Search results for ""Skira""

A groundbreaking work edited by Germano Celant in collaboration with the artist and her New York studio that enriches our knowledge of Louise Bourgeois Louise Bourgeois, who has produced art since the 1930s, began in the 1990s to use her clothes and the clothes of her loved ones as components in her sculptures and drawings. It is as much a reincarnation of her past and her childhood as a confirmation of her relationship with memory. Her visual approach to fabrics transforms decorative accessories into emotional and personal references which, especially in her Cells and later in her drawings, create representations of a tormented and at the same time powerful womanhood. Further development of the artist’s work began in 2002: exploiting the iridescent colours and formal structural properties of pieces of her clothing, she created “The Fabric Drawings,” astonishing works alternating between floral figurative pieces and chromatic abstractions. This set of images is collected here in its entirety for the first time, constituting the closest thing yet to a general catalogue.

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The first title of the Skira Contemporary Arab Artists series, directed by Brahim Alaoui, previous director of the Museum of the Institute of the Arab World in Paris. Bahraini-born Saudi national Faisal Samra graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He worked as an art and graphic design consultant for the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), and later a stage designer for Saudi television. In 2004 he taught in the Fine Arts department of the Amman University in Jordan and obtained his first artist residency in Paris, at the Cite International des Arts, in 2005, which he continues to be a part of today. Faisal Samra has taken part in numerous group shows, including “Word Into Art” at the British Museum (London and Dubai), “Languages of the Desert: Contemporary Arab Art from the Gulf States” (Abu Dhabi, Paris and Kunstmuseum, Bonn), and “Traversée”, (Paris, Cairo, Rabat). He has had solo exhibitions in Middle-Eastern and European institutions alike, and is in the collections of The British Museum (London) National Museum (Mexico City), Modern Art Museum (Cairo), Enrico Navarra (Paris), Saeb Eigner (London), Sheikha Paula Al Sabah (Kuwait), among others.

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The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia’s leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non-monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century.

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This is a guide to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation of Villa Favorita in Lugano. The Foundation's collection includes masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century American painting and European and Soviet Avantgardes. Works range from the Hudson River School (Bierstadt, Church, Cole) to the major American Expressionists (Hawthorne, Hassam, Wadsworth, Thomson), to the periods of Cubism (Leger), German Expressionism (Nolde, Schmidt-Rortluff, Schiele), the Russian avant-garde (Larionov, Malevich), the Dada and Surrealist movements (Man Ray, Ernst), up to Action Painting (Pollock) and Hyper-realism (Estes). This brief guidebook displays the new installation of the Foundation and features a section devoted to the sculpture and old master paintings belonging to this collection, as well as an essay on the history of the Villa Favorita and its gardens on the shores of Lake Lugano.

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The art of the up-and-coming South African artist Candice Breitz draws on contemporary mass culture, devising new systems for understanding reality. Published in association with the Castello di Rivoli, this book documents Breitz's new work "Mother + Father". Exploding the terrain of representation, Candice Breitz employs a variety of darkly humorous and often disturbing tactics to strike out at stereotypes and visual conventions as presented and accepted in the media and popular culture. Breitz appropriates photographs and visual fragments and recontextualises these in bold, sometimes tasteless-seeming images, which radically challenge conventional wisdom and question currently accepted assumptions. Considering herself a "symptom" of her own time, Breitz has articulated her artistic practice by acting directly inside pop culture, opening up, unhinging, and fragmenting its apparent solidity, and devising a sort of creative intervention that transforms her from mute spectator into an active, critical voice. Conceived specifically for Castello di Rivoli, "Mother + Father", 2005, represents one of the artist's most complex projects to date. The work is developed in two distinct installations. The protagonists in the first installation, entitled "Mother", are Hollywood actresses Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine. In "Father" the six father figures have the well-known faces of actors who include Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voight. Suspended in a void made up only of words, facial expressions, and body language, the new interactions of these actors and actresses give rise to the theatrical space of Breitz's work. Digital simulacra, the mothers and fathers devised by the artist are hostages, trapped within a specific emotional repertoire that questions the canons according to which the media - television and Hollywood - have taken over the role of parenting, training the public to experience, through the screen, circumstances that, instead, pertain to real life. Candice Breitz has participated in numerous exhibitions including Re-animations, Modern Art Museum, Oxford, Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, Tate Liverpool. She has been invited to participate in the exhibition Experience of Art at this year's Venice Biennale.

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Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible. A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe-l'oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. Both witty and serious, trompe-l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.

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This is the first chapter in a triennial project that centres on the relationship of the artist with him or herself in the screen-based age. All the works were created after 11 September 2001, a date impressed in the memory of everyone and that marked epoch-making changes. With Timer01, questions are asked on the internal space of the new social context created since the attack on the Twin Towers. One hundred artists from all over the world – many of whom are already well known on an international scale – are the protagonists of this project. This is the structure of the three chapters: Timer01: the individual in relation to him or herself; Timer02: the individual in relation to others; Timer03: the individual in relation to the architectural environment.

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