contessanally

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Venice: seen at the Venice Biennale

enzo cucchi

At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia for Valerio Rocco Orlando's book launch: Francesca ballini Richards, Tiziana Cardini, Valerio Rocco Orlando and Caroline Corbetta

The book

Art dealer, Tiziana di Caro

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Venice: Not Only Biennale - Marisa Merz: It Doesn't Match Yet it Flourishes - Fondazione Querini Stampalia

a detail

Fondazione Querini Stampalia: Marisa Merz – It doesn’t Match Yet It Flourishes. The Marisa Merz exhibition It doesn’t Match Yet It Flourishes at the FondazioneQuerini Stampalia (until September 18) was curated by Chiara Bertola. The veteran Arte Povera artist engages with this historic collection, riffing lightly on a 2006 residency with a drawing-based show on the theme of faces.

Untitled 1993 (above). As part of a universal logic, Marisa Merz’s works reflect her faith in the duration of works of art that goes beyond their material creation and beyond the contingent limitations of time and space. In this sense the view of Giovanni Bellini’s La Presentazione al Tempio has a particular significance. In a small room, near the painting of Bellini, is a kind of constellation consisting of eight triangles of knitted copper wire, placed on the floor and climbing up the wall in a spiral shape, like an organic sculpture proliferating into space. It is like a piece of fabric that has the temporal traces of its own existence woven into it and uniting separate identities. Together with Scarpette 1968 (below), this is one of the two historically important works in the show: the outcome of meticulous manual ability, it is a piece that, for all its lightness and simplicity, dissects different times and places and then unites them in a single dimension.

Scarpette 1968. Nylon thread, an industrially-produced material not usually part of the art tradition, was knitted and transformed into a work of art by an artisanal ability inspired by the feminine and domestic sphere. It is an introspective work whose intimacy is underlined by the fact that its size is based on the artist’s foot and, in this way, she has given a form to her own imprint and a body to her shadow. And so the transparent display-case contains the values of levity and inconsistency. A similar conceptual undertaking is to be found in the painted clay head (below), and the form of which results from the marks of the artist’s hand left on the raw material.

Untitled

The curator of the Marisa Merz exhibition, Chiara Bertola

Untitled

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Friday, June 24, 2011

Venice: Not Only Biennale - TRA The Edge of Becoming - Palazzo Fortuny

Photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Palazzo Fortuny: TRA – The Edge of Becoming. The title of the exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny is TRA – The Edge of Becoming, until 27^th November, 2011. Chosen for its strong and suggestive conciseness, that includes also the word “art” (if read at the inverse). As preposition it signifies “in-between”, “inside”, and as prefix it has also the meaning of an action that goes “beyond”, “ahead of”. As a suffix, TRA is common to many Sanskrit words: mantra, tantra, yantra…
Above: Anish Kapoor's Portrait of Light, Picture of Space

Alex Vervoordt. TRA – The Edge of Becoming is the latest in Axel Vervoordt’s series of richly complex exhibitions in the Palazzo Fortuny, another wunderkammer of more than three hundred archeological objects, paintings, decorative items, and contemporary commissions. The exhibition explores the cross-connections between space, history, artistic heritage and universal wisdom through Marian Fortuny’s rich multidisciplinary heritage. With Axel Vervoordt’s Wabi inspirations and the reflections of the economist Bernard Lietaer, the scientist Eddi de Wolf and architect Tatsuro Miki (Taro), art has the power to take us elsewhere, to complete the initiatory journey towards everyone’s personal and temporary revelation.

Above: Axel Vervoordt next to Alberto Giacometti’s L’Objet Invisible

photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Maurizio Donizelli - Aleph, 20011

Palazzo Fortuny director Daniela Ferretti and artist Riccardo de Marchi

Artist Giorgio Vigna and Roman art dealer Stefania Miscetti

a detail of Giorgio Vigna's Sasso

Denise Levy and May Vervoordt

Fiona Scarry and Servane Giol

Francesco Candeloro - Memorie dei Segni ( Segni dei Luoghi)

Artist Francesco Candeloro

Ettore Spalletti - Nostalgia, Rome

Giulio Paolini - Sulla Soglia

Anthony Gormley - Felling Material XII

Mimi Libeert and Boris Vervoordt

Jannis Kounellis - Untitled

Osamu Kokufu - Attic Garden

Pascale and Duccio Trombadori with Ketty Alvera'

Verdiana Durand de la Penne

photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Silvia Iliadis and Viola Romoli

Margherita Alvera', Riccarda Belgioioso and Martina Mazzotta Lanza

photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Mariano Fortuny’s Atelier. In addition, to commemorate this exceptional exhibition, visitors will are given the unique opportunity to view parts of the original Palazzo which have previously been closed to the public, including the Atelier of Mariano Fortuny on the first floor, three new lateral rooms on the second floor, and seven late gothic windows which have been closed since the 18th century.

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Venice Biennale: Chinese Pavilion - Pervasion

Photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Arsenale: Chinese Pavilion – Pervasion. Pervasion is the title of the exhibition in the Chinese Pavilion. Images, sounds and flavors. Entering the Pavilion we are enchanted by the typical perfume of Chinese culture: tea, lotus flower, wine, medicine herbs and incense mix together with images and sounds to create new intense sensations. White clouds magically appear in the outdoor gardens. The Pavilion is curated by artist Peng Feng and the commissioners are Zhang Yu and Yan Dong.

Above: Empty Incense by Yuan Gong. Twenty sets of ultrasonic atomizers and eight sets of high-pressure water mist system make the Chinese Pavilion and the outside space filled with atomized fragrance.

The Artist. Yuan Gong. The Empty Incenses installation releases fog gradually with circulation and when the space is filled with fog and gets saturated, the objective scene of the inside and the outside will disappear transiently and quietly.

Photograph by Manfredi Bellati

Snow Melting in Lotus – Pan Gonkai. The work is about the border of Western Modern Art. The screen is based on a large-scale Ink Painting Withered Lotus Cast by Iron by Pan Gonkai. As an achieved Ink Painter in both traditional and contemporary sense, Pan means to present the most traditional subject of Chinese painting – lotus, will all well-kept ink painting techniques, to mark a remarkable new step forward within the literati tradition of ink and brush paintings and open up new dimensions for future Chinese Ink painting in his unprecedented oversize scale compositions.

The Artist. Yang Maoyuan – All Things Visible

Yang Maoyuan – All Things Visible. “All Things Visible is an allusion to the secrets concealed within a jar. Also, this English title basically explains one of the intentions of this work, namely that there are no secrets in this world. Why I say that? This aroma is concealed within the vessel like a secret and thus the odor that is perceived through the sense of smell, and the tangible object that is apparent through sense of touch have been inextricably fused together.” Yang Maoyuan.

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Venice: seen at the Venice Biennale

22 June 2011 - Ai Weiwei released from jail but he is not free.

Seen walking around the Venice Biennale hundreds of these totes given out by the Kunsthaus-Bregenz.

Did these help?

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Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Venice: Not Only Biennale - Julian Schnabel - Museo Correr

Museo Correr: Julian Schnabel - Permanently Becoming, And The Architecture Of Seeing. Until November 27^th in the majestic rooms of the Museo Correr in the Piazza San Marco, Julian Schnabel’s exhibition Permanently Becoming, And The Architecture Of Seeing. A painter, a sculptor, and a director, Schnabel is distinguished for his surprising metamorphic ability and his passionate expressive strength seen in his art, inspired by Jackson Pollock’s and Cy Twombly’s, but in European and Mediterranean tradition as well.