Displaying items by tag: sculptures

Madison Square Park regulars are furious that a 500-foot-long art installation will hover over their green space for nine months, blocking sunlight and views of natural trees.

The massive installation, called Fata Morgana and funded by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, is made to appear like shimmering canopies that are raised on top of metal scaffolding to hover over various paths in the park until January 2016.

When a dozen weather-worn wood sculptures from southeastern Nigeria debuted in a Paris gallery in 1974, they were radically different from any African art that had been exhibited in the West. After that brief assembly, the carved Mbembe figures mostly retreated from public view to private collections, excepting one on proud view in the Louvre. "Warriors and Mothers: Epic Mbembe Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art now reunites those works from the 17th to 19th centuries for the first time since the 1974 Paris exhibition.

The sculptures — originally part of massive drums used to communicate between Mbembe communities — remain as enigmatic as they were in 1972 when gallery owner and art dealer Hélène Kamer acquired them from a Malian dealer named O. Traoré.

When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district on May 1, it’s the big things everyone will notice first: the sweeping views west to the Hudson River; the romantic silhouettes of Manhattan’s wooden water towers; the four outdoor terraces for presenting sculptures, performances and movie screenings; and the tiered profile of its steel-paneled facade, intentionally reminiscent of the Whitney’s Modernist, granite-clad Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which had been the museum’s home since 1966.

Its new digs, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, also offer commodious interior spaces: 50,000 square feet of galleries, unencumbered by structural columns, and huge elevators that are themselves immersive environments, the work of the artist Richard Artschwager.

Works damaged in two devastating fires in 1945 that destroyed around 400 paintings and sculptures stored in Berlin’s Friedrichshain bunker, including pieces by Caravaggio, Rubens and Donatello, are being presented in a new exhibition at the Bode Museum. “The Missing Museum: the Berlin Sculpture and Paintings Collections 70 Years after World War II”, which opened March 19, explores ethical and practical decisions museums face in regards to war-damaged works, namely whether they should be restored or left in their ruined state as a permanent reminder of the horrors of the conflict.

“One of the exhibition’s objectives is to bring these works back from oblivion into people’s consciousness,” says Julien Chapuis, the museum’s deputy director and curator of the show, adding that many of the pieces have not been exhibited since 1939.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

Jeff Koons is ramping up operations at his high-tech stone workshop in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where his sculptures are carved almost entirely by machines. This suggests that the artist may be developing new bodies of work in the medium. Since opening Antiquity Stone in 2012, Koons has more than tripled its production capacity; it now has 12 computer-operated stone-cutting machines, two robots and around 30 employees. The facility, which exists solely to fabricate Koons’s work, now bills itself as “the most advanced stone fabrication operation in the world”, according to a job advertisement it posted in January, seeking a supervisor for its Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines.

On February 27, 2015, an unprecedented exhibition will open at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Organized in partnership with Paris’ Galerie Patrick Seguin, the show will feature sculptures by the American artist John Chamberlain in visual conversation with two prefabricated houses by the French designer and architect, Jean Prouvé.  According to a press release from the Gagosian Gallery, both men were “twentieth century innovators who harnessed the strength and suppleness of metal to new potential in their respective fields.”

Since its opening in 1989, Galerie Patrick Seguin has collected demountable houses by Prouvé -- one of the most influential designers of the modern era.

The popular exhibition "Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections" at the Art Institute of Chicago has been extended for three months beyond its original closing date of Feb. 15, 2015. The show, which presents more than 60 superb artworks of the Byzantine era, from the 4th to the 15th centuries, will remain on view through May 10, 2015.

Organized by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports of Athens, Greece, with the collaboration of the Benaki Museum, Athens, and originally exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibition includes major artistic holdings from Greece consisting of mosaics, sculptures, manuscripts, luxury glass, silver, personal adornments, liturgical textiles, icons, and wall paintings.

George Bellows, Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Louise Nevelson and N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. All lived or worked in Maine.

And all are represented in the 45 paintings, sculptures and assemblages in "American Treasures from the Farnsworth Art Museum" at The Society of the Four Arts. The Farnsworth, situated in Rockland, Maine, focuses on the state’s role in American art — the extent to which might surprise some viewers.

Last year, news broke that the Louvre planned to install a selection of Jeff Koons’ large-scale balloon sculptures in its nineteenth-century galleries. The exhibit was to complement the Centre Pompidou’s comprehensive Koons retrospective, which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now, according to The Art Newspaper, the Louvre has scrapped the Koons installation due to a “lack of funding.”

The works to be exhibited at the hallowed French institution included Balloon Rabbit, Balloon Swan, and Balloon Monkey. The massive sculptures, made of mirror-polished stainless steel, are notoriously difficult (and expensive) to install.