Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde at Tate Modern, London

Van Doesburg, who worked in disciplines within art, design and text, founded the far-reaching movement and magazine De Stijl is celebrated in a beautiful exhibition at Tate Modern in London, which will last until 16th May.

This artistic movement of painters, architects and designers sought to build a new society in the aftermath of World War I, advocating an international style of art and design based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals.

Van Doesburg travelled extensively in Europe in the 1920s making connections and collaborating with avant-garde contemporaries of the time. This exhibition explores Doesburg's role as promoter of Dutch Neoplasticism, his Dada personality, his efforts to influence the Bauhaus, his links with international Constructivists, and his creation of the group Art Concret.

Including over 350 works (many unseen in the UK before) by key artists as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerrit Rietveld, Kurt Schwitters and Sophie Taeuber, the exhibition features van Doesburg's rarely-seen Counter-Composition paintings and designs for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg, furniture such as Rietveld's iconic Red-Blue chair, as well as typography, magazines, stained glass, film, music, sculpture and more.

Curated by Gladys Fabre, Independent Curator and Vicente Todolí, Director Tate Modern.


More info on: http://www.tate.org.uk/

New series of books published by Conran Octopus in partnership with the Design Museum, London

This new series of books published by Conran Octopus in partnership with the Design Museum is really good.

Each book lists the top 50 products that have made a substantial impact in the world of British design today, offering a short appraisal of each that explores what has made their iconic status and the designers that give them a special place in design history.

An essential piece of clothing in every woman’s closet, Fifty Dresses That Changed The World includes timeless dresses from the 1915 Delphos Pleated dress to Hussein Chalayan’s 2007 LED dress. The collection of iconic dresses in this book provides an introduction to the path fashion has taken in the last century. It is a story that takes in social and economic change and radically fluctuating positions on gender and sexuality. These are dresses that have encapsulated particular moments in time in a particularly powerful way, and that have provided fascinating insights into the people who wore them as well as the people who designed and made them.

A must-have accessory for all shoe lovers and design enthusiasts, Fifty Shoes That Changed The World includes everything from the 1863 Frye boot to Zaha Hadid’s 2009 Lacoste shoe. The shoe clearly exerts a fascination on people’s imagination. In 20 years of temporary exhibitions at the Design Museum, the retrospective staged in 2003 on Manolo Blahnik at the height of the Sex in the City phenomenon, still holds the record as the most popular exhibition that they have ever done. This selection of fifty designs explores the full range of shoe design. They can address comfort, or self image, fashion or technology.

Other books in the new series publishing October 2009 include Fifty Cars That Changed The World and Fifty Chairs That Changed The World.

More information on: http://www.octopusbooks.co.uk/ and http://www.designmuseum.org/

Raven Row's inaugural exhibition, London

Raven Row's inaugural exhibition - to open on 28th February - is the first large UK show of the collages and mailings of New York artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995). Johnson used radical means to construct and distribute images, inadvertently inventing the ‘mail art movement’. He made art out of social life – both real and imagined – gathering celebrities, the art world, and friends into his work. His influence on twentieth century art far exceeds the recognition he receives.

‘Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return’ will be the largest exhibition yet of Johnson's work in Europe. Significantly, it will be the first anywhere to represent Johnson's mailings, objects he regarded as gifts and thus contrary to the market, equally with the collage works he made for gallery exhibition in the sixties and seventies. Also included will be the collages he subjected to a seemingly endless process of reworking and overlaying that were found signed with multiple dates and neatly arranged in his house at the time of his death.

Raven Row is a new non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre at 56 Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, London. Constructed within two eighteenth-century silk merchants' houses onto which 6a Architects have added two contemporary galleries, the art centre stands on a part of the street that was known as Raven Row until 1895, when it was absorbed into Artillery Lane.

To learn more:
http://www.blogger.com/www.ravenrow.org

Gajin Fujita and his Pacific Tsunami at Haunch of Venison, London

Gajin Fujita Cinco de Mayo 2007

Copyright: Gajin Fujita 2008Courtesy: Haunch of Venison

Gajin Fujita
Pacific Tsunami at Haunch of Venison

25 April 2008 – 24 May 2008

Japanese-American artist Gajin Fujita is to present a series of new panel paintings and works on paper in Pacific Tsunami, his first UK solo show at Haunch of Venison London.

Born and raised in LA, Fujita’s work is greatly informed by the artist’s own cultural heritage and background - large-scale paintings present graffiti overlaid with stylised geisha women, samurai warriors, flowers and animals, motifs from contemporary Japanese cartoons and imagery from American Hip-Hop culture.

As with traditional graffiti the works are produced in layers; semi-precious metals including white gold and gold leaf are applied to wooden panels. These are then obliterated with graffiti, spray-painted by the artist and his crew who contribute with their tags and bombs, more usually seen daubed over empty walls and adorning public transport throughout the city. Finally, a composition of stencilled figures, animals and motifs inspired by traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e imagery and is laid over the top.

Gajin Fujita Wet 2007
Copyright: Gajin Fujita 2008Courtesy: Haunch of Venison

Dating back to the early 17th century, the woodblock imagery of Ukiyo-e sought to express an idealisation of contemporary urban life and typically depicts city life, featuring beautiful courtesans, bulky sumo wrestlers and actors. Fujita’s stenciled and hand-drawn figures also relate directly to Shunga, a branch of Ukiyo-e which sought to express sexual desire, and some of the figures in Fujita’s works brazenly present sexually explicit acts and pornographic imagery.

Gajin FujitaBlue Dragon's Head 2007 Copyright: Gajin Fujita 2008 Courtesy: Haunch of Venison

The stencils used in the works are most often fashioned by the artist, created from cut-out drawings that he makes on paper. Once the painting to which each is allied has been completed, Fujita continues to work on these studies to give them independent stature. The exhibition will include a selection of both small and large scale works on paper.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with a text on the artist’s new body of work from critic Pernilla Holmes. The exhibition, Las Vegas Diaspora: Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland curated by Dave Hickey, includes work from Gajin Fujita, and is on view at the Laguna Art Museum until 1 June 08.

To learn more: http://www.haunchofvenison.com/