Monthly Archive for April, 2011

And the winner of the Archibald Prize is…

Published on April 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The winning portrait of Margaret Olley

By Adam Fulton, The Age

A portrait of the celebrated painter Margaret Olley by the artist Ben Quilty has won the $50,000 Archibald Prize.

The 88-year-old doyenne of Australian art, who was also the subject of an Archibald winner by William Dobell in 1948, said: “Ben’s been wanting to paint me for years. But I kept on saying no.

“And I said: ‘You have to sort of get over this thing you have with death and start celebrating life.’”

When she saw that he had, she said, she agreed.

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Joan Miró: A vital body of work

Published on April 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Constellation: Awakening in the Early Morning by Joan Miró

By P.W., The Economist

FORTUNE often smiled on the artist Joan Miró (1893-1983). He had talent, imagination, wit and terrific contacts. On his first visit to Paris in 1919, the young painter left Barcelona with a “letter of introduction” to Pablo Picasso—a cake baked by his mother. What better to guarantee a warm welcome? The following year, when Miró settled in Paris, he had use of a studio that just happened to be next to the charismatic Surrealist André Masson’s. Masson seemed to know everyone and generously included his neighbour in his circle. In those days Miró was often so broke he lived on radishes, but in other ways he was blessed. In 1923, when he was 30, he wrote to a friend, “We must explore all the golden sparks of our soul.” By that time he was sparkling like a princely fireworks display. When Picasso visited his studio he pronounced, “After me, you are the one who is opening a new door.”

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Sketches From the Man Of Steel

Published on April 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo Courtesy of Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times

By Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra. He has magnified the medium with immense black shapes that sit directly on the wall, their absorptive darkness forcing the space around them to expand or contract. Using black oil paintstick, he has exaggerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies.

Now Mr. Serra is pushing the Metropolitan Museum of Art to new extremes, with a stark, sometimes compelling, sometimes off-putting retrospective of his drawings. The show could be called a qualified win-win, which may be as good a result as could be hoped for.

The first survey of Mr. Serra’s drawings to be mounted by an American museum, the show has been organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Laying out Mr. Serra’s drawing career with unfamiliar thoroughness, it barrels through 40 years of his adamantine engagement with the medium with a sweep that manages to encompass aspects of latter-day Abstract Expressionism while presaging today’s sociable relational-aesthetics art. It contains 41 installation drawings and large to very large framed works; four early videos that convey a visceral sense of his attachment to process, gravity and weight; and an immensely revealing, sometimes touching display of nearly 30 sketchbooks of the kind that Mr. Serra almost always carries with him but has never exhibited.

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