Two Thousand Year Old Cat Still Looks Cool in Gold Earrings at Bonhams’ Sale of Antiquities

LONDON.- Bonhams sale of Antiquities on April 13 includes a beautiful but inscrutable Egyptian cat cast in bronze, with gold earrings, that dates from circa 664-32BC estimated to sell for £15,000 to £20,000. This charming hollow cast bronze cat is shown alert, sitting upright with the tail curled to the right side, the body with stippled surface, wearing a Bes-headed pectoral suspended on a cord and original gold earrings. It has beautiful well-defined features with recessed eyes and incised whiskers. [...]

University of Virginia Art Museum Opens Excavating New Ground: American Art in the 1970s

RICHMOND, VA.- The 1970s featured the announcement of the break-up of the Beatles, the Kent State shooting, the meltdown of Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station and the $1.5 billion bailout of Chrysler Corporation. These tumultuous times also witnessed the maturity of the second wave of the women’s movement, the student movement and the black-nationalist movement, which together irrevocably changed the fabric of the country. Where would modern art go? The 1970s was a decade of [...]

British Artist Lindsay Seers Exhibits “It has to Be this Way” at BALTIC Centre in Gateshead

GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents It has to be this way² by British artist and Derek Jarman Award winner Lindsay Seers from Saturday 12 February to Sunday 12 June 2011. “I was her mother but she was never my daughter and now she has gone missing, I can honestly say that I never loved her” This short, opening sentence of It has to be this way² characterises the ambiguities of a work in which a camera lens rather [...]

Akron Art Museum, One of Only Two Venues in the U.S., to Host M.C. Escher: Impossible Realities

AKRON, OH.- You’ve seen the posters, now see the originals. As the last of only two venues in the United States to show this once-in-a-lifetime loan from Athens, Greece, M.C. Escher: Impossible Realities, on view at the Akron Art Museum February 12 – May 29, 2011, presents the rare and thrilling privilege of examining first-hand the masterworks of Maurits Cornelis Escher. One of the most brilliant yet enigmatic artists of the 20th century, Escher delighted in creating visual puzzles that [...]

Exhibition by American Master Philip Guston Opens at the Phillips Collection

WASHINGTON, DC.- This winter, The Phillips Collection showcases the work of modern master Philip Guston (1913–1980). The exhibition shines a spotlight on a pivotal moment in the artist’s illustrious career, revealing the evolution of his personal aesthetic. The exhibition open on Feb. 12, 2011, and remain on view through May 15. “From acquiring Guston’s powerfully abstract Native’s Return in 1958 to exhibiting his most recent works on paper in 1981, the Phillips has a long history of supporting this complex [...]

AAMD and AAM Statement Regarding Pollock and University of Iowa Museum of Art

NEW YORK, NY.- In response to the recent call to sell Jackson Pollock’s Mural from the collection of The University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Association of Museums released the following joint statement: The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Association of Museums (AAM) are alarmed to learn of the recent proposal to sell the Jackson Pollock painting Mural to underwrite costs at The University of Iowa. Such [...]

18 Photographic Prints by Alex Van Gelder of Louise Bourgeois’s Hands at Hauser & Wirth

ZURICH.- Gnarled, sinewy and wrinkled with age, Louise Bourgeois’s hands were fascinating. Her hands are the subjects of portraits taken by the artist Alex Van Gelder, who, at Bourgeois’s invitation, photographed her at her New York townhouse during the last year of her life. The resulting portfolio of eighteen photographic prints will be on display at Hauser & Wirth Zürich from 12 February. More than purely a portrait project, Bourgeois considered this collaboration to be an extension of her work. [...]

International Artists Deal with Unsharpness in “Blur After Richter” at Hamburger Kunsthalle

HAMBURG.- Blurred surfaces, dissolving contours, hazy appearances and indistinct motifs: More and more often images that are out of focus appear in both contemporary painting and photography. Like no other artist, Gerhard Richter (*1932) has been employing the effect of blurring in his art since the 1960s. Apart from selected figural and abstract paintings the exhibition presents photographs and a film by Richter (Volker Bradke, 1966), to reveal that the phenomenon of the out-of-focus appearance, mostly generated by the painterly [...]

