The Bosa Bosa Review: The National Museum of Art Osaka

Showing posts with label The National Museum of Art Osaka. Show all posts

Monday, 18 June 2012

Unzipped Humanities (5): Imi Knoebel

Welcome to the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

This post is about Imi Knoebel, and geometries without discourse traceable in a non-objective world, where primary colours and eight hundred years of light and darkness, interchange.

Imi Knoebel photo (2010)

Note: While working in the Curatorial Department, The Bosa Bosa Review editor had the chance to contribute to the Japanese version of the "35th Anniversary: Allure of the Collection" printed Catalogue of The National Museum of Art, Osaka (April 2012). More about this in a previous post.

Imi Knoebel in the "The Allure of the Collection" Exhibition Catalogue

©The Bosa Bosa Review

"The Allure of the Collection" Exhibition

The National Museum of Art Osaka, April - June 2012

The Unzipped Humanities series in English:

Unzipped Humanities (1) - Marcel Broodthaers La signature. Serie 1. Tirage illimite (1969).
Unzipped Humanities (2) - Jorg Immendorff Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II) 1998.
Unzipped Humanities (3) - Jean-Pierre Raynaud Auto Portrait (1980).

Unzipped Humanities (4) - Miroslaw Balka φ51x4, 85x43x49(1998).

Welcome to the museum's collection:

Imi KNOEBEL Grace Kelly IV-5 (1990)

We have been working on Imi KNOEBEL's Grace Kelly IV-5 , for the collection catalogue.

colours surrounded by words

colours surrounded by emptiness

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Imi Knoebel was born is Dessau, Germany. He lives and works in Düsseldorf. Note his newest exhibitions: at Tate Ives, exhibiting artist of “The Indiscipline of Painting” (2011-12) and at Albertina Museum Vienna (2011), exhibiting artist of “Albertina Contemporary- From Gerhard Richter to Kiki Smith”. He has recently been commissioned to create six stained-glass windows for the Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Reims ( Notre-Dame Cathedral of Reims, Krönungskirche von Reims), France, to celebrate the cathedral's impressive 800 years of architectural history.

Imi Knoebel,

Stained Glass Windows for the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Reims,

work in progress (2011)

uploaded on youtube on 29 June 2011 by ikonotv here

Imi Knoebel’s work deals with the relationship between space, picture support and colour, experimented through purist analytic series. He was a student of the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the mid-sixties, and is known to have been taught by Joseph Beuys. The idea of reducing a painting to its elemental coordinates, as expressed by the Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich reflects in his entire work. In his 1982 interview with Johannes Stuttgen, he does mention his encounter with Malevich’s text “The Non-objective World”.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Curatorial Night Beat @ The Bosa Bosa Review

There are 33 paintings in the Grace Kelly series, all of them revealing a larger central field framed by 2 horizontal and 2 vertical sections, and a chromatic variation between the 5 sections. The height is considerable: over 2.5 metres. ( We can confirm that the work is huge! )

Imi Knoebel’s work constructs a utopia: a painting wholly free of words, a painting daring to assume freedom of expression, an expression which should perhaps never get involved with definitions. But even though speechless, it implies a construction of the image, surfaces instead of lines, territories of colour, proportions, lengths. The patches of color in Grace Kelly have freedoms and limits. The colour on top always touches the outside on both sides. The colours on left and right have freedom in the lower part and are restricted in the upper part. The colour below is restricted both on the left and on the right. The five parts of the image are set off against each other not only by colour. They are separated by a joint, which allows a little space between the colour fields. A subtlety. A small opening between territories which only a ray of sunlight could pervade.

When a warm colour is being used in the Grace Kelly series, it gives the impression of an exit, of an openness towards something else. Among the 33 pictures from the 4 series Grace Kelly, there are only two images using a warm colour only on the bottom line: IV-5 and III-4. Unlike the other images, these two have a special visual impact, which we, non-objectively express as: no freedom to fly.

