NEWSLETTER FIAC 2016 WWW.ARIANNEPIPER.COM
GEORG BASELITZ Born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany. Lives and works between Ammersee, Germany; Basel, Switzerland and Imperia, Italy. Georg Baselitz is one of Germany s most celebrated living artists. In the 1970s, Baselitz was part of a group of Neo-Expressionist German artists, occasionally identified as Neue Wilden, focusing on deformation, the power of subject and the vibrancy of the colours. He was also inspired by Existentialist art and literature, Dada and the works of the German authors Friederich Nietzsche and Gottfried Benn. Baselitz is most famous for his inverted paintings. By painting his subject s upside-down Baselitz aimed to highlight form rather than content as his primary concern. Baselitz s Heroes series is regarded as a key achievement of 1960s German art. The series illuminates the mood of the 20th century war and the postwar period with aggressively and defiantly painted monumental figures. The series is currently on view in a solo exhibition that tours the Städel Museum (Frankfurt, Germany), Museet Stockholm (Stockholm, Sweden), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, Italy) and the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain). The artist has held major solo shows at Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany, 2014), Albertina (Vienna, Austria, 2013), Musée d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris, France, 2011), Pinacoteca (São Paulo, Brazil, 2010), Galerie Neue Meister und Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlung (Dresden, Germany, 2009), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Baden-Baden, Germany, 2009), Museo d Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina (Naples, Italy, 2008), the Royal Academy of Arts (London, UK, 2007), Louisiana Museum (Copenhagen, Sweden, 2006), Musée d Art de la Ville de Paris (Paris, France, 1997) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA, 1995). Gerog Baselitz has received many honours and awards during his career. In 2002 he was awarded the Commandeur de l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2004 the Honorary Professor at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, and in 2009, he was given the Cologne-Fine-Art Award of the Association of German Galleries and Editions. Foto Nuovo, 2015 Oil on canvas 300 290 cm 02
RICHARD PRINCE Born in 1949 in Panama Canal Zone, Panama. Lives and works in New York, USA. Richard Prince is a controversial artist best known for his use of appropriated imagery. His image Untitled (Cowboy), taken from a cigarette advertisement and originally by the photographer Sam Abell, was the first rephotograph to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie s New York in 2005. In 2008 Prince s painting Overseas Nurse was bought for a record breaking $8,452,000 at Sotheby s in London. Ideas of authenticity and ownership are central to Prince s artistic practice. In 2014, Prince held an exhibit of 38 portraits entitled New Portraits. Each image was taken from his Instagram feed and included images of models, artists, and celebrities. The Instagram prints draw attention to the intersection of art and copyright infringement. Recently, Prince has explored the idea of humor and its representation in gag cartoons. In these works the fine artist combines image and the text in a witty and stimulating manner. Prince s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas, USA); Museum of Fine Arts Collection (Boston, USA); Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA); and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK). The artist has also been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including The Early Works at Neuberger Museum of Art (New York, USA, 2007); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA, 2007); Serpentine Gallery (London, UK, 2008); American Prayer at Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, France, 2011); Prince/Picasso at the Picasso Museum (Barcelona, Spain, 2012); and It s a Free Concert at Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bregenz, Austria, 2014). Untitled (Cartoon), 2015 Ink jet and silkscreen on canvas 188.6 139.7 cm 03
NAUM GABO Born in 1890 in Briansk, Russia. Died in 1977. The sculptor and painter Naum Gabo was a pioneer of constructivist art. Born Naum Neemia Pevsner, he began working in this style in 1915 whilst living in Norway which coincidently is when he adopted the pseudonym Gabo. Working with glass, metal, plastic and stone, Gabo developed a transformative approach to sculpture, breaking solid mass into interlocking linear forms and geometric shapes punctuated by open spaces. Naum Gabo exhibited widely in both the USA and Europe, and lectured at the Universities of Yale, Harvard, and Chicago. His sculptures have been employed for a number of large commissions, including a 25-metre-high sculpture for the Bijenkorf Building in Rotterdam. In 1971 Gabo was awarded an Honorary KBE by Queen Elizabeth ll. Gabo s artworks were mostly abstract and architectural. He sought a visual language that was in sync with space and time as its basic elements. Gabo outlined this approach in his Realistic Manifesto in 1920: Space and time are the only forms on which life is built, he wrote, and hence art must be constructed. In sculptures like Blue Marble (1977) Gabo employs stone to produce a self-contained object that simultaneously gestures towards the universal and infinite. Blue Marble, 1977 Marble 50 31.5 20.5 cm 04
UGO RONDINONE Born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. Lives and works in New York, USA. Ugo Rondinone is an extremley versatile artists, working with mixedmedia to explore themes of fantasy and desire. His trance-inducing paintings and large scale drawings from nature, and by site-specific installations, are poetic and evocative in exploring the emotional and psychic depth of human experience. Rondinone s bluestone sculptures are monumental works created from cut and stacked bluestone to form human effigies. The sculptures are raw and yet surprisingly emotive. Titled the nosy, the anomalous, the observant, the inquisitive, the dutiful and the prudent, the bluestone series are poignant and emotionally charged representations of humanity. Ugo Rondinone has exhibited extensively at some of the world s most renowned art institutions, holding solo exhibitions at the Museum Anahuacalli (Mexico City, 2014), the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA, 2013), the Rockefeller Plaza (New York, USA, 2013), the Kunst Historisches Museum Wien (Wien, Austria, 2012), the Museum Dhont Dhaenens (Deurle, Belgium, 2010), the Musée du Louvre (Paris, France, 2009), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA, 2009). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery (London, UK, 2014), the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, USA, 2013), the Flag Art Foundation (New York, USA, 2013), Le Consortium (Dijon, France, 2012), the Musée Rodin (Paris, France 2011), and the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture (Moscow, Russia, 2010). the prudent, 2016 Stone, steel, concrete pedestal 147 h cm 05
