Contemporary Culture Carousel Jan 23 2012

Hello New Week, Hello New Lunar Year of the Dragon!

Chinese New Year (Washington Post) Today is the beginning of the Chinese lunar year and it’s the most important and longest Chinese holiday – it goes on for fifteen days and ends with the Lantern Festival. Today is also considered to be the first day of spring so the holiday is also known as the Spring Festival. Of course it is celebrated by Chinese communities round the globe and as I am off to London this week (and Lisbon too, lucky me!) I hope to catch some feasting and celebrating in London’s China Town while I’m over. If you want to read up on the cultural background to this holiday go here and for more great photos click here.

Water Panics in the Sea, 2011,  single channel digital stop-frame animation by Laleh Khorramian

Here’s a guide to some luscious sounding NYC Shows you won’t want to miss, written up in The Lookout, (Art in America) Come on, bags to pack, let’s get going! Leigh Anne Miller’s compilation includes Laleh Khorramian’s Water Panics in the Sea at Nicole Klagsbrun Project which closes real soon on Feb 4th, as does Corporations are People Too, the wonderful looking strong group show at Winklemann. And then there’s Joyce Pensato’s Batman Returns at Friedrich Petzel too. The Pensato show goes through to 25th February and hey, I’m seeing ads for cheap cheap flights to New York, who knows, might actually make it over, giving it serious thought! If you can’t get there yourself click on the Links to see what you’re missing.

Winter Timber, 2009, oil on fifteen canvases, David Hockney

This Week’s New Exhibitions (Guardian) Shows in Britain, ranging from the much written about David Hockney A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London, of which you can view a good slide show here (Blouin ArtInfo) all the way to the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinurgh for the exhibition of Anna Barriball’s drawings, video and more, taking in photography, sculpture and mixed media shows at various locations in between.

Top Ten Films of the Week in Britain (Telegraph) complete with sometimes acidic one line summaries as the list nears the bottom. A short fun read, recommended!

Untitled (Orange), painted canvas covered sculpture by Georg Herold at Saatchi Gallery

Paul’s Art World Blog is where I went to check out what to see while I’m in London, since I am *not* going to go stand in line at 5am hoping to get one of the 500 Leonardo da Vinci tickets that go on sale daily. There are three of the group shows he recommends that I hope to catch: The Mystery of Appearances, a “Greats of British Art” show at Haunch of Venison, Radical Drawing with a wonderful list of particpating artists showing and closing soon on 28th January at Purdy | Hicks, and third the New German Art at Saatchi that the Carousel has visited before. That little lot should keep me happy and busy!

Demons, Dancers and Drinkers, 2011, Marcel Dzama at Purdy| Hicks, London

Just Opened

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks (NYT Arts) The LA Gallery just opened on January 19th and the exhibition opened January 20th. Carol Vogel writes of the show: “While many other artists of his generation were appropriating images of American flags or movie stars or newspaper clippings, Mr. Kelly was relentlessly immersed in abstraction: creating color spectrums and panel paintings with nothing but a giant curve or rectangle, or making drawings depicting the simple outline of a leaf.” If you want to see some of the 88 year old artist’s work, click to view the Color, Line and Space Slide Show here

 Karlheinz Weinberger

Karlheinz Weinberger, Intimate Stranger, Kuntsmuseum Basel  “The exhibition presents a body of work that is rarely on public display: the photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006). Shown together with magazines and a selection of vintage fashion, these pictures document a bygone youth culture in Zurich.” One that aimed to challenge notions of Swiss propriety no less! It just opened on the 21st and has until 15th April to run, who wants to go with me to Switzerland? Something about this photography-and-more show that really attracts me, those vintage photos of moody youth! Take a peek at the images on Art Splash.

Wish I Could See

Mother, Francesco Vezzoli

Prada presents  24 h Museum,  Designed by ubiquitous naughty boy Francesco Vezzoli with AMO, Rem Koolhaas’ think tank, you can read a little background on this pop-up musuem on The Guardian. The “24h Museum” opens in Paris on Tuesday 24 January for 24 hours only, till Wednesday 25 January. If you’re in Paris at the time, don’t blink or you’ll miss it, but the website is a lot of fun all by istelf, crying shame I won’t see the show!

Catch before it Closes

As Yet To Be Titled, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 41 x 53.5 inches by Jennifer Poon

Strange Blooms, Jennifer Poon’s solo show at Claire Oliver Gallery has been on since the beginning of January and closes quite soon on February 11th. I love her delicate and lyrical watercolour and gouache works on paper and I’d love to see the stitched and sculpted fabrics too, this is one show I really truly wish I could see! Have to be content with browsing through the images at the Gallery Link instead, and I’ll also cross my fingers in the hope that a gallery nearer me decides to host a Poon solo show soon.

The 3rd International Festival of Contemporary Art of Algiers, (NAFAS),  ends 3rd February. Yes Contemporary Art in Algiers too not just in Beirut, Doha and Dubai.  The theme of the 26 artist show is The Return. “The return is at the heart of today’s reality, curator Nadira Laggoune told ARTINFO UK. She has chosen to understand her topic in the widest possible sense of the term — to encompass, for one, the exile’s homecoming to the fledgling Tunisian democracy.” Algiers is awfully far away, I know, I know, so lucky for us that there’s a fascinating 45 image gallery online at the Nafas Link.

This Week’s Video

One of the works featured at the Algiers FIAC is The House that my Father Built (Once Upon A Time), 2010,  by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji (b. 1960 Baghdad, Iraq, living in Amersfoort, Netherlands). Take a look at the elegaic animation of drawings projected onto a figure painted on canvas, along with personal objects. And if  you want to know more, visit the Vimeo site for his statement about the work.