FAD
magazine
INTERVIEW - Nally Bellati
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Venice: Pre-Biennale - MUST SEEs – Palazzo Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice exhibition
Venice: Pre-Biennale - MUST SEEs – Palazzo Ducale –
Manet Returns to Venice exhibition. In the splendid rooms of the Palazzo
Ducale, until August 18, the exhibition, Manet Returns to Venice is organized by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia in
collaboration with the Musée D’Orsay in
Paris, it is curated by Stephane Guegan, with
the scientific direction of Guy Cogeval and Gabriella Belli, eighty paintings, drawings and prints, some
of which have never left France before, are on show.
Above: Edouard
Manet - The Grand Canal, Venice, 1874, oil on canvas. Manet
was already a famous painter, in 1874, the year of the first Exhibition of
Impressionist Painters,was also the year of his third voyage to Italy and of his return to Venice which he
immortalized in two small canvases showing the Grand Canal. In these pictures,
we seem to sense the already very modern atmosphere of the late Guardi; in the
small but masterly works, which served as a model for much Venetian painting
towards the end of the 19th century, the air is so transparent as to make the
blues and whites of his palette dance as never before.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice. The exhibition arises from a need to
undertake a critical survey of the
cultural models that inspired the young Manet. These models, have
hitherto referred almost exclusively to the influence of Spanish painting on
his art, actually included much Italian Renaissance art, as the Venetian
exhibition shows: alongside his masterpieces, there are a series of exceptional
studies inspired by great 16th-century Venetian paintings, from Titian to
Tintoretto and Lotto in particular. The
exhibition also highlights, his close links with Italy and Venice. His Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia
(1863) are clearly variations on Titian and are both splendid examples of Manet’s
links with Italian art.
Above.
Edouard Manet – Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas and Titian – Venus of Urbino, 1538
oil on canvas. The exceptional
juxtaposition of Titan’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia highlights the
special role that 16th century Venetian painting had on Manet.
Edouard
Manet – The Fifer, 1866, oil on canvas.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice.
Between Music and Theatre room.
Edouard
Manet – Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873-1874, oil on canvas.
In Manet’s famous Masked Ball
at the Opera, which was rejected that same year by the jury of the
Parisian Salon, appears the same dance of masked lovers and ambiguous players
that he must have known through the work of the Venetian Pietro Longhi.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice. Eduoard Manet – Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868,
oil on canvas and Lorenzo Lotto – Portrait of a young Gentleman in his Study,
1530c., oil on canvas.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice.
Eduoard Manet – On the Beach, 1873, oil on canvas. Painted during a
holiday at the sea, it shows Suzanne from behind, absorbed in reading, and Manet’s
brother Eugene in the same position he was portrayed ten years earlier in the
Dejeuner. Both turn their backs to the
observer and seem isolated in their thoughts.
The painting, although painted outside, is a long way from the
Impressionist spirit. The composition
refers to Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna del Sacco; carefully copied earlier in
1857.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice.
Eduoard Manet – At the cafe, Study of Legs, 1880, watercolor on squared
paper.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice.
Eduoard Manet – Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. This is one of the four portraits of Berthe
and one of his masterpieces. Here the
intense, lateral light combines with the virtuoso use of blacks. The painting also heralds the pastels of the
following years, linked to the representation of Parisian fashion of the time.
Palazzo
Ducale – Manet Returns to Venice.
Eduoard Manet – The Lemon, 1880-1881, oil on canvas.
Venice: Pre-Biennale - MUST SEEs - Le Stanze del Vetro - Fragile? exhibition.
Venice: Pre-Biennale - MUST SEEs -
Le Stanze del Vetro - Fragile? exhibition. The Fragile?
exhibition, until July 28, curated by Mario Codognato, at the new
glass museum Le Stanze del Vetro on the magical island of San Giorgio Maggiore
just across from San Marco features 28 works of art by internationally
renowned artists. In the context of
Venetian glassmaking and its peculiar craft
connotations, Fragile? aims at taking a different yet equally
important aspect into account, namely the use of glass as a found object, with
specific metaphorical and linguistic features.
Above: Giuseppe Penone – Barra d’aria, 1969-1996. The work Barra d’aria is a glass
parallelepiped through which the artist stimulates a perception different than
that of the noises of the city. The air
it contains becomes the constructive material of the work, to which one thus
attributes, as would latter also be the case for the celebrated work Soffio, (1978),
sculptural value and an automatic process.
Mona Hatoum – Drowning Sorrow (wine
bottles) 2004, detail. Drowning Sorrow is an installation comprised of two hundred wine
bottles that seem to be set in cement, in an elegant circular arrangement. The glass bottles, the transparency of which
creates the plays of light and shadow often present in her work, if on the one
hand clearly refer to the bitter habit of drowning one’s sorrow in alcohol, on
the other hand, caught in a flow that has crystallized their position, can be
read as a metaphor for a shipwreck or romantic drift since they are potential
ferrymen of anonymous messages.
Gilbert and George - Reclining Drunk, 1973.
The work Reclining Drunk directly calls to mind the widespread problem
of alcoholism in London, previously addressed in other works. Pursuing the
credo of the total superimposition of art and life, the banal gin bottle
crumpled by heat, or better, by suffering, rises to a work of art and becomes a
metaphor for the existential suffering of humanity.
