Mark Francis

Arena

20 March 2010 - 03 July 2010

Abbot Hall Art Gallery
Kendal
Cumbria
LA9 5AL

Mark Francis belongs to a generation of primarily non-objective painters. His work draws on a wide range of previously unavailable scientific images now in general circulation due to the invention of the electron microscope and advances in telescopic technology. This exhibition will showcase some of his most recent work which explores the use of the grid format and the dynamic between the man-made and the natural.

Supported by - Arts Council England, Northern Rock Foundation

http://www.abbothall.org.uk/future-exhibitions

Quanta

A Project by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and William McKeown

A certain distance, endless light

05 March 2010 - 04 July 2010

mima
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Centre Square, Middlesbrough
TS1 2AZ

The exhibition, inspired by the theme of AV Festival 10, energy, will bring together two extraordinary artists, Cuban born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Irish artist William McKeown. Both artists’ work answer the theme of energy in different ways. For this two-person project McKeown is making two new installations, 'The Dayroom' and 'The Daisy Field' (http://www.visitmima.com).

William McKeown will also make a major new solo show entitled 'The Day's Eyes/The Night's Eyes' at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast from November to January 2010/11.

http://www.visitmima.com/exhibitions/current.php

William McKeown

The Armory Show 2010

03 April 2010 - 03 July 2010

Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce its participation in the Armory Show, New York.

The Armory Show
Piers 92 & 94
Twelfth Avenue at 55th Street
New York City

The Armory Show 2010 Opening Day takes place Wednesday, March 3rd for invited guests.

Opening Hours:
Thursday, March 4 - Saturday, March 6 Noon to 8 pm
Sunday, March 7 Noon to 7 pm


With support from

culture ireland | cultúr éireann

promoting the arts abroad

cur chun cinn na n-eadaíon thar lear

Pavo

Three little words

Section

Kathy Prendergast

The Black Map Series

18 February 2010 - 10 April 2010

PEER
99 Hoxton Street
London N1 6QL, UK

Kathy Prendergast uses a range of materials in her work, from ordinary domestic objects to cast bronze, and from chalk or marble to human hair. Since the early 1990s Prendergast has also used maps and ideas around mapping as a key point of departure for a number of series of works.

Prendergast’s current series of Black Maps, exhibited at Peer, are produced by a laborious process of inking-out vast areas of road maps from countries around the world, leaving visible small white dots that denote areas of habitation.

At close inspection, roads, place names and geographical details can still be discerned underneath the densely hatched lines of black marker, giving these works a strong sense of having been crafted by hand. Viewed from a distance, each work has the appearance of a star chart – constellations of small villages, large towns and major cities all represented by hundreds of uniform-size single white marks. 

In some countries, such as Poland and the Ukraine, the distribution of dots across the density of black is fairly evenly spread, suggesting a balanced distribution of population across a geographical area. One could also infer from this that these communities also have roughly equal areas of land for agriculture around them. By contrast, two maps of western USA show lines of clustered of dots and leave large areas totally blacked out, suggesting arteries or routes of passage through less agrarian landscapes. In these works, Prendergast has effaced the functionality of the map as an indicator of the topographies of the land, and has re-cast it to a chart that indicates only our impact and imposition onto it. She recently commented, ‘The map is an expression of the landscape but over and above that, it is an expression of us on the landscape.

Maps are employed in Prendergast’s work as both subject and as object – for their conceptual dexterity and for their functional matter-of-factness. She does not attempt to transform her source material into a pristine, finished object. Her hand as the maker is very present and any imperfections in her methodical process, as well as the integral creases of the map that reveal its original, shop-purchased form are left untouched.

http://www.peeruk.org/current-project.html

The Black Map Series

Jaki Irvine

City of Women

14 January 2010 - 27 February 2010

In 2008 The LAB and Draíocht invited Jaki Irvine to think about William Hogarth's 1732 series of prints, A Harlot's Progress.



City of Women is the work developed by Irvine in response to this invitation. Irvine's short film, City of Women, was shot on Foley Street, formerly Montgomery Street and now the site of The LAB, in June 2009.

The exhibition City of Women at the LAB will also include six original prints from Hogarth's series A Harlot's Progress, on loan from the Irish Museum of Modern Art.



Dublin City Council gratefully acknowledges the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the generous loan of the Hogarth prints from its collection.

City of Women

Sean Scully

Works from the 1980s

05 February 2010 - 01 May 2010

 Sean Scully is one of the most significant abstract painters working today. An internationally renowned artist, he has recently exhibited in New York, Barcelona, Duisburg and Munich.  This exhibition will concentrate on paintings from the 1980s; an important period in the artist’s life and oeuvre, as well as hitherto unseen works on paper from the artist’s own collection.

