abstraction, a war painter, a great portraitist (whose sitters included celebrated contemporary authors such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rebecca West, among others), a novelist, essayist, publisher and editor, and a literary and art critic. Lewis founded journals such as Blast and The Enemy and could aptly be described as a "single-handed avant-garde movement", as well as "the most fascinating personality of our times", as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1913. In short, a fascinating artist as yet undiscovered by the general public.The present exhibition has been organised by the Fundación Juan March with the collaboration of Paul Edwards, the invited curator and leading international expert on Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of other specialists on Lewis including Richard Humphreys, Alan Munton and Yolanda Morató, among others. The works in the exhibition have been loaned from museums and galleries in Europe, the USA and Canada, as well as from private collections.

The collection comprises artworks by seminal figures such as Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, Jean Tinguely, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Le Corbusier, Sol LeWitt, Edgar Degas, Nicolas de Stael, Barbara Hepworth and Picasso.

The 35,600-square-foot Bechtler museum building was designed by the Swiss architect  Mario Botta.

Cézanne and American Modernism brings together 16 of the French master's paintings and watercolors with more than 80 works by 33 American artists, including Marsden Hartley, Maurice Prendergast, Alfred Stieglitz, and Man Ray. Along with the BMA’s two great Cézanne paintings, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry and Bathers, the exhibition showcases outstanding works from public and private collections throughout the U.S., including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is universally acclaimed as the father of modern art for his revolutionary use of flattened perspective, carefully structured compositions, and his signature technique of painting with patches of color.

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955 showcases more than 50 rare and many never-before-seen black-and-white photographs taken in Detroit by legendary artist Robert Frank.

According to Frank, 'The Americans' included “things that are there, anywhere, and everywhere…a town at night, a parking lot, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none…the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights…gas tanks, post offices and backyards….” The exhibition includes nine Detroit images that were published in 'The Americans'. as well as, for the first time, an in-depth body of work representative of Frank’s Detroit, its working-class culture and automotive industry.

Frank was drawn to Detroit partly by a personal fascination with the automobile, but also saw its presence and effect on American culture as essential to his series. Frank was one of the few photographers allowed to take photographs at the famous Ford Motor Company River Rouge factory, where he was amazed to witness the transformation of raw materials into fully assembled cars. In a letter to his wife he wrote, “Ford is an absolutely fantastic place…this one is God’s factory and if there is such a thing – I am sure that the devil gave him a helping hand to build what is called Ford’s River Rouge Plant.” Frank spent two days taking pictures at the Ford factory, photographing workers on the assembly lines and manning machines by day, and following them as they ventured into the city at night.

In 1900, Edward S. Curtis (1868 – 1952) undertook the momentous task of documenting American Indian cultures across the United States. Over the next thirty years, he took over 40,000 photographs and collected information about more than eighty tribes, ranging from the Inuit people of the far north to the Hopi people of the Southwest. Curtis assembled this material into twenty lavishly illustrated text volumes, each accompanied by a folio of approximately thirty-eight printed, hand-pulled photogravures

Gabriel Orozco's work has had a wide-reaching impact on contemporary art practice. Known for his wanderings through many countries, in both urban and natural environments, Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962) has worked without a studio since the late 1980s.

He has transformed found objects and situations through subtle but radical interventions and has created enigmatic and intimate works that reveal his thought processes.

MoMa's midcareer retrospective examines two decades of Orozco's career in an exhibition of some 80 works, revealing how the artist roams freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting to create a heterogeneous body of objects that resists categorization. Works in the exhibition come from international public and private collections, including the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, to Cristina Félix Romandía, a student of classical piano, and Mario Orozco Rivera, a mural painter and art professor at the Universidad Veracruzana. In 1981, Orozco enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP), a division of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), from which he graduated in 1984. In 1986, to broaden his knowledge of contemporary art practice, Orozco left Mexico City for Madrid. There he enrolled in courses at the Círculo de Bellas Artes and, using Madrid as a base, traveled throughout Europe; but by 1987, he returned to Mexico City. He formed a workshop with other artists—Damián Ortega, Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Dr. Lakra (Jerónimo López Ramírez)—and worked with this group for the next five years.

