Posts By matthew rose

Under An English Sky [Part I ] : Wolfgang Tillmans At The Serpentine Gallery, London

I spent a week in London in August, and each day attempted to focus on a substantial outing, an interesting exhibition.  My first jaunt was to cross Kensington Gardens to The Serpentine Gallery where the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans put on something of a retrospective, an expansive display of his alchemical results with photography. The 2000 Turner Prize winner, born in 1968, today a bona fide blue chip in the art world, offers a cornucopia of stolen, manipulated and performative photographic works in his first full-on exhibition in London in seven years. Each piece conspires to reveal the over-reproduced world ... More » »

Letter from Paris: White On White

The white monochrome painting, once a joke –”cow in a snowstorm” – at other times a beacon heralding modernism (Malevich’s White on White, 1918) has carved out a serious place in the canon of aesthetics. Nearly every art movement over the last 150 years, if only a shake or a jitter, has paused long enough to produce an all-over, single-color performance. There are thousands of monochrome works dotting the history of art, pointing to a kind of serial of reduction-minded dramas. Stripped down, these works, bold in their simplicity, end up being complex philosophical constructions gesturing to a manifest aesthetic destiny.

Letter From Paris: Dynasty. A Feast Of Disney, Dust & Dinner

The massive two-museum blast of Dynasty, an exhibition of 40 artists at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is something of a moveable feast of contemporary French art – a collision of dust and Disney with a bit of dinnertime thrown in. The concept, launched by directors Marc-Olivier Wahler and Fabrice Hergott was to invite youngish artists working in France to exhibit two sets of works in each museum. (The two art spaces sit side-by-side looking out towards the Seine River). A stereo effect was anticipated across the vast 5,000-square meters of ... More » »

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010)

Sigmar Polke (1941 – 2010), a German painter who for many recast pop art and revived painting in Europe, passed away on Friday, June 10. The artist who used Ben-Day dots, old etchings and even potatoes (for sculptures), brought a new vibrancy to painting and art making in the 1980s.  His first New York show at Holly Solomon led what many saw as a fresh and aggressive charge to pictorial expression.  Americans like Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Richard Prince rode the oblique figurative + abstraction train for decades. Much of that owed to the  oftentimes irreverent German artist.  One ... More » »

Bonne Année : Rick Tulka

Rick Tulka, Paris-based artist and illustrator best known for his on-the-spot sketches of flâneurs burning daylight and washing back kirs at Le Select, the famed café on Boulevard Montparnasse, offers a self-portrait greeting for 2010. Yes, that was him, penciling in your double chin last Tuesday! Only kidding. Bonne Année… See his site here: Rick Tulka and his portraits of people on his Flickr Page.

Shepard Fairey Does Venice, Silvio

Shepard Fairey, who rose to fame and made his mark with his wildly successful and now controversial Obama campaign poster, has left his mark here in Venice as well.  During the June international art orgy known as the Venice Biennale, Fairey was brought to a tiny bar in the San Polo quarter near the Rialto Bridge by two Biennale hostesses, according to Guiliano, the bartender at Boteri Cafe.

(Picture) Postcard From Paris

After the crowds at the FIAC in Paris subside, the gathering at Paris Photo, held in the Carrousel du Louvre, creates a different kind of picture show.  Intimate and targeted to serious collectors of photography, only 89 galleries, and 13 publishers including book dealers and other image merchants appear fresh and pressed in the well-appointed marble basement of the world’s largest museum.

Letter From Paris: The FIAC – The Hunger, The Hype & The Hysteria

Perhaps the perfect metaphor for the contemporary art fair is the media-fattened story of the Balloon Boy (in the US), which swept across the airwaves on a gust of excitement only to be lanced by the truth.  It was for the money, after all, and the 10 year-old boy (Little Falcon) supposedly trapped in the Warhol-like silver balloon was safe on the ground busy in makeup getting ready for his star turn. It was, of course, a hoax. “They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” said local sheriff, Jim Alderden.

Gilbert and George on politics and Union Jacks

In 2007, Gilbert & George mounted a massive retrospective at the Tate Modern that included “Mullah.” The tremendous work (2.42 x 2.02m) from 1980, featured a stone-faced icon seemingly cast from the Magic Forest. Composed of photographs of cut planks of wood (knots for eyes, nose and mouth) and collaged together in Gilbert & George’s signature multi-panel digital print in black and white, the work seems prescient these days as “mullah” gains traction across the Internet following the violent crackdown on the post-election street demonstrations in Iran.

10 Questions For Peter Schuyff

10 Questions For Peter Schuyff, after a studio visit in Amsterdamn. Painting, Music and life in the land of the Dutch Masters.