Rejecting the meticulous, precise gridded paintings he made in the 1970s, Scully's work took a dramatic turn in the early 1980s. He began to make paintings with relief elements in an attempt to broaden the expressive range of his work. By making his paintings three-dimensional he gave them a more emphatic, physical quality: 'I liked the idea of looking at a painting that you could not look at just from the front but had to move around.' At the same time, stripes began to grow wider and become more pulsating. Colour gained in intensity and black would often be used to evoke feelings ranging from the solemn to the sinister.

The 1980s, a period, which has not been reflected in recent museums exhibitions, holds a very special moment in the development of Scully’s art. His great achievement, realised for the first time in these great works, is the reinvigoration of abstract painting with the metaphorical, the philosophical and the sublime, simultaneously delighting the viewer with the primitive and visceral power of pure paint. Ultimately, Scully's art has probed the very nature of human existence - its pleasure, pain and paradox.

This exhibition is part of a touring programme organized by Leeds Art Gallery and Sean Scully, Curated by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall.

www.visualcarlow.ie

River

Phil Collins

soy mi madre

11 February 2010 - 20 March 2010

DAAD Galerie, Berlin

A telenovela—a television serial melodrama—is one of the most popular and world–famous cultural products of Latin America. The story usually revolves around the romantic narrative of star–crossed lovers, with various sub–plots involving social, cultural, and class–related obstacles to their love. Mexico is among the leading producers and exporters of telenovela, which are subtitled and broadcast in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Far East. Some of the first ever prime–time dramas in this genre were produced there in the 1950s. Most telenovelas, regardless of where they are produced, tend to have white, blond, blue–eyed stars. Whenever ‘ethnic’–looking people appear, they are usually of lower–class origins and have jobs such as janitors, maids, or cleaners, while all the higher–class jobs are reserved for white actors.

Phil Collins's soy mi madre employs the telenovela format to address the Latino and immigrant populations of the Roaring Fork Valley, a sizable percentage of which hails from northwestern Mexico. For Collins, these particular demographics constituted the main focus of his interest in the region. A major recreational complex and one of the most economically vital areas in the United States, the Roaring Fork Valley heavily relies on the network of hospitality, professional service, and property maintenance industries, the employee structures of which are characterized by a prevalence of immigrant labor. In Aspen itself this community exists mainly as a non–resident work–force, dispersed through a ring of satellite towns from which it commutes daily.

soy mi madre was loosely inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids, first performed in Mexico in 1959. Considered one of the seminal texts of the theatre of the absurd, Genet’s play is a violent exploration of the intricate power dynamic that exists between unequals. Revolving around the ideas of role–playing and performance, masks and mirrors, symbols and rituals, The Maids posits social identities as volatile and unbalanced, constructed through the complex layering and manipulation of their inherent potential for theatricality—a notion from which soy mi madre departs as well.

Collins’s film is a study in the aesthetics of telenovela, the related melodramatic genres, and their most prominent authors, such as Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ingmar Bergman. soy mi madre is produced with some of the leading Mexican television actors and film crew—including Patricia Reyes Spindola, Zaide Silvia Guitérrez, Veronica Langer, and Salvador Parra—as well as non–actors, members of the transsexual–prostitute community in Mexico City. The closing credits include El Immigrante by the Argentinean pop–star Fernando Diamant, a song that poetically addresses the loneliness and the anguish of immigration.

Phil Collins: soy mi madre will be published by the Aspen Art Museum later this year. 
Including contributions by Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s leading cultural analyst, Magali Arriola, writer and curator, and an in-depth interview with the artist by Aspen Art Museum director Heidi Zuckerman-Jacobson.

Zimmerstraße 90/91
10117 Berlin

www.daadgalerie.de

soy mi madre

soy mi madre

Phil Collins

AUTO-KINO!

05 February 2010 - 14 March 2010

Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin
presented by Phil Collins

Experimental films, essay films, art videos, docu-dramas, melodramas, krimis, and everything in between – from the warm leatherette of a passenger- or driver's seat. British artist Phil Collins turns the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin into a stationary indoor drive-in cinema. In a cluster of secondhand cars installed in the space, individual vehicles serve as booths or box-seats, offering the audience an intimate situation in which to enjoy a rotating program of artists' videos and film classics. In a playful way, this questions the set-ups in which video art is usually encountered, and reflects on perceptions of the public and the private.

In the 1950s the then extremely successful drive-ins were considered seedy "passion pits" and a moral hazard to youth. In Germany and Europe drive-ins never achieved the same popularity as in the USA: car-ownership was too scarce, ticket prices too high, and winter-month temperatures too low.

Auto-Kino! incorporates the attractions of this now almost extinct mode of spectatorship. Phil Collins and Siniša Mitrović, who jointly run the visual arts company Shady Lane Productions (Berlin/Glasgow), have programmed more than 100 titles covering a broad range of film and video, from the 1920's onwards, which generally relate to two main concerns. On the one hand, the works revolve around the sensual circuitry and emotional impact of moving images, positioning the viewer as a desiring subject. On the other, they explore the duality of authenticity and manipulation embedded in cinematic representation. The simultaneous erection and abolition of cinema's visual pleasures lie at the heart of significant parts of both contemporary filmmaking and visual arts – a traditionally maintained distinction which Auto-Kino! proposes is as blinkered as it is obsolete. Engaging the far-reaching implications of the phenomenon of drive-ins, Auto-Kino! offers the audience a fresh perspective on the promiscuous liaisons between film and the moving image in other visual media.

