Fearful Symmetry: Anish Kapoor’s “Leviathan” / Monumenta 2011
June 8, 2011 § Leave a comment
Filling the 13,500m2 space of Paris’ Grand Palais , Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan is every bit the colossus its Biblical title would suggest. Dedicated to still-missing Chinese artist, Ai Wewei, Leviathan was commissioned by France’s Ministry For Culture And Communication for this year’s Monumenta exhibition, an event now in its fourth year of challenging some of the world’s most renowned artists.
Yielding to the immense space proved advantageous for Britain’s Turner Prize-winning sculptor, whose four-chambered, inflated PVC structure makes explicit use of the glass-domed site, allowing Kapoor not only his trademark scale, but also to extend his close relationship with architecture. Of his spatially-interactive, perfectly symmetrical installation, Kapoor says this: “A single object, a single form, a single colour. My ambition is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience.”
Titanic, womb-like, and all but drawing breath, you have until June 23rd to make this speculative artwork your own.
NordArt 2011
June 6, 2011 § Leave a comment
As above, so on show at this year’s now-commenced NordArt. Running until the 2nd of October 2011, NordArt is showing works by over 200 jury-selected contemporary artists across various mediums, all culminating in a singular aim: to give you the most comprehensive view of contemporary art within a unique arena that does itself become an artwork.
Located at the old Carlshütte foundry buildings in Büdelsdorf, Germany, this annual exhibition has become the largest of its kind in Northern Europe since its 1999 inception. With a vast venue spanning multiple adjoining spaces, NordArt will be accompanied by a selection of cultural events including readings and film presentations. As previously mentioned, the ominously figurative Time Guards sculptures by Manfred Kielnhofer (pictured) will be making one of their ethereal appearances, and on September 17th the doubtless-unmissable Long Night Of The Lights will see the entire exhibition illuminated with coloured light.
The Razor: Artfully Cutting Through The Property Market
March 27, 2011 § Leave a comment
“Open up a structure to the undulating space of sky, landscape and view, and the building becomes an ever-evolving organism” – Wallace E. Cunningham, architect.
What do you get when you cross a Wrightian-schooled member of the AD 100, a client whose brief is akin to a Warhol-style fluctuating artwork, a plot of land widely considered unsuitable for building, and a $32,000,000 price tag? Answer: the Cunningham-designed home of philosophical merging extraordinaire, The Razor, is on the market.
“Nature is not static, nor should be the efforts of man.” Cunningham has, no doubt, brought forth an appreciable continuum of the Wrightian ‘Organic’ ethic, and a remarkable response to working harmoniously with both the environment and the clients’ own wishes. The resultant reactive structure, deeply embedded within the steep and difficult plot, is in perpetual response to its environment and therefore more living sculpture than inert structure. The clients in question, a couple for whom the La Jolla, California, situation afforded them good opportunity to flow internal to external, requested a residence that would be active and reactive; a building which, rather than dominate or compete with the incredible view, would not only compliment it, but act as a sort of passive viewpoint to the landscape itself.
With the advantageous position, lightness of materials, and an approach to design that is “more intuitive than intellectual,” Cunningham took the clients’ brief and returned a property that is of the sharpest adherence to all necessary components, carrying it to a transcendence of its own materials and into a true work of art.
But if you find yourself salivating at the sight of this highly glorified concrete and glass lookout and with a readily-spendable £32,000,000 (or the seemingly more digestible figure of approximately 20,000,000 if you make your acquisitions in Great British Pounds), then The Razor could be the residence of your reality.
Eclect Elect 