Monday, November 29, 2010

Events | NYC, Italian Design Street Walking

Tonight grand opening in Soho of Italian Design Street Walking, an event by I Saloni Milano.
Participating showrooms include: Artemide, B&B Italia, Boffi, Cesana, Flos, Flou, FontanaArte, Giorgetti, Glas Italia, Kartell, La Murrina, Lualdi, Luceplan, Matteograssi, Molteni & C. - Dada, Pedini, Poltrona Frau, Poliform - Varenna, Scavolini, Tre P & tre Piu'
Several celebration will continue through January 8.





Sunday, November 28, 2010

Events | Graffiti Park in Wynwood, Art Basel Miami Beach 2010

Wynwood Walls, Aerosol (graffiti) Art Park for Art Basel: many internationally famous graffiti artist (Shepard Fairey, Coco144, P.H.A.S.E. 2) have adorned warehouse walls in Wynwood Arts District, Miami

Photos by Irene Sperber



Airstream in Wynwood Walls graffiti art park

Kitchen & Bar Restaurant

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Events NYC | Travels in Hyperreality: Macy's Parade

In a almost full moon night I drag myself to the next block in the crushing crowds cheering 20- meter high balloons. It is the surreal atmosphere of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.
Welcome to the land of hyperreality!

Events | Art Basel Miami Beach 2010

PINK SNAILS Creep onto ART BASEL Turf
Irene Sperber

photo credit Irene Sperber

45 GIANT PINK SNAILS announce a season that is anything but slow and plodding for Miami and Miami Beach during Art Basel’s invasion December 2-5.

Backing the public art project Galleria Ca' d'Oro, an Italian art collective and a Rome-based gallery, is opening a Coral Gables offshoot in December. The 8’ x 11’ snails are promoting environmental consciousness along with the message to slow down and listen to our planet. Made of recycled violently hued pink plastic, the snails are causing Miamians to stop and smile as the mollusks are suddenly appearing in residential Miami Beach neighborhoods close to the ART BASEL venue. There is a rumor that the snails will be moved a little closer to the Art Basel Convention Center site every few days, ending up at the adjacent park by December 2nd.

For more information on Art Basel Miami Beach 2010:
http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/

photo credit Irene Sperber

Vernissages NYC | Joseph Havel and Bertrand Lavier @ Yvon Lambert


Joseph Havel



Bertrand Lavier

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Thoughts | The Sublime

The Sublime - and Other Dimensions – in Poetry

SUBLIME – The sublime rises from the nobleness of thoughts, the magnificence of the words, or the harmonious and lively turn of the phrase; the perfect sublime arises from all three together.
Wm. Addis (probably 1604-1662)

As a poet, I cannot claim to ever have written in an exalted, grand or lofty style. That is not my intention as a lyric poet. I can, however, deliver a “lively turn of the phrase.”
In fact, I have rarely read a poem that I considered to be sublime – except for a very few , and those that come immediately to mind are: Poetry by Pablo Neruda, Dickinson’s I Died for Beauty, Ted Hugh’s translation of Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, and his translation of Racine’s Phèdre.
What I aspire to as a poet, is not the sublime in my art, but the duende, as named by Lorca, and described by him as a creative force or protean spirit, such as that of flamenco singers, in all
arts. It is said that the magical quality of a poem consists in its always being possessed by the duende, “a thunderbolt beautiful and terrible …so that whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water.”


Irene Mitchell

Monday, November 22, 2010

Camminando | Water Power, NY

Another abandoned factory in Columbia County

Exhibitions | New York, Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures"

For one who has followed Anthony Caro’s recent sculpture, the current show at Mitchell Inness and Nash is a moment of summation. Caro, the master of open drawing in space, whose drawing creates fresh awareness of space; who, starting in the 1960’s, could make air seem like mass through the play of steel lines and planes in relation, became in recent decades a more monolithic, even figural sculptor. The new large-scale floor pieces in Chelsea have the solidity and grand presence of Caro’s recent works that refer to a figurative language.
However, in this show, when you walk into the gallery, it is the charged air, the sense of the space itself as a presence, that makes the viewer alert.
The ‘negative space’ is transformed by Caro’s inflection of it: don’t just look at the steel sculpture but feel what form can do to the rest of the gallery.
Caro has said that since abstraction is no longer a struggle, a revolution, he now feels free to experiment with figuration. His experiments in a more figural mode allowed him to play off his teacher, Henry Moore, and to engage with the in-the-round history of sculpture through his no-holds-barred approach to large scale work. His recent almost decade-long project, the Chapel of Light, the sculptural transformation of a 12th Century church in Bourbourg, France, (the largest art project in a religious setting since Matisse’s Vence Chapel) was of a piece with this exploration.
The Chelsea exhibition seems to me Caro’s expression of delight in returning, after Bourbourg, to the frankly industrial nature of his life-long medium: steel.
The pieces are made of tons of recycled machine parts, transformed into space smashers and air expanders; caressed by grinders into eye sliding, grandeur-tinged antidotes to the tinniness of so much of our built up world.

Jill Nathanson

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Vernissages NYC | Chelsea, November 18

George Widener @ Ricco Maresca

Lee Krasner @ Robert Miller

The Flag Foundation

Indica on 11th

Odili Donald Odita @ Jack Shainman