some interesting exhibitions: Gottfried Helnwein, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz, etc

The Disasters of War 10, 2007.  Oil and acrylic on canvas.

http://www.helnwein.com/news/update/artikel_3327.html

http://crockerartmuseum.org/art/current-exhibitions

Sacramento: There's a major exhibition at Crocker Art Museum of Gottfried Helnwein's works, Gottfried Helnwein: Inferno of the Innocents, January 29, 2011-April 24, 2011. 

Beautiful Victim I, 1974.  Watercolor on cardboard.

Untitled, 1996.  Oil and acrylic on canvas.

Untitled, 1998.  Oil and acrylic on canvas.

Oath, 2000.  Oil and acrylic on canvas.

http://www.helnwein.com/werke/werke/home.html

For me, I'm not sure if Helnwein's images are really all that challenging, whether they rely more on ready-made referentiality as controversially evocative legerdemain or if that's exactly the profundity itself.  In any case, his works are impressive and well-done.  Above link to more works and info at his website.

The Yawner, 1771-83.  Tin cast.

Szepmuveszeti Muzeum, Budapest
http://mini-site.louvre.fr/saison18e/index_f.php?expo=messerschmidt&langue=en#/messerschmidt/introduction

http://www.neuegalerie.org/exhibitions/messerschmidt

Paris: Neue Galerie, NYC recently had the first exhibition dedicated to Franz Xaver Messerschmidt which in collaboration travels to the Louvre, January 28, 2011-April 25, 2011.  A catalogue is also available. 

Messerschmidt would be considered a schizophrenic these days, which led him to work on his famous character heads often modeled from himself. 

http://www.limmat.ch/schmid/fxm/

Above link to helpful website on Messerschmidt.

From Travelers, 2001-2010.  C-print.
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/humin/events

http://www.bellevuearts.org/exhibitions/upcoming/index.htm

Ann Arbor: Check out the exhibition at Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan featuring some of Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz's supermundane snow globes and photography, White Nights, January 24, 2011-March 16, 2011.  Another exhibition at Bellevue Arts Museum, Travelers: Objects of Dream and Revelation, August 26, 2011-December 31, 2011.

The Orchard at Night, from Islands, 2005.  C-print.

http://www.martin-munoz.com/main.html

More images and info at their website.

http://www.aperture.org/travelers.html

A recent book, Travelers (Aperture, 2008).  It's ok, but could've been better produced imho. 

http://www.cerealart.com/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=37&cat=Walter+Martin+and+Paloma+Munoz

You can get your own snow globe for $750 USD, three to choose from, each with a limited edition of 250.  Some may have sold out. 

Kinder!, 2006.  C-print.

Frank Kunert
http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/emuseum.asp?style=browse&currentrecord=1&page=seealso&profile=exhibitions&searchdesc=Future%20Exhibitions&searchstring=Future/,/greater%20than/,/0/,/false/,/true&action=searchrequest&style=single&currentrecord=2

NYC: There's still some time to go, but this forthcoming exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design is going to be awesome, Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, June 7, 2011-September 18, 2011.  C'mon, it's really cool miniature stuff!!!

Brancusi 1928, 2003.  Digital print.

 http://www.joefig.com/home.html

Bureau de Sigmund Freud, 2002.  Mixed media.

http://www.charlesmatton.com/index.htm

NON-STOP ACTION, 1990.  Mixed media.

http://www.alanwolfson.net/index.htm

Included in the exhibition are work(s) by Martin & Munoz as well as by other faves Joe Fig and the amazing Charles Matton and Alan Wolfson.

Dwellings, 1981.  Mixed media. 

Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

http://whitney.org/Collection/CharlesSimonds

Also, it's a chance to rediscover the works of Charles Simonds, some of the greatest site-specific pieces, mindfully sequestered. 

Andrea Riccio

Satyr, c. 1506-08.  Bronze.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Drinking Satyr, c. 1515-20.  Bronze.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

Satyr and Satyress, c. 1510-20.  Bronze.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

One of my current inspirations, Andrea Riccio.  A most gifted and versatile sculptor.  Due to my proclivities, I'm particularly fond of his small-scale figurative works.  I'm also fond of the satyr motif in art, which is delightfully captured in several works by Riccio. 

