Camera d’Arte

01
Set

WOPART. Work on Paper Fair

AL CENTRO ESPOSIZIONI LUGANO
DAL 2 AL 5 SETTEMBRE 2016
La prima edizione di
WOPART – Work on Paper Fair

La fiera internazionale d’arte interamente dedicata alle opere su carta

Dal 2 al 5 settembre 2016, Lugano sarà teatro di una nuova importante iniziativa legata all’arte.

Al Centro Esposizioni Lugano (via Campo Marzio) si terrà WOPART – Work on Paper Fair, la prima edizione della fiera internazionale interamente dedicata alle opere su carta.

WOPART Fair proporrà un affascinante viaggio in tutte le epoche della storia dell’arte, approfondendo tecniche e linguaggi che caratterizzano i lavori esclusivamente realizzati su supporto cartaceo, dal disegno antico alla stampa moderna, dal libro d’artista alla fotografia d’autore, dall’acquerello e dalle stampe orientali alle carte di artisti contemporanei, presentati da un campione di 50 gallerie internazionali.

La selezione degli espositori è garantita da un comitato scientifico presieduto da Giandomenico Di Marzio, giornalista, critico e curatore d’arte contemporanea e da Paolo Manazza, pittore e giornalista specializzato in economia dell’arte, che comprende anche storici e critici dell’arte e della fotografia, collezionisti, docenti universitari tra i più apprezzati, quali Michele Bonuomo, Marco Carminati, Gianluigi Colin, Massimo Di Carlo, Walter Guadagnini, Giuseppe Iannaccone, Piero Mascitti, Marco Meneguzzo, Anna Orlando, Elena Pontiggia, Massimo Pulini, Marco Riccòmini, Marco Vallora.Continue Reading..

30
Ago

SHOZO MICHIKAWA. AROUND THE NATURE

Il Giappone a Faenza

AROUND THE NATURE, SHOZO MICHIKAWA AT MUSEO ZAULI – mostra personale

Museo Carlo Zauli I via Della Croce, 6 I Faenza I Inaugurazione 1 settembre, 19.30

2 Settembre – 2 Ottobre 2016

In occasione di Argillà Italia, Officine Saffi presenta dal 2 Settembre al 2 Ottobre 2016 la personale Around the Nature, Shozo Michikawa at Museo Zauli realizzata in collaborazione con il Museo Carlo Zauli di Faenza.

Inaugura giovedì 1 settembre alle ore 19.30 la mostra Around the Nature, Shozo Michikawa at Museo Zauli. Un gemellaggio culturale, quello tra Zauli ed il Giappone che ha radici molto lontane – è stato molto intenso lo scambio tra l’artista ed il paese nipponico, con diversi cicli espositivi ospitati dalle istituzioni nipponiche tra il 1974 e il 1981 – e che grazie alle Officine Saffi si rinnova presentando una selezione di opere di Shozo Michikawa della collezione Officine Saffi e alcuni lavori inediti realizzati appositamente per la mostra in un’installazione suggestiva nella stanza dei vecchi forni e nella cantina delle argille, ovvero in quello che era lo studio d’artista di Carlo Zauli e che oggi è diventato sede del Museo e centro culturale.

“Luoghi nei quali il secolare lavoro della ceramica ha lasciato un’impronta profonda nei colori e nell’atmosfera stessa dello spazio e nei quali la misteriosa e naturale armonia tra muri, pareti, oggetti, opere di Zauli e del Maestro giapponese pare perfettamente compiuta, rendendo quasi tangibile uno spirito che dall’argilla passa alla forma.” L’artista giapponese proveniente da Seto, uno dei Nihon Rokkoyo, ovvero i sei più antichi centri ceramici del Giappone, è oggi uno dei più importanti esponenti della grande tradizione artistica giapponese. Le sue sono opere d’arte essenziali e dense che traggono ispirazione dalla natura. “L’energia della natura è davvero immensa” afferma Shozo …”Non importa quanto la nostra scienza o la nostra civilizzazione possano evolvere, il potere dell’essere umano è insignificante a confronto con i minacciosi eventi della natura come i tifoni, i terremoti, gli tsunami o i vulcani in eruzione.… Le mie attività creative personali sono state ispirate da vari fenomeni del mondo naturale, anche quelli a cui si può assistere nella vita di tutti giorni.”*