CÉSAR Born in 1921 in Marseille, France. Died in 1998. César Baldaccini was at the forefront of the Nouveau Réalisme movement with his radical compressions (compacted automobiles, discarded metal or rubbish), expansions (polyurethane foam sculptures), and fantastic representations of animals and insects. Though his work is comparable to artists like Andy Warhol in its appropriation of commercial commodities, César was more interested in the formal traditions of Modernist sculpture, most notably, the work of Alberto Giacometti. César represented France at the 1995 Venice Biennale. His work can be found in the collections of prominent institutions around the world, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Tate (London, UK) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA) among others. César first began making sculptures by welding together pieces of scrap metal in 1952, producing primarily representations of insects, various kinds of animals or nudes. These reworked common objects and recycled urban detritus challenge the values of mass production. César s 1959 sculpture Buste aux jambes fines, an abstracted female figure in wielded bronze, exemplifies this period of César s art. Buste aux jambes fines, 1959/1988 Welded bronze, dark brown patina 99 36 26 cm 06
THOMAS RUFF Born in 1958 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. Thomas Ruff is widely acknowledged as a leading member of a prominent generation of European artists that propelled photography into mainstream art. His work has pushed the limits of the photographic medium, embracing technologies both old and new, including hand-tinting and stereoscopy. In 2003 Ruff published a photographic collection titled Nudes images of internet pornography that had been digitally possessed and obscured. One of his Nudes appeared on the cover of New York Magazine in February 2011. In recent years, Thomas Ruff has been exploring the dynamics of positive and negative imagery. In a series of blue and white negatives Ruff presents inverted versions of 20th century nude studies. The negatives infuse the subjects with white marble skin tones that dramatically contrast the overall blue composition, giving the figures a sculptural dimensionality. Thomas Ruff s artworks feature in private and public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart (Berlin, Germany); Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden); The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA); Essl Museum (Klosterneuberg, Austria); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, USA); National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, USA); Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, United States); National Museum of Photography (Copenhagen, Denmark); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent, Belgium); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA); and the Ackland Art Museum (Chapel Hill, USA). neg nus_09, 2014 C-print 60.5 70.5 cm 07
AMALIA ULMAN Born in 1989 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. The critically acclaimed Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman rose to fame in 2014 after starting Excellences & Perfections, a performance piece that took place on her personal Instagram account over the course of four months. Ulman fabricated a fictional character on the social media app to explore narcissism, consumer culture, gender and sexuality. As well as performance and net art, Ulman s practice also includes installation and video works. Amalia Ulman graduated from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London in 2011. Her work has since been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the United States. These include prestigious institutions such as Tate Modern (London, UK, 2016), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK, 2016) and the International Center of Photography (New York, USA, 2016). In her performance piece Privilege, Ulman exposes how a technocratic culture requires a fabricated and contradictory persona. The work is both an installation and a performance that takes place in the studio and across the artist s social media channels. Having begun in late 2015, the piece also includes a series of witty lenticular prints that expand on her social critique. Privilege 1/11/2016, 2016 Lenticular print 100 100 0.4 cm 08
NICOLAS PARTY Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Nicolas Party is widely known for his colour-saturated paintings and murals. However, the Swiss-born artist also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints and drawings, and works as a curator. His subjects focus on the everyday; coffee pots, cutlery, plants and portraits of both people and animals. Party reworks these familiar objects in a way that heightens or exaggerates their presence. Party s pastel portraits, with their comic-book strangeness and intense colour palette, resemble Fauvist cartoon characters. The works demonstrate how colour, materials and composition can depict human subjects in new and revelatory ways that heighten their physical and emotional presence. His background as a graffiti artist gives the portraits a sense of modern design culture and an ability to smoothly manipulate scale. Having graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2009, Nicolas Party s artwork has featured in numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including Boys and Pastel at Inverleith House (Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015) and Still Life, Stones and Elephants at the Swiss Institute (New York, USA, 2012). This year, Party was commissioned to create site-specific mural installations at the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, USA) and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA). His work is currently included in a major exhibition exploring the human figure in Western painting in the last forty years at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Gent, Belgium). Installation shot of Nicolas Party, Paris Internationale 09