Sunday, October 20, 2013

That Head Turner’s Back, With an Old-School Posse


After almost 30 years, she’s back in town, that gal with the turban, the Christmas-bulb gem, and the over-the-shoulder, did-you-say-something glance. Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” last visited New York in 1984, and much has happened since to burnish her allure.

In the 1990s, art conservators cleaned her up and smoothed out cracks that had come to mar her flawless skin, leaving her looking fresh-minted. More important, after being the subject of a hot novel, a tony film and, most recently, a stage play, she’s now a media sensation, one of the most famous faces in Western art. NYTimes

So she’s certain to pull a crowd when she goes on view, starting on Tuesday, at the Frick Collection as part of a traveling loan show, “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis.” Anticipating a crush, the Frick has placed her alone in its Oval Room. But as the exhibition title implies, she comes from her home in The Hague with celebrity company, 14 other fabulous pictures, all installed in an adjoining gallery. Taken together, they are a gold-standard remnant of the Dutch Golden Age.

Budri - Italian Marble Inlay


Our greatest satisfaction? Always managing to thrill our customers. Tailors of marble, which boasts 50 years of experience in working marble and stone and 20 years in the field of artistic inlay. Just like tailor- made garments, every one of our projects is executed on a customized basis, from simplest to the most complex and large-scale and from the most classical to the absolutely modern, 360° manner. We also have a vast selection of "ready-to-lay" floor coverings (from catalogue); the relative documentation is available on request.

Our approach is characterized by a skillful combination of master craftsmanship and high production capacity. We are the ideal partners for customers in search of experience, impressive production capacity and a high quality level. Every Budri job reflects consummate care, because our goal is always to achieve the excellence typical of Italian style and taste.  Budri




Thursday, October 17, 2013

Takashi Murakami


A lightning rod between different cultural valencies (high/low, ancient/modern, oriental/occidental), Takashi Murakami has stated that the artist is someone who understands the borders between worlds and who makes an effort to know them. With his distinctive "Superflat" style and ethos, which employs highly refined classical Japanese painting techniques to depict a super-charged mix of Pop, animé and otaku content within a flattened representational picture-plane, he moves freely within an ever-expanding field of aesthetic issues and cultural inspirations. Parallel to utopian and dystopian themes, he recollects and revitalizes narratives of transcendence and enlightenment, often involving outsider-savants. Mining religious and secular subjects favored by the so-called Japanese "eccentrics" or non-conformist artists of the Early Modern era commonly considered to be counterparts of the Western Romantic tradition, Murakami situates himself within their legacy of bold and lively individualism in a manner that is entirely his own and of his time.




Claudia Wieser’s The Mirror


Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Claudia Wieser’s The Mirror, the Berlin based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show’s title references Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal film of dreamlike nostalgia and non-linear time. Wieser likewise creates an immersive environment plunging the viewer into contemporaneous subjective and objective narratives.

Wieser is known for her geometric constructions, utilizing a language of Modernism in her materials and structures. Influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, “who underst[ood] their art as a spiritual process,” Wieser broadens their ideals to consider abstraction’s coexistence with experience. She honed her understanding of art and the object, the aesthetic and the functional, with an early apprenticeship as a blacksmith at Bergmeister Kunstshmiede. This studied craft informs her approach to the technical drafting of her multi-faceted mirrors, hand-painted, patterned ceramics, and carved wooden sculpture. Additionally, Wieser incorporates the architecture of the exhibition space, drawing with gold leaf directly on the wall, ceiling and floor, blurring compositional boundaries. Wallpaper and tapestry, patterned with Gothic and Baroque interiors and paintings, further serve to set the stage, acting as both backdrop and actor.



Sarah Morris



Sarah Morris is an internationally recognized painter and filmmaker, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings as parallel to her films - both trace urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In both these media, she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics. Morris assesses what today's urban structures, bureaucracies, cities and nations might conceal and surveys how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in studies of conspiratorial power, structures of control, and the mapping of global socio-political networks. Her work can be viewed at the Petzel Gallery in NYC.