2016-10-26

2219 - 20170319 - U.S.A. - LOS ANGELES - CA - Major museum survey of Toba Khedoori's oeuvre in Los Angeles - 25.09.2016-09.03.2017

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Toba Khedoori, Untitled (branches 1), 2011–12, oil on linen, 31 3/4 × 41 3/8 in., private collection, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London, © Toba Khedoori, photo © Tim Nighswander, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
 
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announces Toba Khedoori (September 25, 2016–March 19, 2017), a major museum survey of Khedoori’s oeuvre over the past 22 years. The exhibition presents the artist’s more recent oil-on-canvas paintings alongside her earlier large-scale works on paper, demonstrating the impressive arc of her artistic production over the past two decades. The exhibition includes more than 25 works and is curated by Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and formerly the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of contemporary art at LACMA, with Christine Y. Kim, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA. Following its run at LACMA, Toba Khedoori will be on view at PAMM from April 20–September 24, 2017.

Toba Khedoori has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1990. Her early works are notable for their precise draftsmanship and for their use of negative space—often at a very large scale. Khedoori frequently depicts architectural forms from distanced perspectives, rendering commonplace objects and spaces familiar yet decontextualized. In recent years, she has transitioned from paper to canvas, producing smaller scale works that hover between representation and abstraction. Like her earlier compositions, these works are enigmatic and acutely detailed; in an art world awash with rapidly moving images and saturated colors, Khedoori remains committed to the silent, slow, and exacting process of working by hand.

Sirmans said, “Toba Khedoori elevates the experience of the commonplace by treating ordinary objects and bits and pieces of nature as if they were precious baubles. Her attention to detail, her surrealist wit, and her appreciation for the magic of the everyday remind us to take stock of what surrounds us.”

“Looking at this survey of Khedoori’s work in the context of recent exhibitions at LACMA, one can see a focus emerging that is indicative of a changing world of art,” said Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Considering the show alongside monographic exhibitions of Agnes Martin, Diana Thater, and Helen Pashgian as well as the long-term installation of Maria Nordman’s YANG-NA, it is clear that there is rapidly growing recognition of the work of women artists. In addition, the exhibition extends LACMA’s efforts to trace the recent history of art in Southern California, which includes Thater and Pashgian, as well as John Altoon, Asco, Edward Kienholz, Ken Price, Noah Purifoy, and James Turrell.”

Toba Khedoori is arranged in loose chronological and thematic order. The exhibition begins with large paintings on paper that ushered her into the contemporary art scene in the early 1990s. Her breakthrough came with monumental paintings on paper, such as Untitled (doors) (1996) and LACMA’s own Untitled (hallway) (1997), within which detritus from her studio floor appears embedded in the wax surfaces. Depicting common objects and architectural features and occupying a space between painting and drawing, these impressive works seem to withhold as much as they reveal. While Khedoori’s works are emphatically two-dimensional, the scale of those early paintings brings them into dialogue with the actual experience of architecture, which she often represents in fragments. While Khedoori’s emphasis the quotidian as subject matter serves as a sober update of Pop Art’s embrace of common objects, her placement of these everyday objects within undefined and thus mysterious surroundings invites an almost surreal unease.

Departing from the large scale and two-dimensionality found in Khedoori’s early work, the exhibition transitions into the artist’s paintings of the early 2000s. Here scale, shadows, and contrast become more varied and dramatic. Untitled (clouds) (2005), for example, is a vertical format with its entire upper half is filled with billowy clouds while the lower half is mostly empty space. Before 2005, almost all of Khedoori’s works are horizontal, suggesting the horizon line of nature and landscapes in the history of art while creating a surprising contrast with the everyday objects shown within these frames. Untitled (clouds), on the other hand, is oriented vertically and the clouds occupy the frame of the picture with no sky around them.

Untitled (black fireplace) (2006) and Untitled (white fireplace) (2005) feature an almost photorealist depiction of wood burning in a fireplace. In these works, she takes the same subject and paints it twice, changing only the color of the space surrounding the image of the fireplace. Using encaustic, she makes one work black; the other is simply oil and wax on paper, like her earlier works. Through this contrast, she encourages viewers to examine these differences, inviting them to question the copy in a world where the idea that something cannot be reproduced has long ago vanished.

The final gallery in the exhibition showcases the artist’s most recent work, including two paintings depicting branches and leaves. In Untitled (leaves/branches) (2015), Khedoori executes the line, color, and proportions of foliage with technical mastery. In contrast to the photorealistic quality of these works, other pieces in this final gallery move toward grids and abstraction, such as Untitled (tile) (2015), a geometric study of a mosaic tile floor reflecting light from an unseen source.

Toba Khedoori was born in Sydney, Australia in 1964. She received her BA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1988) and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (1994).

Her work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (2003); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2002); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997).

Khedoori was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994) and a MacArthur Foundation Grant (2002). Curators have included her in numerous international group exhibitions such as the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); 2nd Seville Biennal (2006); Liverpool Biennial (2006); 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004); and the Whitney Biennial (1995).

Prominent museums that hold her work in their permanent collections include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Basel; Albertina, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles
 
 
 
 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Toba Khedoori - 25.09.2016 - 09.03.2017 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-20

2218 - 20161231 - U.S.A. - GREENWICH-CONN -"Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors' Private Collections" at the Bruce Museum - 24.09.2016-31.12.2016

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Jenny Saville, The Mothers, 2011. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 106 5/16 x 86 5/8 in. Collection of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
 
Only yesterday, it seems, one was hard-pressed to name more than a handful of successful women artists; now the list would be extensive, and the choices rich and varied. Although numerous recent exhibitions have featured women’s art, the collecting of art created by women has received scant attention. In fact, private collections are in the process of being dramatically transformed, shifting to focus on contemporary artists, women in particular. 