Un impulso originario che accomuna Carlo Zauli e Shozo Michikawa pur lavorando in tempi lontani e con pratiche diverse e di cui scrive Matteo Zauli, direttore del Museo:

“E’ il modo di sentire e di rivivere la Natura nelle forme a costituire il terreno culturale comune all’universo zauliano e alla scultura ceramica giapponese contemporanea e, in particolare, all’opera di Shozo Michikawa. Riferimento costante dell’opera del Maestro giapponese che per sua stessa ammissione non si discosta mai dal riferimento oggettuale, la forma vaso è altresì origine di tutta la ricerca ceramica di Carlo Zauli, diventandone dal 1976 anche cardine scultoreo attraverso la stagione degli sconvolti”.

Lavori che partono quindi dalla forma utilitaria dei vasi o delle ciotole e che vengono elevati ad opere d’arte plastiche. Masse di terra plasmate dalla sacralità del gesto dell’artista, che presentano molteplici tagli e sfaccettature realizzate senza che Shozo tocchi mai con le mani l’opera fino al momento della cottura.

“Armonie ed equilibri tra materia e archetipo antropologico che nel lavoro dei due artisti trovano un perfetto punto di equilibrio, quasi a rappresentare nella forma un rapporto ideale tra uomo e natura”.

Durante Argillà e in occasione della mostra, Shozo Michikawa terrà un workshop presso il Museo Zauli dove dimostrerà i procedimenti unici di creazione delle sue opere.

*Shozo Michikawa, saggio dal catalogo della mostra Fo
rbidden City.Continue Reading..

18
Ago

Silvestre Pestana. Techno-form

FROM 26 MAY 2016 TO 25 SEP 2016

Silvestre Pestana (1949, Funchal, Madeira) is one of the most radical and least known figures in Portuguese contemporary art. A poet, artist, and performer, Pestana has created a singular body of work in a variety of media since the late 1960s. The first major presentation of his work, this exhibition brings together over 100 rarely seen works with documentation and archival materials to highlight the artist’s pioneering use of drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, installation, video and performance to confront the relation between society, art and technology.
Emerging from a group of experimental poets in the 1960s, Pestana combined the visual arts with poetry as a form of resistance against censorship in early drawings, collages, and sculptures. Between 1969 and 1974, as a political exile in Sweden, he created public interventions in the form of gardens and performance-based actions that suggested the fragile ecological and social conditions of contemporary life. Returning to Portugal after the 1974 Revolution, Pestana developed a unique visual grammar using light, language, and visual forms that conceived of the human body as a social, ideological, and technological circuit. The politicized actions, collages, and photographs from 1970s and 1980s use his body to activate linguistic and non-linguistic codes, while attempting to expand poetry into a spatial and choreographic practice.
The artist’s polemical performances of the 1970s and 1980s — documented in a few remaining images — presciently addressed how technologies of the third industrial revolution could elicit both horror and fascination, offering both forms of entertainment and control. Biometrics, militarization, and the extension of the human into a vast information network mark his photography, video, and installation work of the 1980s. Using the moving image as a tool for performative and poetic action, Pestana became one of the pioneering figures of video art in Portugal. Always an early adopter of novel technologies, he has utilized computing, gaming software, and drones in recent decades to develop new expressions of artistic resistance, continuing his decades-long engagement with various political and technological systems that permeate contemporary life.Continue Reading..

