Displaying items by tag: religious art

Al Farrow’s meticulously crafted sculptures are both haunting and mesmerizing. Using materials such as deconstructed guns, bullets, bone, glass, and steel, Farrow creates ornate religious structures, ritual objects, and reliquaries that are visually striking and emotionally confounding. Through these shockingly beautiful sculptures, Farrow examines the abiding relationships between religion and violence, peace and brutality, the sacred and the unholy.

This unique exploration began after a trip to Italy when Farrow was confronted with a reliquary containing the remains of an ancient Saint. Reliquaries, which are containers that store and display precious relics, were often crafted of or enrobed in opulent materials such as  gold, silver, ivory, enamel, and gems.

Visit InCollect.com to read more about "Al Farrow: Wrath and Reverence," now on view at Forum Gallery in New York.

About nine months ago, Sylvan Barnet, 88, a professor emeritus of English literature at Tufts University, was told that he had brain cancer. The doctors said that he had between six months and a year to live. His partner, William Burto — a retired chair of the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell — died in 2013, aged 92, after four years of illness.

Burto and Barnet met in graduate school at Harvard University in 1951. Together over the course of half a century, as they taught English, wrote textbooks, and lived in a small house in Cambridge with a third professor, the two men quietly amassed one of the finest private collections of Japanese calligraphy and religious art outside of Japan.

Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of the enterprise software company, Oracle, has loaned a portion of his inimitable collection of Japanese art to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for the exhibition In the Moment: Japanese Art from the Larry Ellison Collection. The show presents 64 objects that span over 1,000 years.

Highlights from the show include significant works by well-known artists of the Momoyama (1573-1615) and Edo (1615-1868) periods as well as important examples of religious art, lacquer, woodwork and metalwork. Ellison assembled a large portion of his collection with the help of the Asian Art Museum’s former director, Emily Sano. Serving as Ellison’s personal art curator and advisor, Sano helped the billionaire acquire hundreds of important Japanese art objects including 17^th century folding screens by Kano Sansetsu and 18^th century paintings by Maruyama Okyo.

In the Moment: Japanese Art from the Larry Ellison Collection will be on view at the Asian Art Museum through September 22, 2013.