Paul Talbot Art » Exhibitions

Accidents will happen?

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:58:02 +0000

Accidents will happen, (Elvis Costello maybe), anyhow occasionally we drop things, knock items over, touch and mark objects. Why am I mentioning this, well, I cam across this and thought it was worth posting. I haven’t just dropped a canvas, it fell off the studio wall as I was setting it to take a photo of it, no damage to report! When he accidentally put his elbow through his $139m Picasso in 2006,

Las Vegas casino king Steve Wynn only had himself to blame. But who stabbed a Rembrandt? And why was a Rodin sculpture blown up? John Hind puts 13 unlucky works of art in the frame

Pablo Picasso goes ‘Pop’
One day after informing them he’d just agreed to sell Le Reve for a record $139m to a hedge fund manager, Las Vegas casino kingpin Steve Wynn invited guests to view it in his office. While explaining the painting’s provenance, he put his elbow through it, exclaiming: ‘Oh no, oh shit!’ A conservator charged $90,500 for ‘rissverklebung’ (thread reintegration) and then Wynn put in a claim to Lloyds for $54m, based on a post-restoration valuation of $85m. ‘Picasso used the cheapest thin canvas – and it went “Pop!”, like shrink-wrap,’ noted Wynn. ‘I almost made the biggest mistake of my life selling that painting, but I got lucky and poked a hole in it.’

Diego Velazquez gets slashed
After repeatedly slashing the naked back of the woman in the Rokeby Venus at

London‘s National Gallery in 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson explained: ‘I tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst. Justice is as much an element of beauty as colour and outline.’ Thirty-eight years later she gave a different explanation for her actions: ‘I didn’t like the way men gaped at it all day long.’ In 1918 three suffragists attacked 13 paintings in

Manchester City Art Gallery with hammers – three of the works were by Victorian painter George Frederic Watts, the worst damaged being his Prayer

Rodin is dynamited
In 1970 one of Auguste Rodin’s original casts of his world-famous sculpture The Thinker, situated outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in

Ohio, was dynamited by members of the radical group The Weathermen, who later accidentally blew themselves up. The lower parts of the legs of The Thinker were annihilated, its base expanded, twisted and contorted. Since the decision was made to re-mount it in its damaged form, a generation has grown up in

Cleveland believing that the sculpture was conceived that way by Rodin. At Tate

Britain in 2003 Rodin’s The Kiss was (with permission) wrapped in a mile of string by artist Cornelia Parker, prompting outraged artist Piers Butler to cut the string.

Mondrian is vomited on
The head conservator at

New York‘s Moma says that decisions to undertake restoration, such as ‘pigment work-ups’, are often based on whether ‘the thrill has gone from a painting’. Similar motivation was claimed by artist Jubal Brown, who ate blue cake icing and blue Jell-O before entering Moma in order to projectile vomit on to Piet Mondrian’s Composition With Red and Blue – to ‘liven it up… I found its lifelessness threatening’. Brown had months earlier vomited red on to Raoul Dufy’s Harbour at

le Havre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the head conservator said: ‘Fingerprints can be much more difficult. Touching – of abstracts especially – is chronic here.’

Rembrandt is slashed, slashed again and then sprayed with acid
The Nightwatch holds the dubious honour of being attacked three times in

Amsterdam‘s Rijksmuseum. In 1911 an ex-navy chef, disgruntled by discharge and considering it the state’s most valuable possession, attacked it with a knife ‘to cool my anger’. In 1975 an unemployed teacher, declaring ‘Jesus sent me’, slashed it repeatedly, later explaining: ‘Rembrandt was the master of light, but when he painted The Nightwatch he was under the influence of the dark.’ In 1990 an escaped psychiatric patient sprayed sulphuric acid on it. Released nine years later, the same attacker cut a large circular hole in Picasso’s painting Nude in Front of the Garden

Andres Serrano is given a good kicking and then gets hammered
In 1997 the director of the National Gallery in Melbourne closed down an exhibition after two attacks in two days upon Serrano’s Piss Christ. In the first attack, Christian John Allen Haywood wrenched the photograph – of Christ on the cross submerged in urine – from the wall and kicked it; in the second, a youth hammered the photograph eight times while another youth ‘distracted guards’ by jump-kicking a juxtaposed Serrano portrait of a Ku Klux Klan member. Last year, hooded neo-Nazis broke into the Kulturen Gallery in

Skane, Sweden, to attack photographs in Serrano’s The History of Sex, then posted film of it on YouTube.

Marcus Harvey is splashed with ink
In 1997, at the Sensation show at London‘s

Royal Academy, artist Peter Fisher threw red and blue ink at Harvey‘s

Myra, hours after another artist, Jacques Role, had thrown eggs at it. Sensation, which also included Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Ever Slept With (later destroyed in a £60m warehouse fire) subsequently moved to Brooklyn’s

Museum of

Art. There, Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (portraying an African Virgin decorated with dung and pornography) was sprayed with white paint by retired teacher Dennis Heiner, whose blind wife found it blasphemous. When Mayor Guiliani withheld the museum’s grant, 200 ‘art lovers’ threw dung at a painting of Guiliani as the Virgin Mary.

