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WORLD ARTS NEWS
"Vadim
Voinov: The State Hermitage under the Full Moon"
2005-10-25 until 2006-02-25 at the
State Hermitage Museum
St. Petersburg, , RU Russian Federation
 The
exhibition Vadim Voinov. The State Hermitage Under the
Full Moon will open on October 25th, 2005 at the
General Staff Building of the State Hermitage Museum,
and will be on display through February 25, 2005. The
exhibition has been organized by The State Hermitage
Museum, in the collaboration with the Kolodzei Art
Foundation (USA), Atellier II Gallery of Art (Moscow),
Kultur Kontakt Foundation (Vienna, Austria), Pechatny
Dvor Printers (St. Petersburg), Dean Publishers (St.
Petersburg) and Free Culture Foundation (St.
Petersburg). Vadim Voinov was born 1940 in Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg) and lives and works in
St. Petersburg. In his works, Voinov uses a technique
he himself created--functional collage--intended to
reconstruct the history of Czarist, revolutionary,
Soviet and contemporary Russia. In the 1960’s and
1970’s Voinov studied the history of early St.
Petersburg architecture. An art historian himself, he
published articles and undertook archeological
expeditions. His devotion to archeology and
understanding of the significance of each object
introduced into his work a historical significance. He
developed functional collage beginning in 1979. The
objects used in Voinov’s works acquire a new
historical meaning as a result of their inclusion.
Voinov’s works are laconic in their composition. For
this installation Voinov chose the unrenovated
interiors of the General Staff Building on Palace
Square. The exhibition consists of collages and
installations made of authentic found objects on
themes connected with the newest history of Russia.
The title of an exhibition, Vadim Voinov. The State
Hermitage Under the Full Moon, expresses the presence
of the artist as an exhibitor in a major museum of
Russia and the world. For political reasons such
recognition was absolutely impossible for many
decades, and till now it seems to the artist a strange
dream. There are 73 works represented in the
exhibition, installed in five rooms. Each group of
collages and separate installations are thematically
connected and titled: Red Wall; Circle-The Father of
a Square; The Viennese Set; and others. The
installation of the exhibition is an artwork in
itself. The catalogue for the exhibition includes 17
essays with 110 illustrations. Each copy of the
catalogue is marked by an original, unique object: a
stamp from the 1920’s-1940’s with the image of a
soldier (“Voinov” can be translated into English as
“soldier”). The catalogue is published in Russian and
English.
"Tony
O’Malley"
2005-10-26 until 2006-01-01 at the Irish
Museum of Modern Art
Dublin, , IE
 A
major retrospective of the work of the Irish painter
Tony O’Malley, one of the most important and best-loved
Irish artists of the past 100 years, opens to the public
at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 26
October 2005. The exhibition, entitled simply Tony
O’Malley, focuses particularly on certain core aspects
and key moments in an extraordinarily productive career.
It covers O’Malley’s early years as an amateur artist
painting the landscape of his native Co Kilkenny,
through his years in St Ives and the Bahamas and his
return to Ireland in 1990, to some of his last works,
created shortly before his death in 2003. The exhibition
comprises more than 60 works, drawn mainly from private
collections. Tony O’Malley is curated by the curator and
critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith. It is presented in
association with THE IRISH TIMES and H&K International.
Born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, Tony O’Malley was
until the late 1950s a part-time artist working, from
1934 to 1958, with the Munster and Leinster Bank in
various branches around Ireland. Although suffering
chronic ill-health, he continued painting throughout the
1950s, developing his craft through a process of trial
and error and through studying, in reproduction, the
works of the great masters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh.