Useful English -Japanese glossary:

Imi Knoebel, Grace Kelly IV-5 イミ・クネーベル『グレース・ケリー（Ⅳ-5）』

Albertina アルベルティーナ美術館

Kasimir Malevich カシミール・マーレヴィッチ

Related links:

Christoph Schenker, Imi Knoebel: The Limits of Communicability, in Flash Art, Vol XXIV, No 161, November/December 1991, pp 103-107.

Imi Knoebel Exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery NY, review by Stephen Mueller in Art In America and review by John Yau in The Brooklyn Rail (2009)

Mary Boone Gallery website

Imi Knoebel's works at Volta8, in Basel, 2012.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Unzipped Humanities (4): Learn about - Miroslaw Balka

Welcome to the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

This post is about Miroslaw Balka, a Polish artist whose Blue Gas Eyes cannot forget. The darkness.

Miroslaw Balka, BlueGasEyes, 2004

The absence. The objects left behind the sweat, the tears and the salt. The lost humanity.

The danger that it would all be forgotten.

Miroslaw Balka photo (2010)

Note:

"The 35th Anniversary: The Allure of the Collection" exhibition opens at The National Museum of Art, Osaka on 21 April 2012.

Our contributions to the Collection exhibition catalogue already went to print. For updates and texts in the Japanese language authored by The Bosa Bosa Review, please check again around April. You can read the English version here on the blog.

Unzipped Humanities (1) covered Marcel Broodthaers and his work La signature. Serie 1. Tirage illimite (1969), while Unzipped Humanities (2) introduced to our readers Jorg Immendorff's Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II), also in the museum's collection. Unzipped Humanities (3) discussed Jean-Pierre Raynaud's work Auto Portrait.

We hope you enjoy. Cheers.

Welcome to the museum's collection:

Miroslaw BALKA φ51x4, 85x43x49 (1998).

We have been working on Miroslaw BALKA's φ51x4, 85x43x49, for the collection catalogue.

watching the chair, the handcuffs, the rope

separating the salt and the wounds

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in

Poland

. In his works he makes use of objets trouves, and with these he brings about collective memories of lost presence. He applies subjective particles: salt, dust and ashes onto materials such as wood, steel, terrazzo and carpeting. In 2009, his installation "How It Is” has been commissioned by Tate Modern for its Turbine Hall. He currently lives and works in his home town, Otwock.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Curatorial Night Beat @ The Bosa Bosa Review

φ51x4, 85x43x49 is an artwork from 1998 (wood, steel, salt and plastic, φ51x4cm, 85x43x49cm). Courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka).

An old chair is hanging from the ceiling with a rope, it is tilted and has a hole in the middle of the seat. Two wheels of the size of handcuffs are placed on the back of the chair.

This image brings back to memory medieval instruments of torture, where the victim would be placed in a chair and the iron restraints would be tightened, usually with a fire heated underneath. The hanging of the chair could imply the hanging of a victim as well. Balka's chair does not touch the floor, and this lack of contact keeping spaces at a distance is a common feature in his works, as it can be seen in the sarcophagus-like works 50x40x1,190x50x40,190x50x40,190x50x40 (1992). The chair does not leave tracesssss.

On the floor, a steel disk covered in salt. The salt spread on top of the disk symbolises human tears and sweat, and it has been previously used to cover a whole bed as night fear. There are two holes in this disk. Two holes in the disk have appeared before in Balka’s work, such as 380x230x13,69x67x13 (1993) , where they were filled with ashes, symbol that something, someone once was/lived/ has been and departed. Balka's works often cross the line between life and death, they belong to a world in-between, which is nothing but dark.

In this particular work the holes are left empty, and empty-filled is one of Balka's key contrast-pairs, presence as absence and absence of presence of the human body. He drills holes into the very idea that something/someone has been removed from existence. All these redefine the intangibility of human traces.

While this work might make think of medieval instruments of torture, Balka did not necessarily show interest in medieval subjects. Most likely this work has a contemporary meaning, that of a living memory. The collective memory of people who have known communist Poland is haunting his works and with this, Balka is celebrating the “living traces” of his own memory.

