Soshana - Life and Work
August 31, 2008 - February 8, 2009
Yeshiva University Museum New York
Soshana, born Susanne Schüller in 1927 in Vienna, was forced to flee her home country in 1938. She first went to Switzerland, then England, and finally New York. After studying art in England, she later met and married the painter Beys Afroyim. Her first major exhibition was in Havana in 1948, using the name Soshana as pseudonym. Her early works are portraits and still lifes painted in a realistic na?ve style. While in Paris, she became acquainted with artists like Picasso and Giacometti, who both painted her portrait. In response to the political circumstances of the post WWII era and world events, her style became increasingly abstract. She created her own visual language using strong Expressionist strokes and brought her subconscious fears and hopes to the surface. Her oeuvre reflects an underlying insecurity and existential yearning for a better time with moments of vivid clarity and hope. Soshana's work is now in important public and private collections and has been exhibited widely in Paris, Zurich, London, Tokyo, Washington D.C., and Mexico among many other locations.
Yeshiva University Museum
at the Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, NYC 10011
www.yumuseum.org
MARIA LASSNIG
SEPTEMBER 27, 2008 - JANUARY 11, 2009
Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati
This exhibition marks the first solo show for Austrian painter Maria Lassnig in the United States. Lassnig, one of the most inventive and influential European artists working today, continues to produce some of her best work well into her late 80s. Her most frequent subject is her own body, and she describes her artwork as body-awareness paintings. Lassnig's approach to painting as a tool for self-awareness allows her to capture the observation of her internal self and her bodily and sensorial experiences. She expresses this observation through her lush, vibrant style and an astute use of color as a transmitter of feelings and states of being. Since the early stages of her career, Contemporary Arts Center's Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator Raphaela Platow writes, Lassnig has exhibited a fiercely idiosyncratic independence and has persevered in her autonomy, consistently eschewing fashionable trends while remaining oblivious to her standing in the art world. This solo exhibition features Lassnig's paintings from 1999 to the present as well as seven animated films she created between 1971 and 1992. This exhibition comes to the CAC from the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Organized by the Serpentine Gallery, London
Curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist in association with Rebecca Morrill
CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER
Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art
44 E. 6th Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202
www.ContemporaryArtsCenter.org
POLWECHSEL
CONCERT US TOUR
September 30 - October 05, 2008
Polwechsel work with a stringently refined vocabulary of techniques in sound production and sonic choreography. Their works often patiently study and extract beauty from the bare elemental juxtaposition of techniques. They explore strategies where form and function are radically and frequently challenged - the starting point is an expanded musical discipline that deals with the mechanics of beauty in its many perspective distortions and variations. It renders poetry through process and is littered with perfect imitations of failure and aleatory justifications that occur with stunning clarity of gesture and purpose.
- Dean M. Roberts
MARTIN BRANDLMAYR PERCUSSION
BURKHARD BEINS PERCUSSION
WERNER DAFELDECKER DOUBLE BASS
MICHAEL MOSER CELLO
SEPTEMBER 30 - MIDDELTOWN AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site
OCTOBER 03 - PHILADELPHIA AT SLOUGHT
http://slought.org/content/11378
OCTOBER 04 - CHICAGO AT RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
http://www.issueprojectroom.org
OCTOBER 05 - NYC AT PROJECT ISSUE
http://www.wesleyan.edu/
POLWECHSEL
http://www.polwechsel.com/inde.htm
FIRST MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE OF AUSTRIAN ARTIST FRANZ WEST
OCTOBER 12, 2008 -JANUARY 04, 2009
THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
The Baltimore Museum of Art has organized the first major US retrospective on Franz West, an internationally acclaimed Austrian artist whose singular vision has resulted in one of the most remarkable bodies of work produced since the 1960s. On view at the BMA from October 12, 2008 to January 4, 2009, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008 includes more than 120 objects that reflect West???s extraordinary innovations in sculpture, design, and works on paper. The selection ranges from early interactive works from the 1970s to two enormous, brightly colored objects created for this exhibition.
Known for his intriguing sculptures, provocative collages, and giant outdoor installations, Franz West (born 1947) has played a critical role in redefining the possibilities of sculpture as a social and environmental experience for the past three decades. His manipulation of found materials, papier-mâché, and furniture is unlike any other in appearance and application. Though fundamentally sculptural in its construction, his work veers towards the biomorphic and prosthetic, mines the intellectualism of Freud and Wittgenstein, and possesses a sly wit and awkward beauty that speaks with equal fluency to the aesthetics of painterly abstraction and trash art.
The exhibition will then travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218-3898
www.artbma.org
BODIES IN URBAN SPACES
A MOVING TRAIL FOR A GROUP OF DANCERS
SEPTEMBER 05 - 06, 2008
PHILADELPHIA LIVE ARTS FESTIVAL
Willi Dorner's bodies in urban spaces is a moving trail choreographed for a group of dancers. The performers lead the audience through selected parts of public spaces and semi-public spaces such as squares, places, streets, passages, and shopping malls. A chain of body sculptures, set up very quickly and existing only temporarily, allows the viewer to perceive the same space or place in a new and different way. The body sculptures give the city architecture and its places a new meaning and a new perception: a symbolic action - on the run, set up quickly, but also gone very quickly without leaving any traces behind except for imprints in the eye witnesses' memory.
Photos: Lisa Rastl
www.livearts-fringe.org
