Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny - Part I: Dora Maar - Ritsue Mishima - Barbara Paganin


Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny.   The Spring at Palazzo Fortuny until July 14, brings together five exhibitions by talented women artists: Dora Maar’s Notwithstanding Picasso Ritsue Mishima’s Tras FormaBarbara Paganin’s Open Memory – Anne-Karin Furunes’s Shadows and The Amazons of Photography from the Collection of Mario Trevisan.





Venice: Spring at Palazzo Fortuny – Part I: Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso.    Henrietta Theodora Markovitch better known as Dora Maar (1907-1997) was a beautiful French photographer, poet and painter of Croatian descent, best known for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso.

 Photo by Xavier Grandsart - courtesy Fortuny Museum

Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. A woman of rare beauty and enigmatic personality who had seduced Picasso, the leading painter of the century and, subsequently abandoned, had sunk into madness, living cut off from the world for the remaining fifty years of her life. “Sacrificed to the Minotaur”, “Segregated with her musty phantoms”, “Dora, painted tears” were some of the titles in the newspapers when her goods were cold at auction after her death.
Above. Man Ray - Portrait de Dora Maar (solarisation), 1936, silver bromide gelatin print.

photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati


Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora Maar was an extraordinary artist in her own right.  This exhibition aims to highlight her singular talent and is the first show to be dedicated to her photography in Italy. Thanks to loans from important museums and private collections, the exhibition, comprising over one hundred works, including some unpublished ones of great interest, examines her career and personality.
Above. Dora Maar – Vieille Femme et Enfant (dit Le Pisseur) – 1935c., vintage silver bromide gelatin print.



The Dora Maar exhibition is a project by, as well as, the layout of Daniela Ferretti.



Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora had a multi-faceted personality as well as being a great photographer.
Above. Dora Maar – Homme sur un Trottoir, Trappe de Visite, 1935c. vintage silver gelatin print.



The curator of the exhibition Victoria Combalía, a scholar who has dedicated much time to studying Maar.




Dora Maar, by SIAE 2013 - photo credit:  photographic archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid – courtesy Palazzo Fortuny




Dora Maar - Picasso Debout Travaillant à Guernica dans son Atelier des Grands-Augustins, 1937,silver gelatin print.





Dora Maar – Notwithstanding Picasso. Dora was certainly a complex and tormented woman as portrayed in Picasso’s pictures, but also acute, intelligent and politically involved.
Above. Pablo Picasso, Tete de Femme (Dora Maar), 1939, oil on canvas.

 
Spring at Palazzo Fortuny: Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. Artist Ritsue Mishima (1962) draws stimuli for her work from natural forms and reflections of light: her glass is transparent, colorless, and conveys a sense of purity and luminosity, capturing and expanding the light and colors its surroundings. This exhibition presents her latest creations, the result of a careful analysis of the modus operandi of Mariano Fortuny.
Above. Ritsue Mishima – Titano, 2013, glass.

 photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati
 
Artist Mirco Marchelli


Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. The artist pays close attention to the space in which she places her works; the play of transparency and of reflections produces infinite visual variations for the subject. 
Above. Ketty Alvera with a sculpture by Ritsue Mishima.

 
Ritsue Mishima – Tras Forma. The thousand-year-old tradition of making glass in Venice, seen through the lens of Mishima’s Japanese culture, results in works forming a highly contemporary alphabet. 
Above. Ritsue Mishima – Melograni, 2013, glass.

  photograph  and copyright by manfredi bellati

Spring at Palazzo Fortuny: Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. Venetian artist Barbara Paganin’s exhibition presents jewels and stories that draw their inspiration from the emotions of their past.  Tangible elements of borrowed memories: 19th-century miniatures, porcelain animal, good-luck charms, depicting mice, hippopotamuses, rabbits, ivory elephants, a little compass, the queen from a chess set… This is the first time the artist has chosen to include “extraneous” elements and objets trouvés in her work. Her work begins with a search among the antiques shops of Venice to find these little objects, which one could imagine were once jealously guarded in some child’s “treasure casket”.
Above. Barbara Paganin and one of the 25 brooches from Open Memory display. 

 
Photograph by Alice Pavesi Fiori, courtesy Palazzo Fortuny

Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. This is the first time the artist has chosen to include “extraneous” elements and objets trouvés in her work. Her work begins with a search among the antiques shops of Venice to find these little objects, which one could imagine were once jealously guarded in some child’s “treasure casket”.
Above. Barbara Paganin - 
Open Memory n.24, 2011-2013.
photograph and copyright by manfredi bellati

Barbara Paganin – Open Memory. Every brooch tells a story, which can be imagined differently by every observer, adapting it to his own memory. There is no single key to interpret it, but instead a different one for every “reader” of this album of memories composed chapter by chapter. The twenty-five works are planned as a single corpus, on which Paganin has worked continuously over the past two years, and are designed to be displayed all together for the first time at Palazzo Fortuny.
Above. Barbara Paganin - 
Open Memory, 2011-2013.

 
Curator of the Open Memory exhibition Valeria Accornero.


 
 
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