Happy New 2013 kids

To all beauty in the world expressing itself in ways we feel close to, and to all those going through the school of hard knocks, may 2013 bring you only the best ! Happy Holidays ~

 

© A great kid

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.

© Volta Show 2012

Art and Kids - Safe Play with Baby Color

This is a special post, dedicated to colours, kids and parents concerned with safe toys, safe crayons and white walls. Art educators in schools and museums may sneak a peek.

NEWS* In Japan, "Baby Color" (Privee A.G. Corporation Japan) has won the Kids Design Award 2011 and was chosen 1st in the Kids Safety section.

The Honey Sticks Beewax Crayons from New Zealand are comparably smart, yet Baby Color's "spinning top" design has many more features.

BABY COLOR crayons (Japan):

They do not break.

They can be chewed on.

The colours are easily removed from your walls.

+

DESIGN: They look fantastic.

FUN GAMES: Kids can spin them like tops.

ART EDUCATION: You can teach your kids about art.

ART EDUCATION

Teach your kids about abstract art, modern sculpture, Parisian artists and the Endless Column.

Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, in Targu-Jiu

uploaded by dlee29 here on 27Feb2007

Read to them about another of Brancusi's sculptures bearing the same title, Endless Column, in the MoMA collection in New York.


Kids know that art is not just about drawing trees and flowers.


DESIGN & FUN GAMES

These coloured tops are so so much fun.

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

Related links:

Miroslaw Balka How It Is installation at Tate Modern (2009-10)　

Topography exhibition at Modern Art Oxford (2009-2010)

Fragment exhibition at the Akademie der Kunste Berlin (2011-12)

Read also Marck Prince's article Miroslaw Balka, published in Frieze in connection with the Nonetheless exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (September 2011).

Create your own Obsessive Artwork

Creative promotion involves a lot of things.

But when a marketing campaign to promote the arts makes the public feel involved, the creative potential of the initial idea becomes unpredictable and all the more interesting.

Recreativeuk.com has come up with something new. REcreative asks you to

create your own obsessive artwork

and submit it here.

The best project will be chosen by a panel of judges including the Curator of the Exhibition Frances Morris, the Directors of Tate Modern and the South London Gallery; Chris Dercon and Margot Heller and Yayoi Kusama's studio.

The artist chosen will win a trip to Tokyo, Japan to visit Kusama’s studio later this year.

Now that is a challenge (for UK citizens and permanent residents). Considering the worldwide Kusama-mania these past few months, the idea REcreative UK had will probably turn into a very successful event.

Tokyo is a great place !

Good luck with your submissions.

P.S. Should you win, feel free to ask questions about Yayoi Kusama's Japan anytime.

Yayoi Kusama Tate Exhibition Opening In Pictures

Deja vu? Most known print and broadcast media in the UK featuring the Yayoi Kusama exhibition opening story with identical shots: a way of publicity which is probably having the desired impact on the viewers. You can go see her works in London starting from Thursday, 9 February 2012.

Yayoi Kusama Tate Opening on BBC here

Yayoi Kusama Tate Opening in The Guardian here

Yayoi Kusama Tate Opening in The Independent here

Yayoi Kusama Tate Opening in The Telegraph here

Crowding at the Press Conference on 7 February 2012:

Yayoi Kusama and curator Frances Morris, in pictures here

Check out a new video about Yayoi Kusama

on the Tate Youtube Channel here

Allegedly, Yayoi Kusama has not been out of Japan for twelve years, and remember she will turn 83 in March. It must have been a long flight, so let us give her a round of applause !

See also the Japan exhibition in pictures in a previous post.

YayOi Ku$ama and the dOt$ Ob$e$$iOn - O$aka 2012