The exhibition will travel to three other museums after MoMA: Kunstmuseum Basel (April 18 to August 10, 2010); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (September 15, 2010, to January 3, 2011); and the Tate Modern, London (January 19 to April 25, 2011). Each exhibition will be a uniquely designed collaboration between the artist and the institution where it is presented.

Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius features approximately 50 works, including more than 20 sketches and studies by Leonardo, some of which will be on view in the United States for the first time.

Through an examination of the sculpture that Leonardo studied, the drawings he created for his own sculptural projects (the majority of which were never realized) and his interactions with other Renaissance sculptors, the exhibition seeks to shed new light on Leonardo's seminal role in the development of Renaissance sculpture and the work of artists who followed him.

Luc Tuymans features approximately 75 key paintings from 1978 to the present and reunites works from important series as initially set out by the artist. Luc Tuymans (born 1958) is considered by many to be one of the most significant painters working today, and his distinctive visual style and approach to issues of history and memory have influenced an entire generation of younger artists. Interested in the aftereffects of some of the most traumatic events of the last and present century and their representation in the mass media, Tuymans uses a muted palette to create paintings.

Born and raised in Antwerp, where he continues to live and work, Tuymans draws on the historical traditions of Northern European painting as well as photography, cinema, and television. He appropriates images from a variety of sources and makes use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and sequencing to offer fresh perspectives on the medium of painting as well as larger cultural issues.

Perhaps best-known for his early work on the Holocaust, the artist has turned more recently to such topics as the postcolonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11, and the role of institutional religion in an increasingly secular world.

Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis explores the interactions between Caribbean and Latin American artists and U.S.-born and European artists working in New York in the early twentieth century, who together fomented many of that era’s most important avant-garde art movements.

This ambitious exhibition will present for the first time together more than 200 important works by artists from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, as well as, U.S. and European artists working in New York. Contextual material—such as period photographs, original magazines and books, reproductions of poems, writing, and other documentary materials.


Joaquín Torres-García: New York Street Scene
Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery
© 2009 Artists Rights Society

Conceived by El Museo’s director, Julian Zugazagoitia, and organized by its chief curator, Deborah Cullen the show is divided into five sections:

The first section of Nexus New York focuses on artists who chose realist or expressionist formal means during a period from approximately 1910 through the 1920s, and their key artistic exchanges as they traveled to New York and its environs to study with renowned American teachers. For exmaple, Puerto
Rican artist Miguel Pou y Becerra traveled to New York in 1919 to study at the Art Students League with Robert Henri, whose realist Ashcan School theories paralleled Pou’s own developing proposition to document quotidian life on his island in order to venerate its national ideals. Similarly, Celeste Woss y Gil left the Dominican Republic to study at the League from 1922 to 1924 and 1928 to 1931. Previously stifled by her island’s conservative artistic environment, she embraced teachers such as George Luks and his fleshy, gritty painted realities. Upon her return to Santo Domingo, her bold nude mulatto and black females established her as an influential teacher to younger Dominican generations, later going on to direct an important art academy that initiated the founding of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1942.

A more complex exchange was that of Alice Neel and Carlos Enríquez who met in 1924 at the Pennsylvania Academy summer school. They were married in 1925 and returned to his home in Havana, Cuba, where Enríquez participated in the early vanguard exhibitions. After returning to New York in 1927, they eventually separated, however the impact of the Caribbean modern movement on Neel’s work continued to evidence itself in her bold formal style and social agenda.

The second section will include pioneering travelers to New York who moved within Dada and Cubist circles in the 1900s and 1910s. This section focuses on the 291 Gallery, the De Zayas Gallery, and the Modern Gallery.

