A controversial exhibition by graffiti artist Banksy has been closed for "legal reasons"

July 22nd, 2003

The show was shut after painted animals, which became hot and distressed, were taken back to their farm, a spokeswoman said.
Organisers did not want to go on without the main attractions - cows, sheep and pigs that attracted animal rights protestors - but there were actually no legal problems, she said.
Banksy is now considering taking the show on a national tour, the spokeswoman added.
The exhibition, called Turf War, was held in a disused garage in east London.

Religious images

It stayed open for one day after the animals were taken away - but it was decided to keep the doors shut on Monday, the final day.
Turf War also included a painting of the baby Jesus with a bomb strapped to his chest and Banksy's version of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker.
Banksy, from Bristol, real name Robin Banks, has been hailed as "Britain's most celebrated graffiti artist" and designed Blur's latest album cover.
Turf War included pigs painted in police colours, sheep painted in concentration camp stripes and a cow covered in images of Andy Warhol's face.
The animals were removed because the "severe heat and heavy petting" were "causing distress to the animals", a statement said.
Their removal had nothing to do with protests by animal welfare campaigners, organisers said.
The beasts were all show animals from Cheddar, Somerset, were used to being on public view, and the paint was animal-friendly, a spokeswoman said.
An inspector from the RSPCA approved the animals' conditions, the spokeswoman said.
And Hackney Borough Council said they were not happy about the show going ahead - but could do nothing to stop it.

Celebrity party

A demonstrator, Debbie Young, chained herself to railings surrounding a cow, in protest at what she saw as animal cruelty.
Stars including Jamie Oliver, Sara Cox and Jarvis Cocker turned up to the show's opening party on Thursday.
Banksy has turned down four requests to do adverts for Nike and his work is usually seen only on walls in cities across the world.
He has previously painted the Queen as a chimpanzee during her Golden Jubilee and sprayed "Mind the crap" on the steps of the Tate Britain before the Turner Prize ceremony.

Источник: www.bbc.co.uk

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Works by Cйzanne, Gauguin and Renoir stolen in Argentina 23 years ago have been fond in Paris

July 22nd, 2003

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA.- Works by Cйzanne, Gauguin and Renoir stolen in Argentina 23 years ago have been fond in Paris. The find was confirmed this week by Interpol. The works had been stolen 23 years ago from the Museo de Bellas Artes of Argentina.

The three paintings were stolen on Christmas Night of 1980, together with other 13 works of art. This was later known as the greatest art theft in Argentina. Jorge Glusberg, director of the Museo de Bellas Artes, confirmed that the works were found. He stated that Interpol and Argentine justice agents will fly to Paris to see the works and negotiate their return to Buenos Aires.

The three works are: “The Road,” a watercolor by Paul Cйzanne and with an estimated value between $120,000 and $160,000 dollars; “Portrait of a Woman,” an oil painting by Auguste Renoir, estimated at around $500,000 and $700,000 dollars; “The Call,” by Gauguin with an estimated value between $150,000 and $200,000 dollars.

The 16 works were stolen from the Museo deBellas Artes on the night of December 25, 1980 and were valued by Christie’s for $2.8 million dollars. The works were part of the Mercedes Santamarina Collection, whose brother was a local collector. Works by Cйzanne, Degas and Matisse are still missing.

Источник: www.artdaily.com

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Art Forum Berlin 2003 will be on view from October 1 to October 5, 2003

July 16th, 2003

BERLIN, GERMANY.- The International Fair for Contemporary Art Art Forum Berlin 2003 will be on view from October 1 to October 5, 2003. Art Forum Berlin, The International Fair for Contemporary Art, will take place this year from October 1st through the 5th in Europe’s most exciting and eagerly visited cultural capital. The Professional Preview and Vernissage will be held on Tuesday, September 30th. Presenting visitors with a captivating overview of new tendencies in current art production, Art Forum Berlin continues to draw increasingly higher numbers of art-lovers, collectors, curators and critics to Berlin each consecutive year. The city’s ongoing evolution into a outstanding art metropolis further pro-vides an incomparably enriching artistic back-drop for this most daring of international art fairs.

For the first time since its founding in 1996, Art Forum Berlin will now be presented in the airy daylight halls 18 to 20 at the Berlin Fairgrounds, allowing for an even more appealing ambiance and underscoring Art Forum Berlin as a clear and lively platform for the presentation and trade of contemporary art. The fair will feature 99 galleries from 24 coun-tries showing work spanning the entire range of artistic mediums. Video, along with photography, painting, sculpture and installation will be represented. In 2003, the proportion of exhibitors from countries other than Germany remains steadily at 55%, substantiating the unbroken interest in Berlin as a significant site for contemporary art.

