Displaying items by tag: solo exhibition

Los Angeles certainly knows how to throw a party. But never is it more obvious than in the week leading up to the Academy Awards, when its party-throwing prowess is on full display. There are soirées by "Vanity Fair," the Weinstein Company, and Bulgari—one can easily find herself invited to four or more fêtes in one evening alone. The art world of LA is no exception; in fact, why wouldn't dealers capitalize on the likelihood of having Sir Elton John or Ingrid Sischy swing by, say hello, and support an opening night shindig even if only for a 15-minute drive-by en route to another celebration?

Gagosian Gallery is the master at availing itself of the big guns visiting LA during this high-flown week; the last four years, the art world monolith has brought forth fantastical openings by Urs Fischer, Richard Prince, and Taryn Simon (also known in LA environs as Gwyneth's sister-in-law). This year, Gagosian gives us figurative painter John Currin, opening Thursday, February 19, with his first solo show in LA in nearly a decade.

Hans Haacke, a father of Conceptual art and one of its chief political firebrands, has often made works incorporating lists, visually unlovely but highly effective ways to show how the world works. If you were to borrow the technique to show the unusual position Mr. Haacke has occupied in the art world for more than 50 years, the list might look something like this:

1. He has resisted allowing his face to be photographed, because he says that artists are too often fetishized as personalities.

2. He does not allow his work to be shown in art fairs and has attended only one, in Germany in the late 1960s, which so disgusted him that he flew back home to New York the next day. (“It was held in a circus tent, if you can believe that,” he said.)

Damien Hirst’s first solo exhibition in Sweden opens on 29 August, at McCabe Fine Art in Stockholm. Known for producing art that breaks boundaries and explores the relationships between art, science, religion, death and beauty, Hirst has developed a wide-ranging artistic practice that includes installation, sculpture, painting and drawing. In the twenty-six years since he emerged as a leading member of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement with ‘Freeze’, the seminal exhibition curated by Hirst in 1988, the artist has risen to international fame with iconic works that include the shark suspended in formaldehyde ("The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," 1991) and the diamond-encrusted skull ("For the Love of God," 2007). Painting has also remained an important aspect of Hirst’s practice with prolific series including the "Spot Paintings," "Spin Paintings" and the "Kaleidoscopes"; in which vibrantly colored butterfly wings are arranged in intricate patterns and stuck into household gloss paint.

In 2008 Hirst created a series of one hundred and fifty "Psalm" paintings, each named after an Old Testament psalm.

"Transmitting Andy Warhol" is the first exhibition to explore Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) and his role in establishing new platforms to disseminate art, and his experimentation with new approaches to art reception that redefined artistic practice and distribution. The first solo exhibition of Warhol’s work in the north of England, "Transmitting Andy Warhol" rethinks Warhol’s pivotal role in re-defining the access to culture and art as we know it today. Highlights include the Marilyn Diptych, Dance Diagram and Do-it-Yourself paintings, and other loans from international collections and the ARTIST ROOMS collection. Also presented will be a spectacular evocation of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s famed ‘total art’ environment which provided the framework for performances by the Velvet Underground.

The exhibition brings together more than 100 artworks and is the first solo exhibition of Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) work in the north of England.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913–1915 (August 3–November 30, 2014), the first focused look and the first solo exhibition on the West Coast in almost ten years of the American-born artist’s German paintings in the United States. From 1912 to 1915, Hartley lived in Europe—first in Paris and then in Berlin. There he developed a singular style that reflected his modern surroundings and the tumultuous time before and during World War I. Berlin’s exciting urban environment, prominent gay community, and military spectacle had a profound impact upon him. Marsden Hartley features approximately 25 paintings from this critical moment in Hartley’s career that reveal dynamic shifts in style and subject matter comprised of musical and spiritual abstractions, city portraits, and military symbols to Native American motifs.

The Nassau Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York is currently presenting the exhibition Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art. The solo show consists of an array of large, striking portraits by the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927). The exhibition is drawn from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s extensive collection of the artist’s work.  

A primarily figurative painter, Katz often portrays his friends and family, especially his wife Ada, in simple, brightly colored compositions. Because of these aesthetic predilections, he has often been associated with the Pop Art movement. Katz’s expansive oeuvre also includes numerous landscapes, particularly of New York City and Maine. Since 1951 Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and he has been included in nearly 500 group shows worldwide.

Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art will be on view at the Nassau Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.  

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.