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The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made art-world news in February, 2010, when his 1961 bronze Walking Man 1 sold at Sotheby’s in London for $104.3 million U.S. Experts had estimated it would go for between $20 and $30 million, but ten bidders sent the price skyrocketing—a surprising result given that the sculpture was produced in an edition of six. The subject of interest for numerous critics and intellectuals, including the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti’s insistently figurative art linked modernist reductivism to the European tradition of humanist sculpture. This remarkable volume establishes a context for Giacometti’s work with some family art history. Alberto’s father, Giovanni, is now recognized as an important early modern Swiss painter; another relative, Augusto, was also an adventurous painter. Giacometti’s brother Diego, a frequent model and muse for the sculptor, was a furniture designer. The reproductions are faultless throughout the book and lend a visceral presence to sculptures and paintings alike. An in-depth illustrated chronology furnishes a rich social background for an artist who is now famous for expertly rendering modern alienation.
These people walking up and down the street were unconscious automatons…like ants; everyone went his own way, by himself, entirely alone, in a direction none of the others knew…Except they would turn towards a woman. A motionless woman, and four men walking…it occurred to me that I had always made a woman standing still, and a man always walking. All of my women stand there, and all of my men walk by.
—Alberto Giacometti, 1961
In a series of recent exhibitions, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery director Michèle Thériault and the curator Vincent Bonin have been hard at work reassessing the fundamental value of archives in reconstructing a key point in contemporary Canadian art, namely the period that saw the initial rise of artist-run culture and its subsequent implosion under differing ideological and administrative points of view. This hefty volume follows up with plentiful primary sources and new critical interpretations that argue for the pros and cons of these “partially realized utopias.”
More appreciative overview than critical examination, this book traces artistic activity in the Middle Eastern region over the last half century. Organized according to a themes-plus-key-works structure, it includes more than 200 artists, only a handful of whom (such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat and Walid Raad) will be familiar to Western audiences; artworks by Wafa Hourani, Nedim Kufi and Parviz Tanavoli are highlights among the lesser-known names. While the overall quality of the included work is uneven, the book is eye-opening in several senses: it establishes the central role that calligraphy and poetry continue to play in much art from the Middle East region and allows us to witness a contemporary- art tradition that comes out of a clearly sacred rather than secular lineage.
Like the artists’ videos featured within it, this catalogue to a group exhibition curated by Hladki is infused with a direct, DIY aesthetic and clear, accessible prose. Making a case for the “nervy tinderbox vehemence” of works by Maureen Bradley, Dana Claxton, Allyson Mitchell and b. h. Yael, the book includes carefully considered essays by the likes of Lisa Steele and Richard Fung that attest to the lasting influence of Canadian feminist practices.
Every few years, Phaidon’s Cream series has ten curators fashioning an overview of new voices on the international scene. This entry begins with a conversation among the curators about how and if 2008’s global recession has affected new art-making. Geoffrey Farmer, Janice Kerbel, Ron Terada and Althea Thauberger make the roster, thanks to the presence of the Canadian curator Kitty Scott among the gatekeepers. This crop of 100 gravitates toward performative, ephemeral practices, as well as complicated intellectual and/or material infrastructures for their art. The format is questionable, however: while there is visual punch to seeing the art-world “news” presented on old-fashioned broadsheets, the resulting broken-up columns of tiny type make reading the book’s thoughtful entries on the latest and greatest an eye-straining struggle.
This “recipe” book, produced as a textual extension of Western Front’s 2008 group show “Kits for an Encounter,” collects instruction-based projects from 16 artists and groups, including Vahida Ramujkic, Kristina Lee Podesva and The Center for Tactical Magic. While appealingly openended, the projects’ Fluxus-inspired, pragmatic approach to creating communion and antagonism is often at odds with the editors’ densely theoretical introduction.
If Marina Abramović’s spring retrospective at MOMA set out to canonize the self-styled “grandmother of performance art,” this intimate yet decidedly non-hagiographic biography, written by a former assistant to the artist, offers a compelling subtext to Abramović’s extraordinary life and career, including her largely undocumented early years in Yugoslavia. Westcott elegantly pieces together rare, illuminating photos from Abramović’s private archive and adds testimonies from more than 60 of the artist’s colleagues to paint a human portrait of a living legend.
For Abramović, performance was a means of initiating herself—again and again— into a sharpened state of consciousness...constructed traumas that served as rehearsals for death.