Balka’s objects filling galleries and museums, white cubes with white salt, and spaces with memories are obviously political, they deal with the politics of change, of a historical reality disappeared quickly from the collective memory as if it had never existed. "Culture is terminally-ill with amnesia", wrote Andreas Huyssen in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. With this chair installation again, Balka is sculpting from memory.

Miroslaw Balka's How It Is at Tate 2009 © Guardian

uploaded by TheGuardian on 10 Nov 2009

Along with the rapid change, the mass marketing of nostalgia has been pushed forward. While the computerized present is defined by an overflow of information and random-access memory industry bound up with forgetting and therefore producing amnesia, the past belongs to a read-only memory, not re-writable. No cyberspace crowdedness is used in his works, no super-technology, no dazzling visual effects, no impressive pattern. Balka does not re-write history, yet he recreates a memory of the body in pain. He recreates the emptiness. The deep dark. The helplessness. The meaninglessness of what people have been able to do to other people

Useful English -Japanese glossary:

Miroslaw BALKA ミロスワフ・バウカ

“How It Is” あるがままに

Sunday, 5 February 2012

Unzipped Humanities (3) : Learn about - Jean-Pierre Raynaud

Welcome to the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

This post is about Jean-Pierre Raynaud, a French artist working with time shadows and their abstract tendency to shrink into the geometrical perfection of a very spatial void. Raynaud is building walls around himself, filling them with white tiles and with the impossibility of breaking out. He then smashes them and films his self-made-prison break.

Container Zero @ Centre Pompidou Paris

from r.coppola, click here

Why would anyone literally build a Cartesian space as a defence system against the outer world? Is this a new frame of mind? If so, it might look rather sceptical to some. Freeing oneself from the world becomes possible only after having gone underground within the self.

Jean-Pierre Raynaud (1993)

Note:
Unzipped Humanities (1) covered Marcel Broodthaers and his work La signature. Serie 1. Tirage illimite (1969), while Unzipped Humanities (2) introduced to our readers Jorg Immendorff's Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II), also in the museum's collection.

We have contributed to the collection catalogue, which is expected to be published in March-April 2012. For updates and texts in the Japanese language authored by The Bosa Bosa Review, please check again around April. Cheers.

Welcome to the museum's collection:

Jean-Pierre RAYNAUD Auto Portrait (1980).

We have been working on Jean-Pierre Raynaud's Auto Portrait, for the collection catalogue.

Field research, digging, digging

Unearthing 19-years old mortuary chamber

- ceramic tiles at the Biennale di Venezia, 1993-

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Jean-Pierre Raynaud was born in Paris in 1939. He graduated from Horticulture in 1958, had the first group-exhibition in 1964 at “Salon de la Jeune Sculpture”. In 1976 (or 1975?) he created the stained-glass windows for the Noirlac Abbey in France. He held a one-man show at Pompidou Centre, in Paris, in 1979. Later, in 1981 he had his first exhibition in Japan, “Espace Zero” opened at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Here he temporarily transformed the whole exhibition space into his work.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Curatorial Night Beat @ The Bosa Bosa Review

Auto Portrait is an artwork from 1980 (tile and cement, 129x46x46cm. Courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka). Another frame of mind, perhaps? Raynaud marks his territory with white ceramic tiles set on a grid of 15 by 15 cm, with a black grouting joint (mortar) of 5 mm. The white tiles, along with the red pots and the "Do Not Enter" traffic signs have become his artistic signature.

Auto Portrait, a self-portrait, shows a simple structure of a white ceramic tiled-head on top of a white ceramic tiled-body. A similar work, triple-size, is Stele pour les droits de l'homme, erected in Barcelona (1990)

image Wikipedia

Five years later, in 1985, Raynaud will make Stele + crane neolithique, a sculpture where on top of the white ceramic tiled-body he places not a tiled-head but a skull in a glass case, standard image of an artistic meditation on the subject of life and death.

