Marina Abramovic was one of the first contemporary artists I learned about in my earliest art history classes years ago — and she’s part of the reason why I fell in love with the art history major. Film Forum was showing her documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, for a limited time and I am so, so glad I was able to see it. Her performances, while ephemeral, were still beautifully recreated within her 2010 MoMA retrospective alongside her largest performance to date (sitting for three months straight during MoMA hours across from museum visitors). The documentary felt emotional and warm — as a viewer I got a wonderful sense of how she is as a person and as an artist. She’s kind, she’s spiritual, and she’s able to endure so much physical and emotional discomfort for her art and audiences. I think I just fell in actual love with Marina Abramovic.

Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present trailer. Now playing until Tuesday, June 26th at Film Forum in New York City. 

thepacegallery:

Robert Irwin: Dotting the i´s & Crossing the t´s, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York City.© Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Kerry Ryan McFate / Courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Dotting the i’s & Crossing the t’s: Part I features a new site-conditioned installation that incorporates the gallery windows overlooking 57th Street, altering the viewers’ orientation. Knowing and seeing are challenged in this work. (via Exhibition of new work by Robert Irwin on view at the Pace Gallery)

I am still beating myself up over the fact that I haven’t seen this exhibition in person. I’ve had friends who have seen the show and are still raving about Robert Irwin’s work and the exhibition! 

callmeowner:

theseasonofthewitch:

Marina Abramović - The Artist Is Present: This emotional exhibit, held in the Museum of Modern Art for three months in early spring 2010, featured Abramović sitting in a chair for the entirety of the day at the museum. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork. Abramović, acting as an “emotional mirror” to the patrons, silently stared at them, often inducing deeply profound and heartbreaking reactions.

I am really, really fascinated by this. When I tried to empathize just sitting in a chair across from someone and being present in that silence and face-to-face contact, the welling vulnerability brought a mist to my eye, too. Think about this— how often today, in the age of emails, text messages, and tumblr apps, do we spend a prolonged a focused period of time maintaining eye contact with anybody. Extra credit: see Ann Hamilton’s mouth-operated pinhole cameras, at 11:00-13:00 in the video. Hear what she says about face-to-face?

I really wish I could have experienced this performance art while it was on display. The results feel so moving! 

7knotwind:

On 18 June, the V&A unveiled SWARM STUDY / III, a new interactive light installation by Random International which is made up of illuminated brass rods, suspended from the ceiling in an arrangement of four large cubes. As visitors move up and down the stairs, so the light follows in swarm-like formations, varying subtly in its intensity. Tracked by a camera, the visitors’ movements stimulate the behavior of the installation. Controlled by a complex algorithm, Swarm Study / III translates collective behavioral patterns found in nature into moving light. Though apparently inanimate, the installation is brought to life by visitors’ activity, engaging them with both the swarm itself and the surrounding space of the Museum.

Text and Images from designapplause.com via: huiyan

The Morgan Library & Museum is hosting an exhibition of sixty-six works by Josef Albers starting July 20th and I cannot wait to visit!

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
July 20 through October 14, 2012

Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his series of paintings, Homage to the Square, in which he endlessly explored color relationships within a similar format of concentric squares. Less well-known are the studies he made for these compositions. With approximately sixty oil sketches on paper, this exhibition will reveal a private side of Albers’s work. These sketches were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and have rarely been seen after his death. 

On view will be early studies (1930s–early 1940s), studies for Albers’s Adobeseries, inspired by Mexican architecture (1940s–early 1950s), and studies forHomage to the Square (1950s–1970s). These vibrant sketches provide insights into the artist’s working process and, in contrast with the austerity and strict geometry of the final paintings, are remarkable for their freedom and sensuality.

Works are drawn from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany. The exhibition, which is traveling to multiple venues in Europe before coming to the Morgan (the only U.S. venue), is organized by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop. 

