Latest news with #AlexanderCalder
Identity
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Identity
Exploring Movement & Balance: Calder/Hiquily Exhibition at Opera Gallery
March 2025–Opera Gallery is pleased to present 'Calder/Hiquily: Balancing Act', an exhibition dedicated to the artists Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Philippe Hiquily (1925-2013) from April 15- May 4, 2025. Featuring 8 works on paper and 21 sculptural works, this exhibition presents a visual dialogue about Calder and Hiquily's shared fascination with movement, material, and form. Alexander Calder, who studied mechanical engineering before pursuing art at the Art Students League in New York, is known for his pioneering mobiles and kinetic sculptures, that revolutionised modern sculpture with the innovative use of wire and metal. With his use of mathematics and principles of engineering, Calder's practice represented a broader conceptual engagement with the relationship between humans and machines, as well as art and technology. By Calder's estimation, kinetic art was striving to 'lift the figures and scenery off the page and prove undeniably that art is not rigid'. Calder's 1953 mobile New Old Universe, with its colourful, spherical forms suspended in perfect harmony, exemplifies the synchronicity between precision and coincidence at the core of his practice.
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Danish Art Show Examines Our Awe, and Terror, of the Deep
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, roughly 25 miles north of Copenhagen, occupies a sprawling estate on Denmark's eastern coast. From its sculpture garden, featuring works by Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, the eye travels out over the cliff to the Oresund Sound. On the other side of that shimmering water, roughly eight miles away, lies Sweden. This is a spectacular setting for any exhibition, but is particularly well suited for the one now on view: 'Ocean,' an expansive look at the pull that the deep has exerted on the human imagination (through April 27). That topic is, of course, as vast and fathomless as the sea itself. The roughly 130 artworks and objects that comprise 'Ocean' are spread over an entire wing of the museum and include paintings, sculptures, photos and videos, as well as scientific specimens, archaeological finds and even live fish. Through these objects, the exhibition fuses past with present and art with science to illuminate how our shifting perspectives have always shaped how we understand and interact with the sea. Thematic and multidisciplinary exhibitions like 'Ocean' and earlier ones held at the Louisiana, including 'The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,' which ran in 2018, might strike some museum-goers as unexpected — not the sort of fare they are used to seeing at a modern art museum. According to Poul Erik Tojner, the museum's director since 2000, these kinds of shows can also serve as a refreshing corrective. 'You sometimes get the impression that everybody thinks that art is only about art, which is a nice point of view, but it is obvious that art also has an extreme potential for talking about the world,' said Tojner, who also is one of the show's three Danish curators. He said that assembling a show of disparate works — which here included marble statues retrieved from the ocean floor, an 18th-century shell cabinet with more than 800 specimens, and precious minerals from the seabed — 'is a way of reactivating a lot of stories and narratives that are inherent in artworks.' 'Both the moon and the ocean are really motors for all kinds of myths and rituals and religious thinking,' added Tine Colstrup, the show's lead curator, who joined Tojner on a recent tour of the exhibition. 'So it's interesting to explore these themes and kind of let knowledge areas join forces,' she continued. Visitors to 'Ocean' are greeted by enlargements of pages from Anna Atkins's 'Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions' (1843-1853), often considered the world's first photography book. Atkins, a Victorian-era botanist, placed seaweed on an emulsion that turned Prussian blue when exposed to light, leaving white, shadow-like impressions where the algae had been — a method familiar to anyone who has ever made sun prints. Her dreamlike and semi-abstract images help to set the tone for the contents of the opening galleries, with their emphasis on how rapidly evolving technology has both demystified the sea and made it the subject of art over the past 150 years. Inside the first room is the Lithuanian artist Emilija Skarnulyte's large-scale video installation 'Aphotic Zone' (2022), in which documentary footage from deep-sea research expeditions is blended with fictional, digital visions of a post-human underwater world. Colstrup felt it was important to introduce the theme of the exhibition in an aesthetic, rather than an intellectual, way. 