Two exhibitions
dal 15/2/2008 al 9/5/2008
Segnalato da
15/2/2008
Two exhibitions
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Surveying the artist's 70-year career, "Edward Hopper" features watercolors and oil paintings, and concentrate on his most productive years - from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s - when he created his most enduring images. "Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light" features 25 works from the Art Institute's collection, set in the context of watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil paintings on loan from other museums and private collections.
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (1882–1967), creator of art that novelist John Updike described as "calm, silent, stoic, luminous, and classic," is one of the most enduring and popular American painters of the 20th century. His paintings have been celebrated as a part of the very grain and texture of the American experience. This exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Hopper's work to be seen in American museums outside of New York in a quarter century.
Surveying the artist’s 70-year career, Edward Hopper will feature watercolors and oil paintings, and concentrate on his most productive years—from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s—when he created his most enduring images such as the Art Institute’s iconic Nighthawks (1942). A pivotal American artist who was intensely private, Hopper made solitude and introspection important themes in his paintings. The exhibition will be arranged chronologically and thematically, focusing on the work he executed in Gloucester and Truro, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York. Approximately 50 oils and 30 watercolors, together with literature and history of the artist’s own time, will show Hopper’s place in the tradition of American realism and modernism. Edward Hopper and its companion exhibition, Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, will provide a survey of the American realist tradition and chart the growth of modern subject matter—from Homer, America’s first modernist, to Hopper, the nation’s best known 20th-century realist.
Catalogue: A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Featuring essays by the Art Institute’s Judith Barter, Field-McCormick Chair of American Art; Ellen Roberts, assistant curator of American art; and other scholars, the volume is available for purchase in the Museum Shop and online at www.artinstituteshop.org.
Organizer: This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sponsor: This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
........................................
Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light
Winslow Homer, who created some of the most breathtaking and influential images in the history of watercolor, was, famously, a man who received almost no formal artistic education. Acknowledged in his own day as America’s most original and independent watercolorist, he had an intuitive relationship with this challenging yet flexible medium. Between 1873 and 1905, he created nearly 700 watercolors. A staple of his livelihood, watercolors were also his classroom, a way for him to learn through experimentation—with color theory, composition, materials, optics, style, subject matter, and technique—far more freely than he could in the more public and tradition-bound arena of oil painting. This exhibition provides an intimate look at how one of America’s most celebrated painters discovered for himself, over a period of more than three decades, the secrets of the watercolor medium.
Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light—which was organized by the Art Institute and will be shown exclusively in Chicago—is the largest exhibition of Homer’s watercolors to be presented in more than two decades. It features 25 rarely exhibited Homer watercolors from the Art Institute’s collection, set in the context of watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil paintings on loan from other museums and private collections. A total of 130 works tells the story of Homer’s development as an artist, presenting an intimate look at his watercolor practice, his techniques and materials, and the way he adapted his approach and his color palette to the many different natural environments in which he painted, from the rocky, deserted coast of Maine to the lush habitats of the Adirondack Mountains and the Caribbean. The exhibition also examines the way Homer’s watercolors relate to his work in oil and other media, revealing the central role the medium played in helping him to achieve the fresh, immediate, light-filled scenes that have become his most enduring legacy to American art.
This project is the result of a collaboration among curators, researchers, conservators, and conservation scientists. The latest analytical technology has been usedto examine the Art Institute’s watercolors, enabling the exhibition and catalogue to present new information about his pigments and his artistic intentions, revealing fascinating details about what lies below their surfaces. A related Web site, www.artic.edu/aic/research/homer, available in February provides high-resolution images and in-depth analysis of these findings, allowing the viewer to examine Homer’s tools, techniques, and works in minute detail.
Catalogue: A beautifully illustrated catalogue also accompanies the exhibition. Published by the Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, the volume presents essays by exhibition curator Martha Tedeschi and conservator Kristi Dahm and includes contributions by Judith Walsh and Karen Huang. The catalogue will be available in February for purchase in the Museum Shop and online at www.artinstituteshop.org.
Organizer: This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sponsor: Terra Foundation for American Art is the Lead Foundation Sponsor as part of American Art American City, a Chicago celebration of historical American art.
.........................................
Until June 8, 2008
Gallery 227
Figuration in Contemporary Design
The exhibition looks at the recent employment of figurative characteristics in the design arts. Through digital literacy and enhanced fabrication techniques, this avant-garde, modern movement reintroduces hybrids of methods and ideologies that were once considered too ornamental in character or too handcrafted for the 20th-century minimalist design vocabulary. This figurative modern aesthetic displays characteristics that play with the notions of romanticism, subjectivity, nature, and anti-intellectualism as well as high-low culture. Featured designers and studios are: Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Jürgen Mayer H., UNStudio, Foreign Office Architects, Kuth/Raneri, ROY, Joel Sanders with Balmori Associates, KOL/MAC, Greg Lynn/FORM, R&Sie, Klein Dytham, Gage/Clemenceau, MoD, Aranda/Lasch, Kivi Sotamaa, PATTERNS, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Marcel Wanders, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Hella Jongerius, Patricia Urquiola, Tord Boontje, Petra Blaisse, Abbott Miller, An Te Liu, Demakersvan, and 2x4.
Image: Edward Hopper
The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue - Chicago
Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday 10:30-5:00
Thursday 10:30-8:00 (Target Free Thursday Evenings after 5:00)
Saturday and Sunday 10:00-5:00