2011-05-25

U.S.A. - AMARILLO-TEXAS - Ciria - Rorschach Heads


The Amarillo Museum of Art is pleased to present the recent work of the extraordinary Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria in a profoundly stirring, provocative, and consciousness-expanding exhibition, titled Ciria-Rorschach Heads. Following a tradition in contemporary Spanish painting that includes Antoni Tàpies or Antonio Saura; the young Ciria came to attention in the early 1990s with a series of fiercely lyrical abstract paintings that surprised artists and critics alike. Over the pas two decades, Ciria's mammoth painterly inventiveness has propelled him into the echelons as a leading painter among others in his generation.

This is Ciria's first exhibition of work in a museum in the United States in which the artist has vigorously turned his attention toward the Rorschach Heads, a merging and blending of abstraction and figuration. The Heads are powerful and complex, strong in color and size. Ciria in the manner of a conductor in an orchestra uses his brushes like a baton conducting and orchestrating the surface with fierce brushstrokes filling the canvas with the colors of red, black, grey, orange and white and finally his signature spattering of paint.

Ciria invites us to create a narrative about his emotionally charged paintings. The inner meaning we bring away as viewers is often dictated by our own emotional associations that the paintings trigger. Powerful and stirring, they make us uncomfortable and yet we return again and again to confront the visual story Ciria brings to us. Ciria bares his soul to us if we are brave enough to take the time to look, to see and therefore to comprehend.

Born in Manchester in 1960, Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria has exhibited extensively in Europe, Latin America and North America. Some of his recent solo exhibitions include: the Círculo de Bellas Artes, (Madrid), Christopher Cutts Gallery, (Toronto), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, (Tel Aviv), National Museum of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art, (Santiago de Chile), Couteron Gallery, (Paris), Museum of Modern Art, (Santo Domingo), and the Pasquart Art Center, (Biel, Switzerland). Ciria recently had a major exhibition in New York in the Stefan Stux Gallery, February-April 2011. He has an up-coming exhibition in Valencia Spain at IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, September 13, 2011.

He is the recipient of numerous international prizes and scholarships such as the Extraordinary Prize Queen Sofía, Madrid, 1999, grants from the Ministry of Culture and Science of Israel, Tel Aviv, 2001, and the Gonzalo Parrado Foundation Scholarship, Madrid, 2008 and 2009.


Amarillo Museum of  Art      20.05.2011 - 31.07.2011


Website & source : AMoA

Website : City of Amarillo

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2011-05-18

U.S.A. - ABINGDON-VIRGINIA - Goya, Dali, & Warhol: Masterpieces of World Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts



In partnership with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and a statewide celebration of their 75 Years of Collecting in Virginia, William King Museum is honored to host this exhibition of works from nearly every continent and time period. Works by the signature artists include some of Francisco Goya’s prints, such as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Salvador Dali’s The God of the Bay of Roses, and one of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn silkscreens. Well-known artists such as George Catlin, John Constable, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Jim Dine will also be represented. Other highlights include ancient Greek vessels, Indian textiles, African sculpture, and Peruvian jewelry.


William King Museum       08.04.2011 - 10.07.2011


Website & source : William King Museum

Website : Abingdon

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

2011-05-04

U.S.A. - CITY OF NEW YORK-NEW YORK - German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse


From E. L. Kirchner to Max Beckmann, artists associated with German Expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century took up printmaking with a collective dedication and fervor virtually unparalleled in the history of art. The woodcut, with its coarse gouges and jagged lines, is known as the preeminent Expressionist medium, but the Expressionists also revolutionized the mediums of etching and lithography to alternately vibrant and stark effect.

This exhibition, featuring approximately 250 works by some thirty artists, is drawn from MoMA’s outstanding holdings of German Expressionist prints, enhanced by selected drawings, paintings, and sculptures from the collection. The graphic impulse is traced from the formation of the Brücke artists group in 1905, through the war years of the 1910s, and extending into the 1920s, when individual artists continued to produce compelling work even as the movement was winding down.

The exhibition takes a broad view of Expressionism, highlighting a diverse array of individuals—from Oskar Kokoschka and Vasily Kandinsky to Erich Heckel and Emil Nolde—who nonetheless shared visual and thematic concerns. Their works reflect a period of intense social and aesthetic transformation, and several themes of continuing resonance emerge. These include a focus on urban experience, an uncompromising approach to the body and sexuality, and an abiding preoccupation with nature, religion, and spirituality. Most pivotal for these years, however, was the experience of World War I. The war and its aftermath are the subject of works by a range of artists, including Otto Dix, whose series of fifty searing etchings, The War,Hell (1919), confronts the violence and decadence in Berlin during the immediate postwar period. was based on his own service in the trenches; Käthe Kollwitz, in a portfolio of seven woodcuts focusing on the devastation felt by the families left behind; and Max Beckmann, whose lithographic series,Hell(1919), confronts the violence and decadence in Berlin during the immediate postwar period.

In addition to a publication and a major website on German Expressionism, the exhibition will mark the culmination of a major four-year grant from The Annenberg Foundation to digitize, catalogue, and conserve all of the approximately three thousand Expressionist works on paper in the Museum’s collection.


MoMA   27.03.2011 - 11.07.2011