'When we talk about the ocean, yes it's science and we have climate change, but it's also beauty, and it's something sensual,' she said. In the next gallery, visitors are invited to compare the high-definition video that Skarnulyte used in 'Aphotic Zone' with earlier underwater films by Jean Painlevé, whose cinematic portraits of octopuses and sea horses are every bit as astonishing as they were nearly a century ago, and by the popular deep-sea diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau. The footage from the pioneering aquatic filmmakers that is in the show suggests that contemporary deep-sea video would be unthinkable without their innovations. From there the show dives further back in time, with a stunning display of 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates, among them sea slugs and cephalopods. They are the painstaking work of the father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, master glass artisans from Dresden, Germany. They made their menagerie largely for research purposes and with meticulous scientific observation, mechanical precision and a dash of creativity. These exquisite, fragile objects, whose wild colors, astounding detail and high degree of verisimilitude make them look like psychedelic pastries, are among the most dazzling works in 'Ocean.' But even the more conventional presentations contain surprises. In a room dedicated to the sublime, a key motif in Romantic art, violent depictions of the sea abound. The first item in that gallery, however, is a poster for the 2000 disaster film 'The Perfect Storm' by the German director Wolfgang Petersen, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. The poster unmistakably revisits the iconography of 19th-century paintings of shipwrecks, with a beleaguered vessel surfing the wave of a digitally rendered squall. With this somewhat cheeky choice, the exhibition makes the point that our imaginations are still as riveted by the overwhelming violence and passion of the sea as they were over two centuries ago, when Caspar David Friedrich painted 'After the Storm' (1817), which also features in the exhibition. 'Ocean' also reckons with painful narratives, including the legacy of colonialism and slavery. The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's haunting sculpture 'Akua's Surviving Children' (1996) evokes historical crimes and traumas through driftwood sculptures made with wood collected from a beach roughly a dozen miles north of this museum. The artist assembled the work, a group of standing figures that recalls Rodin's 'The Burghers of Calais,' at a nearby former arms factory that produced long-barreled flintlock muskets known as Dane guns, weapons that played a key role in the Danish slave trade in Ghana. Colstrup said she was particularly glad to have Anatsui's work in the show given how Denmark's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade remained something of a historical blind spot for the country. 'It's an extremely political and very local piece,' she said. Nearby, the ocean is depicted not only as a site of oppression but also of resilience and rebirth. The two companion paintings that make up the American artist Ellen Gallagher's 'Fast Fish and Loose Fish' (2023) reference the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya — an alternative Black history of an underwater utopia populated by descendants of enslaved Africans thrown from slave ships. Kara Walker's collage 'Rift of the Medusa' (2017) offers a Black and feminist response to Théodore Géricault's famous painting 'The Raft of the Medusa,' which depicts the deadly aftermath of an 1816 shipwreck off the West African coast. As the show progresses, it leaves behind the myths — old and new — that the ocean has inspired in favor of a more explicit confrontation with environmental crises. 'We didn't want to make a climate show,' said Colstrup. At the same time, she acknowledged that when putting together an exhibition like this, it was impossible to ignore the strain — plastic pollution, rising sea levels and marine biodiversity loss — on the ocean right now. In 'Flooded McDonald's,' a video by the Danish art collective Superflex, a replica of the fast-food restaurant is submerged beneath murky water, with a bobbing statue of Ronald McDonald and trash — the debris of consumer culture — floating eerily through the abandoned interior. In the Danish-born artist Kirsten Justesen's 'Mer Maid / Hav Frue' (1990), 16 small black-and-white images arranged in a four-by-four grid, a modern-day Venus in a bathing suit vacuums pollution from the sea — a comment both on environmental neglect and an assertion of female resilience. One of the concluding pieces -— and one of the exhibition's highlights — is 'Vertigo Sea,' by the Ghanaian-born British artist John Akomfrah. The three-screen video installation that blends historical imagery of whaling, migration and ecological disasters was first screened at the Venice Biennale in 2015. The 48-minute-long film presents the ocean and humans' interactions with it as part beauty, part horror. Placing the video toward the end of 'Ocean' makes sense; it underscores one of the exhibition's preoccupations: that the ocean, endlessly symbolic and physically finite, demands understanding and responsible stewardship. Colstrup recalled something that ocean scientists and marine biologists told her when she was putting the show together. 'If we are to protect something, anything, we need to know it exists and we need to love it.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
BMW Marks 50 Years of Iconic Art Car Collection with Global Exhibition Tour
