Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Landscape of Being - ebook



AGENCY – Art, Life and Society e-book 2 - THE LANDSCAPE OF BEING


CONTRIBUTORS

Writers: Ankur Betageri (India) Lucrezia De Domizio Durini (Italy) Robert C Koehler (USA)
Phil Rockstroh (USA) Margaret Wheatley (USA)

Artists: Ishola Akpo (Benin) Jelili Atiku (Nigeria) Conrad Atkinson (UK/USA) Lucy Azubuike
(Nigeria/USA) The Caravan Gallery (UK) U We Claus (Germany) Nicholas Galanin (Alaska)
Deborah Kass (USA) Olga Kisseleva (Russia) Simon Lewandowski & Richard Price (UK)
Mário Macilau (Mozambique) Ian MacKenzie (Canada) Fabian Marcaccio (Argentina/USA)
Graham Martin (UK) Ealy Mays (USA/Paris) Patrick McGrath Muñiz (Puerto Rico) Laura Nelson
(UK) Jackie Raybone (UK)  Anna Tretter (Germany) Angela Tyler-Rockstroh (USA)

The Landscape of Being is conceived and curated by Dr Graham Martin


‘The Landscape of Being is about our state of being in this still beautiful, globalised post-modern
crisis-ridden world. This book starts where our first e-book On the Contemporary ended, with a
call for humanitarian values, and for individuals and societies to embrace a common humanity
and the preciousness of human life. Its beating heart comes from the Occupy Movement,
Contemporary African art, Buddhism and the work of Joseph Beuys. The struggle for our
humanity, even for the capacity to be and remain human, seems ongoing and so, into an
increasingly virtual and consumerised world, I send this book out as flame, wound and reality.’


Released 12th October 2012 and available as a free pdf download.


Graham Martin
Director of Agency – Art, Life and Society, an international curatorial project based
in Yorkshire, UK, concerned with the socio-political and the how and why of living.  


Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Haute Malerei, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg

Group painting exhibition at Kunstmuseum MagdeburgOctober 14, 2012  to February 12,  2013 

Participating artists:  Jonathan Lasker, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, Neo Rauch, Fabian Marcaccio, Daniel Richter, Adrian Schiess, Alicia Paz, Sarah McGinity, Rashid Johnson 





From the Press Release:


HEUTE. MALEREI

The exhibition HEUTE. MALEREI is looking for a cross-sectional view of the genre of painting, while avoiding any kind of attachment to specific trends, schools of thought or generations. The exhibition aims to present items that pursue the creation of imagery through the use of figurative expression. It investigates the topic of the present, a topic which is established by the painting process itself and which is able to reflect the contradictory, unchanging and complex relationship between man and his world today. The open questions may lead, for example, to relationships between the use of colour tones and how they are expressed, between the surface of the image and the space depicted within, between illusion and reality, between conception and artist. The exhibition will present the items in comparison, albeit not for the purpose of comparing them, but rather to emphasize the proprietary and the unique, in which both the moment and the path taken to this point are revealed. 

The exhibition uses examples to examine the idea of what makes painting different from other artistic pursuits today, what connects it to the historical era in which painting enjoyed a privileged position, and what it contributes today in the midst of the dominance of media imagery. This gives rise to the question of how painting profits today as a necessary reaction to the media. 

Several works of each painter are shown, providing more than just a cursory glance, offering instead a sufficient perspective into the attitudes of each painter, enabling us to see clearly how they truly perceive the world. This exhibition focuses on these unique qualities of each of the items in which a complexity becomes apparent, a complexity that opens out into the painting but also creeps through the superficially visible to become meaning. The method of approaching contemporary painting, the intellectual management of handling traditional painting resources, with the cosmos of colour and the limitations of the canvas, the complex intellectual-manual process is the focus of the concept behind the exhibition. This exhibition does not seek to turn it into an academic exercise by examining labels such as ‘neo’ or ‘post’, but rather to examine individual models that have proven to be accepted over many years and models that have only joined them recently, models that have bound themselves to the unique medium of paint, shunning any other form of categorization in the process. 

Of course, an examination of painting as it is in our era gives rise to the belief that they could be representative of our times. In this regard, it is interesting to consider its connection to the definition of art, and to ask whether art could even exist without painting. To those that look, it is obvious that developments to date have given painting its place time and time again, thereby also providing the concept of art with a place in the lives of people.

Dr. Annegret Laabs, Uwe Gellner
Magdeburg , April 2012

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Paintant Report, FLUOR

Paintant Report, 2012
Commissioned for FLUOR Magazine, Issue #3

To order:
From Spain, Germany, Latin America
From everywhere else


2012 · FLUOR – One year, one magazine

FLUOR, contemporary culture magazine, appears at a time of economic crisis, amid a whirlwind that entangles and mixes art with business, luxury with necessity, ideas with forms… that make craft into art and vulgarity into elegance. Although it’s designed and created from the world of visual arts, FLUOR is not just an art magazine but a publication that will generate synergies that will set relations between the different languages and cultural forms of the present, past and future. A publication that will pay special attention to the work of artists and artists themselves. They will be the protagonists of FLUOR: with their works, their texts and their contributions. Painters, illustrators, photographers, writers, musicians… FLUOR’s pages will be filled with their work, their ideas and their words.

An essential part of FLUOR, which will define the magazine, will be the projects of invited artists who will create 16 pages of personal creativity, with specific and unique works, made especially for FLUOR. Familiar and unfamiliar artists, young and old, Spanish and other nationalities and that use any language. It doesn’t matter, every three months, in FLUOR we hope to make room for everyone: artists and ideas, forgotten and unpublished texts, narrative and beauty, horror and doubt, art and thought.

In FLUOR there will be no art criticism or any kind of critical opinion beyond the ones that our collaborators and invited artists raise with their views and attitudes. The formal and conceptual crisis of criticism has done much harm to Contemporary Art, and so with FLUOR, the objective is to introduce a different approach to culture, art and the work of artists with minimum intermediaries.

FLUOR will be, as of the first trimester of 2012, the contemporary culture magazine of these turbulent times, a place to visit on paper, a parallel exhibition space, a mixing desk for DJs of today’s culture, a magazine on who we are and what we will be in the future.

It is quarterly and bilingual (Spanish and English), to facilitate its distribution throughout the world. FLUOR will be distributed in bookstores and museum shops, and is designed for subscription (primarily for the direct contact that can be created between the reader and the publisher). It will also be present at art and book fairs around the world. We will strive to be close enough to the reader and art and literature enthusiast so that they can always count on the magazine, tailored to their tastes and interests.

FLUOR is certainly a different magazine and above all, bold and modern up to the point that it’s able to unite in its pages all kinds of languages and formats.