The third section features Joaquin Torres-Garcia whose time in New York from 1920 to 1922 fostered his radical formal experimentation and influenced others. The Uruguayan innovator travelled to the city to manufacture wooden toys of his own design. Supported by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Juliana Force, Katherine Dreier, the Anderson Gallery and others in New York, Torres-García met Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella, Max Weber and the Peruvian Carlos Baca-Flor, among others.

The fourth section looks at the expansive influence of the Mexican modernists in New York, whose dominance had been felt beginning in the 1920s, but which peaked during the 1930s. One important location was Union Square, where both the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop and the New School for Social Research were located. In 1936, Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros founded his "Experimental Workshop (A Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art)” in Union Square, the primary goal of which was to develop, promote and teach experimental techniques that would lead to the crystallization of a truly revolutionary art form.

The exhibit also features for the first time ever, a fresco panel from Diego Rivera’s New Workers’ School Cycle, completed in late 1933 after his ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, one of the most significant art world controversies ever to take place on U.S. soil. This scandal involved Rivera’s 1933 mural Man at the Crossroads, which was destroyed in 1934 before completion due to Rivera’s sympathetic depiction of Lenin.

Frustrated Rivera utilized his large Rockefeller family fee to carry out the Union Square mural cycle that clearly depicted his political ideologies, once the other project was abruptly destroyed.

This section also examine the connection between the goals of the Mexicanidad movement and that of the "New Negro" project, based in Harlem. Pioneers include Miguel Covarrubias, who moved to New York in 1923, publishing his artworks and impressions of the city in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

The fifth section focuses on various sites of Surrealism, which gained currency as international artists joined forces in New York starting with World War II’s approach in the late 1930s to the war’s end. These include the 1939 World’s Fair and the New School for Social Research, which housed Paris’ Atelier 17 during the War.

Candido Portinari of Brazil, who had garnered attention at the 1935 Carnegie International, also sent major panels to the 1939 World’s Fair, although he did not finally visit the city until late 1940 for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when he also undertook a series of murals for the Library of Congress.

An illustrated, bilingual scholarly catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition with essays that focus on specific environments, exchanges, or centers, and which detail the various artists’ New York milieus and artistic development.

Marian Goodman Gallery shows two new works by award-winning British artist and film maker Steve McQueen. On view in the North Gallery is Giardini, 2009, a work first shown at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 2009, when McQueen represented the UK. This will be the first U.S. presentation of the work and its New York premiere. A second new work, Static, 2009, made especially for this exhibition, is on view in the North Gallery viewing room.

Steve McQueen was recipient of the Turner Prize in 1999 and an OBE in 2002. His debut feature film Hunger (2008),  won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2008. Steve McQueen attended Chelsea School of Art, London (1989-90); Goldsmith College, London (1990-93); and Tisch School of the Arts, NYU (1993-94). Born in London in 1969, he currently lives in Amsterdam and London. 

Upcoming projects include a film to be directed by McQueen based on the life of Fela Kuti, the African musician and activist who died in 1997, and a solo survey exhibition in the U.S. and Europe slated for 2012-2013.

During the Spanish Counter-Reformation, religious patrons, particularly the Dominican, Carthusian and Franciscan orders, challenged painters and sculptors to bring the sacred to life, to inspire both Christian devotion and the emulation of the saints. The exhibition brings together some of the finest depictions of key Christian themes including the Passion of Christ, the Immaculate Conception and the portrayal of saints, notably Pedro de Mena’s austere rendition of Saint Francis Standing in Meditation, 1663, which has never before left the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral.

By installing 16 polychrome (painted) sculptures and 16 paintings side-by-side, the exhibition aims to show that the ‘hyperrealistic’ approach of painters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán was clearly informed by their familiarity – and in some cases direct involvement – with sculpture.

In Seville, Francisco Pacheco taught Velázquez, later his son-in-law, and a generation of artists the skill of painting sculpture as an integral element of their training. Pacheco himself painted the flesh tones and drapery of exquisite wooden sculptures carved by fellow Andalucian, Montañés, known by his contemporaries as ‘the god of wood’. Among the most important examples is their life-size Saint Francis Borgia Meditating on a Skull' 1624 (Church of the Anunciación, Seville University) commissioned by the Jesuits to celebrate his beatification that year. Another highlight of the exhibition is the fascinating juxtaposition of Velázquez’s The Immaculate Conception, 1618–19 (National Gallery, London) with Montañés’s exquisite polychrome sculpture of the same subject, about 1620 (Seville University).