New York City artist kris scheifele has created a series of sculptures formed from acrylic paint. in working with layers of paint-chips or disintegrated acrylic panels, scheifele has developed an arsenal of artistic techniques to create her experimental actualizations. all of the artist’s pieces investigate the physicality of a medium— removing the surface in which the solution is applied, instead, fashioning forms from the paint itself. scheifele tells designboom of her paint squares, “the technique of building up and cutting away all this layered paint not only embeds the work with a temporal record, but also produces a great deal of debris. in the spirit of ‘using every part of the animal’, the acrylic paint chips are collected in boxes where more time must elapse before they fuse into porous cubes.”

bbbbird:

Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. (via triangulation) 

hahamagartconnect:

Sock Portrait

Not long ago we posted a story about artist Hong Yi’s Coffee Stain Portrait of Jay Chou. Well, she’s finished a new project and it’s just as amazing as the last.

This portrait of famous Chinese Film Director, Zhang Yimou was made with bamboo sticks, pins, and socks. (<—I know you love that oxford comma).  

Yi (a.k.a. RED) says she was inspired by an old residental alleyway where she saw bamboo sticks poking out of windows with laundry hanging onto them, waving in the air. For her, the beauty was in seeing something so traditional in a modern, pumping city like Shanghi.

And because many of Zhang’s movies (House of Flying Daggers, Hero, art director for Beijing Olympics) highlight the beauty of the Chinese culture through the use of bamboo fields, and traditional dress, she choose her materials accordingly.

*Hong Yi’s website

*For more on the project, visit Oh I see Red!, where we picked up this great story.

taumazo:

A work consisting of 1.4 million sheets of paper in forty different colors.

░ www.taumazo.com ░

Peter Wegner’s Guillotine of Sunlight, Guillotine of Shade: a two-wall die cut paper installation in the Phoenix Art Museum (and also my favorite of the whole museum).

insidethearchive:

(via Lisa Hamilton - BOOOOOOOM! - CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO * PROJECTS)

I am interested in how painting can reveal something about the nature of perception and its relationship to meaning. The tools of our visual understanding- how we make since of the physical world through light, color, shape, line, texture and perspective- can be purposed to propose an experience that expands beyond the visible landscape into a space of perception previously unseen. It is a rare venue open to inquiry; visual play and flexible thinking reveal something about how we understand, and about how meaning is constructed.

I believe that painting is well positioned to engage ambitions of both viewer and artist that are beyond words. In the last few years I have begun to re-evaluate the fundamental elements of visual language and how they function within abstraction. This has lead me toward a more careful consideration of how an abstract image is constructed and how it makes sense or can challenge a sense of visual logic. I define myself as a painter, and believe that the content of my work is unequivocally within the domain of painting, however, my investigations have begun to lead me toward a more expansive definition of what painting is, what context it can be found in and form it can take.

       - Lisa Hamilton, artist

art-it:

Ryan Gander, Your present time orientation (First Act) – Random abstraction (2011), the components of several Mondrian (and other various abstract Modernist composition painters) paintings separated into their solid colours and re-represented by painting a vast amount of differing shaped and sized cheap commercially available colored glass clip frames, exhibited casually leant against the wall as a random abstraction

<The 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia>

Aleksandar Maćašev, a Brooklyn-based visual artist, recorded his average daily mood for two consecutive years, making sure to condense his feelings into the smallest understandable form of communication: a color. Macasev chose a hexidecimal color code to represent his mood at the end of each night and eventually transformed the 730 colors into an installational project. The experiment allows for much personal interpretation by the viewer, especially considering the varied cultural and emotive definitions of color. The largest ChromaTweet project is located in DUMBO, Brooklyn, New York and I sincerely hope to view it this coming week during my adventure to the city. 

Bjarne Melgaard’s “The Night Within Us!” exhibition in the Guido W. Baudach Gallery of Berlin. 

The central motifs in the portrait paintings created for The Night Within Us! – which can be seen as self-portaits of the artist as Annie -are the existential human need for tenderness, trust and partnership on the one hand, and the painful realisation of lies, deceit and abandonment; themes that are emphatically reflected in the pastose tears that flow from the wide eyes of the faces. But caution: Bjarne Melgaard’s Annies are smiling.