calendario eventi  :: 

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9/6/2008

Three exhibitions

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Arikha
10 june - 7 september

Arikha is a “re-born” artist, one who has died and returned to life several times. The first occasion was when he was little more than a child and was torn from his home, deported with his family and thrown into concentration camps. During that terrible period his father died but Arikha miraculously survived thanks to some of his drawings. Rescued from the shadows, he was taken in May 1944 to the Jewish refuge of Eretz-Israel in Palestine and for five years lived in the Ma’aleh-Hahmisha kibbutz near Jerusalem, working on the farm, studying and receiving military training. His artistic education began slightly after this in the Bezalel School. In his new homeland, this new collective home, one of his teachers also gave him a new name, replacing the old family surname of Dlugacz, which means “broad”, with its Arameic translation of Arikha. The first resurrection is symbolised in this change of name.
The second resurrection took place some time afterwards. Arikha enlisted in the Jewish defence force known as the Haganah and fought in its ranks in the turbulent days at the end of the British mandate in Palestine. On 18 January 1948 when he was part of the armed escort of a convoy, he was seriously wounded by the terrible dum-dum exploding bullets. During his agony he experienced a strange out-of-body sensation. He was given up for dead and his “corpse” was taken to a mortuary where a nurse read his name on a label and notified his sister. Arikha’s sister arrived and convinced a doctor to operate on him. After the operation, Arikha was in a coma for six days then came back from that land of no return.
The third resurrection was not a physical but rather a spiritual one, and is to be seen in the realm of painting. As the artist has explained on numerous occasions, in late February or early March 1965 he visited the Louvre to see the exhibition Le Caravage et la peinture italienne du XVIIème siècle. One painting by Caravaggio particularly struck him: The Resurrection of Lazarus. Arikha suddenly realised that modern art had become Mannerist, just as in Rome in the time of Caravaggio. He felt that his vocation as an abstract painter had come to an end.
A few days later, on 10 March 1965 Avigdor Arikha got up in the morning and experienced an overwhelming desire to draw from life, possessed, as he put it, by a tremendous “hunger of the eyes”. Arikha asked his wife Anne to pose for him and attempted to draw her portrait. The work was not a success and he felt discouraged but returned to try again and again with an unprecedented passion. At the end of the day he had produced around thirty drawings in brush and sumi ink, drawings that he would later destroy as unsatisfactory. However, his fever did not abate. On the following day Arikha returned to drawing, and the next day and the next and so on for weeks and months, primarily in brush and ink. His new start was beginning to take shape. For eight long years Arikha devoted himself to drawing from life, to making prints and to studying art history. Finally, on 20 September 1973, following his return from a period in Israel, he suddenly experienced a violent need to paint from life and felt himself equipped to do so.
Since then Arikha has remained faithful to this procedure of working from life, which he considers the only way to preserve the traces of the lived experience. For Arikha, the more a work of art moves away from any generic abstraction and focuses on the individual nature of the model, the closer it will come to the truth. For this artist, all painting is a sort of portrait: “When I paint a face it has to be this face, not a generalised one, not a generalised apple, but this one in particular.” Just as each moment in life is unrepeatable, so Arikha does not allow himself to retrace his steps in order to revise or modify his work. As in Goethe’s Faust, painting holds on to the moment, pleading with it: “Abide thee yet a while, thou art so fair…”

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Miró: earth
17/06/2008 - 14/09/2008

This exhibition presents a survey of Miró´s work in th period between 1918, the year of his first solo exhibition, and his death in 1983. The guiding concept is a recurring theme in his work: the earth. In contrast to other art historical interpretations which have emphasised the artist´s links with Surrealism, the present exhibition will focus on his fidelity to rural and pagan life, his fascination with excess, fecundity -including sexuality- and death. Seen from this viewpoint, Miró´s work in the second half of his life acquires greater importance than is usually acredited to it.

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PhotoEspana 08: Florian Maier-Aichen
From June 3 to July 27, 2008

Florian Maier-Aichen (born Stuttgart, 1973) began his studies in Essen and subsequently continued his artistic training in Los Angeles. His working method is clearly different to a particular trend evident in recent German photography influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Maier-Aichen does not follow a systematic programme or use a serial, typological approach. In contrast, he tends to make each image individual in the manner of a unique project that requires a specific conceptual, aesthetic and technical approach.

Among his preferred subjects are mountain landscapes (a recurring theme in German Romantic painting, whose greatest exponent was Caspar David Friedrich) and the Californian coastline. These images are notably indebted to 19th-century panoramic painting and photography of a monumental type. They offer a theatrical and Sublime representation of nature in which the landscapes are markedly stylised, exploiting to the limit the pathos inherent in their contemplation. To do so they use unusual and even extreme viewpoints, taken from helicopters or from mountain peaks in the manner of the early topographical artists. In addition these photographs reveal a remarkable control of formal aspects such as the framing of the composition and size of the image (often large-format), the density of light and above all the use of an unusual colour range that is closer to painting than photography.

Maier-Aichen’s images, taken with large-format analogue cameras, are the result of a careful process of digital manipulation. Each image encompasses a microcosm that responds to a rigorous sense of composition and internal organisation in which the real and the virtual are not clearly differentiated. His work places the viewer in an ambiguous situation between the immediate recognition of the terrain that these landscapes depict and the unique beauty and disturbing attraction with which they are imbued.


Image: Florian Maier-Aichen, Untitled (Malibu South), 2004 C-print. 58,42 x 66,04 cm. Private Collection © Florian Maier-Aichen

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Palacio de Villahermosa
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid

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