DENNIS OPPENHEIM alla galleria CONCEPTUAL di Milano

Gli anni Sessanta hanno visto numerosi autori cercare di sondare nuove vie per la ricerca estetica. Anche e nonostante fossero nel mezzo di turbinii politici variegati tali artisti hanno ampliato lo spettro espressivo in modo peculiare e variegato. Uno degli autori che ha partecipato a questa mossa estetica con notevoli lavori non si può non annoverare Dennis Oppenheim.

Oppenheim_Armature for Flying Gardens. Courtesy Galleria Conceptual

In questa mostra si vuole esemplificare dei passaggi topici di tale percorso nel contemporaneo. In esposizione documentazione fotografica dagli anni Sessanta e Settanta di Land Art. Non si possono dimenticare anche i progetti per opere monumentali del decennio successivo. In tutti questi lavori l'artista invadeva lo spazio, o modificandolo o interagendo con esso tramite la propria dimensione corporale.

Photo courtesy Galleria Conceptual

Dennis Oppenheim sostituisce la classica tela dipinta con nuove modalità estetiche. Il campo d'azione di tale ricerca diventa il territorio e la stessa permanenza dell'opera viene superata con la sua mera e sostanziale documentazione. Un'opera che appare nel suo tempo, non vuole permanere ma che ha trovato modo di arrivare fino a noi in modo indelebile.

- Stefano Taddei

DENNIS OPPENHEIM

A cura di: Graziano Menolascina

Periodo: dall'8 maggio al 28 luglio

Orari di apertura: dal martedì al venerdì 14.00 - 19.00 - sabato 10.00 - 18.00

Dove: Galleria Conceptual, via Mameli 46, MILANO

Photo courtesy Galleria Conceptual

Tate Modern presents the work of Dora Maar

This autumn, Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective of the work of Dora Maar (1907–97) whose provocative photographs and photomontages became celebrated icons of surrealism. Featuring over 200 works from a career spanning more than six decades, this exhibition shows how Maar’s eye for the unusual also translated to her commercial commissions, social documentary photographs, and paintings – key aspects of her practice which have, until now, remained little known.

Dora Maar, Untitled (Hand Shell), 1934

Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, Dora Maar grew up between Argentina and Paris and studied decorative arts and painting before switching her focus to photography. In doing so, Maar became part of a generation of women who seized the new professional opportunities offered by advertising and the illustrated press. Tate Modern’s exhibition will open with the most important examples of these commissioned works. Around 1931, Maar set up a studio with film set designer Pierre Kéfer specialising in portraiture, fashion photography and advertising. Works such as Untitled (Les années vous guettent) c.1935 – believed to be an advertising project for face cream that Maar made by overlaying two negatives – will reveal Maar’s innovative approach to constructing images through staging, photomontage and collage. Striking nude studies such as that of famed model Assia Granatouroff will also reveal how women photographers like Maar were beginning to infiltrate relatively taboo genres such as erotica and nude photography.

During the 1930s, Maar was active in left-wing revolutionary groups led by artists and intellectuals. Reflecting this, her street photography from this time shot in Barcelona, Paris and London captured the reality of life during Europe’s economic depression. Maar shared these politics with the surrealists, becoming one of the few photographers to be included in the movement’s exhibitions and publications. A major highlight of the show will be outstanding examples of this area of Maar’s practice, including Portrait d’Ubu 1936, an enigmatic image thought to be an armadillo foetus, and the renowned photomontages 29, rue d’Astorg c.1936 and Le Simulateur 1935. Collages and publications by André Breton, Georges Hugnet, Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Jacqueline Lamba will place Maar’s work in context with that of her inner circle.

In the winter of 1935–6 Maar met Pablo Picasso and their relationship of around eight years had a profound effect on both their careers. She documented the creation of his most political work Guernica 1937, offering unprecedented insight into his working process. He in turn immortalised her in the motif of the ‘weeping woman’. Together they made a series of portraits that combined experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, anticipating her energetic return to painting in 1936. Featuring rarely seen, privately-owned canvases such as La Conversation 1937 and La Cage 1943, and never-before exhibited negatives from the Dora Maar collection at the Musée National d’art Moderne, the exhibition will shed new light on the dynamic between these two artists during the turbulent wartime years.