Ai Weiwei – Dust to Dust, 2009. Dust
to Dust is a simple glass jar, like one you could buy at Ikea, a symbol of the
conformity of modern industry, it contains within it the pulverized remains of
an ancient ceramic vase from the Neolithic period, destroyed by the artist
himself, who with this irreverent act transformed an ancient urn into a modern
one. Condensing the memory of history
into a handful of dust, translating the container into the contained.
Le Stanze del Vetro - Fragile? exhibition. Instead of the precise traits of manufactured
artworks, other aspects are sought, such as symbolic transparency, fragility
and resistance, imprecision and smoothness, along with the construction of
elements that draw inspiration from reality and contemporary artistic language. “In the 21st century, because of the
historical avant-garde movements, visual arts cease to be a sole mimesis of
reality through painting and sculpture, states curator Mario Codognato
(above), by using objects and materials taken from the real world and
industrial production, a new metaphoric, yet tautologically concrete, dimension
is born. Glass, thanks to its widespread use in architecture and its double
nature of transparent medium and at the same time barrier, becomes a new
linguistic tool through which to create images”.
Artist and the exhibitions’ art director Laura de
Santillana and chairman of Pentagram Stiftung Marie-Rose Kahane.
Joseph Beuys – Terremoto in Palazzo, 1981, detail.
Terremoto in Palazzo is a disturbing installation, loaded with memory and
collective pain, made by the artist right after the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia
on invitation by the Neapolitan gallerist Lucio Amelio, who dedicated an
important contemporary art exhibition to the tragic event. The symbolic power of exploded glass in the
center of the installation reflects the fragility and transitoriness of
existence and contrasts with the precariousness of the still-intact jars that
support the furniture, a metaphor for a civilization in delicate balance.
On the scientific committee David Landau.
Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, general secretary
Pasquale Gagliardi.
Marcel Duchamp – Air de Paris, 1919-1939. Duchamp’s sarcastic irreverent practice is
also present in the work Air de Paris, a classic pharmacy cruet that the artist
paradoxically claimed to be full of air from the French capital. The transparency of the glass container
underlies the inconsistency of the assumption, that it is the presence of air,
which is obviously invisible and above all the immateriality of the work
itself, the value of which resides fundamentally in the artist’s assertion.
Damien Hirst – Death or Glory, 2001.
Death or Glory is a title which carries within the ambivalence of the
artist’s work in the precise desire to give rise in the public to a double
reaction of attraction/repulsion, to attempt a representation of human
transitoriness and at the same time to proclaim the victory of science over
flash. The fascination of Hirst’s work
lies in the contradiction of the message even before the provocation of the
language, in the capacity to formalize the anxiety of contemporary humankind
through tangible visions.
Cyril de Commarque (above) – Migrants, 2013. In the installation Migrants,
bottles are on the one hand a metaphor for the forced voyage in the desperation
for survival of the African populations constrained to travel the waters of the
Mediterranean to cross invisible boundaries of Europe in a makeshift way and,
on the other hand, the symbol of a limbo, a condition at once both uncertain
and hopeful. In a composition organic in
tone and emulating the vascular system, glass bottles contain throbbing forms
similar to a heart or lungs that fill the room with the sound of voices, anonymous
and confused messages that create a sensation of disorientation, a state of
precariousness, of tension and finally of personal involvement in this
collective drama.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Venice: Pre-Biennale – MUST SEEs - Palazzo Grassi – Rudolf Stingel.
photograph
courtesy palazzo grassi
Venice:
Pre-Biennale – MUST SEEs - Palazzo Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. Until December 31, Palazzo Grassi presents
the exhibition Rudolf Stingel,
curated by the artist himself in collaboration with Elena Geuna. The project,
conceived expressly for Palazzo Grassi, unfolds over the atrium and both upper
floors, a space of over 5.000 square meters. For the first time, the museum devotes the whole exhibition area
to the work of a single artist. The
exhibition includes previously unseen paintings as well as creations from the
past years and a site-specific
installation. This is Stingel’s largest ever-monographic presentation in
Europe.
Palazzo
Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. The exhibition presents a selection of over thirty paintings from collections
around the world, including the artist’s collection and that of Francois
Pinault. Many of these works were created in the studios of Merano and New York
specifically for this project, which spreads over all the rooms of Palazzo
Grassi, where carpeting based on an oriental rug covers the entire surface of
the walls and floors.
Above.
Francois Pinault and Rudolf Stingel with Untitled (Franz West), 2011 oil on
canvas, Pinault Collection.
Palazzo
Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. Untitled, 2012,
oil on canvas, three panels, Pinault Collection.
Chief
executive and director of Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana Martin Bethenod
and New York dealer Paula Cooper.
The
Atrium.
Palazzo
Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. Untitled
(Madonna), 2009, oil on linen, Pinault Collection.
Curator
Caroline Bourgeois.
Palazzo
Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. Untittled,
2013, oil on canvas, Pinault Collection.
Palazzo
Grassi – Rudolf Stingel. The project,
conceived by the artist expressly for Palazzo Grassi, spreads over all the
rooms of the building, where a carpet with oriental patterns covers, for the
first time, the entire surface of the walls and floors.
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