—James Westcott in When Marina Abramović Dies
Like Kapoor’s work itself, this giant volume, the most comprehensive on the Bombay-born British sculptor to date, is at once beautiful, imposing and inviting. The book covers Kapoor’s beginnings in performance art, Eva Hesse–like assemblage and the bright, delicate pigment works that won him acclaim in the 1980s, then moves on to document the seemingly endless array of sculptures he has produced in a wide range of materials (fibreglass, stone, stainless steel and PVC, to name a few) since then. These works are often reflective and shaped simply and sensuously; while undeniably visceral and on occasion truly monumental, many feature enigmatic voids that have given rise to a critical discourse of absence and the sublime around his work: rather than taking up space, they seem paradoxically to open up the space around them, to possibility, self-reflection and a place for the viewer. Despite its obvious grandeur and drama, Kapoor’s work is shot through with humour, grace and intimacy; his recent works in wax add an energetic, unexpected element of deconstructed messiness to a polished, distinguished oeuvre.
I think I am a painter who is a sculptor. My view is that sculpture has always been about presence in the world... What I have been engaged in...is to deal with an illusory presence in the world; one that isn’t necessarily here...I am making physical things that are all about somewhere else.
— Anish Kapoor
Lover of the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio and immortalized by painters such as Giovanni Boldini and Augustus John, Luisa Casati was one of the most notorious celebrities of the early 20th century and an inspiration for artists ranging from Man Ray to Jean Cocteau. Now the iconoclastic beauty is the subject of a new book by the Casati archivists Ryersson and Yaccarino. With more than 200 pictures, including private family photos, this visually lavish publication chronicles the rise and fall of a heroine who, despite her tragically destitute end, transformed herself into a work of art. With a preface by Diane von Furstenberg and an afterword by Lady Moorea Black, Casati’s granddaughter, it encapsulates the haunting legacy of an unmatched muse.
It’s difficult to pin down the work of the British artist Liam Gillick. From writings on neo-utopian idealism to gallery-filling sculptural scenarios on social dynamics, his practice defies categorization and exists instead in the rich, critical middle ground between art and life. The approach has earned Gillick a wide following among prominent international curators and critics, a fact that is reflected in the impressive list of contributors to this reader. The Rotterdam-based Canadian writer Monika Szewczyk has put together a volume that abounds with the complexities of Gillick’s work and offers insights into its participatory strategies.
Join us on Thursday, September 23, and Saturday, September 25, for exciting events that celebrate the visual arts.
Canadian Art’s under-40 patron group launches its second year with a program of extraordinary behind-the-scenes art events.
Congratulations go to winner Pandora Syperek and runners-up Deirdre McAdams and Vency Yun.
The Canadian Art Foundation, with RBC, is pleased to announce the 15 semifinalists in the 12th annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
In this video, recorded on Saturday, May 29, 2010, as part of the Canadian Art Gallery Hop in Vancouver, Kitty Scott, director of visual arts at the Banff Centre, and Douglas Fogle, chief curator of the Hammer Museum, joined artists Lisa Anne Auerbach and Althea Thauberger to offer their thoughts on the artist’s role in the world.
Canadian Art is currently seeking an Online Production Manager to join its team. Applications are due September 10, 2010.
Canadian Art magazine is currently seeking an editorial professional to join its team. Applications are due September 15, 2010.
Canadian Art’s under-40 patron group had a fun make-your-own dining experience with one of Toronto’s hottest young artists
Learn about the influences that shaped the PS1 curator’s thinking as he prepared for his exhibition “The Talent Show”
Join us September 23 for a gala benefit and September 25 for a free day of talks at galleries citywide
In recent years, both the Dia and MASS MoCA have mounted tribute exhibitions to late American artist Sol LeWitt. This week, Mercer Union wraps up its own notable homage, which recreates a 1981 wall drawing LeWitt did for the then-fledgling space.
For the past number of years, there's been controversy regarding the future of Halifax’s Khyber Arts Society. Seen by many as a key venue locally and nationally, the Khyber was back in the news this month as a city report recommended a new three-year plan for its space.
Play and strife come together, DIY style, in Todd Tremeer’s Little Wars (Make Me), an interactive project that debuted this month at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. In it, viewers can collaborate on a wall-sized battle mural and “bring the war home” via paper-cutout soldiers.
Summer is often marked by contrasts, a dynamic that the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery seems to pick up on in its current pairing of solo shows: John Kissick’s manic, multifaceted paintings and Gwen MacGregor’s calm, geoscience-toned fieldwork.
MKG127 acknowledges Toronto’s above-average summer temperatures with “Heat,” an exhibition that ironically offers some cool respite while displaying works that evoke bubbling tar, existential crises and blistering guitar solos.