Stele + crane neolithique (1985)

from Le Fil du regard blog

We know that to Raynaud, the white ceramic tiles are related to the image of a hospital, as well as that of a home.

In 1970 he created Mur sens interdits where he is showing a large-sized monochrome photograph of a patient in a psychiatric institution, surrounded by the typical hospital white ceramic tiles. Raynaud attaches dozens of "Do Not Enter" traffic signs to an inescapable reality, a negation of live within life, a painfully surviving death within life. The photograph itself has been found prior to this date, and chances are that this hospital image is at the root of his choice for a tile-style.

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Mur sens interdits (1970)

Shifting from hospital image to home sweet home image. From 1969 until 1993, Raynaud built his home in La Celle Saint-Cloud, covering all surfaces in white ceramic tiles. Then in 1993 he decided to destroy it and save the fragments in buckets as artworks. The destruction has been documented on video camera.

home sweet home

smash-in-progress, 1993

from Henri Jacobs's blog

Art critic Toshio Shimizu argues that the white ceramic tiles define the habit of removing proofs and traces in the 20^th century. Tiles are a construction/ decorative material used in hospitals and slaughterhouses, can be easily washed of dirt, and keep no memory of any presence, experience or sign of life.

Therefore, we can regard a space built with white tiles as a person’s territory clearly marked, a Cartesian space, signifying Perfection, the Absolute, a space where one closes oneself, as a defence system against the outside. The body becomes one’s total space, and the space defines itself in strict relation to one’s body. An enclosed space is a place of freedom.

Useful French-Japanese-English glossary:

Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Auto Portrait (1980)

ジャン＝ピエール・レイノー　《自画像》

Selfportrait

Abbaye de Noirlac

ノワルラック・シトー派修道院

Noirlac Abbey

Stele+crane neolithique

《碑＋新石器時代の頭蓋骨》

Neolithic Skull

Toshio Shimizu (name)

清水敏男

Toshio Shimizu

Mur sens interdits

《壁・進入禁止》

Do not enter Wall

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Unzipped Humanities (2) : Learn about - Jorg Immendorff

Welcome to the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

This post is about Jorg Immendorff, a German artist who has lived rather intensely. His "aesthetic experience of life" covers painting, sculpture, cocaine, trial court, probation, disease, religious enlightenment.

Jorg Immendorff photo (2005)

Note:
Unzipped Humanities (1) covered Marcel Broodthaers and his work La signature. Serie 1. Tirage illimite (1969), also in the museum's collection.

We have contributed to the collection catalogue, which is expected to be published in March-April 2012. For updates and texts in the Japanese language authored by The Bosa Bosa Review, please check again around April. Cheers.

Welcome to the museum's collection:

Jorg IMMENDORFF Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II) (1998).

We have been working on Immendorff's second "last self-portrait", Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II), for the collection catalogue.

image & text

image & light

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Jorg Immendorff was born in 1945 in Bleckede, Germany. It is well known that he was taught by Joseph Beuys at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf. Most known work of his is without doubt, the Café Deutschland series (1977~). He died in 2007 in Dusseldorf.

Jorg Immendorff Cafe Deutschland (1984)

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Second self-portrait:
Jorg Immendorff Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II) , 1998

Curatorial night beat @ The Bosa Bosa Review

We apologise that the quality of the image uploaded here is rather poor.

We shall try to explain in words that which cannot be properly seen.

Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II) is an artwork from 1998 (oil on canvas, 250x210cm. Courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka). It is the second self-portrait Immendorff has painted in 1998, year he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). These two self-portraits, Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait I・II), bearing the subtitle "the last self-portrait", can be regarded as the “last” trace of oneself, the bringing into consciousness of an imminent threat become close reality, that of the end of existence. We have not yet been able to find other self-portraits apart from these two.

