Friday, July 19, 2013

Shahzia Sikander @ Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art

Source: The CJM website

Highlights from SFMOMA's collection

On view through October 27, 2013

Beyond Belief is an expansive exhibition exploring the spiritual dimensions of modern art, especially as seen through the lens of Jewish theological concepts. The exhibition features forty-eight internationally-known artists whose work—painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation art—are all drawn from SFMOMA’s outstanding collection. Ranging from a 1914 abstraction by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian to a luminous 1960 abstraction by Mark Rothko and oversized prayer beads by contemporary artist Zarina, Beyond Belief provides an engaging alternative that prioritizes spirituality in the reading of art.

The Limitations of  Legibility
For Shahzia Sikander, who grew up listening to the Koran but unable to read it in Arabic, the presence of letters was both an invocation of the holy and a reminder of the limitations of language. In her rendering of verses from the Laotian epic Sang Sinxay, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poem based on classical Buddhist literature, the legibility of the letters becomes less important than the dynamic presence they invoke.
 
 
Shahzia Sikander

..... read more

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Pre-Party on the Roof of The Met

Benefit Event

The Post Pride VIP Reception


Visitors on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
Another great view of Imran's installation at The MET  (Source: The Met website)
 
Monday, July 22, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Show location on map
Director Thomas P. Campbell invites you to join special guest Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and screenwriter, along with Met staff and Museum friends for a private VIP pre-party and viewing of The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi. Your pre-party ticket includes cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, pre-registration to the Museum's annual LGBT Post Pride Party, and exclusive viewings of special exhibitions PUNK: Chaos to Couture and Photography and the American Civil War. Membership is required to purchase tickets.

Friday, July 12, 2013

The Most Important Artists of 2013 (So Far) - Imran Qureshi


Source: Complex Art+Design website

Imran Qureshi is picked as one of the most important artists of 2013 !

click here to read the entire article


The Most Important Artists of 2013 (So Far)
 
 
 

12. Imran Qureshi

Exhibitions: "Roof Garden Installation by Imran Qureshi" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 14 - November 3, 2013), "Imran Qureshi: Artist of the Year 2013" at KunstHalle (April 18 - August 4, 2013, "The Encyclopedic Palace" at the Venice Biennale 2013 (The Italian Pavilion)

Imran Qureshi began 2013 with an award from the Deutsche Bank for Artist of the Year, giving him the opportunity to fill the gallery space of their main Berlin location with whatever he chose. He created custom pieces in the space for the exhibition, including a separate, dark walkthrough space with various staircases leading to his trademark small paintings under minimal light. One room in particular has a mound of crumpled, "blood"-splattered tissue paper, providing the uncomfortable feeling that many of Qureshi's bloody works tend to.

He created a similar installation for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but the real showstopper is his piece on the Met's rooftop for the summer, where one can really experience the flowery, blood-covered floor, and by simply attending, voluntarily interact with it. Qureshi's commentary on humanity's history of violence, done on both the scale of his miniature paintings and his large, rounder works and installations, remains relevant and has spoken volumes in 2013. -Cedar Pasori

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Seher Shah @ The Drawing Centre, NY

Source: http://thebottomline.drawingcenter.org           

Viewing Program artist Seher Shah’s architectural drawings are both fantastical and factual. Her drawings are complicated studies of real architectural spaces with multiple perspectival renderings of the structures. On a recent studio visit we talked about her influences and thoughts on the failed idealism of particular Modernist buildings.

Seher mentioned that her drawings use external references in combination with internal, more emotive systems of representation.  In order to better understand the internal/external play in her drawings I proposed that we investigate this idea in her recent work, Object Repetition, recently installed at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas. Object Repetition is a new direction for Seher.

It is composed of identically reductive geometric forms, which reference both buildings and monuments. The work feels like a three dimensional drawing. I wanted to get at the aspects of her work which are difficult to communicate, her associations with emotions and time. We loosely worked out a sequence of images that would provide a flexible interpretation of Seher’s work and perhaps reveal the internal object anxiety that interests her.

Below is a series of images of both the finished work and Seher’s conceptual source material, which offers a vantage into its intuitive and textural nuances.

 –Lisa Sigal, Viewing Program Curator



Seher Shah, Constructed Landscapes, Object Repetition. 1000 cast hydrocal objects with ink, dimensions variable. Installation at Amoa Arthouse in Austin, Texas, April–June 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.










Seher Shah, Constructed Landscapes, Object Repetition. 1000 cast hydrocal objects with ink, dimensions variable. Installation at Amoa Arthouse in Austin, Texas, April–June 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.






Seher Shah, Object Repetition. 480 cast hydrocal objects with ink, dimensions variable. Installed at Headlands Center Residence in San Francisco, California, 2010.