A number of works in the exhibition date from these
early years. Winter Landscape, Arklow (1953) and Winter
Landscape, New Ross (1957) present the viewer with
bleak, geometrical landscapes where small houses huddle
together against the elements, reflecting something of
the economic and social conditions in the country and of
the personal losses O’Malley suffered - the deaths of
his mother and brother - around that time. In 1960
O’Malley moved to St Ives in Cornwall, which he had
already visited on a number of occasions and where he
was to live for the next 30 years. The change wrought in
his work by his new circumstances and surroundings - St
Ives had been a well-known artists’ colony since the
1930s - can be seen in two self-portraits painted just
two years apart. In Self-Portrait, Heavy Snowfall at
Trevaylor (1962-63) the artist is depicted in muted
tones, in a solemn, ordered studio as the snow piles up
outside. In Bird Painter (1965), by contrast, he is
suffused with an elemental energy, poised to transform
nature into art, his interest in birds, present from the
start, having taken on a new life in St Ives. This
leitmotiv recurs again and again in a variety of works,
including the powerful The Hawk Owl (1964) and in Hawk
and Quarry in Winter, in Memory of Peter Lanyon (1964),
his tribute to his close friend and fellow painter Peter
Lanyon, who died in a gliding accident in1963. In the
early 1960s, O’Malley began one of his best-known series
of pictures, which he continued until the late 1990s.
Painted every Good Friday and frequently drawing on
images from local Kilkenny tomb carvings, they address,
often obliquely, the theme of Christ’s passion. These
ranged from Wooden Collage, Good Friday (1968), a
strikingly simple evocation of the Crucifixion in
blackened fragments of wood and slate, to Good Friday
Painting (1994), which bears the expanded repertoire of
gesture and colour resulting from his visits to the
Bahamas in the 1970s and ‘80s. Tony and his wife, Jane -
the Canadian artist Jane Harris, whom he had married in
1973 - made their first visit to Jane’s family in the
Bahamas in 1974. This radically different environment
initially posed some challenges for O’Malley, more
especially in terms of the vastly different nature of
the Caribbean light. However, O’Malley’s legendary
persistence won out. In Bahamian Butterfly (1979) the
formal idiom developed in gloomier climes is expanded to
accommodate the visual resplendence of his new
surroundings. During this period O’Malley’s work began
to be exhibited much more regularly in Ireland,
particularly at the Taylor Galleries. In 1984 he had a
retrospective in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. A solo
exhibition by the Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall toured to a
number of English and Irish venues. The inclusion of
four of his larger Bahamian canvases in the 1988 ROSC
came as a considerable surprise to those whose knowledge
of his work was confined to his paintings from the 1960s
and ‘70s. The first exhibition of O’Malley’s work at
IMMA was held in 1992-93. Following receipt of a major
body of his work on loan from George and Maura
McClelland in 2000, a further exhibition from that
collection, was held in 2001. Since then the Museum has
received a heritage donation from Noel and Anne Marie
Smyth of 60 of the O’Malley works from that collection
to add to those already in its Collection.
This new chromatic range was carried
over into O’Malley’s later Irish paintings, following
his permanent return to Ireland in 1990. Undeterred by
failing eyesight, he found new modes of expression in
works such as Sense of Old Place (1997) in which the
watery depths of the pond spread out to encompass the
entire landscape. Tony O’Malley continued working almost
up to the time of his death in January 2003, true to his
feelings, expressed in an interview The Sunday Tribune
in 1984, “I have no time for people who mess about,
doing nothing when it suits them …There’s so much to do.
If I run out of canvas I just paint over something I’ve
already done. I’m an old man and I started painting
late. I don’t want to waste any time”.