For me, Riccio's works are remarkable for a certain lack of formal quality, their naturalism, their everydayness as it were.  They're magically mundane, how a particular expression or posture communicates the subject's singularity.  Riccio's figures have an intimate vitality, which is corroborated by their size, as if the viewer is swooping down to catch a slice of life. 

The Sheperd Daphnis with Pipes, c. 1520-30.  Bronze.

The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

http://art.thewalters.org/viewwoa.aspx?id=21684

The Shouting Horesman, c. 1510-15.  Bronze.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/riccio-andrea/5873/

Many of Riccio's works are at Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

http://www.basilicadelsanto.org/ing/visita/storia.asp#arca

Another link, to the Paschal candelabra at Basilica of St. Anthony, Padua.

http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/riccio/allen.htm

http://www.frick.org/assets/PDFs/Press_2008/RiccioImageLis.pdf

The Frick had the first exhibition dedicated to Riccio, but this was over two years ago.  However, there's some good info at its website.  Riccio's 'Oil Lamp' is on view at the Frick. 

An exhibition catalogue is available, the first monograph on Riccio: Denise Allen, Peta Motture, et al./Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2008).

Ron Mueck - Dead Dad

***Recently, I wrote this overloaded description.***

artnet.com/magazine/features/saltz/saltz6-6-3.asp

Ron Mueck's 'Dead Dad' (1996-1997) is one of his earliest pieces and continues to be my favorite.  I did not know about the hyperrealist extraordinaire until I chanced upon his exhibition at the National Gallery when I visited London in 2003.  Despite my penchant for meticulously crafted works, I honestly was not prepared for the exact and exacting verisimilitude of Mueck's sculptures.  Mueck single-handedly seemed to have set a new benchmark in the long history of figurative sculpture as well as to have overturned a certain complacency toward what the tradition can achieve.  The presentation of 'Dead Dad' is straightforward enough, austere, a depiction of the naked and supine corpse of Mueck's father, two thirds life-size.  It was produced with silicon casting from a clay model and mixed media including Mueck's own hair.  A merely formal representation is transcended by the clinical details themselves taken to an impeccable if not impossible level, where it becomes akin to products of steadfast religious adoration, or some miracle.  No doubt, the piece cannot help depending on the illusion of faithfulness to reality, but quite unlike any painting or sculpture hitherto seen, the unequivocal likeness down to every pore, wrinkle, and hair turns on the viewer's passive perception of reality, compelling a certain equivocality of perceptual givens - I must admit, I was almost tempted to touch it as if it would awake or move, absolute realism was "unreal."  Unlike in postmodernism, however, Mueck's hyperrealism is not the loss of an affective engagement with reality, but rather, it signals to a rapprochement with reality, and possibly its re-enchantment.  Reality can be reimagined through (hyper)realism.  Mueck could have constructed the piece to scale, but miniature is an effective performative device to invite intimacy and empathy but also to frustrate identification-cum-disavowal.  The doll size portrayal of the deceased is a poignant one, preciously wrought, and the physical smallness alludes to existential smallness.  Moreover, the pathos is somewhat undercut by the hyperreal strangeness itself, which elicits the viewer's omniscient gaze only to expose the reductio ad absurdum of its pretensions to self-certainty and security. The piece, like most of Mueck's oeuvre, explores the darker and disquieting channels linking humanity.  Mueck's subject is archetypally neither hero nor jester, and if there is any irony, it is only natural to a greater awareness of the traumas of quotidian life and existential vulnerability, that frailties and failings, incompletion, and puzzlement are just as much essentially human, needing to be recognized, and daresay beautiful and enthralling.  Mueck captures imperfection perfectly.  That said, there lingers what can be a bleak assessment, that both the original and the copy are no longer privileged sites of truth and unable to claim inherent authenticity, this disjunction which also provides for a human confluence.  By uncanny means necessary, the familiar becomes peculiar, and the peculiar becomes all-too-familiar ... such is Mueck's uneasy humanism.