Art Forum Berlin boasts an extensive program of panel discussions accompanying the fair and numerous parallel exhibitions and events taking place in the city, making it a highlight event of Europe’s autumn art season. Among the panel discussions for 2003 in which renowned artists, curators and other professionals from across the globe will take part, are those focussing on biennales and their relationship to the host city, the art scene and culture politics of Slovenia, the interdisciplinary hybrid between art and film and Canada’s contemporary art scene. As in previous years, there will once again be an extensive program for international collectors and VIPs.

Applicants to Art Forum Berlin are juried by an annually changing international Admission’s Committee which this year consisted of: Patricia Asbaek (Galerie Asbaek, Copenhagen), Georg Kargl (Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna), Frank Lehmann (Galerie Gebrьder Lehmann, Leipzig) and Thomas Schulte (Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin) as well as curators Marcella Beccaria (Castello di Rivoli, Turin), Ulrike Groos (Director of the Kunsthalle Dьsseldorf). and Christian Nagel (Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne/Berlin) as representative of the International Galleries Advisory Board.

Источник: www.artdaily.com

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SOTHEBY'S sells rediscovered Rembrandt self-portrait for Ј6,949,600 ($11,346,290)

July 16th, 2003

A RECENTLY-DISCOVERED Rembrandt self-portrait dated 1634 sold at Sotheby's in London for Ј6,949,600 ($11,346,290/¬9,991,540) - the highest price ever achieved for a Rembrandt self-portrait and the fourth highest price ever paid at auction for a work by the artist.

The painting sold to the American collector Steve Wynn, who was bidding in person on the telephone and who bought the painting after a lively battle with a determined private collector bidding in the room. The self-portrait was the highlight of today's Old Master Paintings sales which made a combined total of Ј22,426,640 ($36,614,921), and which saw many works handsomely exceed their pre-sale estimates, with new auction records set for works by Jean-Marc Nattier and Giulio Cesare Procaccini.

Alex Bell, Head of Old Master Paintings at Sotheby's in London said: "We were delighted with the price achieved by the portrait, which fully reflects the importance of the work and its intriguing history. The painting will now go on public display in Las Vegas and we are very glad that the wider public will have an opportunity to see it at first-hand. In addition to the Rembrandt, the sale saw strong, competitive bidding throughout, with some exceptional prices achieved for works by Vernet, Vanvitelli, Carracci and many others. Today's sales confirm that quality works which are fresh to the market are as sought-after as ever, and demand for Old Master Paintings remains extremely strong."

The Rembrandt self-portrait, which was hidden for over 300 years behind layers of overpaint, will now be hung in the Wynn Resorts Collection in Las Vegas where it will be on view to the public. The striking image of one of the world's most celebrated masters recently emerged after more than two years of painstaking cleaning and is the first Rembrandt self-portrait to appear at auction in the last 30 years. (The last one sold at Sotheby's in 1973.) It is also one of only three known Rembrandt self-portraits still in private hands. Sold by a descendant of the French collector Paul Page, the painting exceeded its pre-sale estimate of Ј4,000,000-Ј6,000,000 by a healthy margin.

Self-Portrait with shaded eyes had previously lain concealed beneath the reworking of one of Rembrandt's pupils who, shortly after the work was executed in 1634, transformed the portrait into a fanciful study of a flamboyantly dressed Russian aristocrat. After various attempts at cleaning by curious owners in the twentieth-century, the painting was taken to Amsterdam in 2000 where it was subjected to careful research and restoration by Ernst van de Wetering (Head of the Rembrandt Research Project) and Martin Bijl (former Head of Conservation at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam).

Источник: www.sothebys.com

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Kasimir Malevich an exhibition in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. NEW YORK, through September 07, 2003

July 6th, 2003

The Guggenheim's delayed survey of the career of Kasimir Malevich, curated by Matthew Drutt (late of the Guggenheim and now with the Menil Collection, Houston), is probably the most revealing show to date of the wizard of the Russian avant-garde. Some 120 paintings, drawings, and objects, from breakthrough works like Black Square and Black Cross to the portraits of the '30s, illustrate the evolution, achievements, and disintegration of the founder of Suprematism. If some of Malevich's sociopolitical aspirations for his Soviet-period abstraction seem headily ambitious, there's no doubting his intellectual rigor and pervasive influence. New archival research should give the multiauthor catalogue a long shelf life.

