all in the present must be transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys

Till January 12, 2007 Deutsche Guggenheim presents the exhibition all in the present must be transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys.

The show examines affinities between the two artists, who, though separated by generation and geography, share aesthetic and conceptual concerns. The exhibition focuses on the metaphoric use of materials, the belief in metamorphosis, and the relationship between action and its documentation in their respective practices. It also reveals fundamental, philosophical differences between Barney and Beuys that, in turn, further enhances our understanding of each artist’s work.

The exhibition’s contents are drawn largely from the Guggenheim Museum's permanent collection and pair a selection of drawings and vitrines by both artists, as well as Barney’s multipart sculpture Chrysler Imperial (2002) from CREMASTER 3 with Beuys' installation Terremoto (1981). The presentation will also examine the performative side of their practices, giving evidence to the way they both have theatricalized their sculptural production.

Organized by Nancy Spector, the exhibition will travel to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice during the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Additional to the show an extensive supporting program takes place allowing the visitor to immerse oneself deeper in the artists’ conceptions and thoughts.
A large film program takes up the concept of the exhibition and juxtaposes a selection of films by both artists and is screened at the cinema babylon berlin:mitte as well as at the Deutsche Guggenheim.

I went to this show expecting it not to be great,usually the shows here dont really do much to me  I think its the space itself.

But this show which was the first one i'd been to for ages restored mty belief in art had a really good time. Photos below and there are some over at LondonAlive as well.

Paul P Priestley (“Peep” to his friends) is one of the greatest artists working in the UK today. If you haven’t heard of him, this is not surprising: he does not court art market attention, works primarily for his own satisfaction, and his work has mainly been seen only by those lucky enough to stumble upon his small but crowded workspace within Sheffield’s BLOC studios. Inside, it is like something from the cabinet of Jan Svankmajer: deformed and cross-bred dolls and other toys form intricate tableaux and, if you are lucky enough to visit when there is enough sunlight to feed his creations’ solar panels, they come alive and move around the studio. But although on the surface his creations could be seen as dark toys and curious distractions, they are the outward signs of a vigorous intelligence, part of a body of work which (along with his series of anthropomorphised churches) seeks answers to recurring questions about the role of religion within the power structures of modern life.

His latest show, his first at BLOCspace, opens on Friday 1^st December and continues until Sunday 17^th December. The gallery’s website describes the show thus:

P. P. Priestley’s inaugural exhibition at Bloc fills both the gallery and the outside courtyard. His large-scale sculptures of anthropomorphised churches function as elegant formal sculptures, whilst simultaneously constituting the elements of an installation that presents a carefully constructed narrative. Left as basic wooden frames, these personifications of the Christian Church are stripped bare of their function and exterior trappings and appear to perform deviant acts. One lays crumpled in a heap in the gallery while another appears to be trying to climb the gallery wall. Priestley's smaller works, constructed from parts of dolls and model animals, are presented in sometimes disturbing tableaux, juxtapose sado-masochistic, religious and bestial imagery.

Priestley's use of automata has been prevalent in his work for a number of years. Using DIY mechanics he creates kinetic sculptures that often use solar power as an energy source. His sculptures contain archetypal and symbolic imagery: angels, winged horses, cherubs and demons. “Most of the work depends on what materials I can find to recycle at the time”, he says. “I’ve used windmills, waterwheels, bicycle pumps and hand-cranked generators – all my materials are things that other people have thrown away”.

FAD caught up with Peep on the eve of his show’s opening, and asked a few questions. Below are his answers (and a few from his technicians Brodie and Nick, who wandered in and out during the course of the interview): (more…)

Oleg Kulik. Deep into Russia. 1996.

White Space Gallery presents Depository of Dreams: Alexander Brodsky, Olga Chernysheva, Ivan Chuikov, Yuri Avvakumov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Oleg Kulik, and Dmitri Prigov, on view through December 20. "Depository of Dreams" brings together the work of eight internationally renowned Russian contemporary artists who explore a panoply of collective and private dreams and visions, conditioned and informed by the Soviet ideological utopia. The exhibition takes the form of an installation, where the viewer can access drawings, prints, photographs, paintings and albums by browsing through the storage system of a semi-abandoned depository.

The artists in the exhibition represent the major independent art movements in post-World War II and post-Soviet Russia. On show are 1970's "Moscow Conceptualists" (Ilya Kabakov, Ivan Chuikov, Dmitri Prigov), "Sots Art" (Vitaly Komar), 1980's "Paper Architecture" (Alexander Brodsky and Yuri Avvakumov), as well as more recent works by notorious performance artist Oleg Kulik, and well-known social documentary artist Olga Chernysheva.

The depository will reveal iconic pieces by Moscow conceptual artists such as Ilya Kabakov's album Mathematical Gorsky,1974, from the series Ten Characters, Ivan Chuikov's Window painting, and Dmitri Prigov's series of drawings Phantom Installations. Yuri Avvakumov, one of the founders of the "Paper Architecture" movement presents a series of prints designed as ironic reminiscence of Tatlin's constructivist Monument to the Third International, developing like a scaffolding around the skeleton of Mukhina's Monument to Worker and Farmer, the popular icon of Socialist Realism.