Claude Monet is punched
One midnight last year, five drunks somehow accessed the rear of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, wherein one of them punched a hole in Monet’s prized painting of the

Seine. Following the attack, the minister of culture promised to seek stronger sanctions against the painting’s ‘desecrators’. A week later, having visited Avignon’s Museum of Contemporary Art and kissed an all-white abstract painting by Cy Twombly, a woman appeared in court and heard the owner’s lawyer declare her lipstick stain ‘as aggressive as a punch’. She insisted that she loved Twombly’s work, had been ‘overcome with passion’ in its presence and ‘thought he would understand’.

Leonardo Da Vinci is blasted with a shotgun
In 1987, for reasons he couldn’t explain, ex-soldier Robert Cambridge drew a 12-bore shotgun from under his coat and fired at the Virgin’s breast in Da Vinci’s Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist at London’s National Gallery, resulting in ‘cauliflower-like’ damage. In 1962 an artist had thrown an ink bottle at the same painting, asking afterwards: ‘Would you be prepared to die to protect it?’ Also at the National, in 1990 Federico Barocci’s Madonna and Child was slashed by Martin Came, an art lover experiencing ‘subconscious distress’ in relation to the painting due to recent separation from his wife and child.

Pablo Picasso is graffitied
During an anti-war protest at NY’s Moma in 1974, ‘KILL LIES ALL’ was sprayed on

Guernica in red by Tony Shafrazi – then an artist, now a top art dealer. He explained: ‘I wanted to retrieve

Guernica from art history and give it life. I wanted to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; to dwell within the act of the painting’s creation, put my hand within it.’ The following year Guernica was moved to

Spain, where it was exhibited in a bullet-proof container with armed guards on either side. Picasso, noted Shafrazi, once painted over a Modigliani.

Damien Hirst is rubbished and inked
Art not recognised as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare’s bin-bagging at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst’s installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. ‘I didn’t think for a second it was art,’ explained Asare. Hirst found this ‘hysterical’. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labelled the piece Black Sheep. ‘I was providing an interesting addendum to his work,’ said Bridger in court.

Michelangelo takes a hammering
In St Peter’s in

Rome in 1972, geologist Laszlo Toth attacked the Virgin cradling Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pieta, removing her arm at the elbow and most of her nose, and chipping her eye. He explained: ‘Today is my 33rd birthday, the age Christ died. I did it because the mother of God does not exist. I am Christ. I am Michelangelo. Now I can die.’ And in 1991, an unsuccessful artist hammered a toe off David, leading conservators to discover the origins of Michelangelo’s marble.

Tracey Emins bed springs are tested
In 1999, at Tate

Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. ‘Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks,’ said witness Harry Pye. ‘They realised we were serious artists – doing it purely from a creative point,’ said Xi. ‘Don’t take seriously Emin saying we were “like failed artists threatening to jump off

Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery” – probably she got drunk.’ In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp’s La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.

banksy on show

admin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:14:44 +0000

One of Banksy’s earliest commercial artworks – complete with Tipp-Ex amendments – is to go on show in one of the largest exhibitions of his art yet seen.
The original drawing was made for the band Onecut in Banksy’s native Bristol in 1999/2000. It pre-dates album covers he produced for Blur and other bands.
But time pressures meant the graffiti artist did not follow his usual method of producing a stencil. His original workings on paper include the use of felt tips and correction fluid.
The image, Underground Terror Tactics, goes on display at the Andipa Gallery in Walton Street, Knightsbridge, from Friday to 29 March. Its price tag is £35,000.
Gallery director Acoris Andipa said: “It is believed to be one of Banksy’s first commercial works.”
His previous projects for Onecut included a stencil that caused a scandal when it was sprayed on the wall of a sex clinic.
Some 60 works can be seen at the exhibition, all tracked down from private owners – many in Bristol.
Titles include Paranoid Pictures, Roadwork Rat and Precision Bombing.
Prices range from £7,500 to £300,000 – higher than the current £288,000 auction record for a Banksy. (source: evening standard)

All aboard the showcase! (Saatchi)

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:48:40 +0000

Having had my work on the saatchi online gallery for some time and entering the ongoing voting competition, I very much doubt that my work will feature into this venture!! One can only hope….
Charles Saatchi is to open one of the world’s largest private galleries of contemporary art and go into direct competition with Tate Modern.
The new gallery, in King Street, Chelsea, is replacing Saatchi’s previous site at County Hall, which closed after the collector breached the terms of the lease.
The new location will feature 15 large rooms spread over three floors and cover 50,000sqft.
The Tate features a huge Turbine Hall and three floors of galleries that run the length of the 200 metre-long building, with a total of 371,350 square feet floor space.
Like the Tate, the Saatchi will be free to visitors when it opens in spring.
It will have longer opening hours than any other British gallery or museum, running from 10am to 10pm most days, thanks to sponsorship from New York-based auction firm Phillips de Pury, which is opening a British European HQ and auction rooms in Victoria later this month.
Saatchi, 64, is planning to launch his gallery with a show featuring his vast collection of contemporary Chinese art.
It will be followed by an exhibition by new US artists and then a show of contemporary Indian art.
The latest purchase by the collector, who has fostered the careers of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, is a painting of Nazi Holocaust mastermind Heinrich Himmler. Saatchi paid a reported £3,000 for the portrait by Jasper Joffe, 32. (source. evening standard)

Strike 3 – Damien Hirst!

