Search results for ""author penelope curtis""

In early 1920s England, Nora''s life in a state of flux. A gifted painter, married to man named Herbert, she has fallen in love with another. Sent away to her parents'' home to consider her position, she decides to take control of her life. She divorces her first Herbert to marry the second, then embarks on an existence on the margin of the artistic and political elite. This quest for control of her life as an artist, mother and wife will continue. Nora is a gifted painter but struggles to find the focus that seems to come so easily to male artists who are not required to fit their work into their domestic lives. In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for Adam, her older colleague. Fifty years later, his daughter seeks out Maria to discover what really happened between them. Adam is the author''s father, and Nora the grandmother she never knew. Penelope Curtis offers sensitive portraits of those whose lives she has had to imagine in order to un

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This volume examines the relationship between modern sculpture and architecture in the mid-twentieth century, an interplay that has laid the ground for the semisculptural or semiarchitectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and artists such as Dan Graham. The first half of the book explores how the addition of sculpture enhanced several architectural projects, including Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Campus (1934). The second half of the book uses several additional case studies, including Philip Johnson's sculpture court for New York's Museum of Modern Art (1953), to explore what architectural spaces can add to the sculpture they are designed to contain. The author argues that it was in the middle of the twentieth century – before sculptural and architectural forms began to converge – that the complementary nature of the two practices began clearly to emerge: figurative sculpture highlighting the modernist architectural experience, and the abstract qualities of that architecture imparting to sculpture a heightened role.

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Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome is a fresh examination of the developments in Mattiacci’s sculpture from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, dates that embrace the two decades he spent living and working in Italy's vibrant capital. New research by the contributors to this book reveal how the exceptional constellation of studios, galleries and institutional spaces as well as the architectural and landscape settings Rome offered were the crucial factor in Mattiacci's rapid sophistication as an artist. In the mid-1960s the city was already a major centre for art, literature, theatre and cinema, and the setting for numerous avant-garde performative 'actions' and 'happenings'. The Piazza del Popolo district was crowded with bars and galleries, and Mattiacci soon became warmly acquainted with various gallerists and artists, including the Arte Povera practitioners Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. In this challenging and competitive environment Mattiacci sought to establish his own distinctive exploratory style, investigating materials, forms, sounds, presentations and actions in endlessly novel and inventive ways. The extraordinary Tubo, the long flexible yellow coil of metallic tubing that could be endlessly rearranged and even carried out of a gallery into the streets by files of admirers, was first exhibited in 1967, and made his name. The following year he staged Lavori in corso, a trio of very popular performances, in the Circo Massimo, which involved spinning huge umbrellas in imitation of the Earth's rotations and revolutions. Percorso, in 1969, was Mattiacci again in action, this time driving a noisy roadroller into and around a gallery. In the 1970s – a difficult decade of political violence in Italy – Mattiacci continued to explore both outwardly and inwardly. He was increasingly fascinated by archaeology, antique alphabets and non-literate cultures, notably the USA's First Peoples, and he created actions and presentations that ranged from exhibitions of x-rays of his own inner organs to appearances encased in 'bandaging' and plaster. In 1981 he first showed the admired Roma, a collection of 50 large sinuous metal shapes inspired by the volutes of classical and Baroque architecture, once again an artwork that is endlessly rearrangeable, indoors or out. Sculpture in Action is the beautifully illustrated account of Mattiacci's artistic creativity in those decades.

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