camminando | Destination MoMA via Central Park

Public art: Olaf Breuning "clouds"

Fifth Avenue: Bergdorf Goodman windows

53rd Street: MoMA window video installation

53rd Street: Uniqlo storefront as media façade

@MoMA: Sigmar Polke "Alibis"

@ MoMA:"Conceptions of Space" entrance

@ MoMA, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art

@ MoMA: Cristopher Williams: "The Production Line of Happiness"

@ MoMA: sculptures in the garden and lobby

@ MoMA: lobby views

urban views: Broadway, Apple store and Lincoln Center Alice Tully Hall

camminando + exhibition | January 25

The first snow of 2013 in a extremely quite and deserted Central Park

Wolfang Laib's installation made of Pollen from Hazelnut, MoMA, second floor atrium

Images from "9+1 Ways of Being Political" at MoMa

"Specific Collisions" at Marianne Boesky Gallery

Total walk lenght: 8km, 435 calories burned

Exhibitions | A January Afternoon at the MoMA

In a January dark evening looking at art can always bring comfort. This visit to the MoMA was to me particularly inspiring; often looking at artwork already seen many other times seam to bring new meaning and discoveries. Or perhaps it was only mood...

Eiko & Koma installation greetings the museum visitors in the lobby

The iconic Andy Warhol "Campbell Soup"

Edvard Munch: The Scream

The Scream (Der Schrei der Natur, The Scream of Nature) is the 1895 The pastel-on-board version among the most celebrated and recognized images in art history, will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art for a period of six months. Of the four versions of The Scream made by Munch between 1893 and 1910, this p from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands; the three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. The 1895 pastel-on-board version of the painting is lent by Norwegian businessman and collector Petter Olsen; it was purchased at Sotheby's for a record US$120 million at an auction in May 2012.

     And finally, in the adjacent room I was able to look at some of my favorite paintings from the late nineteenth - early twentieth century MoMA collection, spanning from geometric abstraction to surrealism and metaphysical art.

"The Starry Night"  by  Vincent Van Gogh (1889)

Henry Matisse, "Dance (I)", 1909

Giorgio de Chirico "The Seer", 1914-15

Giorgio de Chirico, "Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)", 1914

 

 

René Magritte  "The False Mirror", 1928

Tokyo: 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde  is another remarkable exhibition combining different media and scales, from painting and sculpture to lighting, architectural and urban design.

But definitely the most inspiring exhibition for me was Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925. The title is quite descriptive: collaborations between artists, working in many different media and theme, in the early nineteenth century; I found quite extraordinary how the exhibition was highlighting the intersections and networked discourses emerging from many different creative approaches —explained graphically by he diagram in the MoMA exhibition website This exhibition links many works in abstraction to include many different media: paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and expressionist dance..

Exhibitions | Alighiero e Boetti

  “Do you know why dates are so important? Because if you write, say, ‘1970’ on a wall, it seems like absolutely nothing, but in thirty years’ time . . . Dates have this beauty: the more time passes, the more beautiful they become.” 

"Mi Fuma il Cervello"

MoMA hosts Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, a retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, of works by Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti (1940–1994). Boetti was one of the representatives of the Arte Povera, a movement which similarly to conceptualism and minimalism was making use of common every day materials as well as incorporating thought process in the artwork.

Boetti was often incorporating reflections and aphorisms in his work:

“First of all I prefer thought. This is the basic thing. I really think manual skill is secondary. . . . It’s taking things from reality. Everything, however small and humble, always has a beginning and stems from reality.”

“I went to a supplier of building materials. It was thrilling to see the wonderful things that were there! Seeing all these materials filled me with such crazy enthusiasm, in the end it turned to nausea! But still, some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments.”

“For me, the work on the embroidered maps achieved the highest form of beauty. For the finished work, I myself did nothing, in the sense that the world is as it is (I didn’t draw it) and the national flags are as they are (I didn’t design them). In short, I did absolutely nothing. What emerges from the work is the concept.” 

“I have done a lot of work which presents a visual disorder that is actually the representation of a mental order. It’s just a question of knowing the rules of the game. Someone who doesn’t know them will never see the order that reigns in things. It’s like looking at a starry sky. Someone who does not know the order of the stars will see only confusion, whereas an astronomer will have a very clear vision of things.”

  “Often when I draw I use both of my hands. Normally I am right-handed. When I draw with my left hand it is a kind of conversation with myself exploring the positive and the negative, the ego and alter ego, the order and disorder and mounting it on paper. It is as if on one hand there is Alighiero and on the other, Boetti.”