Displaying items by tag: sculptures

On Saturday, May 17, Jack Shainman inaugurated The School, his new gallery in Kinderhook, New York, with a performance by Nick Cave. Shainman, who runs two galleries in Manhattan, originally set out to find a storage space for his growing collection. After a change in plans, he enlisted Spanish architect Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas to convert the former Martin Van Buren Elementary School into a gallery. Outfitted with the requisite white walls and poured concrete floors, the space retained some of its original features, including the proscenium arch that once towered over the auditorium’s stage.

The 30,000-square-foot gallery, which is currently open by appointment only, is hosting an abbreviated Cave retrospective. Cave, a former dancer who trained with Alvin Ailey, is best known for his Soundsuits -- wearable fabric sculptures that are brightly colored and otherworldly, often made from found objects. The exhibition at The School also includes tondos sculpted out of fabric, mind-bending wallpaper, and bricolage sculptures. Cave’s performance on Saturday night featured dancers from nearby Williams College wearing his Soundsuits and traditional Ghanese music courtesy of the Agbekor Friends Society. In addition to hosting exhibitions, The School also houses Shainman’s growing permanent collection.

 Gagosian Gallery in New York is currently hosting an exhibition of Alexander Calder’s gouache paintings on paper. Best known for his kinetic sculptures or “mobiles,” Calder created lesser-known gouache paintings throughout his life.

Calder created his first series of paintings in gouache during a year-long stay in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1953. These spur-of-the-moment paintings were more immediate than Calder’s large-sale sculptures, which he was producing at the same time. While Calder’s paintings and sculptures both explore form, space, and balance, his gouaches are anchored in the natural world, while his sculptures tend to be more abstract. Calder also wandered outside of his restricted palette of black, white, and other primary colors in his gouaches, often experimenting with vivid ochres, yellows, and vermillion

Winslow Homers in the shadow of a defunct Beech-Nut baby food plant. A Rembrandt, Picasso, Rubens and Renoir up the hill from a paper mill. The founder of the Hudson River School vying for attention amid baseball memorabilia and old farm machinery.

There are plenty of treasures to be found among the collections of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-path art museums dotting upstate New York. But they're well worth the trek for anyone looking for great art in unexpected places, whether it's the rolling, bucolic countryside typical of many areas or the industrial grittiness of riverside mill towns.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which stood by Steven A. Cohen last year as his SAC Capital Advisors LP bore the brunt of a massive insider trading probe, has come to the billionaire’s aid again.

The top prime broker to the former hedge-fund firm, Goldman Sachs is making a personal loan to Cohen for the first time, according to a regulatory filing, joining the list of banks that have provided SAC’s founder with credit lines backed by his $1 billion art collection. Like Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., New York-based Goldman Sachs is making the loan through its private bank as part of an effort to expand its business catering to ultra-wealthy individuals.

As flowers begin to peak out on campus, many of Harvard’s most recognizable sculptures have also emerged from their winter covers—just in time for a tour of the Yard’s public art works, hosted by Harvard Art Museums on Friday.

“I am interested in the life of objects,” said Francesca G. Bewer, the research curator who shared details about the artists, materials, and history behind the sculptures. “I am interested in how things are made, and I think other people are too.”

The Hall Art Foundation announces an exhibition by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson being held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 3 May – 30 November 2014. This survey brings a focused selection of Eliasson’s sculptures, photo series, optical devices, and works on paper together with his major outdoor installation, Waterfall (2004), unveiled at the Hall Art Foundation last year.

Throughout the past two decades, Eliasson’s installations, paintings, photography, films, and public projects have served as tools for exploring the cognitive and cultural conditions that inform our perception. Ranging from immersive environments of color, light, and movement to installations that recontextualize natural phenomena, his work defies the notion of art as an autonomous object and instead positions itself as part of an active exchange with the visitor and his or her individualized experience. Described by the artist as “devices for the experience of reality,” his individual works and projects prompt a greater sense of awareness about the ways we both interpret and co-produce the world. By recreating the natural through artificial means and capturing it in both time and space, Eliasson's work encourages the renegotiation of linear perceptions of space as well as the line between reality and representation.

Paris’s Picasso museum, which houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of the Spanish painter’s work, is set to reopen its doors in September after being closed for five years for renovation, the culture ministry announced Sunday.

The popular museum was originally to be closed for a two-year renovation and the delay has caused controversy, with the painter's son Claude Picasso on Friday accusing the French government of indifference and saying he was "scandalised and very worried" about the future of the museum.

Widely considered one of the greatest sculptors of all time, British artist Henry Moore played a pivotal role in translating modernism into three dimensions. A new exhibition at the artist’s former home in Hertfordshire, England, examines the influence that Moore’s soaring, organic sculptures had on contemporary art.

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” presents works by some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary arts, including Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor. Works by a number of post-war artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, are also included in the exhibition. Site specific works by leading British artists Richard Deacon and Robert Long have been commissioned as part of the show.

“Body & Void” presents sculptures that examine Moore’s central themes, including the exploration of internal and external space, mother and child, and figures in a landscape, alongside contemporary works that touch on the same topics. For example, Hirst’s “Mother and Child (Divided),” a bisected cow and calf floating in giant tanks of formaldehyde, appears between Moore’s rose marble sculpture “Mother and Child” and “Stringed Mother and Child,” a single plaster cast that features two forms connected by a series of cords. The three works explore the same mother and child relationship in vastly different ways.

“Body and Void” fills the galleries and gardens at Perry Green, where Moore lived and worked for 50 years. The estate is also home to the Henry Moore Foundation, which was established by the artist in 1977. Although Moore amassed considerable wealth during his lifetime, he chose to live frugally and put most of his fortune towards endowing the Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.  

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” will remain on view at Perry Green through October 26.

American sculptor Richard Serra has won the the Architectural League of New York’s 2014 President’s Medal. The award is the League’s highest honor and is bestowed, at the discretion of the organization’s President and Board of Directors, on individuals to recognize an extraordinary body of work in architecture, urbanism, art, or design. Recent recipients of the award have included Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Serra is best-known for his large-scale steel sculptures that explore the physical and visual relationships that exist between the viewer, the site, and the work. He has produced a number of site-specific sculptures that engage with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. Serra’s latest work, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates placed in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It is his second public commission in Qatar.

Serra, who is the first visual artist to win the Architectural League’s President’s Medal, will be given the award on May 6 in New York City.

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has launched a website that allows users to explore its vast collection from any location. The eMuseum features the institution’s best known works of art, many of which are not currently on view, and allows visitors to browse collections by object or artist. Users can view images of each work and create their own collections through the site.

To date, over 1,000 paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been photographed, catalogued, and uploaded to the website. The museum’s entire 12,500-work collection will be available online by 2018. The first phase of the project was made possible thanks to a $13,000 Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and support from the Welfare Foundation. 

The Delaware Art Museum focuses on American art of the 19th through the 21st centuries and English Pre-Raphaelite art of the mid-19th century. To access the museum’s new database, click here.