To obtain even greater realism, some sculptors such as Pedro de Mena and Gregorio Fernández introduced glass eyes and tears as well as ivory teeth into their sculptures. Fernández’s astonishingly realistic Dead Christ, 1625–30 (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; on long term loan to the Museo Nacional Colegio de San Gregorio, Valladolid) incorporates the bark of a cork tree to simulate the effect of coagulated blood, and bull’s horn for Christ’s fingernails. It was fully intended that believers should feel truly in the presence of the dead Christ.

During 'Semana Santa' (‘Holy Week’), some 17th-century polychrome sculptures are still carried through the streets by religious confraternities, particularly in Seville, Granada and Valladolid, the most important centres of this art. During the evening of Palm Sunday, Seville’s Archicofradía del Cristo del Amor (‘Confraternity of the Christ of Love’) process a life-size sculpture of the Crucifixion by Juan de Mesa. The exhibition features a smaller version of this work, about 1621, which although non-processional, plays a vital role in the pastoral life of the confraternity.

While sometimes deeply unsettling, depictions of Christ’s suffering or indeed Juan de Mesa’s Decapitated Head of Saint John the Baptist, about 1620 (Seville Cathedral) are also exquisitely finished. When depicting the saints, sculptors and polychromers combined their skills to achieve maximum facial expressiveness. Alonso Cano’s life-size head of Saint John of God, 1655 (Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada), which has never left Spain before, depicts with astonishing sensitivity the compassionate expression of Granada’s patron saint.

Zurbarán’s heightened illusionism, in particular his handling of fabric, shows an acute understanding and appreciation of sculpture. Saint Serapion, 1628 (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT), is among the artist’s greatest achievements. The saint’s voluminous white habit cascades with astonishingly rendered crevasses of deep shadow. Here, Zurbarán demonstrates that painting can indeed achieve the same disconcerting realism as sculpture.

The Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 BC showcases funerary objects discovered in Deir el-Bersha, a necropolis in central Egypt, by the joint Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts Expedition in 1915. It includes the famous painted "Bersha coffin," the mummified head of one of the tomb’s two occupants, and hundreds of items deemed necessary for a comfortable afterlife in ancient Egypt. This find represents the largest Middle Kingdom burial assemblage ever discovered and sheds light on the grand lifestyle enjoyed by local governor and priest Djehutynakht and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht. The conservation and reconstruction of many of the items—damaged by grave robbers in antiquity—have taken almost a century to complete. For the first time since they were placed in the tomb, the assemblage will be displayed in its entirety.

The Secrets of Tomb 10A examines the mysteries surrounding the Djehutynakhts: their lifestyle, the fate of their possessions after they were buried, and whether the mummified head is male or female. It also offers an engaging introduction to evolving funerary practices in Egypt from the 11th through 13th dynasties and provides insights into daily life of the high officials of the time. Featured are more than 250 objects, many of which have never before been on view. These include four painted coffins, cult objects, vessels for food and drink, furniture, jewelry, walking sticks, and sealed beer jars (one of which will be opened and examined), as well as the largest known collection of wooden models from the Middle Kingdom representing—in miniature form—a range of activities and items that would have been found on the couple’s estate.

The exhibition includes 50 major artifacts excavated from the tomb of King Tut, including his royal diadem (the gold crown discovered on his head), as well as one of the gold and precious stone inlaid coffinettes that contained his mummified internal organs. More than 70 objects from other royal graves of the 18th Dynasty (1555 B.C.-1305 B.C.) are on view as well.