Exhibition at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts Incites Questions About the Act of Dreaming

ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts presents Dreamscapes, on view February 11–August 13, 2011. This exhibition incites questions about the act of dreaming—a succession of thoughts, images, sounds or emotions, which the mind experiences during sleep. The artworks on view and their juxtaposition with Tadao Ando’s architecture offer new ways to think about the content and purpose of dreams on numerous levels: physiological, psychological, cultural and spiritual. The concept behind the exhibition began with the Pulitzer’s Watercourt. [...]

Portraits of Scottish Artists from the Prints and Drawings Collection

EDINBURGH.- This spring The Artist Up Close brings together a broad range of portraits of some of Scotland’s most admired artists created by themselves, their friends or family. The display includes prints and drawings from the National collection spanning the last 300 years. Portraits of Sir Henry Raeburn, Allan Ramsay and Sir David Wilkie are shown alongside modern artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Anne Redpath, and Alan Davie. Whilst these artists’ names and work may be familiar, this display will [...]

Royal Academy of Arts Stage Premiums Featuring the Work of 16 Postgraduate Students

LONDON.- In February the Royal Academy of Arts stage Premiums which feature the work of 16 postgraduate students. This annual exhibition held in the Sackler Wing of Galleries comprises contemporary artwork by postgraduates in their second year at the Royal Academy Schools. Premiums provides an excellent opportunity to view new work by emerging artists at the interim point of their 3 year course. Works in the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, video and photography. Jolanta Rejs, From the series – Beyond [...]

Gagosian Gallery Paris Presents “Rodin – Sugimoto,” an Exhibition of Sculpture and Photography

PARIS.- Gagosian Gallery Paris presents “Rodin – Sugimoto,” an exhibition of sculpture and photography, on view from February 11 through March 25, 2011. Auguste Rodin brought monumental public sculpture forward into the modern era. Although educated in the academic traditions and idealized subjects of classical and Renaissance sculpture, he embraced truth to nature as his artistic credo. His uncanny ability to imbue inert substances with movement and feeling reveals the idiosyncrasies and psychological depths of the human subjects that he [...]

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí Acquires Etude Pour ‘Le Miel est Plus Douce que la Sang’

FIGUERES.- The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí announce that it has acquired the work by Salvador Dalí: Étude pour ‘Le miel est plus douce que la sang’, at the auction which took place at Christie’s London, on February, 9th, 2011 at 10pm, for a final price of £4,073,250. The work, lot 106 of the auction catalogue, an oil on wood from 1926-1927 representing one the first surrealist works of the artist, is a complete study for the painting of 1927 “Honey is [...]

Art and Archives Make Up Caravaggio Show at Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza Church in Rome

ROME (AP).- Art lovers will get rare glimpses of Caravaggio’s often violent life in an exhibit in Rome and combining centuries-old documents from archives as well as paintings, including a portrait last seen in public 100 years ago. Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, a church with a courtyard designed by Baroque artist Borromini and later home to Italy’s state archives, hosts the show until May 15. Curators told reporters at a news conference Thursday that one document on display features a drawing [...]

Dynamics! Cubism / Futurism / Kineticism on View at the Belvedere in Vienna

VIENNA.- With its show DYNAMICS! Cubism / Futurism / Kineticism, the Belvedere offers a comprehensive insight into abstraction as practiced in Vienna between 1919 and 1929, in the context of European Modernism. The phenomenon of Viennese Kineticism, which has hitherto attracted little attention internationally, is presented alongside masterpieces from all over Europe, including works by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Carlo Carrà, and Giacomo Balla. In the early 1920s, it was particularly the students in Franz Cizek’s class at [...]