News: Design and business, art and technology, ideas and good stuff

2024 (created in 1959)

Josef Albers was approached to design the covers for a series of jazz records in what turned out to be one of the artist’s rare graphic design projects. “Josef was deeply influenced by Bach and was fascinated with rhythm. Think about the way that percussion sounds and you realise that the large squares on these covers are almost like kettle drums and the little squares more like hi-hats”, said his commissioning editor. Form, for him, always had to conform to purpose even in graphics.

Albers was a German-born American artist who joined the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus from 1922 to 1933. He emigrated to the US in 1933 to flee Nazism. He later headed the Yale University design department.

dezeen.com,
albersfoundation.org

Copy ©dezeen.com, image ©Joseph Albers, 1959

October 5, 2024 until January 26, 2025

Artist Miriam Cahn evokes powerful emotions with simple brushstrokes and a vigorous drawing style. Her paintings and drawings depict human atrocities with brutal reality.

stedelijk.nl

Copy ©Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Image ©Miriam Cahn, ‘o.t.’, 8.3.2021, photo: François Doury. Courtesy of the artist; Meyer Riegger and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

2024

I paint people who are wealthy, powerful, or significant – people who have had an influence on this country, and on me personally, whether directly or indirectly, whether for good or for bad.  Vincent Namatjira

Namatjira’s  portraits resemble caricatures, bordering on outsider art. But according to the art historian Wes Hill they also have “a level of sophistication that only a colourist, not a satirist, could possess”. Born 1983, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, he lives and works Indulkana, South Australia Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands.

mca.com.au
iwantjaarts.com.au

Text: Wikipedia, image ©Vincent Namatjira, The Royal Tour 12 (detail), 2020, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

22 June to 13 October 2024

Analogue craftsmanship and experiment

In a world that is dominated by digital screens, technology, speed and overproduction, Cowen seeks to draw our attention to the sublime experience of nature’s beauty through his work. As a photographic artist, he keeps well away from the digital world and has a real hands-on approach to the craftsmanship of the photographic process. He uses self-made enlargers to create large analog prints on thick, wavy photographic paper. He experiments with darkroom techniques and chemical formulas, rendering each print a unique work.

huismarseille.nl

Image: P126, 2020-2023, Digitalisation: Farbanalyse Cologne ©Jeff Cowen, Copy ©Huis Marseille

March 16 until July 14, 2024

Marina Abramović has been a prominent figure in performance and body art since the 1970s and is considered one of the most important founders of this art form. An early proponent of using the human body in performance, she has consistently pushed herself to the limit emotionally and physically, exposing herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death.

Featuring over 60 works, including photographs, videos, sculptures, four iconic live performances (all making their debut in the Netherlands) and two participatory works, this survey covers her entire impressive oeuvre.

stedelijk.nl

Copy ©Stedelijk Museum
Image Marina Abramović and Uwe Laysiepen (detail), 1978 ©CC CODA Museum-Wikimedia

24 April to 9 July 2024

With a soundtrack comprised mostly of the album Landfall by the legendary Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet, one of the foremost contemporary classical music ensembles, a shared passion of deep sorrow and beauty unfolds on stage. Relinquishment becomes a dedicated search for a crack, and glitches in the movement code turn out to be free, playful, and emotive material.

batsheva.co.il

Image and copy ©Batsheva Dance Company

16 Feb 2024 - 9 June 2024

Extraordinarily productive, innovative, entertaining and a little rough around the edges: Frans Hals was one of a handful of painters who defined the 17th century. His distinctive, freewheeling style of painting became so influential that it’s easy to forget that he was its founder. So after thirty years, it’s high time for a new retrospective.

rijksmuseum.nl

Image: Jester with a Lute, 1620–1625, canvas (detail), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikipedia Commons. Copy: Rijksmusem Amsterdam

January 2024

Anselm is a 2023 3D documentary film directed by Wim Wenders, chronicling the art of German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. The film had its world premiere at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 2023 as a special screening, where it competed for the L’Œil d’or.

Described as “immersive”, the film illuminates Kiefer’s work, life journey, inspiration, creative process, and the artist’s fascination with myth and history. The aim is to “blur” the boundary between film and painting.

imdb.com

Copy and image CC ©Wikipedia

7 October 2023 to 11 February 2024 (Nantes) and 11 April to 1 September 2024 (Barcelona)

Valadon was well known as an artist and model during her lifetime, especially toward the end of her career, in the 1920s more specifically, as she helped to transform the female nude that depicted expression through a woman’s experience. She resisted typical depictions of women, emphasising class trappings and their sexual attractiveness, through her realistic depiction of unidealised and self-possessed women who are not overly sexualised. Championed by contemporaries such as Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, her nude work is realistic, colourful and powerfully contemporary. The 2024 travelling exhibition can be seen in Nantes and Barcelona.

https://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/en/programme/exposition/suzanne-valadon

Copy ©Centre Pompidou-Metz and Wikipedia
Image ©La Chambre bleue (detail), 1923, Public Domain, Wikipedia