A further highlight is the loaned collection of pieces from the intact tomb of Yuya and Tuyu, the parents-in-law of Amenophis III. This tomb was discovered some 20 years before that of Tutankhamun, and had until then been the most celebrated find in the Valley of the Kings.

The objects are accompanied by photos of Howard Carter taken in 1922 to illustrate the condition of the tomb during the first opening.

Exploring a cross section of art made during a period marked with revolution and socio-political tumult, this exhibition also embraces five interventions by a current generation of artists whose work reflects the concerns of 1969 and brings the exhibition into the present. This exhibition includes examples of painting, sculpture, photography, print, illustrated books, design, drawing, media, and film as well as a wealth of documents drawn from MoMA's archives. 

Diverse artistic practices, concerns, and themes are presented ranging from the minimalist sculpture of Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, abstract painting and drawing of Helen Frankenthaler and Gego, to films by Walter de Maria and Michael Snow, and politically charged works of the Art Workers Coalition and Martha Rosler.

Wind/Rewind/Weave investigates the global crisis of production and skill based textile labor through three major works: Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, a unique installation titled 'Local Industry,' and the first exhibition of Rewinds, a large sculpture in glass.

As the project 'Local Industry,' Anne Wilson has transformed one museum gallery into an active factory site, using it as a productive space where museum visitors work together through the production of a bolt of cloth.

Anne Wilson is a Chicago based visual artist who creates sculpture, drawings, video animations and installations that explore themes of time, loss, private and social rituals.

Cuban group Rumbankete - open dance floor!

Voices: Gonzalo Chomat, Eddie Felix, Iris Cepeda
Violin: Kirsten Bersch, Naomi Sato
Trombones: Denis Jiron, Nick Daley, Jim Miller
Percussion: Michael Duffy, Alberto Lopez, Joey de Leon
Piano: Matt Amper
Bass: Larry Vasquez

All-Star 14 piece band from Los Angeles - Rumbankete is their Cuban Dance Music Big Band and labour of love! - Includes players who have performed & toured with Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, Queen Latifa, Poncho Sanchez, Ozomatli, Joan Sebastian, Luis Enrique, Domingo Quiñones, Lalo Rodríguez, Michael Stuart, Tito Nieves, Jimmy Bisch, Dave Valentín, Andy Montañez, Snoop Dogg, Mariah Carey, Mos Def, Kim Burell & Seal.

510 Embarcadero West
Oakland, CA 94607

Curated by Max Presneill, FYI - The Reflected Gaze - Self Portraiture Today focuses on self-portraits by contemporary artists.

Artists featured:

Justin Bower, Chuck Close, Emily Counts, Ariel Erestingcol, Mark Greenwold, Julie Heffernan, Damien Hirst, Per Huttner, KAWS, Tom LaDuke, Hung Liu, Jennifer Nehrbass, Gavin Nolan, Fahamu Pecou, Dane Picard, Frank Ryan, Peter Sudar, Terri Thomas, Holly Topping, Alexandra Wiesenfeld, Cindy Wright and Liat Yossifor

Each of the artists in One on One engages the life of one person. The goal of each examination is different, as are the means and the findings. But in each case, the artists use their subjects as mirrors, not only for themselves, but also for the viewer.

Terry Allen creates works in a wide variety of media including music, painting, sculpture, drawing, video, theater, and installation. SITE will present Terry Allen's latest work GHOST SHIP RODEZ, a multi-dimensional, multimedia exhibition inspired by an episode in the life of the great French theater visionary, poet, and artist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948).Taking its title from the French mental institution "Rodez," where Artaud spent a number of years, this exhibition will consist of drawings and multimedia works blending sculpture and video. Allen invites us to take a journey into the depths of Artaud's mind as he sees it — a place where the boundaries of time and space are broken, where the past and future come together in the present.