10
Ago

Bill Viola. Mary

Bill Viola’s major new work for St Paul’s Cathedral
The second permanent large-scale installation here by internationally-acclaimed artist

Mary will be inaugurated in the North Quire Aisle on 8 September 2016 – to coincide with the Feast of Mary
Mary has been conceived as a companion piece to Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) which was unveiled in the South Quire Aisle of the cathedral in 2014. These installations are the first moving-image artworks to be installed in a cathedral in Britain on a long-term basis.

Bill Viola said: “The two themes of Mary and Martyrs symbolise some of the profound mysteries of human existence. One is concerned with birth and the other death; one with comfort and creation, the other with suffering and sacrifice. If I am successful, the final pieces will function both as aesthetic objects of contemporary art and as practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion.”

St Paul’s Chancellor Canon Mark Oakley said: “Bill Viola’s art slows down our perceptions in order to deepen them. He uses the very medium that controls mass culture today, film, and subverts that control to instead open up new possibilities and contours of understanding.
“Through the life of Mary, and her relationship to her son, Viola invites us to dive into the mystery of love’s strength in birth, relationship, loss and fidelity. I have no doubt that this fresh installation will lead our many pilgrims and guests into purposeful reflection and hopeful prayer”.
In 2003 London’s National Gallery was the location for one of Bill Viola’s most successful exhibitions, “The Passions”, a body of work rich in sacred and art historic influences and which directly launched the preliminary discussions of installations for St Paul’s Cathedral. The idea of creating two new contemporary works seemed a logical next step that would follow the completion of the extensive cleaning and renovation of the Cathedral’s interior and exterior.
Bill Viola (b. 1951) is internationally recognised as one of the leading artists of our time. An acknowledged pioneer in the medium of video art, he has for 40 years created a wide range of video installations that are displayed in major museums throughout the world. His works focus on universal human experiences – birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness – and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.
Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.Continue Reading..

09
Ago

Giorgio Griffa: Quasi Tutto

FROM 14 MAY 2016 TO 04 SEP 2016

‘His art deserves a place in the global history of abstraction.’
Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first large-scale museum survey of the paintings and drawings of Giorgio Griffa. It is the Italian artist’s first exhibition in Portugal. The exhibition is the culmination of a series of shows originating at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève (Switzerland), travelling to the Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (Norway) and the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (Italy). Curated by Serralves Museum director Suzanne Cotter and Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève, the exhibition at Serralves presents an expanded selection of more than thirty paintings and over forty drawings dating from 1969 to 2015. Surveying Griffa’s highly abstract yet eminently pictorial production, this ambitious exhibition reveals the artist’s commitment to the practice of painting as a cumulative process whose continuum is part of a broader physical and metaphysical reality.

Giorgio Griffa (1936, Turin, Italy) is part of the Italian generation of artists who came of age in the 1960s and proposed a radical redefinition of painting. From the late 1960s, Griffa set about reducing painting to its essential components of raw, unstretched canvas, pigment and brushstrokes, stripped of expressive subjectivity, radically redefining the medium and its possibilities within a world in transformation. While his use of simple materials and gestures aligns him with the work of the Italian arte povera artists and the proponents of Support/Surface in France, who were his peers in the 1960s and 1970s, his interest in the immediacy and performative dimension of painting as a time-based process was also inspired by Zen philosophy. During the 1980s, a return to neo-expressionism and the Italian transavanguardia marked for Griffa a period of re-engagement with the expressive potential of his elemental use of colour, line and gesture that had sustained his practice in the previous decade. Inspired in part by fellow artist Mario Merz’s use of the Fibonacci sequence, in the 1990s the numbers of the golden ratio entered into Griffa’s pictorial language. His paintings from the past two decades bring together these constitutive elements with renewed vigour and vital urgency. The works in the exhibition at Serralves reflect these key moments in Griffa’s oeuvre, including important paintings from the artist’s cycle of paintings known as ‘Alter Ego’ that constitute a conceptual and intellectual dialogue with painters from Tintoretto to Matisse and Agnes Martin.Continue Reading..