Displaying items by tag: documentary

A new documentary about American artist Robert Mapplethorpe is coming soon.

HBO Documentary Films will debut Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures in April 2016, which is the first feature-length film on the late photographer, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Now is the time for the public to rediscover Mapplethorpe's work, over a quarter century after his death.

Fondazione Prada will open a new permanent exhibition space in Milan on May 9 with a range of planned artistic activities, some of which have been selected to create a bridge with its existing Venetian venue.

Robert Gober and Thomas Demand will create site-specific installations in response to the new building’s architecture, while director Roman Polanski will delve on his cinematographic inspirations with a new documentary and a screening of some of his films. A selection of artworks from the Prada Collection will also be curated around different themes.

A pair of feet dangle from the top half of the frame — two unremarkable men’s shoes topped by trouser legs caught mid-flap in an insistent breeze. Far below lie the diagonals and verticals of a building and its back lot — rows of blacked-out windows, regimented lines of trees. And though the plain logic of the photograph, titled “Seconds Before Landing,” from Willi Ruge’s 1931 documentary series “I photograph myself during a parachute jump,” tells you that one thing is hurtling toward another, the work gives off a strange sense of suspended motion, an anxiety that won’t quite be dispelled by any impending landing.

Plenty of the 300-plus images in MoMA’s expansive new exhibition, “Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949,” feel especially weighty with symbolic import — like Herbert Bayer’s “Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait),” 1932.

The documentary maker and writer Hannah Rothschild is to become the first woman chair of the National Gallery, it was announced on Monday. She will head the board of trustees when the businessman Mark Getty – grandson of the oil tycoon J Paul Getty and son of the philanthropist Paul Getty – steps down at the end of his term on August 10, 2015.

Rothschild, a trustee since 2009, said: “From a very young age, the National Gallery has been a source of inspiration and solace.

The explicit subject of Frederick Wiseman’s magnificent documentary “National Gallery” is the stately museum that rises at the northern end of Trafalgar Square in London. Like most of Mr. Wiseman’s work, the movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach. It’s about art and process, money and mystery, and all the many, many people gazing and gawping and, at times, lining up to see a blockbuster show. That “National Gallery” is also about movies is surely a given.

With cool intelligence and a steady camera, Mr. Wiseman guides you through the museum and past its masters, pausing to look but also to listen to what becomes a museumwide conversation on form, content and context.

The New York Times has a thorough rundown of a very messy battle over the estate of the late reclusive photographer Vivian Maier, whose talent only came to light after her death in 2009, aged 83, and “nearly penniless and with no family.” Maier spent most of her life working as a nanny for wealthy Chicago families, quietly pursuing her passion for photography out of the public eye and producing poignant, documentary scenes of everyday life in Chicago, New York, and other American cities.

Since 2007, John Maloof, a former Chicago real estate agent who purchased tens of thousands of negatives for under $400, has been actively promoting and overseeing her work through commercial galleries (most notably with the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery), exhibitions, books, and a recent documentary that he helped direct, Finding Vivian Maier.

LA-based photography non-profit the Lucie Foundation has announced the six photographers to be honored with its 12th annual Lucie Awards. During the November 2 ceremony at Carnegie Hall, Carrie Mae Weems will be honored for fine arts, Nan Goldin for portraiture, Martin Parr for documentary, and Nick Ut for photojournalism. Jane Bown will receive the Lifetime Achievement award and Pedro Meyer will be given the Visionary Award.

n a piece for the New Yorker in 2000, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” It’s a question that’s also at the heart of a new documentary about the artist that’s opening at Film Forum on May 7. LeWitt may be the chilliest member of a group of ice-cold artists associated with the male dominated first wave of minimalism, who rejected strict interpretation of their work and whose contradictions were expertly critiqued in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Flamethrowers”:

“Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself,” the main character says of her boyfriend’s work. “I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse […] and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.”

A documentary about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) has been acquired for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics. Tim’s Vermeer, which was directed by Teller of the illusionist duo Penn & Teller, features Tim Jenison, a Texas-based inventor who explores how Vermeer created his shockingly photo-realistic paintings a century before photography existed.

At one point during his ten-year investigation, Jenison traveled to Delft, Holland, where Vermeer worked, to meet with the British artist David Hockney, who had also questioned how Vermeer and his contemporaries created their breathtakingly realistic paintings. Using 17^th century technology such as lenses and mirrors, Jenison eventually figured out the technique used by the Dutch master “supporting a theory as extraordinary as what he discovers,” Sony Pictures Classics said in a news release.

Sony Pictures Classics will release Tim’s Vermeer in 2014.

The Louvre’s famed Winged Victory of Samothrace, a marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike dating back to the 2^nd century BC, has been prominently displayed at the museum since 1884. In September 2013, the work will be removed from public view so it can undergo a $4 million restoration. After the sculpture and its base have been cleaned and repaired, Winged Victory will return to its legendary spot at the museum. Officials expect the project to be completed by Spring 2014.

It became clear that Winged Victory was in need of some attention after becoming significantly discolored by dirt, lessening the distinction between the white marble of the sculpture and the gray marble of the its base. The restoration, the first in nearly 80 years, will also deal with a support frame that was inserted on the back of the statue and a crack in the work’s base. The floors, walls, stairs, and ceilings surrounding the statue will also be cleaned; this portion of the project is less timely and is expected to reach completion in late 2014 or early 2015.

The Louvre is currently working on a book, a documentary, and a symposium focusing on the Winged Victory, one of the museum's best-known pieces along with the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo.