The Art Project - Powered By Google

Wow. Google never stop working eh. He's the latest addition to their online empire; The Google Art Project. An amazing online collection of art work from museums around the world, allowing you to view the works in a detail never seen before on the web!

check it out... www.googleartproject.com

Antony Gormley : Critical Mass at the De La Warr

I've just been to visit the De La Warr Pavilion back in Bexhill and had a quick look around Antony Gormley's Critical Mass exhibition on the roof top terrace. The exhibition is running there until the 31st August 2010 and is free of charge.

The arrival of Critical Mass at the De La War is the first ever sculpture installation on the roof top terrace. Critical Mass is one of Antony Gormley's most known works, made up of sixty life size cast iron body forms. All of the haunting bodies were cast from molds of Gormley's body.

I'd seen the exhibition previously but had not realized the original concept for the casts. The literature at the exhibition explains, "...The first impression is of some kind of trauma, perhaps an act of violence perpertrated towards the masses such as terrorism or genocide (The work was originally made for a huge railway terminus in Austria, thus consciously connecting it to the victims of the Jewish holocaust."

Another great exhibition at the De La Warr! If you're in the area, its definitely worth taking a look.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: The Curve

Tickets: Free admission
Times: 27 February 2010 - 23 May 2010
Open daily 11am-8pm | Open late every Thu until 10pm

Trained as a musician and composer, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. His installation for The Curve will take the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other instruments and objects. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.

This great exhibition is coming to it's end this month so hurry if you want to see it! See the Barbican website for more details.

Modern Masters with Alastair Sooke

BBC One is currently half way through it's Modern Masters series, which aims to explain the work of the four founding fathers of modern art. Namely Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.

The series has so far been a great success for Alastair Sooke who is new to presenting on the BBC. During each hour long installment of the series, Sooke investigates not only the works but the personality of each of the masters. Quizzical interviews with friends and partners ensue, along with a few impersonations and 'have a go' moments. The last episode on Henri Matisse saw Sooke cutting out shapes of coloured paper to create his own version of Matisse's Icarus.

Look out for the next episode, showing on BBC 2 Sunday 16th May at 9pm, and the final episode is on the 23rd or May 2010.

See the past episodes on the BBC >

SALVADOR DALI


ANDY WARHOL


PABLO PICASSO



HENRI MATISSE

Balloon German Panther Tank by Hans Hemmert

German panther, 2007
960 x370 x 300cm

Im Rahmen der Ausstellung:"diese vorbereitung der bereitschaft des sich-offen-haltens für die ankunft oder das ausbleiben des gottes", städtische galerie nordhorn 2007

Roughly translated by Google to...

As part of the exhibition: "This preparation is the willingness of the keep-open, or the inevitable arrival of the god", urban gallery nordhorn 2007

See more of Hans Hemmert's work at www.ingesidee.de

Virgin Media - ‘Speed of Light’ installation

This spring, an immersive, light-based art installation commissioned by Virgin Media to celebrate 10 years of broadband in the UK will open to the public on London’s South Bank.

Created by UK art and design practice United Visual Artists ‘Speed of Light’ explores the themes of communication and modernity. The responsive work puts the public firmly at the heart of the experience, with a series of experimental light works flowing through the labyrinthine spaces of the Bargehouse, a four-storey industrial space situated on the South Bank.

The installation will be located at the Barge house, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, Southbank, London, SE1 9PH. From 9 – 19 April (online preview from 31 March) open to the public Mon-Sunday- 11:00am - 7.00pm (last entry 6:30pm). Cost: FREE

About ‘Speed of Light’

‘Speed of Light’ is a series of installations that invoke in the viewer a sense of the “magic” involved in fibre optic communication. Stripped back to its materials, fibre optic is a thin strand of glass, with nothing more than a flickering beam of light. UVA have used this beam as the starting point for their work. The installations dramatize the experience of using fibre-optic communication, re-imagining it as an immersive environment.


[Photographs by Tom Oldham]

The Art of Green and Blacks

Green and Blacks have just launched a new competition to create 'art' by using their own bars of chocolate. Before you go out and buy 700 bars of the stuff, they've also developed a handy online canvas to create your very own masterpiece on.

