Barnaby’s Garden!


FRAGONARD IN LOVE. SUITOR AND LIBERTINE @ Musée du Luxembourg

Below are a selection of the drawings a Fragonard exhibit from a 2016 show. Had a ball with all the fabulous and fashionable older Parisian set at this quaint little museum right inside the Luxembourg Garden.

“Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism.Wikipedia
Born: April 5, 1732, Grasse, France
Died:
August 22, 1806, Paris, France

 

fragonardsmal8

fragonardsmal7

fragonardsmal6

fragonardsmal5

fragonardsmal4 fragonardsmal3

fragonardsmal2 fragonardsmal1 fragonardsmal  fragonardsmall4

fragonardsmall5

fragonardsmall3

fragonardsmall2

fragonardsmall2-jpg

fragonardsmall1


Ipad Drawings by James Lipovac

here

 


Adrian Piper in All the World’s Futures, La Biennale di Venezia, 2015

by James Lipovac
DSC03783

I was recently bowled over by the powerful work of Adrian Piper currently on display in Venice.  A conceptual artist with a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, Piper was born in New York City and works out of Berlin. Her art opens eyes and seeks to build bridges between people. Last week at the Biennale, she received the Golden Lion for best artist for her efforts.

Among the group of pieces is an interactive installation titled “Rules of the Game” which called on viewers to sign life-long contracts at three separate desks, with one of the three rules:

I will always be too expensive to buy

I will always mean what I say

I will always do what I say I am going to do

tooexpensive

everything

 

 

DSC03785

In another room, objects were covered with the words “everything will be taken away” and hung next to a giant photo of the Nazis at their Degenerate Art Show. I was taken, as is often the case, by the way the work effected the audience, or didn’t. You can see in the photo at the top of the post, viewers standing around blankly, while the man on the right talked loudly on his cellphone for the entire time I was viewing at the work. Her ominous prediction sees so much more probable in this setting. After a week of contemplating the theme of All the World’s Futures, I found Piper’s directness on the topic hard to describe as anything less than courageous and superb.

DSC03784

DSC03787

 

 

eveerything


Adrian Ghenie @ the Romania Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2015

by James Lipovac DSC03729

This image of a giant Venus Fly trap dwarfing a man in a trench coat standing underneath a menacingly heavy sky was a stand-out at Ghenie’s speculator painting performance at the 56th La Biennale di Venezia in the Romanian Pavilion.

I first came across Adrian Ghenie’s work at Pace in New York in March of 2013. A painter friend of mine encourage me to check out the show. The strength of the work is Ghenie’s ability to harmonize elements of abstract figuration and more realistic interpretations all in the same canvas.

IMG_2897

I was excited to see what a fellow painter would do given the chance to represent their own nation, in this case, Romania. In his show “Darwin’s Room” Ghenie uses Darwin, evolution, and survival as themes for his grand brushwork and sheets of oil. He switches between and harmonizes intimate slow moments of finessed detail, larges areas of squeegeed paint, and thick sections of impasto.

DSC03715 DSC03716 DSC03717

DSC03718

DSC03719

DSC03720

DSC03721

DSC03722

DSC03723
DSC03726

DSC03727

DSC03728

IMG_2896


Chiharu Shiota “The Key in the Hand” @ the Japan Pavilion, La Biennale da Venezia 2015

IMG_2670 IMG_2671

Chiharu Shiota’s  “The Key in the Hand” installation is a bold vision of the the dark beauty of the human life lived. This Berlin-based artist was born in Osaka Prefecture in 1972.

Curator, Hitoshi Nakano- “After being confronted with the deaths of several intimate friends and family in recent years, Shiota has converted these experiences into the lingua franca of pure and sublime art without averting her eyes from the reality that all human beings must face “life” and “death” but that each of us must do so individually. “


José Antonio Suárez Londoño @ the 2013 Venice Biennale’s Encyclopedic Palace

The Labs happened upon José Antonio Suárez Londoño in Venice. Born in Medellín, Colombia in 1955, he is a persistent draftsman and documentarian of the imagined.london

His practice is to create a drawing a day. Originally this charge came from writer friend, Héctor Abad. Abad proposed a collaboration where Suárez Londoño would make work to inspire the author’s writing. At the end of each month, Suárez Londoño was to share his drawings with Abad, who would then create a work from these 30 or so drawings. In the end, at least in the story we were told, the output coming in proved too overwhelming for old Héctor, who backed out of his end, even though it seems to us that our guy was doing all the heavy lifting. Still the Labs sends many thanks to Abad for inspiring Suárez Londoño to make these intimate, outstanding, imaginative, tedious, whimsical, and mysterious gems.londono londono1

Suárez Londoño remained engaged in the rigor of this encyclopedic way of working, and decided to continue making daily work tied to his daily readings, starting with Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices. The images pictured here are from his collection “Franz Kafka, Diaries II, 1914-1923”. Our understanding is that there are 365 of these bad boys, all done in 2000, all mixed media, all 13 x 20 cm, and all better than anything you made all year!

