Displaying items by tag: steel

"Intimacy" is not a word that first comes to mind when thinking about Alexander Calder's steel work. But when you step inside Dominique Levy's immaculate townhouse galleries on the Upper East Side, where some 40 rarely-seen Calder maquettes are on view, intimate is exactly how it feels.

Collaborating with architect Santiago Calatrava Lévy presents two floors of Calder's miniature (the smallest work is 1.5 inches tall) to table-top sized sculptures. Many have not been on view since his MoMA retrospective in 1943.

A public sculpture given to Milan by the artist Alberto Burri, then demolished by the city administration, will be rebuilt next year in honor of the centenary of his birth.

"Teatro Continuo" (Continuous Theatre), a cement stage surmounted by six rotating steel “wings”, was installed in Sempione Park after being presented for the 1973 Milan Triennale, but the city dismantled the work in 1989, citing its poor condition.

The Portland Museum of Art placed the Robert Indiana sculpture “Seven” in front of the museum Monday morning. The steel sculpture, which announces the museum’s presence at 7 Congress Square, will be celebrated at 5:30 p.m. Friday as part of the city’s First Friday Art Walk.

Indiana, 86, lives on Vinalhaven off Rockland. “This is a public announcement that 7 Congress Square will always be a place for art,” said chief curator Jessica May. She called Indiana “one of the state’s most beloved artists,” and said placing art outside the museum is part of a larger effort to engage with the public whenever possible.

Last month, Colby College Museum of Art put on a view a 1968 painting by Joan Mitchell that museum director Sharon Corwin believes is the best example of abstract expressionism in Maine. Next month, the Portland Museum of Art will unveil an 8-foot-tall steel “Seven” sculpture by Robert Indiana, once rejected by the Prince of Monaco, in the pedestrian plaza out front.

The two works share few similarities, but they represent the latest high-profile acquisitions by two leading museums in Maine and highlight the challenges facing curators and museum directors as they shape collections across the state.

In both instances, the museums acquired the art because benefactors took personal interest in bringing it to Maine.

Cardi Gallery, the Milan-based modern and contemporary art gallery, presents "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," an exhibition of over thirty important collages and sculptures created between 1955 and 1970 that reveal the formalist achievements of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), an icon of the Feminist art movement and one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century. "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," is on view through December 20, 2014.

"Louise Nevelson: 55-70" features works created between 1955 and 1970, a period when the artist’s signature modernist style emerged, with labyrinthine wooden assemblages and monochrome surfaces, and evolved, as Nevelson incorporated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, aluminum and steel in the 1960s and 1970s.

American sculptor Richard Serra has won the the Architectural League of New York’s 2014 President’s Medal. The award is the League’s highest honor and is bestowed, at the discretion of the organization’s President and Board of Directors, on individuals to recognize an extraordinary body of work in architecture, urbanism, art, or design. Recent recipients of the award have included Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Serra is best-known for his large-scale steel sculptures that explore the physical and visual relationships that exist between the viewer, the site, and the work. He has produced a number of site-specific sculptures that engage with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. Serra’s latest work, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates placed in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It is his second public commission in Qatar.

Serra, who is the first visual artist to win the Architectural League’s President’s Medal, will be given the award on May 6 in New York City.