Dora Maar, Model in Swimsuit, 1936

After the Second World War, Maar began dividing her time between Paris and the South of France. During this period, she explored diverse subject matter and styles before focusing on gestural, abstract paintings of the landscape surrounding her home. Though these works were exhibited to acclaim in London and Paris into the 1950s, Maar gradually withdrew from artistic circles. As a result, the second half of her life became shrouded in mystery and speculation. The exhibition will reunite over 20 works from this little-known – yet remarkably prolific – period. Dora Maar concludes with a substantial group of camera-less photographs that she made in the 1980s when, four decades after all but abandoning the medium, Maar returned to her darkroom.

Dora Maar is curated by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Damarice Amao, Assistant Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator with Emma Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Tate Modern.

Dora Maar, Untitled (Legs), 1935

Dora Maar

Curated by: Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska

Period: 20 November 2019 – 15 March 2020

Opening hours: 10.00 – 18.00 from Sunday to Thursday and until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday

Where: Tate Modern, Bankside, London

Sillabe has published the catalogue for PREMIO COMBAT PRIZE's tenth edition

If – as I believe – it is true that, as it reflects our identity, contemporary art is essential for envisioning our cultural, social and economic future, then the tenth edition of the Combat Prize – a goal that we had set four ourselves since the first edition – bears witness to a decade characterized by great social and cultural transition which have led to the changed perspectives through which art today is produced, analyzed and marketed.

Premio Combat Prize's catalogue - Sillabe Edition

To mark this tenth Combat Prize, we have decided to meet this new challenge by stanging the best possible exhibition and face the task with the seriousness and ambition that have distinguished all previous editions. Consistency, coherence and continuity in the exhibition’s format, aims and roles have succeeded in improving the visibility of our participating artists and their competitiveness on the art market. This has created mobility within the “system” making it possible to give voice to all the creative experience that compromise most of contemporary artists output and its enormous, inexhaustible wealth. It is this coherence that has gradually brought the Combat Prize into the national spotlight, to the point that it has become one of the most popular competitions in Italy and acknowledged as an important growth opportunity for artists during various phases of their careers. Many voices of the contemporary, and the works of the more than nine thousand artists who have participated in the competition’s editions, are an excellent key to reading the past decade. And, thanks to hardcopy publications and digital archiving of the works produced over the years, they will surely become a tool for analyzing a period in which the boundaries of an area inhabited by just a few have expanded making it a place open to all in an mass phenomenon representing society’s fast changes. The municipal government of Livorno has played an important role, and deserves enormous praise as do the partners who have always supported the project, along with the city’s places of culture such as the Museo Fattori, the Granai di Villa Mimbelli, the Fortezza Vecchia and the Fortezza Nuova, the Museo di Storia Naturale and the Villa del Presidente, that have hosted the competition. In turn, these places have grown and reinforced their respective missions – educations and training, planning and opening their doors to all artistic production with special attention to those that extend the process over the long - term. Heartfelt thanks to all the artists, curators and collectors who have participating in the previous editions and to the one thousand two hundred arts from fifty-two countries taking part in this year’s Combat Prize. Their careers have developed in many different ways, but they are all characterized and united by a shared desire to record our world, blazing new trails and through their explorations, find innovative answers. I hope that the Combat Prize will prove to be a marvellous voyage of the exploration that will bring you new knowledge and awareness.

- Paolo Batoni

Edited by: Paolo Batoni Edition (cm): 21x21 Year: 2018 Pages: 140 Illustrations: a colori Translation by: Julia H. Weiss Languages: italiano/inglese Texts: Paolo Batoni, Francesca Baboni, Andrea Bruciati, Stefano Taddei, Paola Tognon, Daniele De Luigi, Lorenzo Balbi, Matteo Bergamini

Prize: euro 20.00

You can order the catalogue at the Sillabe Publishing House or by sending your request to: info@premiocombat.it