The evening and weekend programs present feature films from Germany's rich history of genre cinema, with an emphasis on the turbulent years of the 1930s and 1940s. Reimagining Schlossplatz/Marx-Engles-Forum as the site of a drive-in that never existed, Auto-Kino! brings together a selection of Ufa melodramas, West German thrillers and DEFA rubble films that invite the audience to look again at the relationship between the idea of national community, and the articulation of its social and political body in the light of cinematic representation.

Opening
9 pm, February 4 - 9 pm, February 5, 2010
24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon (1993), 24 hours

Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin
Schlossplatz, Berlin-Mitte

www.kunsthalle-berlin.com

AUTO-KINO!

Siobhan Hapaska

The Nose That Lost Its Dog

31 October 2009 - 30 January 2010

Glasgow Sculpture Studios

Exhibition of newly commissioned sculptural work by Siobhán Hapaska

Scottish deerskin, stainless steel, LED lights and fibreglass are amongst the materials being used by Siobhán Hapaska to make three new sculptures during a Production Residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GSS).

Hapaska’s works propose a poetic play of imagery and ideas, of textures and colour…..interesting and serious, even when they seem playful.

For this, her first solo show in Scotland Hapaska has created three large-scale sculptures which continue her subtle exploration of themes of conflict and resolution, both domestic and political, juxtaposing natural and synthetic materials to create works that are unique and resonant. The works are united in this exploration, through their construction and choice of material and by their placement within the gallery space.

www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org

The Dog That Lost Its Nose

Downfall

Sean Scully

Constantinolpe or the Sensual Concealed, The Imagery of Sean Scully

24 October 2009 - 14 February 2010

Ulster Museum, Belfast

A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION 1973 - 2009

The Ulster Museum will re open after a major redevelopment with this landmark exhibition dedicated to the work of Ireland’s most internationally celebrated artist, Sean Scully.

Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed The Imagery of Sean Scully is a major retrospective of Scully’s work, charting his career from his early grid paintings of the 1970s to variations on the expansive and sensuously painted Wall of Light series that was shown to international acclaim at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006. The exhibition will also include new work.

This exhibition brings together over sixty paintings and additional works on paper to provide an authoritative and illuminating celebration of Scully’s career. The Ulster Museum will be the only British and Irish venue for this important exhibition. The title of the exhibition refers to the layered complexity of visual impressions that exist in all cities and have provided enduring and stimulating influences on Scully’s painting.

Organised by the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e. V Bonn, on tour from MKM Museum Kuppersmuhle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany.

www.nmni.com/um/What-s-on/Exhibitions/Exhib-1

Mirror Silver

Siobhan Hapaska
Isabel Nolan

FRAGILE - Fields of Empathy

15 May 2009 - 16 August 2009

Musee d'Art Moderne de Saint Etienne Metropole
touring to:
Accademia d'Ungheria, Palazzo Falconieri (Borromini), Roma
and
Daejean Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

Curated by Lóránd Hegyi

The exhibition FRAGILE presents a selection of various artistic statements based on questioning the poetical potential of a new, intimate, immediate approach of human experiences in
micro-communities and micro-histories without any kind of universalistic legitimization by external, supra-personal – mythological, religious, ideological or political – value systems
or hierarchical determinations. This anti-monumental, antihierarchical,
anti-formalist, participative, empathic and open attitude creates a new kind of sensitive relation between different systems of organisation of life and work. It animates sensitive, emotionally rich human situations in which latent
capacities of generating values inside of micro-communities are possible. Fragility seems to be an esthetical and ethical entity connected with solidarity, empathy, capability of participation rather than a negative quality, a sign of weakness.

Fragility is a metaphor for participation, giving, sharing, empathy. The FRAGILE exhibition presents about 40 international artists whose activity manifests a subtle, poetical, intimate, anthropological vision on contemporary life experience and whose work neglects
any form of monumentalism or rigid formalism. Instead of rigorous absolutism through formal structures, the diverse methodology of these artists reflects subtle happenings and micro-narratives in the unlimited complexity of everyday life. They don’t reveal any expansionistic or moralistic strategies,
neither any external legitimacy based on ideology or religion - they rather celebrate the quality of empathy, solidarity, tolerance and the capacity of emotional participation and sentimental intensity. This fine, subversively poetic approach to so-called “micro-realities” creates new, sensitive constellations in the complex real context of “the concreteness of concrete selves” (Arthur C. Danto).

www.mam-st-etienne.fr

Sometimes I imagine my love has died

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