⚡️ Read the full article on Motorious BMW's iconic Art Car collection is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, launching a global exhibition tour highlighting the unique convergence of automotive engineering and contemporary art. Since its inception in 1975, when American sculptor Alexander Calder turned a BMW 3.0 CSL race car into a vivid, rolling canvas, BMW's Art Car initiative has drawn some of the art world's most influential figures, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Jenny Holzer. To date, 20 renowned artists have transformed BMW vehicles into dynamic artworks, making the series one of the automotive world's most ambitious and celebrated cultural endeavors. To mark half a century of collaboration, BMW announced its largest-ever international tour for the Art Car series, featuring special events and exhibitions spanning five continents. The collection represents an extraordinary timeline of art history, encompassing minimalism, pop art, conceptualism, abstraction, and digital expression. 'Our 20 BMW Art Cars have become global icons, narrating stories about society, technology, and performance," said Ilka Horstmeier, BMW Group Board Member for Human Resources and Real Estate. "This anniversary highlights our enduring commitment to fostering innovation and creativity through meaningful artistic partnerships.' Julie Mehretu's recent work, the BMW M Hybrid V8—the 20th Art Car—will make prominent appearances, including exhibitions at Art Basel in Hong Kong and the Shanghai Auto Show. Beyond the car itself, Mehretu's project includes workshops for young filmmakers and media artists in five African countries, culminating in an exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town in 2026. Other milestone events include a European kickoff featuring Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Koons at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts and SPARK Art Fair, followed by appearances at prestigious events such as the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este in Italy and special museum exhibitions across Europe and Asia. To commemorate the anniversary, BMW will release a third edition of its comprehensive Art Car catalogue, a new limited-edition scale model of Mehretu's car, and a new fashion collection in partnership with Puma. The BMW Art Car project, first envisioned by racing driver Hervé Poulain and BMW Motorsport chief Jochen Neerpasch, has evolved into a globally recognized fusion of automotive and contemporary art, continuously inspiring new dialogues between artists and automotive enthusiasts alike.
Washington Post
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Trump administration slashes division in charge of 26,000 U.S. artworks
The future of a vast collection of public artwork is in doubt as the Trump administration plans to fire workers who preserve and maintain more than 26,000 pieces owned by the U.S. government, including paintings and sculptures by renowned artists, some dating to the 1850s. Fine arts and historic preservation workers at the General Services Administration told The Washington Post that at least five regional offices were shuttered last week and that more than half of the division's approximately three dozen staff members were abruptly put on leave pending their terminations. Workers expressed fear that the cuts will threaten a collection of precious art housed in federal buildings across the country, including Alexander Calder's 1974 'Flamingo' at the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago and Michael Lantz's 1942 'Man Controlling Trade' outside the Federal Trade Commission building in D.C.
Arab News
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Tuwaiq International Sculpture Symposium launches in Riyadh
RIYADH: The sixth annual Tuwaiq International Sculpture Symposium began in Riyadh on Wednesday with 30 works of art created during a live sculpting exhibition at Roshn Front last month. Held under the theme 'From Then to Now: Joy in the Struggle of Making,' the event runs until Feb. 24. The annual symposium brings together local and international artists, and includes a series of workshops, educational trips and interactive talks. Organizers have announced that all sculptures created during the event will become part of the permanent collection of Riyadh Art. These sculptures will be placed in prominent public spaces across the city, complementing the 35 sculptures from previous editions of the Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium, which were installed at the King Abdulaziz Historical Center. Among the prominent additions to Riyadh Art's permanent collection are 'LOVE (Red Outside Blue Inside)' by American artist Robert Indiana and 'Janey Waney' by American artist Alexander Calder, both located at the King Abdullah Financial District Metro Station. Additionally, 'Sun' by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone was recently installed at the King Abdulaziz Historical Center. Riyadh Art is dedicated to installing more than 1,000 public artworks throughout the city as part of its efforts to enhance and diversify Riyadh's cultural landscape. The symposium showcases works created at Roshn Front during a live public sculpting phase which took place from Jan. 15-Feb. 8. The event featured artists from a range of backgrounds. Out of more than 750 applications from around the world, 30 artists from 23 countries were selected. The artists represent a wide range of sculptural traditions and contemporary practices, with each piece reflecting this year's theme. Sebastian Betancur-Montoya, curator of the 2025 Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium, said: 'The exhibition is the culmination of weeks of dedication, artistic exchange and craftsmanship. 'These sculptures are not merely temporary installations; they are part of an ongoing cultural dialogue that connects history with modernity, contributing to the development of Riyadh's public art scene.' As part of the public engagement program for the live sculpting phase, which features group discussions, workshops, training sessions and guided tours, the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to interact with the artists' creative processes and gain a deeper understanding of the importance of contemporary sculpture. Tuwaiq Sculpture is a key program within the Riyadh Grand Projects, an initiative launched by King Salman in 2019.
