During a few days in Sao Paulo, I went to several museums and about a dozen far-flung galleries. Each had something to recommend it, whether the art or exhibition on view or the architecture or physical lay-out of the space, but nothing I saw or experienced surprised or captivated me as much as what I saw at MASP. MASP, the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, is a private, nonprofit museum founded by Brazilian businessman Assis Chateaubriand in 1947. Originally located elsewhere, it moved in 1968 into a Modernist structure designed by Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi on Avenida Paulista, a busy shopping and business thoroughfare. The museum occupies a glass-walled rectangular box that is suspended high above the street … [Read more...]
proyectosLA: A Model Fair
Amid the hubbub and bounty of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative is proyectosLA, a two-month long commercial art fair of remarkable quality, taste, and inspiration, which is housed in a converted downtown warehouse. Near the entry, a collection of small rooms radiating off communal office space serve as booths for 19 galleries from throughout Latin American and the U.S. that present select works by Latin American artists. The remainder of the 20,000 sq. ft. space is occupied by the exhibition Here the border is you, which is comprised of fascinating and distinguished work drawn from the 19 galleries. They are installed so as to elicit dialogues among the established and emerging, multigenerational artists … [Read more...]
Notes on a Visit to Buenos Aires, December 2016
In early December, I traveled to Buenos Aires, where I always encounter wonderful art and exhibitions, ranging from early Modernist to Contemporary, some of which I will note briefly here. Time and again in Buenos Aires, I have seen work by Latin American artists little known to me who were shortly thereafter the subjects of major museum and gallery exhibitions in the U.S. and elsewhere. I will therefore point out work by artists--a number of women in particular--whose art caught my eye. At MALBA, Museum de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, where I always begin my trip, the permanent collection galleries featured abstract work of the late 1950s by the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark, who had a retrospective at New York's MoMA in 2014, … [Read more...]
Enrique Martinez Celaya Studio Visit
A few nights ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Culver City studio of Enrique Martinez Celaya, whose work I have long admired, together with a small group from ArtTable. Martinez Celaya moved back to Los Angeles two years ago after a ten-year hiatus, during which time he lived in South Florida (where he retains a studio) and Berlin. Martinez Celaya is an old-fashioned artist in the sense that he paints in oil and wax on canvas and creates sculptures cast in bronze that are rendered in a representational manner. However, his works go beyond naturalism to embrace poetry, poignancy and wonder, being rich in implied narrative and displaying a deep-rooted humanism. Each provides a journey into its own world and experience. Each is … [Read more...]
Gego at Dominique Lévy Gallery
Works of Gego's Reticulárea Series (1969-82)--sculptures in which slender lengths of wire are used to create space-enclosing networks of lines in undefined shapes--have increasingly appeared in museum collections and art fairs over the course of the past decade. Yet this German-born, Venezuelan artist, who died in 1994, remains underknown by North American audiences. A small survey of her work at the Drawing Center in 2007 attracted some attention, while a show at the Americas Society in 2012 was all but ignored. The tightly-curated, museum quality exhibition Gego: Autobiography of a Line, currently on view at the Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York, may finally do the trick in establishing her reputation. The show is timely, coming at a … [Read more...]