Check out the Art of Green and Blacks >

Whilst you're there why not vote for my attempt, 'Great Black' (- get it? Clever I know, it could've been Green Britain but i thought that would just be a lie).

The winners of the competiton can be voted for on the gallery and the 9 most popular will be put to the great Sir Peter Blake (creator of the heart piece above) to decide on the winner. The winner will receive their masterpiece created from 700 Green & Black’s chocolate bars, or if they prefer, a signed print of the artwork plus 700 Green & Black’s chocolate bars.

Good luck!

Mona Lisa target of brutal tea based attack!

This is the best news story in some time! The Mona Lisa was attacked on the 2nd August, by a cup of hate filled tea. This ungracious act was performed a Russian woman in the Louvre, Paris.

Great stuff, I mean if you're going to attack a pretty mediocre piece of art, you might as well do it in style.

Art teacher wins portrait prize

Could this be a 'Susan Boyle' moment for the world of art?

I read about this the other day, it's a really nice story, makes a change from the usual winners, there's not a shred of pomp here.

The winner, Peter Monkman's winning piece, Changeling 2, is part of a set of pictures painted of his daughter Anna at varying stages in her life. He won a £25,000 prize along with a tidy £4,000 commission! Not bad for an art teacher from Surrey. The painting is due to go on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London as part of the BP portrait Award exhibition.

"Now in its 30th year, it is one of the most prestigious portrait competitions in the world, and highlights the best in contemporary painting.

It aims to encourage artists to focus upon, and develop, the theme of painted portraiture within their work.

Monkman, who is director of art at Charterhouse School, Surrey, studied visual arts at the University of Lancaster, John Moores University Liverpool and the University of London.

It is the first time his work has been shortlisted for the award.

'Magical quality'

Monkman said: "I challenge the fixed notion of an idealised image of childhood and substitute it for a more unsettling, complex representation that exists in its own right as a painting."

The initial idea for the winning portrait came from photographs of Anna playing in woods in Brittany, France, where the light had a "magical quality".

Chair of the judging panel and National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne said: "This is a superb, magical portrait - a very worthy winner for the BP Portrait Award."

The second prize of £8,000 went to Michael Gaskell, from Sheffield, for a portrait of his son Tom, who was aged 17 at the time of the first sitting.

"He was at the period in adolescence between boy and manhood and fleetingly suspended between both," Gaskell said of the work, titled Tom.

The third prize of £6,000 was awarded to Annalisa Avancini, a painter and design teacher from Italy, for her portrait titled Manuel.

Mark Jameson, 29, won the BP Young Artist Award of £5,000 for Benfica Blue - a portrait of his sister, Lyndsey, which he said was unfinished".

Source

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Whitechapel Gallery reopens

Whitechapel gallery, East London, has finally re-opened it's doors to the public after a costly make over (£13.5m!). There is a buzz over the new gallery space which has seen it's first new coat of paint for a few years. The curators have many events planned to keep the hype in motion. The first exhibition opens on Sunday (5th April), entitled: Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!
Here's what the Whitechapel Gallery website has to say about the exhibition,

"In her remarkable pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, German sculptor Isa Genzken immersed visitors in a series of environments on the theme of ‘Oil’. Like a three dimensional collage the pavilion presented a poetic culmination of the major themes in her work: the psychedelic qualities of industrial materials, architectural form, the loss of the natural world, the properties of colour, and the energy and violence of western culture.

This is the first retrospective of a major European artist whose fusion of photography, paint, architecture and found objects into the realm of sculpture has influenced generations of younger artists. The show commences with early floor works from the 1970s and continues with a sequence of windows, rooms and buildings cast from plaster and concrete in the 1980s. Living and working in Germany and in New York, Genzken’s column structures of the 1990s draw on the vertiginous, reflective forms of Manhattan skyscrapers, adapted in 2000 into proposals for improvements to the architecture of Berlin.

The exhibition also features elements from more recent installations such as Oil, 2007 and Ground Zero, 2008. They are created with toys, souvenirs, furniture, building materials — the stuff of consumer culture, arranged in associative scenarios that are in turn funny, poetic and disturbing."

Other exciting events coming up are:
Gallery Talk: William Mann
Michael Craig-Martin in Conversation with Andrea Tarsia
Mother Foucault with Will Self
England: A play by Tim Crouch
Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity & Jay Street Film Project