Adam Kennedy, a 23 year-old Glasgow-based artist who recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, has won the Aspect Prize, the most important award for Scottish artists. His success in winning one of Britain’s largest independently funded arts prizes was announced at a reception at The Fleming Collection, which has become an embassy for Scottish art in London, last night (Mon 10 January) by the leading Scottish actor Bill Paterson.
The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce the appointment of Elizabeth Hurley as the museum’s new Vice President for Development, effective February 14, 2011. In this capacity, Hurley will assume responsibility for overseeing all aspects of the museum’s fundraising goals–including the Annual Fund, major gifts, planned giving, institutional giving, and development operations.
From Bloom County to Mars: The Imagination of Berkeley Breathed
Cartoon Art Museum
February 5 – June 19, 2011
The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to present From Bloom County to Mars: The Imagination of Berkeley Breathed, a retrospective exhibition covering the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist’s career from his beloved comic strip Bloom County to the upcoming Disney film Mars Needs Moms, based on his children’s book of the same name. The exhibition features a comprehensive look back at Bloom County as well as Berkeley Breathed’s children’s books and movie projects, including material from Secondhand Lions and Flawed Dogs.
FOCUS: Robert Lazzarini
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
February 13-April 10, 2011
Robert Lazzarini is best known for his sculptures of common objects in which detailed craftsmanship is combined with precise illusionistic distortion. Scaled to the size of the original object and using the same materials, Lazzarini creates versions of guns, knives, brass knuckles, chairs, telephones, telephone booths, and skulls, among other things.
Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation
Saint Louis Art Museum
January 21 – May 1, 2011
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the first major exhibition in the U.S. of the work of acclaimed Dutch, Brussels-based artist Manon de Boer.
Manon de Boer (b. 1966, Kodaikanal, India) has crafted a unique and influential cinematic language that for over a decade has been defined by narratives of time, memory, and the relationship between sound and image. Central to her work is a keen focus on the temporal dimensions of portraiture, as she depicts friends, writers, dancers, composers, and musicians on film to capture the nature of memory and the passage of time. Alongside a documentarian strain that threads through her work, De Boer has also reconceived the structures of sound and musical composition to explore how they transform cinematic perception.
Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting
Saint Louis Art Museum
January 21 – May 1, 2011
Over the past decade, Richard Aldrich (b. 1975, Virginia) has assiduously orchestrated an eclectic body of work that reveals, in all its variation, a consistent sensibility: a keen appreciation for the complex disposition of painting and its potential to reveal the intimate and nuanced experiences that exist outside language. For his first solo museum exhibition, on view from January 21, 2011 through May 1, 2011, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents nearly twenty of the artist’s large-scale works, produced over the last several years that span abstraction, figuration, “object-paintings,” and text-based canvases.
The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Jan. 15 – June 5, 2011
Works by Ray K. Metzker, one of the most original and influential photographers of the last half century, will be on view from Jan. 15 to June 5, 2011, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker will reveal Metzker’s ability to turn ordinary subjects, including the urban experience and nature, into the visual poetry of the finely crafted black-and-white print.
Dane Mitchell: Radiant Matter Part 1
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
March 5 – May 29, 2011
Perfumes, vaporisers and de-humidifiers form the base of the Govett-Brewster’s latest exhibition Dane Mitchell: Radiant Matter Part 1.
The Gallery’s New Zealand Artist in Residence Dane Mitchell investigates materials in states of transition.
Stealing the Senses
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
12 March – 5 June 2011
Stealing the Senses at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery shows work by international and Aotearoa New Zealand artists whose practices offer immersive sensory encounters.
Collectively the artists propose new phenomenological experiences that highlight the socio-politics of the senses.
John Marin‘s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism
Art Institute of Chicago
January 23 through April 17, 2011
In 1948, a nationwide survey pronounced John Marin (1870-1953) “America’s Number 1 artist.” Marin’s exuberant and improvisational paintings are recognized today as critical to the evolution of American modernism. Less well known, though, is the extent to which Marin pushed the limits of the watercolor medium, establishing for a new generation of artists its inherent suitability to avant-garde expression. The Art Institute of Chicago has organized a major exhibition that is the first to explore this idea through close technical analysis of the artist’s watercolor practice: John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism, which will be on view in the museum’s Jean and Steven Goldman Prints and Drawings Galleries in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Wing (Galleries 124-127) from January 23 through April 17, 2011.
Thomas Huber / Wolfgang Aichner: passage2011
a several week art happening may – June 2011, Munich – Zillertaler Alps – Venice
The undertaking is driven by hope: bare handed the artists will drag a self-made boat over the Alps. Neo-romantic aspirations and sisyphean exertion characterize the mission, whose apparent aim is to launch the boat into the lagoon in time for the most distinguished art event in the world, the Venice Biennale – to eventually celebrate the victory of art over nature in a triumphal journey up the Canale Grande – or to fail dramatically.
MAM’s 39th Benefit Art Auction exhibition features over 100 wonderful contemporary artists from near and far. The exhibition, with 26 pieces of Silent Auction artwork and 76 pieces of Live Auction artwork, represents a diverse spectrum of media from painting and drawing to ceramics and photography. It is an impressive survey of the best emerging and established contemporary art in our region. This is an exciting year for the auction exhibition.