In 2002 Hasan Elahi was falsely accused by a misinformed neighbor of involvement in the 9/11 terrorists plots, and was subsequently subjected to a sixth month long investigation by the FBI. Provoked by this ordeal, Elahi initiated Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project a web-based project that provides his location in real-time and archives the traces of his life, such as photographs of every meal he has eaten and his bank transaction records. Elahi's obsessive use of technology to track himself is "an exaggerated version of the life we live now," where photographic and electronic surveillance have become the norm. SITE will exhibit the most complete presentation of Tracking Transience to date with a multimedia installation streaming material drawn from an extensive database representing Elahi's activities over the last eight years.

The husband and wife team McCallum & Tarry create works that investigate issues of social justice. Their practice includes a variety of media including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and public interventions. By focusing on the voices of individuals, McCallum & Tarry create works that highlight the personal dimension of issues such as civil rights, homelessness, and war. In a significant number of their works, McCallum & Tarry have used themselves as their subjects. SITE  presents three of their most intimate and poetic video-based works: Topsy-Turvy (2006), Cut (2006), and Exchange (2007). These works explore the complex legacy of race and the way it figures into contemporary relations, particularly rooted in their own experiences as an interracialcouple.

Kaari Upson's The Larry Project, is a multi-disciplinary investigation into the life of a man she has never met. Initially based on the life of a real person, Larry has become more fiction than fact, and Upson's relentless investigation of the minutia of his life offers extraordinary insight into the mind of the artist herself. Through an archival method, Upson has given Larry a multifaceted life while simultaneously assimilating her life with his. Upson conceived of the project in three chapters, representing different levels of psychological engagement. Selected works from each of these chapters include drawings, paintings, video, and sculpture.

When a young German playwright named Alois Senefelder developed a new printmaking process in the 1790s, little did he know that his discovery would start a communication revolution. Lithography, or flatsurface
printing, transformed the exchange of information and everyday life for the next century and beyond. This technique brought art, literature, music, and science to the masses; gave rise to product advertising and consumer culture; educated a growing middle class; and turned commercial printing from a craft into an industry. Lithography also colorized a predominantly black and white publishing world.

The Color Explosion: Nineteenth Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection presents about 250 examples of 19th century American lithography from The Huntington’s Jay T. Last collection of lithographic and social history. Advertising posters, art prints, calendars, certificates, children’s books, colorplate illustrations, historical views, product labels, sales catalogs, sheet music, toys, games, and trade cards are just some of the artifacts that will be included in this comprehensive exhibition.

Entitled Tseng Kwong Chi: Body Painting with Bill T. Jones and  Keith Haring, this is an exhibition of photographs taken by the American artist Tseng Kwong Chi in 1983 in collaboration with the choreographer Bill T. Jones and the artist Keith Haring.

Shown in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Tseng's and Haring's deaths, these large-format photographs document the spirit of interconnected creativity that pulsed throughout the East Village in the 1980's.

Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-1990) was born in Hong Kong and immigrated with his family to Vancouver, Canada as a teenager. He studied art in Paris before moving to New York in 1978. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Museum of Art in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2010, his photographs will be included in Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. and in Dreamlands at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.

Catherine Opie (American, born 1961) created inkjet prints from scans of 7x17-inch negatives of the mini-malls that characterize Los Angeles's automobile culture.

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao (Taiwanese, born 1977) digitally combined color film negatives into seamless inkjet prints for his Habitat 7 project, which traces the route of the New York subway from Queens to Manhattan. By layering hand-cut chromogenic prints made in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, during the summer solstice, Soo Kim (American, born South Korea, 1969) achieved the three-dimensional effect of a semitransparent city.

The Getty Center
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Victorious Ones presents paintings and sculptures depicting the Jinas, the founding teachers of Jainism, and the spaces they sanctify throughout the universe. Central to this Indian ascetic faith, dating from between the 6th and 5th century BCE, is an ethic of nonviolence and respect for all living beings.

Images of the Jinas embody these ideals of perfection and serve as objects of devotion through which the Jinas can be accessed. Their life stories are told in illuminated manuscripts and the places where they are revered are portrayed in detailed pilgrimage maps and diagrams of the vast Jain cosmos. 

Present-day practitioners of the this little known ancient faith accumulate few material possessions, and look at things from the points of view of others.