Alison Watt - Phantom

ART London

Alison Watt: Phantom
The Sunley Room at the National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
12 March - 22 June 2008
Admission free.

by Sarah Pasetto

The National Gallery is always bustling with visitors, especially as a Saturday afternoon approaches closing time. The tourists and art lovers hurry from painting to painting, seeking to soak in every last “must-see”, every last detail before being chased out of the lofty rooms. I strode through the crowd, twisting and turning past the remaining eager viewers, past Renaissance and Baroque drama hung against blood-red damask, to enter Alison Watt’s “Phantom” exhibition. Here, the atmosphere was radically different. This was no home for loud whispers, bulky backpacks, harnessed chaos. The only noise in the show’s antechamber was hinted at, by one of the painter’s sources of inspiration: Francisco de Zurbaran’s Saint Francis, robed in rough monk’s cloth, quietly howling in mystical piety.

The exhibition displays a number of vast canvases, each depicting folds of white fabric in close-up. However, far from being clinical or aseptic, they convey a sensation of softness, as does Proserpina in her Bernini incarnation. Human presence is suggested, not only through the inevitable parallel with a slowly-tousled intimacy, but also through the interplay of cloth and negative space. The black gaps mirror parts of the human anatomy - a languidly parted mouth, a narrowed eye, a private cleft. The lighting is suffused, and the walls a cool blue-grey, making the atmosphere as rarefied as the first lights of dawn, and creating the impression that the visitor has been allowed into most intimate chambers. Ultimately, it is an irresistible aura of sensuality that emanates from the collection - overpowering precisely because it consists, like the most refined and mature form of seduction, of intriguing, tantalising, allusion.

Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe

ART New York

Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128

By Melissa Passman

Thomas Krens, the polarizing director of the Guggenheim Foundation for twenty years, plays a central role in the story of Cai Guo-Qiang’s massive spectacle of an exhibition currently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. With last week’s surprising news that he would be stepping down as director, journalists began to eulogize his tenure, once again reminding us of the motorcycles and the Armani suits that will certainly remain as symbols of the excess that characterized his brash leadership style.

The current retrospective (co-curated by Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art) is no different. As a vocal proponent of Cai Guo-Qiang’s theatrical art, my first impression on walking though the revolving doors was one of amazement. Confronted first by the cars hanging from the ceiling with fluorescent bulbs piercing them, and then by tigers with arrows that fill the second ramp. On the third ramp, an installation originally commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin invites us to weave in and out of the line of wolves that will eventually crash into a glass wall. According to the wall text, this piece is an allegory for the Berlin Wall, synthesizing local and global histories.

Also drawing on recent history, Cai recreates “New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” a Communist propaganda sculpture from the late 1960’s. Occupying almost an entire ramp, a team of Chinese sculptors will fabricate this piece throughout the duration of the exhibition, exposing the process to the multitudes of visitors who will inevitably pass through the museum. He continuously insists on this process of audience engagement, whether incorporating paddleboats steered by four year olds and live snakes into his installations or forcing us to navigate past tigers pierced by arrows.

Best known for his work with gunpowder and fireworks drawings, I can’t help but think of the politically charged link to Cai’s prominent participation in the Beijing Olympics. As a prelude to the coming months, this is one spectacle that shouldn’t be missed.

Impressions on Dobrzanski in Milan

Art Milan

view of Vayont, 1964

Edmondo Dobrzanski

Castello Sforzesco
Milan, Italy
Until the 6th of April, 2008

by Odette d'Albo

Walking through the new exhibit of Edmondo Dobrzanski’s works will allow its Milanese audience to reacquaint themselves with a forgotten master of 20th Century European art. The labyrinthine display of paintings reveal the dramatic sensibility of an artist's solemn and serious view on life. The "white-cube"-effect of the exhibition design is a stark contrast from the consistently dark tones of the two-hundred and fifty works on display.

“This black timber is the fulcrum of all, the pin," states the artist on his predilection for dark palettes. "The sum of my experiences and of my limits. Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, except Cézanne, lived of an external light. I speak about an interior light. My paintings would be more and more black because inside them are my things, things that I feel. The black is not funerary, there’s hope inside it. There’s hope in dram."

Loneliness and silence are fundamental aspects of Dobrzanski’s intense art, as can be seen in Vayont, a large wooden painting created in memory of the over 2,000 victims of a disaster in 1964, when a city in Northern Italy was devastated by a landslide and tsunami caused by the reckless construction of a dam. The large painting, created immediately after the tragedy and exhibited at the Expo of Losanna in 1964, brought the artist public and critical attention, exemplifying his life-long commitment to a socially-engaged aesthetic.

Furthermore, as a Jewish artist, Dobrzanski was forced to leave Milan in the 40s because of Italy’s racial laws. He became a refugee in Switzerland, never forsaking his artistic intentions and political integrity, although he was sometimes frightened by his mind’s creations. “I worked on war themes and I created a cycle of drawings with anti- Nazi sentiments” recalls the artist “now I only have a little series of them, because I tore up and burnt many of them. I was frightened that Germany could come in, there was the real danger that they would open the Swiss canal toward France. (…) I lived in fear and dismay of having done those tables. If the Germans had entered Switzerland from the north and they had found those drawings I would have been shot.”

The experience of such fear is extremely important in his career and probably informs his politically-charged and anguished art. The exhibition reveals the clear influence of Expressionist painters such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, who depicted the working class in its loneliness and labour.

The exhibition curated by Maurizio Del Giudice succeeds in re-evaluating and recontextualizing the once-eminent artist into contemporary art history. More modestly, it also gives us the opportunity to appreciate the power of a painter who was at one time considered, along with Giacometti, one of the greatest Swiss artists of the past century.

Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings

Art New York

Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings
The Tina Kim Gallery
The Chelsea Arts Tower
545 West 25th Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

by Shayla Lawson

Nothing new. I have trouble with the contemporary art world’s acceptance of hybrid print work as a new-medium substitute for the craft of drawing. I readily admit, I have little knowledge of Amer or Farkhondeh, I found an advertsiment for the art opening on flavorpill.com, but I have an intense attraction to the intimacy and reverence that accompanies artist that work as part of a successful collaborative partnership. That said, I found little about the work present in RFGA show that transcended beyond their shared enjoyment of process. Birds and thread-stiched Disney characters scattered in a field of pornographic heroines do not an artshow make. Although the press release refers to their attraction to Dadaist Automism and “the latent eroticism of the human form,” I found the half-dozen dry, uninspired, and downright silly. Yes, I am certain Farkhondeh and Amer would give elegant recitations regarding the meaning of each drawings. And they work so adeptly as a team one could easily make the argument RFGA constitutes a third artist in the body of singular and collaborative work produced by these artists in the past twenty years or so. But nothing in the pieces showcased a new take on humanity, a broader reflection on the human body, an elevated sense of craft. They were doodles. And not even particularly compelling ones in the art world of widely accepted contemporary doodling. Better luck next time, boys and girls.