Enjoy, readers!

londono2 londono3 londono4


Sol Lewitt @ Mass MoCA: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

IMG_1925

From the Mass MoCa website:

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective comprises 105 of LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings, spanning the artist’s career from 1969 to 2007. These occupy nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that have been installed—per LeWitt’s own specifications—over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus. The 27,000-square-foot structure, known as Building #7, has been fully restored for the exhibition by Bruner/Cott & Associates architects, which has closely integrated the building into the museum’s main circulation plan through a series of elevated walkways, a dramatic new vertical lightwell, and new stairways.

The works in the exhibition are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt designated the gift of a major representation of his wall drawings, as well as his wall-drawing archive.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, states, “Watching this grand installation of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings progress over the past six months has been nothing short of thrilling. In addition to providing an enduring exhibition of great beauty, this retrospective will enable visitors to behold for the first time the full trajectory of a major aspect of Sol’s artistic career. Until today, the only way to view multiple LeWitt wall drawings has been to travel far and wide, pursuing them individually in situ or in temporary museum exhibitions. Now, visitors will be able to return to MASS MoCA again and again to experience this visual feast of Sol’s wall drawings in a single location, doing so at their leisure over the next twenty-five years.”


IMG_1927

LeWitt—who stressed the idea behind his work over its execution—is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and is known primarily for his deceptively simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his artworks.

IMG_1931

Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing—and stunningly beautiful—variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead, to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or to project into the viewer’s space, while others meld to the structure of the wall itself. IMG_1932

IMG_1891 IMG_1890

IMG_1937


Ellen Altfest @ the Venice Biennale, 2013

altfest

Ellen Altfest, born in 1970 in New York, creates modestly scaled, hyerrealistic paintings of still lives, landscapes, and truncated male nudes that are exceptionally labored. All work is done from life, using natural light. Works take months, even years to complete. Futurelab first encountered her work, pictured below, at the 2013 Venice Biennale show, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni.

altfest1 altfest2 altfest3 altfest4 altfest5 altfest6 altfest7 altfest8


Matt Bollinger at Zürcher Gallery, December 2014

IMG_0849-0.JPG

IMG_0855.JPG

IMG_0847-0.JPG

IMG_0852-0.JPG


John Walker @ Alexandre Gallery, October-November 2014

 

walker

This John Walker exhibition at the Alexandre Gallery is fantastic. A painter’s painter, these are about the material. These careful abstractions of a real place, a spot he found in Maine, the works are full of creative mark-making that will entice you jump back on the subway and head to the studio to try some of these moves yourself. Or at least that’s how it made us feel. Enjoy!walker1

walker5 walker4 walker3 walker2 walker6 walker7 walker8 walkr9


house on the hill

IMG_9800.JPG


jimmy carter slipping on ice

IMG_9798.JPG

newsweek, november 26, 1977

James Lipovac, The beginning of the end, ink on paper, 9″ x 12″, 2021


Bedwyr Williams, The Starry Messenager, Welsh Pavilion, 2013 Venice Biennale

DSC03182

Bedwyr Williams immersive five room installation looks at the microscope and the astronomic. Its Powers of Ten meets early Mtv. The youtube clip below is an interview with the artist about the piece. Fast forward to 4.0o to see a portion of the video component of the installation.

IMG_3263


IMG_9799.JPG


Konrad Smoleński, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

IMG_3104 IMG_3255

Konrad Smoleński’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More at the Polish Pavilion was one of the Futurelab’s favorite pieces at this year’s Venice Biennale.

At the top of every hour, the bells ring for only first five minutes, followed by ten minutes of feedback and reverb. Incredibly, somewhere in that time, the sounds reverberating in the space reassemble into the original sounds of the bells. This is a must-see of this year’s Biennale. Simple, yet imposing, every element plays an integral  role in the experience. If you have the pleasure, don’t leave until its over. Unfortunately, our video got erased over the course of our week in Venice, but this video will give you a sense of things. To see the bells in action, skip to 1.06.


Richard Mosse, The Enclave

DSC03280 Image 4 Image 5 Image 7 Image 10 Image 11 Image 12 Image 14 Image 15

Richard Mosse, The Enclave, 2012 @ the Pavilion of Ireland, Venice Biennale 2013

One of this year’s Biennale favorites of The Futurelab is this stunning exhibition of photos and videos captured with kodak aerochrome infrared color film, an outdated technology once used for military surveillance. aerochrome film is intended to clearly denote the potential enemies in camouflage by turning everything in a landscape that contains chlorophyll pink. The result for Mosse is a haunting collection of surreal gems. Hope you enjoy.


Marwa Arsanios, “Have you ever killed a bear?”

MarwaArsaniosMarwa Arsanios, “Have you ever killed a bear?” or becoming Jamila, 2012 @ the 2013 Venice Biennale, Future Generation Art Prize


DSC03231 DSC03232 DSC03233 DSC03234Ryan Trecartin @ the Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2013


Da Vinci (2012) by Yuri Ancarani is the third part in a trilogy of videos that explore the ritual-like gestures of three unique professions. Currently on view in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale until September 2013.