The Bruce Museum opens Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections. Greenwich and the nearby communities in Fairfield and Westchester counties are home to a number of the finest contemporary collections, and thus to some of the most exciting art by women being made today. Her Crowd will offer the rare opportunity to see what some of America’s most influential collectors of contemporary art consider beautiful, important, and compelling. Themes specific to women continue to be of significance: motherhood, food, sexuality; beauty and its discontents; stereotypes of femininity and their undoing; intersections of gender and race. Equally important for Her Crowd is the current powerful resurgence of abstraction in its myriad forms: minimalist patterning, expressive mark-making, and painterly exuberance. Many artists represented in the show traffic in unexpected collisions: of the second and third dimension, of the carefully crafted and the found object, of the concrete and the immaterial. Running the gamut from established figures to brilliant newcomers, the exhibition includes remarkable work by Yayoi Kusama, Kiki Smith, Betye Saar, Annie Lapin, Margaret Lee, Carol Bove, Dana Schutz, Jessica Stockholder, Jenny Saville, and Tara Donovan, among others. Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections will offer a glimpse into the exciting interchange between contemporary artists and their passionate collectors.

The exhibition is co-curated by Kenneth E. Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator of Art, and Mia Laufer, PhD candidate (Washington University in Saint Louis) and Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow.
 
 
 
 
Bruce Museum - "Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors' Private Collections"
24.09.2016 - 31.012.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-12

2217 - 20161230 - U.S.A. - CHICAGO, IL - Smart Museum of Art presents collection of 830 photographic works - 22.09.2016-30.12.2016

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An extraordinary collection of 830 photographic works spanning from 1844 to 2012, bequested to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, forms the basis of an expansive new exhibition, There was a whole collection made: Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman, September 22–December 30, 2016. The exhibition of more than 300 works is curated by Laura Letinsky, Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the College at the University of Chicago, and herself an acclaimed photographer, and Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curator of Contemporary Art.

There was a whole collection made mines the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman’s 2014 gift of over eight hundred photographic works by 414 artists to the Smart Museum, essentially establishing a major new resource for the public as well as scholars of the history and theory of photography. The exhibition draws extensively from the collection, which the Guttmans built over 31 years, and includes rare vintage prints by pioneers of the medium like William Henry Fox Talbot and David Octavius Hill; modern works by Hannah Höch, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, and Helen Levitt; contemporary classics by Diane Arbus, Malick Sidibé, Chuck Close, and Carrie Mae Weems; and much more. The exhibition opens with a dramatic salon-style wall of nearly fifty works and afterward is organized into five thematic sections: the natural and built world; photographic experimentation; documentary; portraiture; and “fifteen minutes of fame,” which features portraits of famous and not-sofamous people by other famous, and not-so-famous photographers.

“Rather than seeking to collect, for example, all the works of a specific artist, period, or place, or the best known or most precious, Lester and Betty Guttmans’ choices grew out of their inquisitiveness and wide-ranging interests in the world,” said exhibition co-curator Laura Letinsky. “The breadth of historical, technological, and conceptual strategies, as well as the variety of subject matter, demonstrate an ongoing curiosity. It is a thoroughly eclectic and a fantastically personal gathering of images expressive of the Guttmans’ full, deep lives.”

“This exhibition marks the Smart Museum’s first opportunity to publicly celebrate the Guttmans’ inspiring collection and the generosity of their bequest,” added co-curator Jessica Moss. “At the Smart—Lester and Betty’s neighborhood museum—their passion and curiosity will live on as their collection becomes a vital resource not only for teaching and research but also for all to enjoy.”

There was a whole collection made is accompanied by a fully illustrated multi-author catalogue published by the Smart Museum and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

The Guttmans were married for 50 years and worked together at Argonne National Laboratory, where Lester Guttman (1919–2006) was a senior scientist and editor of the Journal of Applied Physics and Betty Guttman (1922–2014) was a technical librarian. Betty was also an alumna of the University of Chicago (SB 1943) and the couple were longtime Hyde Park residents. While photography was just one of their shared pursuits—they were also patrons of art and music in Chicago and, as amateur mycologists, coedited the journal McIlvainea—they enjoyed the deep pleasure of living with art that one knows well.



Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago - Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman
22.09.2016-30.12.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-10-05

2216 - 20170212 - U.S.A. - EAST LANSING - MICHIGAN - Broad Art Museum - Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists - 27.08.2016 - 12.02.2017

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Geng Xue, Mr. Sea, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Klein Sun Gallery, New York

Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists focuses a critical lens on the artistic production of a group of highly talented, emerging women artists from China. Collectively, the artists in this exhibition investigate a wide-range of themes and issues, including the status of women in China; cultural and gender identity; interpersonal relationships; and more broad sociopolitical dynamics, both in China and beyond. Importantly, their probing investigations stir discussion and draw attention to their diverse and varied experiences.

The generation of individuals born in China during the 1970s and after witnessed significant changes—including ideological, cultural, social, and in the domestic sphere—as a result of China’s opening up to foreign markets and international exchange. These shifts have in turn motivated artists to experiment within their own artistic practices in order to better understand the struggles and conflicts they encounter both privately and publicly. Following this line of inquiry, Fire Within brings together fresh perspectives and approaches to traditional mediums with the intent to reveal the new forms of consciousness that have emerged in recent years. Taken together, the works on display transcend gender and cultural differences, instead tapping into a more universal sense of human nature.



 
Broad Art Museum - Fire Within: A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists 
 27.08.2016 - 12.02.2017