CutUp are a London based group of artists linked by a shared desire to reorder the urban landscape through intervention and play. CutUp’s practice incorporates collage, film and installation and focuses largely on the creative potential of the street as a site for interventionist art and disruption.

CutUp’s belief in utilising existing materials from the street, has led to works manifesting themselves as the re-ordering of advertising posters and street furniture, without adding anything new – recycling what was there already. Interested in the idea of the ‘street as a stage’ for intervention or creative activity as determined by Walter Benjamin and later the Situationists, the collective aims to introduce elements of disquiet into the urban everyday.

For their second exhibition at SEVENTEEN, CutUp’s sites for intervention are again brought into the gallery space, temporarily, before returning to the street. The exterior of the gallery will be boarded up, and the boards perforated by drilling, creating imagery through the dispersion of light from within. The interior of the gallery will house a wooden, cubic structure, echoing the exterior it is also pierced. Inside the box is a new film projection, in which a four-sided tower of drilled boards is at first illuminated and then consumed by a fire started in its centre. Around this structure sit a number of new collaged and re-ordered advert works, housed in light boxes, and the gallery is dominated by a new sound installation. The show extends further outside the gallery space in the form of CutUp’s outdoor interventions on the streets of London, which have already started to appear, and should endure after the show closes

Friday 1st December 2006 to Saturday 14th January 2007
PV 30th November 6pm

SEVENTEEN
17 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8AA

Via HOOKED

An exhibition of site – responsive sound and audiovisual installations and performances at Holy Trinity Church, Leeds, featuring work by a selection of Yorkshire based artists:

• Andy Abbott
  Church of Noise by Therapy?
• Luke Drozd
  Cacoughony
• Lucy Gibson & Stuart Bannister
  You Heard It There First (Part II)
• Phill Harding
  Sanctuary
  Shabash
• Jez Riley French
  tristesse (htl) 11206
• 5-MeO-DMT
  (Joe Gilmore, Jim Brouwer and George Rogers)
  How One Became Two
• 7 Hertz

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Francis Bacon: Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955 Oil on canvas 108.6 x 75.6cm, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, UEA 30.

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts will present Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, on view through December 10, 2006. Francis Bacon (1909 -1992) created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during the 1950s. From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of Van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later. For a painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of dark claustrophobic interiors, there were even glimpses of landscape, recollections of Africa and the South of France. It was a period which saw Bacon still searching for himself and eager to explore a variety of impressions and take all kinds of risks.

Throughout his life, Bacon carefully controlled the way his work was selected, presented and even interpreted. He ensured that all museum exhibitions devoted to his work took the form of classic retrospectives, with the emphasis placed on his most recent paintings and especially on the late triptychs. As a result, the latter part of Bacon’s oeuvre has been far more widely exhibited than the earlier half of his career.

This exhibition will take the thirteen Francis Bacon paintings in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection as the nucleus for a show which will include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public before. The exhibition will explore the major themes that interested Bacon between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, affording an unprecedented insight into the artist’s imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Peppiatt on behalf of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition

Rebeca Méndez, Series: Homeland 3, "Peace White", 2004, ink-jet art print and plexiglas, 40 X 15 X 15 inches.

Andlab presents Rebeca Méndez, "Each Day at Noon", on view through December 7, 2006. Since the late 1980s, the subjects of Rebeca Méndez’s photographic series are varied and have included industrial hotel beds, landscapes, seascapes, and natural patterning. Her works are studies in the everyday, in stillness and emptiness, as well as in isolating the temporal in phenomena.

Méndez completed her B. F. A. at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 1984. After a successful career in design, returned to Art Center to receive her M. F. A. in art and new media, in 1997. She is based in Los Angeles and travels internationally capturing images in various media—16mm film, digital video and photography.

In 2004, Méndez began her Homeland series consisting of extreme panoramic landscapes of what she calls ‘ever landscapes’–landscapes and seascapes being farmed and quarried for daily human nourishment and consumption. Méndez’s interest is to give the viewer a glimpse of these raw materials in their integrity and beauty, as well as expose cost of convenience. Her landscapes and seascapes are carefully planned images of sea or land and sky in which horizon line bisects each picture. In her compositions, she creates new, non-existent landscapes where glaciers float puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Each of the six compositions has an overall dominating – red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of those colors correspond to the United States’ Department Homeland Security’s National Alert Threat Levels. Méndez realized that "peace"—currently the most important ambition humanity—and its corresponding color, white, were missing from the chart, and it became her sixth composition. Méndez’s latest photographic work About to Happen, 2006, consists of still frames of her 16mm film shoot throughout Iceland. By isolating a single frame of an infinite repetition, Méndez images move beyond appearance and expose temporality in phenomena. In ‘Dettifoss 001’, Méndez captures an instant of Europe’s largest waterfall–500 cubic meters per second.

‘Rebeca Méndez Each Day at Noon’ at ANDLAB ART Gallery features works from Méndez’s Homeland 3 and About series.

ANDLAB shows works in its mission to foster curiosity and knowledge, offers a variety educational opportunities and creative developments through its selection of art and design classes and projects.