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:43:11 +0000

DAMIEN HIRST DONATES PICKLED COW AND OTHER MAJOR WORK TO TATE
Damien Hirst’s cow in formaldehyde is now part of the permanent collection at Tate.

Damien Hirst has donated four major works of art, including his infamous pickled cow, to the Tate collection.
The gift includes an early vitrine, The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991), the sculpture Life Without You (1991), one of the first in Hirst’s series of fly paintings Who is Afraid of the Dark? (2002), and the exhibition copy of Mother and Child Divided (2007) which is on display in Turner Prize: A Retrospective at Tate Britain until January 6 2008.
It is the first phase of a major gift of works from Damien Hirst’s personal collection that he has committed to Tate.
“It means a lot to me to have works in the Tate,” said the 42-year-old artist. “I would have never thought it possible when I was a student. I’ve been in negotiations with the Tate for a few years to make sure they get the right pieces to represent me properly.”
“I think giving works from my collection is a small thing if it means millions of people get to see the work displayed in a great space.”
Works already in the Collection by the artist include the major installation Pharmacy (1992), the shell cabinet piece Forms Without Life (1991), a suite of 13 prints from The Last Supper (1999) and a print from the series London, Untitled (1992).
This latest donation will, according to Tate Director, Nicholas Serota transform the representation of his work in Tate’s Collection. “Tate is indebted to international contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst for working with us on building the collection,” he said.

source: Isla Harvey 24hour museum staff

Tom Phillips Exhibition

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:50:21 +0000

Big picture
Widely considered a touchstone of postmodernism, Tom Phillips’ artistic project, ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel’, has achieved cult status since its initial publication in 1970. One day, Phillips went into a book shop with the intention of buying a cheap book which he would use as the basis for an art project. He randomly selected William Hurrell Mallock’s A Human Document and began the long process of transforming it into a work of art. He paints, draws or collages over the pages, leaving some of the original text on show. This display will follow the evolution of the ongoing project from its beginnings to the present day, with different editions on show alongside related works-on-paper, as well as a number of new pages that have not been seen in public.
Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 6 Jan

Modern life paintings

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:49:29 +0000

As some one who uses photography in their work, I will give this a whirl, from the brief intro on the site it looks good
For video introduction:

The first major museum survey of its kind, The Painting of Modern Life re-examines what has been arguably the most influential development in the history of contemporary painting: the use and translation of photographic imagery. Curated by The Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff, the exhibition charts the international evolution of this tendency over the past 45 years, including seminal photo-inspired works from the early 1960s by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Revealing the surprising stylistic diversity of this work, the exhibition also focuses on the great variety of subject matter from the personal to the political, addressed by featured artists.

‘This is the rare show that can sustain an argument’ (Daily Telegraph).

‘This is a show that stimulates mind and eye’ (Observer).

List of Artists:

Richard Artschwager, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Eggerer, Judith Eisler, Franz Gertsch, Richard Hamilton, Eberhard Havekost, David Hockney, Johannes Kahrs, Johanna Kandl, Martin Kippenberger, Liu Xiaodong, Malcolm Morley, Elizabeth Peyton, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Luc Tuymans and Andy Warhol.

some interesting stuff

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:53:05 +0000

Having spent an hour or two! looking around on the scarlet impernet I occasionally come across something that takes my eye, leads onto other things and sinks in to my lower depths of my mind – to be retrieved at some point and used as a reference or just sits there and scores on the intriguing/wow front. This is one of those occasions – cool sculptures, exploring more of the work through searching; apart from the instant visual humour, the concept being many of the works: are what attracts me to his work.

I am interested in the object, in liberating it from its field, giving it a new validity and meaning. It is integrated in a different system of values and ideas: in that of art. In this way it loses its function and takes on another. I do not want to go so far as to say that the object is no longer recognized. Rather I want to have the appeal of the recognition effect on the one hand and that of alienation on the other, which the object emanates. Source:Erwin Wurm interviewed by Desirée Schellerer, Design Vienna, (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, February 16-March 27, 1989)You may recognise one or two pieces – they have been taken further and used in an advertising campain regarding a greener environment (sorry, didn’t save link along the way)

Erwin Wurm, one of Austria’s most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the 1980s. Wurm is primarily a sculptor, and traditional sculptural concerns such as the relationship between object and pedestal, the function of gravity, the fixing of form, and the manipulation of volume, play through all his work.