"Meanwhile...Ivan Zulueta"
2005-10-26 until 2005-12-18 at the Centre de Cultura
Contemporania de Barcelona
 The
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents
the exhibition ‘Meanwhile...’ by Ivan Zulueta, curated
by Álvaro Machinbarrena, which will run in Hall -1 of
the CCCB from 26 October to 18 December 2005. The
exhibition includes two practically unshown works by
Ivan Zulueta, well known for his filmography and
graphic work: his long series of Polaroids and the
Super-8 features made between 1971 and 1976. The title
of the exhibition refers to the parallel nature of
these works, developed simultaneously with the rest of
his output, and also reproduces a phrase
(‘Meanwhile...’) that is recurrent in many of his
Polaroids, appearing like a wipe or a transition
vignette. The series of polaroids in the exhibition
will show just part of Zulueta’s vast body of work,
using a layout that avoids distorting the intention of
the author, who is very interested in the potential of
Polaroids to ‘construct’ stories. In the end, the
Polaroids become arrested images in a vast collection
of picture cards or comic-book vignettes. The editing
of Polaroids also represents the obsessive, excessive
ingredient that shapes Zulueta’s work and his way of
working. For many years, Ivan Zulueta shut himself up
at home. In this self-exile, he compulsively
photographed the walls of his room, producing
thousands of Polaroids. The Super 8 selection brings
together some early works and others that might be
considered by the contemporary eye to be pure
exercises in image, with neither start nor finish, and
which contribute to a greater understanding of his
work. The exhibition will be accompanied by two
documentary videos: one more general, related to the
work Arrebato and the film’s moment of conception, and
the other centring on the process of the exhibition,
more related to his Polaroids. In addition, some of
Zulueta’s cinematographic work will be presented at
the Barcelona Independent Film Festival, L’Alternativa,
which will take place from 11 to 19 November 2005 at
the CCCB. Visitors will be able to see the artist’s
two full-length films, Arrebato and 1,2,3, escondite
inglés, as well as some shorts and joint ventures with
Televisión Española. The exhibition is a production of
La Casa Encendida, Madrid, where Zulueta’s Polaroids
went on show from March to June 2005. Before
travelling to Barcelona, the exhibition was held at
the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid
(July-September 2005).
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,"Connecting Points: Paintings by Lisie S. Orjuela"
2005-10-24 until
2005-11-07 at Zeitgeist
Gallery,
Cambridge, MA, USA
Zeitgeist Gallery presents
Connecting Points : paintings by Lisie S. Orjuela. October 24-November
7, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 29, 3-6 pm. Lisie S.
Orjuela visually taps into the inner world of the psyche, spirit,
soul. Her paintings are reminiscent of woven textiles, with layers of
thoughts intertwined with feelings and experiences. Her work is timely
since it also explores rising up from difficult times. These experiences
are often mournful, yet ever vibrant and on the move. Her intent is to
grasp connections and find the relationships that exist therein, whether
within ourselves, others and/or our surroundings. Orjuelas Connecting
Points series features richly colored, textured figurative
images. Each painting evokes a state of mind. Orjuelas main interest
lies in the interior dimensions, the psychological spheres and
environments. Hence the lack of recognizable placement for the human
figures. Instead they dissolve and then emerge out of the surrounding
ground, interacting with it, being a part of it. Patterns and textures
have become an important part of Orjuela’s vocabulary in the last few
years, adding to the richness and ambiguity of the pieces. The
complexity of the figures inner worlds are hinted at by using an organic
process of layering visual textures with rich earthy colors. Orjuelas
process is slow and deliberate, as she mines for the interior dimensions
that lie beneath each image. Her Connecting Points paintings are not
only weighty in content, they are also hefty in size. With most of
the pieces having dimensions of approximately 4ft. by 4ft., Orjuelas Connecting
Points looms large visually and mentally. Originally from South
America, painter Lisie S. Orjuela has lived in various countries and
throughout the United States. She currently resides and has her studio
in Connecticut. Orjuela is a founding member of the vibrant Arts &
Literature Laboratory Gallery in New Haven, CT. In addition
to participating in numerous group exhibitions, Orjuela has had solo
exhibitions in MA, CT, NJ, MO, IL, OK, and Mexico. Orjuela’s solo
exhibit at the Zeitgeist Gallery will be running concurrently with
another Connecting Points solo exhibit at the Edward Williams Gallery,
Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Hackensack NJ. The exhibit in
New Jersey runs from October 3d-November 4th.
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