A monumental Hans Hofmann exhibition opens at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) this week, marking a comprehensive reevaluation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential abstract painters. With nearly seventy paintings—including works from private collections that have never been exhibited in a museum setting—Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction presents an unprecedented and fresh look at Hofmann’s studio practice, focusing in particular on his continuously experimental approach to painting and the expressive potential of color, form, and space.
Art News
The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD, has announced a program of 12 AIPAD Talks during the Show, which runs April 4 through April 7, 2019 at Pier 94 in New York City. Prominent curators, collectors, artists, and journalists will discuss thought-provoking ideas, new trends, and unique processes involved in photography. AIPAD Talks speakers will include Vince Aletti, Harry Benson, Dawoud Bey, Chris Boot, Malcolm Daniel, Sarah Greenough, Deana Lawson, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Corey Keller, An-My Lê, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Carol Squiers, and Martha Wilson.
The Norton Simon Museum presents Matisse/Odalisque, a vibrant exhibition that explores the theme of the odalisque, a reclining nude or concubine that was a popular subject in European art throughout the colonial period. These erotic images of women in the geographically vague “Orient” evoked a life of luxury and indolence far removed from 19th-century industrial society (and 21st-century standards of representing race and gender).
Phillips’ first New York auction of the 2019 season, New Now on February 27th, is considered the go-to place for the latest in cutting edge art. Featuring luminaries in the contemporary art field, the auction has works by long-term established artists, and up-and-coming innovators. With over 170 works, spanning decades, the auction includes impressive, thought-provoking, genre-challenging paintings, prints, sculpture and photography. We’re shining the lens on 10 artists known for pushing the envelope.
Bernardo Bellotto is recognized as one of the greatest view painters in history, acquiring his fame in mid-18th-century Dresden as the court painter for the elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II—who was also King Augustus III of Poland. Over the course of a decade, Bellotto produced dozens of breathtaking depictions of the city and its environs, most measuring over eight feet in width. The success and renown of these grand, comprehensive works would earn Bellotto prestigious commissions at prominent courts throughout Europe.
A powerful multisensory installation of sculpture and sound by American contemporary artist, poet and activist Vanessa German will be on view at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia Feb. 22 through July 7, 2019. The major work, which combines figures without their heads, heads without their bodies, found objects and ephemera, grapples with some of the most profound challenges of contemporary life, including violence, loss and inequity, particularly in communities of color and for the LGBTQ community.
Frieze Los Angeles debuted as a new international art fair on February 14, 2019 and closed on Sunday, February 17, 2019, celebrating the city’s pivotal role in the international art community. The fair attracted 30,000 attendance across the gallery tent and backlot program, including civic leaders, international art collectors, curators, critics, and members of the Hollywood entertainment community.
Contemporary artists and mother/daughter team Lizbeth Mitty and Dana James are pleased to announce ‘The Thread’, a joint exhibition featuring new works from each artist. The show derives its title from their genetic and psychosocial bond, and their mutual experience as women in the art world. Hailing from successive generations with contrasting cultural landscapes, Mitty and James simultaneously diverge and overlap in subject matter they address, while employing antipolar visual linguistics. The artists are closely aligned in their process-driven approaches, and each serves as the other’s most honest and consistent critic. ‘The Thread’ is an intergenerational dialogue between two artists of markedly different aesthetics, whose close-knit familial bond is channeled through technique and modus operandi.
Marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the influential German school of art and design, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening and Day Sales will present artworks by those who taught at the Bauhaus and those whose outputs were transformed by its teachings.
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) presents “From Camelot to Kent State: Pop Art, 1960–1975,” an exhibition that embraces the generation of artists known as Pop artists. In reaction to consumerism and popular mass media, these artists took inspiration from advertisements, logos, comic strips and television using new technologies of the time, working with master printers and publishers.