Have a look at the first self-portrait, below. It is rather colourful, and certain elements attract the eye: the artist hiding in an eagle's "outfit", see the bird's beak, head and wings, then on the left side of the burning candle, a golden Tower of Babel placed next to an image of war and attack aircrafts. Behind the candle, perhaps an image of the earth, whose just or unjust fate is decided by Roman-like divinities holding the libra (balance scale).

Should you be able to have a closer look, you will notice that there is a worm crawling on the character's finger.

First self-portrait:

Jorg Immendorff Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait I) , 1998

The NMAO Osaka Museum owns the second self-portrait, an artwork where in a rather dark space, the candle is still burning in the middle of the table, Tower of Babel has been replaced by a different golden shape, the pattern on the walls turns erotic, and the artist abandons the carnival approach to fashion for a dark suit. The worm is still there.

The candle is one frequent symbol in Immendorff’s work. You can find it in the “Painter’s Friend” (1985) artwork, showing some of Immendorff's most frequent elements, an ape, a candle and a brush. It is a typical symbol of mortality, of the time consuming itself. So is the worm crawling on his finger present in both images, a symbol of death, of nature destroying the human body. Both self-portraits come about as Allegories of Vanity.

Let us consider other works where the elements mentioned above, the erotic pattern on the wall, the worm, and the golden shape have been previously used.

Erotic pattern on the wall. The following image reveals the same erotic pattern used for the walls behind our character in Das Bild ruft II.

Jorg Immendorff Ohne Titel

(Studie: Buhnenprobe 1, The Rake's Progress), 1993

It is a sketch for Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress opera, performed by the Vienna State Opera Chorus at the Salzburg Festspiele in 1996. Immendorff was in charge with the set and costume design.

Check out the pattern on the floor.

video uploaded by naxosvideos on 14 June 2010

See the pattern on the floor and walls in this video

uploaded by TheGreatPerformers on 17 September 2007

The worm. This is an earlier artwork, from 1992. Most elements, including the table, candle, meditative pose, dark suit, and crawling worm are present.

Jorg Immendorff Bild mit Geduld, 1992

The golden shape. In Der Weltlauf, a work completed the same year, 1998, a shape resembling our golden shape is to be seen on the central axis of the image. It does not look very different from an udder.

Jorg Immendorff Der Weltlauf, 1998

This golden udder, replacing the golden Tower of Babel in Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait I), may very well be seen as a pornographic symbol of Lust, though we would not insist on it. The tiny dark dots spread all over this golden surface make us think rather of a beehive, please note that the name "Immendorff" itself refers to a "bee village".

Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II), with its Durer-like Melancholia image, can be regarded as an artist's contemplation on life and death, a representation of consciousness, of its intentionality and transparency, where sexuality is central to his life and to his body. Whatever choices have been made and aesthetic experiences lived, the dynamic flow of actions is abruptly halted by the vanity of life and body, both endangered by a burning candle shedding light and darkness on the growing hunger of this nasty worm called death.

Useful German-Japanese-English glossary

Jorg Immendorff Das Bild ruft (letztes Selbstportrait II)
ヨルク・インメンドルフ　《絵が呼んでいる　（最後の自画像　II）》
The Image is Calling (last self-portrait II)

Der Weltlauf
世の成り行き
The Course of Things

Ohne Titel (Studie: Buhnenprobe I, The Rake’s Progress)
無題（習作：舞台リハーサルI,　放蕩児の遍歴）
Untitled (Study: Stage probe 1, The Rake's Progress)

Related links

Learn about the Immendorff/Lupertz exhibition at the MdM (Museum der Moderne) Monschberg, Salzburg, Austria, 9 April - 3 July 2011 from the official website or from heatheronhertravels' photostream on flickr.

Read his artistic profile on the Saatchi Gallery website.

Pages

Monday, 18 June 2012

Unzipped Humanities (5): Imi Knoebel

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Unzipped Humanities (4): Learn about - Miroslaw Balka

Sunday, 5 February 2012

Unzipped Humanities (3) : Learn about - Jean-Pierre Raynaud

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Unzipped Humanities (2) : Learn about - Jorg Immendorff