Richard Shone

Источник: www.artforum.com

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Sotheby's Auctions, July 10, 2003. Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), ‘The Montalto Madonna’ . Estimate: 470,000–780,000 USD

July 6th, 2003

The appearance of this remarkable painting at auction marks an important rediscovery of what was assumed to be a lost work by the great 17th-century painter, Annibale Carracci. The painting, commonly referred to as ‘The Montalto Madonna’, after Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto who commissioned the work in circa 1598, had only previously been known through engravings and numerous contemporary painted copies. Its recent reappearance has provoked great excitement among art historians.

The painting was already famous at the beginning of the 17th century: the biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori speaks eloquently of it in his Vite of 1672, stating that it had been much copied; a remark supported by the existence of numerous versions today. Although by the time Bellori was writing the painting was in the collection of Lorenzo Salviati in Rome, it seems to have disappeared soon afterwards. It is only through careful study, with the aid of an 18th-century inventory number on the reverse of the picture, that the Old Master Paintings department at Sotheby’s has been able to reconstruct the painting’s history and provenance, uninterrupted from the 17th century until today. The copper remained in the Salviati collection until the last member of the family line married Fabrizio Colonna, and then the painting passed by descent through the Colonna family until the end of the 18th century. It was probably around this time that it was bought by Sir Archibald Campbell, possibly while in Italy during a Grand Tour, and the picture was hanging in his residence in Scotland, Garscube House, by 1857. The house was sold to Glasgow University in 1947 and the contents were dispersed the following year: the Carracci appears in an auction catalogue of February 1948 with a correct attribution to Carracci but not recognized as being the lost ‘Montalto Madonna’.

This picture displays all the qualities for which Carracci was most admired. His Classicising style combines High Renaissance influences, particularly those of Correggio, with a new naturalism. This novel approach to painting formed the basis of the teachings of the Accademia degli Incamminati, in which Carracci played a founding role, and which provided a platform for the launch of the Baroque in Italy.

Letizia Treves. Director in the Old Master Paintings department, Sotheby’s London.

Источник: www.sothebys.com

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Norwich Gallery Presents “EASTinternational”.

July 6th, 2003

The Norwich Gallery presents today “EASTinternational - Selectors Toby Webster and Eva Rothschild,” on view through August 23, 2003. The selectors of EASTinternational 2003, Toby Webster (Director of the Modern Institute Glasgow) and sculptor Eva Rothschild, have chosen 30 artists from Scotland, England, Europe and the USA whose work will form an exhibition that highlights new directions emerging from contemporary artistic practice, in particular a focus on the way artists have explored fresh responses to twentieth century modernist art, design, architecture and history.

In the introduction to the EASTinternational catalogue, ’The Future isn’t any Better’, Lynda Morris writes about how emerging artists in Britain today see their historical context as being just that of the last decade. For young artists today, then, the history of modernist art and design is something to be rediscovered and used again, but in potentially unexpected or irreverent ways. This has led, for example, to a renewed interest in the ’handmade’ image or object, reflected in the fact that this year’s EASTinternational includes just one purely digital, video work and shows a return to painting and sculpture.

A number of the selected artists make work that makes specific reference to modern architecture and design, and to ways in which we may or may not live today in the utopias promised by the progressive art and architecture of the mid-twentieth century. Ideas of construction, materials, colour and pattern appear repeatedly in EASTinternational 2003, and point to ways in which we might still propose idealistic social changes in contemporary culture and at the same time have ambivalent feelings about the idea of the future. EASTinternational has commissioned a special edition of the graphic comic-book Art School Scum, available for visitors under 18, that satirises the exhibition.

Artists: Alex Frost, Alex Graham, Alex Pollard, Camilla Lшw, Caroline De Lannoy, Christopher Landoni, Christopher Wraith, Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson, Craig Kucia, Elise Ferguson, Francis Lamb, Gareth Jones, Gregor Wright, James Pyman, Karla Black, Kate Davis, Lawrence Corby, Lorna Macintyre, Lynn Hynd, Mark Pearson, Markus Amm, Martin Poyner, Michael Stumpf, Nike Savvas, Peter McDonald, Richard Hughes, Ruth Claxton, Sara MacKillop, Simon Bloor, and Toby Ziegler.

EASTwork, funded by the Regional Arts Lottery Project, has enabled the commission of two major projects in 2002/3. Matthew Houlding was invited after EAST 2002 to undertake a major outdoor sculpture. Fabricated in steel and aluminium, with a golden interior, The Long Journey Home, Sapphire Ex15 will be a futuristic space in which to sit and think amongst the trees between the University’s modern architecture. EASTwork has also produced a collaboration with slimvolume for a loose bound set of posters, made as an edition of 150 by the 30 exhibiting artists and 2 selectors. Half of the edition will be given to people selected by the artists, slimvolume and EAST, while 75 copies will be on sale during the exhibition price Ј30.

Источник: www.artdaily.com

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