Joana Vasconcelos at Waddesdon Manor

2016-07-Vasconcelos_MF_bJoana Vasconcelos: Lafite

Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
15 June – 23 October 2016

Major new addition to Waddesdon’s contemporary art collection, and part of its programme to work with contemporary artists. A pair of sculptures by Joana Vasconcelos has been installed on the North Front. In the form of a giant pair of candlesticks made of glass wine bottles (from Château Lafite Rothschild), set on a steel armature and lit from within with fibre-optic strands, they symbolise the Rothschild family’s connection to the world of wine.
Joana Vasconcelos (b.1971) lives and works in Lisbon and exhibits internationally, most recently at the Château de Versailles and at the Manchester City Art Gallery.
Video showing Vasconcelos and her team construct the sculptures, with Lord Rothschild talking about them.

European Capital of Culture 2016: San Sebastián

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1516-2016. Peace Treaties

San Sebastián
San Telmo Museum of Basque History &
Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea
17 June – 2 October 2016

The main art exhibition of this year’s European Capital of Culture: San Sebastián (jointly with Wroclaw, Poland) throughout 2016. Shows 300 art works on the theme of war and peace. Includes works by Goya, Murillo, Picasso, Ribera, Zurbarán as well as Rubens, and 20th-century and contemporary works by Le Corbusier and Hans Haacke.
Exhibition brochure

Art from Latin America Today (London)

2016-08-SouthLondonGalleryLogoUnder the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today

South London Gallery, Camberwell, London
10 June – 4 September 2016

Touring exhibition from the Guggenheim MAP Initiative, showing works by some 20 contemporary artists born after 1968 and curated by the Guggenheim’s MAP curator of Latin American art, Pablo León de la Barra. The exhibition of installations, paintings, performance work, photography, sculpture, and video includes work by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, who has also created (with the help of staff from Kew Gardens) a permanent garden for the South London Gallery.

This is the final venue on the exhibition’s international tour, following display at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in June 2014 and the Museo Jumex, Mexico City in November 2015.

 

El Siglo de Oro (Berlin)

2016-07-Siglo-Berlin2-CroppedEl Siglo de Oro. The Age of Velázquez

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

01 July 2016 to 30 October 2016

This summer in Berlin, a major exhibition showcasing 17th century Spanish painting and sculpture in all its fascinating variety goes on show outside of Spain for the first time. El Siglo de Oro: The Age of Velázquez comprises more than 130 masterpieces by Velázquez, El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Bartolomé E. Murillo, as well as lesser-known artists such as Alonso Cano and Gregorio Fernández.

The Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin pairs its collection of Spanish paintings – one of Germany’s most important – with numerous international loans for the large-scale exhibition. Many of these works are on display for the first time in Germany, and reveal the wealth of 17th century Spanish art on a scale never before seen. A central task of the exhibition is to provide a comparative perspective on the development of painting and the sculpture of the period.

Exhibition catalogue (English ed.): click here for details

2016-07-SigloLogo

 

Ramon Casas in Barcelona

2016-07-Casas
Ramon Casas and the shadow puppets at Els Quatre Gats. Bohemia and the popular imaginary
Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
30 June – 20 October 2016
(http://www.museunacional.cat/en/ramon-casas-and-shadow-puppets-els-quatre-gats-bohemia-and-popular-imaginary)

The collection of Ramon Casas’s works held by MNAC has recently been enriched with the acquisition of an unusual group of 12 ‘Chinese shadow’ drawings or silhouettes designed by Casas, and cut and constructed by the painter Josep Meifrèn (Eliseu Meifrèn’s brother) and member of the circle of friends associated with the Els Quatre Gats bar. The display documents the link between Casas’ work and the artistic practices modelled on those popular in Parisian cabarets and adopted by Barcelona’s bohemia. The people portrayed in the silhouettes have been identified and include the owner of thr bar Pere Romeu and a Casas’ self-portrait. The exhibition will include other graphic elements such as posters, photographs, drawings, invitations, programmes, many of which are part of the museum’s collection and have not been published before.

Symposium – One Hundred Years of Cultural Transfer: Barcelona 1888-1992 – 24-25 Nov 2016 – Barcelona

International Symposium
One Hundred Years of Cultural Transfer: Barcelona 1888-1992

24-25 November 2016

Departament d’Humanitats-Institut de Cultura
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona

The advent of Barcelona as a modern, cosmopolitan, innovative metropolis, open to the world, is punctuated by two founding events: the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and, a century on, the Olympic Games of 1992. Both are key moments for the presentation and (self-) representation of the city with a transnational and global scope.

The International Symposium One Hundred Years of Cultural Transfer: Barcelona 1888-1992 will examine, from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective, a string of cultural transfers marking the century spanning from 1888 to 1992, and opening the debate on how these transfers contributed to an interweaving between Barcelona and other Western capitals. Going beyond the privileged axis of exchanges between Barcelona and Paris, the Symposium will encompass other European and American centres of reference, such as London, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Mexico City or Buenos Aires, with the aim of lifting the discussion to a transnational dimension that transcends bilateral frameworks.

Organising Committee: Pol Capdevila (pol.capdevila@upf.edu), Tobias Locker (tobias.locker@upf.edu) and Tomas Macsotay (tomas.macsotay@upf.edu).

Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC)

This post was written by Melanie Lenz, the V&A’s Curator of Digital Art. In this blog entry, posted to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Argentina’s independence, Melanie explores a small but remarkable number of the V&A’s digital artworks made in Argentina in the late 1960s.

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Grupo CAyC, around 1980

The V&A’s extensive collection of early digital artworks were primarily made by practitioners working in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the United States. The prohibitive costs of the emerging new technology meant that initially sites of artistic production were largely limited to European and North American research laboratories and universities that could afford the required equipment. However, a small but intriguing number of early computer-generated works were created by Argentine artists associated with the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC). The full blog post explores the fascinating history behind these artworks and looks at how they ended up in the V&A’s collection.

 

Sorolla at CaixaForum

2016-06-SorollaSorolla. Apuntes en la arena
CaixaForum, Girona
28 June – 6 November 2016

(Then touring to CaixaForum, Tarragona, 23 November  – 5 March 2017)

123 works by Sorolla, primarily drawings selected by Consuelo Luca de Tena from the Museo Sorolla’s large holdings, and displayed alongside a small number of related large paintings and oil sketches or ‘colour notes’. The exhibition is divided into five sections covering his early career and different beach-side and fishing themes.