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28/9/2006

Four exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland MOCA, Cleveland

New season featuring the exhibitions Dana Schutz: "Paintings 2002-2006", Catherine Opie: "1999 & In and Around the Home", Olivo Barbieri: "site specific_" and Richard Long: "Cornwall Circle Mingle with friends"


Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006

Dana Schutz's ecstatically imaginative paintings have established her as one of the rising stars of the contemporary art world and one of the most sought-after young artists in the United States today. With lush surfaces and a flamboyant palette ranging from gaudy yellows and reds to deep greens and purples, Schutz's figurative paintings portray hypothetical scenarios that are gruesome and funny, unsettling and absurd. In many of her works, Schutz paints things that one almost cannot imagine: figures devouring themselves in the Self-Eaters series (2003), another recreating itself from dismembered parts in the painting Twin Parts (2004). Preposterous and bordering on the grotesque, these works serve, for the artist, as metaphors for exploring the creative process of making and remaking. Other works in the exhibition, such as Party (2004), a painting that portrays the Bush Administration Cabinet, are more politically satiric in nature, delivered with the verve so typical of Schutz's painting.

Schutz draws on a rich amalgamation of sources including the German Expressionists, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, Paul Gauguin and the Symbolists, Philip Guston and others, but she inventively twists, subverts, and recreates pictoral conventions with a compelling intensity and freshness. In her paintings, narrative and portraiture become something totally unexpected. "My pictures float in and out of pictorial genres," says Schutz. "Still-lifes become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive." In quoting or assimilating art historical styles, Schutz's paintings tell the story of the history of painting in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is a history that the artist boldly makes her own in paintings deftly executed with imagination, vigor, and conviction.

Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006, the first comprehensive solo museum exhibition of the artist's work, features eighteen paintings created over the last four years. The exhibition was curated by Raphaela Platow and was organized by The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.

About the artist Schutz lives and works in New York City. She earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2000) and an MFA from the Columbia University School of Fine Arts, New York (2002). Her paintings have been featured in one-person exhibitions in New York, Boston, Paris, Berlin, and Santa Fe, and in many group exhibitions, including the Prague and Venice Biennials. Schutz's work is in numerous private and public collections including The Progressive Collection in Cleveland, OH; the Saatchi Collection in London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York.

Lead sponsorship for MOCA Cleveland's presentation of Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006 and its related programs is generously provided by An Anonymous Donor, with additional funding from Toby Devan Lewis.

A color catalogue, the first major publication of Schutz's work, is available at ARTspace for $30 / Member price $27.

A color lithograph in an edition of 100, generously donated by Schutz to support MOCA's exhibitions, will be available for sale this Fall. Go to www.MOCAcleveland.org/editions for more information.


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Olivo Barbieri: site_specific_

A collaboration with Kent State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design

In site specific_, his ongoing series of films and large-scale stills, Italian artist Olivo Barbieri creates unusual aerial portrayals of international cities. Filming from a helicopter with a tilt-shift lens camera, Barbieri produces selectively focused images that make Las Vegas's swanky casinos, Rome's ancient monuments, Los Angeles's buzzing metropolis, and Shanghai's contemporary skyscrapers look eerily like miniature models. By blurring imperfections and distorting the scale of buildings and people, Barbieri redefines our customary ground-level perspective of these cities. Although they appear uncannily artificial, these images are actual depictions of spectacular urban landscapes.

This exhibition features two 35mm films and five still images from Barbieri's site specific_ROME (2004) and site specific_LAS VEGAS (2005). In the first series, Barbieri magnifies the astonishing quality of Rome's recognizable monuments by portraying them as fantastical models. In his subsequent series, site specific_LAS VEGAS, he uses the same technique to emphasize the affectations of this "adult playground" with images that further enhance the artificiality of Las Vegas's replicated environments. In visual dialogue, these series push viewers to question the substantiality of reality and artifice both in images and in the physical world.

About the artist

An Italian representative in the 1992, 1995, and 1997 Venice Biennales and the forthcoming 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbieri has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at venues that include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the International Center of Photography, New York; and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. The film site specific_LAS VEGAS, critically acclaimed at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, won the Golden Gate award at the 2006 San Francisco Film Festival and will be screened in the 2006 New York Film Festival.

The exhibition is curated by Steven Fong, Dean, Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, and Megan Lykins, Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Fellow, MOCA Cleveland.

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Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around the Home

Organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County, CA.

The documentation of America has long intrigued photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus. Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Opie redefines this genre with vibrant photographs that capture subjects, animate or not, that reflect an essence, identity, or character of America. Opie presents to us a conceptual portrait of our ethos in all its diversity and complexity.

Renowned for her photographic series of communities and urban landscapes, Opie is concerned with expanding notions of identity and community. From her studies of lesbian families, surfers, empty freeways, and the neighborhood developments of Valencia, CA, Opie documents a specific cultural identity. Opie's presentations are as varied as her subjects. Her rich and lush images, which alternate between large and small as well as black-and-white or color, are stunning both in content and technical proficiency.

In celebration of her 2004 Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, Opie's exhibition debuts a new series of intimate and politically charged photographs titled In and Around the Home. As the artist has stated, "[the series] has its own sense of Americana…, but relies on t.v., my family (a queer family), and the events that take place in my neighborhood to represent a microcosm of America." In and Around the Home provides a window into the tender, domestic world the artist has built for herself, and the public, political world that frames and sometimes threatens it. This new body of work is shown together with 1999, a series taken while Opie was on a road trip across the U.S. at the millennium that both captures iconic Americana and portrays the expansive American landscape. 1999 & In and Around the Home offers a unique perspective from an artist who has significantly enriched our visual culture.

About the artist

Born in Sandusky, OH, Opie received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. She taught at Yale University and is currently a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she lives and works. Opie's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Muse'e National d'art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around the Home is organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 96-page catalogue available in ARTspace for $45 / Members $40.

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Richard Long: Cornwall Circle

In the veiled, natural light of the Gerald and Phyllis Seltzer Rotunda Gallery, Richard Long's Cornwall Circle (1991), an outstanding work from the collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), has been on view since May and will remain at MOCA until the end of December. We asked Dexter Davis, a CMA guard temporarily assigned to MOCA, to comment on this popular piece in a new venue. In 1998, Davis, a painter, was the featured artist in MOCA's first PULSE Series exhibition.

In Cornwall Circle's present installation, Davis observes, "The light, color, form, and texture of MOCA's Rotunda gallery creates and environment that makes the sculpture seem more alive, organic, and functional." Previously, the sculpture has been displayed at the CMNA in proximity to other prominent works in the collection, initially in the Armor Court of the original 1916 building and then in a contemporary art gallery in the 1971 Marcel Breuer addition. Davis finds that MOCA's gallery, "creates a personal space that offers viewers a kind of intimacy with the sculpture and helps them more closely examine the work." The circular shape of the gallery, the light hardwood floor, and the floor-to-ceiling windows allow a new appreciation of the sculpture's symbolic design and beauty. Davis elaborates, "The room gives the viewer a full range of sensory experiences with the work. The rich colors of the sculpture vary with the time of day. As shadows move across the work, new angles, textures, and patterns are created on the slate pieces.

Until Cornwall Circle can be enjoyed again in the renovated galleries of the CMA, all are invited to experience it afresh in its temporary location at MOCA Cleveland.


Image: Dana Schutz, Lovers, 2003, oil on canvas 90 x 120 inches, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida

FALL OPENING PARTY
September 29 / 7-10pm
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

MOCA Cleveland 2006
8501 Carnegie Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
General hours of operation: Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm
Closed Mondays and all major holidays

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