calendario eventi  :: 

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24/1/2008

Two exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland MOCA, Cleveland

Craig Lucas 'Surge'

Craig Lucas has led a distinguished career as a painter for over forty years, exploring formal and conceptual issues in the tradition of abstraction. Lucas’s abstract paintings are characterized by grid compositions, bold primary colors, gestural marks, and geometric and organic shapes. Over the years, the artist has explored the relationship between color and form, mark-making and structure, and patterns, systems, and networks. As translations of the world around him, Lucas’s abstract studies are as much about perception as they are about reality.

For this exhibition, Lucas redirected his abstract work to create semi-figurative paintings and prints in response to the war in Iraq. Integrating evocative war imagery with bold geometric abstraction, Surge (2007) is a large-scale, multi-panel painting that breaks new ground for the artist in subject matter and scale. In Surge, Lucas covered loosely painted war scenes (as depicted in newspaper photographs) with a red, white, and blue geometric composition allusive of the American flag. This motif is repeated on seventeen square canvases that together create a long, banner-like painting.

Accompanying this striking work are monotype prints that extend Lucas’s exploration of abstraction and representation. In the prints, Lucas abstracts eight war scenes by printing them on top of one another in different colors and configurations. The dense build-up of color, form, and content serves as a metaphor for the complexities of the Iraq war.

Lucas’s practice of incorporating figuration into abstraction to address a major political event has precedence in contemporary art history. The broad shift from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art in the late 1950s was influenced in part by American economic, domestic, and foreign policy. Abroad, painters like Georg Baselitz began using figuration to comment on post-World War II Germany. The prominent Abstract Expressionist, Philip Guston returned to figurative painting in the late 1960s in part due to his strong reaction to the Vietnam War. In 1988, Gerhard Richter paused from abstraction to create October 18, 1977, a blurred figurative series about the radical Baader-Meinhof Group. In these and other instances, abstract artists have capitalized on the literalness and familiarity of figuration to convey serious, political ideas.

In both series, Lucas’s loose, often obscured rendering of war-scene images compels the viewer to slow down and examine the pictures closely. To decipher their meaning, one must scrutinize the nuances of each roughly-drawn or printed image, an act in contrast to the more immediate assimilation of the war as depicted in the mainstream media. In slowly unraveling each image, we consider each incident more thoroughly, an experience that is difficult, at times even unpleasant, but important nonetheless.

[ABOUT THE ARTIST] Craig Lucas has exhibited his work regionally, nationally, and internationally. He has received numerous awards including an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship and the Visual Arts Award from the Akron Area Arts Alliance. A professor of painting at Kent State University for over thirty-five years, Lucas was honored by the University in 2006 with the establishment of The Craig Lucas Graduate Assistantship.

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Sam Taylor-Wood
On view January 25th, 2008 through May 11th, 2008

A leading artist of her generation, Sam Taylor-Wood came to prominence in the mid-1990s as one of the YBA’s (Young British Artists), the British art movement that propelled such artists as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin to celebrity status for their provocative and sensational works. Taylor-Wood has since become renowned for deftly manipulating the signature media of our age—photography, film, and video—into compelling psychological portraits that tap into the ethos of our times. Organized by MOCA Cleveland, this first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. brings together a selection of 29 works from the mid-1990s to the present. After its MOCA Cleveland debut, the exhibition travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (August 2 through October 5, 2008).

Inspired by opera, film, and everyday life, Taylor-Wood probes the human experience in her art, capturing moments of introspection, pain, and joy. Her work examines the human experience from the inside out, exploring everything from the inner psyche to dysfunctional relationships and the uneasy sense of disconnection that permeates contemporary life. Human vulnerability, both emotional and physical, is a constant theme, as is an intense aspiration, in more recent works, to transcend human limits.

Taylor-Wood’s works include individual photographs and photographic installations, single and multi-projection film/video installations. Drawing freely from a variety of sources ranging from Renaissance painting to Hollywood celebrities, her thought-provoking portraits and scenarios often grapple with mental and physical breaking points. The film/video Hysteria (1997) portrays a woman’s tumultuous descent from exhilaration to psychic disintegration. The poignant and beautifully rendered Crying Men (2002-2004) series of photographs depict international male film stars like Laurence Fishburne, Ed Harris, and Benicio del Toro in moments of sorrow and introspection. A number of Taylor-Wood’s works probe the ravages of time and our impending mortality. Referencing 17th century Dutch still life painting, the excruciatingly beautiful yet ultimately sickening, Still Life (2001), moves from sensual beauty to abject repulsion by documenting the decomposition of fruit over time. More recent works explore a fascination with suspended states—the sense of being caught in between two worlds. In David (2004) Taylor-Wood portrays soccer icon, David Beckham asleep, caught somewhere in the nether world of dreams. In the Self Portrait Suspended (2004) series, Taylor-Wood appears gracefully suspended, ascending or falling in what appears as a quest to reach a moment of “absolute release and freedom.” With a sensibility that can be trenchant or poetic, Taylor-Wood’s images of strength, endurance, and vulnerability confront the richness and complexity of our humanity.

[ABOUT THE ARTIST] Since her first solo show in 1995 at White Cube, one of London’s leading galleries, Sam Taylor-Wood (born in London in 1967) has exhibited her work extensively at prominent museums such as La Fundaciò “La Caixa” (Barcelona); the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and the Hayward Gallery (London). In 1997, Taylor-Wood received the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennial and was nominated for the Turner Prize. Among her most recent one-person exhibitions have been those at the STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium in 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), and the Baltic (Gateshead, England) in 2006. Taylor-Wood’s work is in many prominent collections ranging from the Tate Gallery (London) to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York).

25 january:

OPENING CELEBRATION

5:30pm / Meet the Artist: Sam Taylor-Wood
One of the most acclaimed artists today discusses her work of the last decade. Her exhibition at MOCA Cleveland is the artist’s first one-person museum show in the United States.

7–10pm / Public opening
Looking for an evening adventure? Come celebrate our Winter / Spring exhibitions to the expansive grooves of UK DJ Marc Cotterell.

Image: Craig Lucas

MOCA Cleveland
8501 Carnegie Avenue - Cleveland

stampa

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