“Drinks with Louise Bourgeois” at White Flag Projects

This Wednesday March 10th, an archival 1975 interview with Louise Bourgeois will be screened as the last installment of the season for White Flag’s DRINKS series. It’s a free event with free drinks (compliments of WFP and Schlafly Beer.)

Louise Bourgeois’ (b. 1911) long and notable career has endured several decades of art historical movements without swerving from its singular and uncategorizable identity. Her work, which spans every medium, mines the intensely personal, traveling a precarious line between psychological menace and childlike naïvity while maintaining an astute dialogue with abstract and formal concerns. She lives and works in New York.

A major traveling retrospective of her work was inaugurated at the Tate Modern in London in 2007 and ended at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009. Further information about Bourgeouis’ life and work can be found here.

DRINKS with Louise Bourgeois will be held Wednesday, March 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Newtonland, visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

Newtonland at White Flag Projects

Science and art can sometimes be seen as being at odds with one another—fact versus feeling, the tangible versus the intangible. It’s rare when the objectivity of science and the subjective nature of art come together in a harmonious pairing; however, artist and curator Michelle Grabner bridges the gap in Newtonland, an exhibition that opens this Saturday, February 27th from 7 to 10 p.m., at White Flag Projects.

The artworks featured in Newtonland are both whimsical and astute as they play on space, geometry, perception, and movement. Greg Bogin frames white space with shifting neon colors, prompting viewers to take note of what isn’t there as their eyes trace the border of his shaped canvas. Elizabeth Bryant also works with negative space by removing cutouts from an otherwise saturated photographic landscape and then hanging the fragments around the image for the viewer to piece together. Several other pieces in Newtonland also deal with the concept of negative space – Ib Geertsen’s torqued metal mobile confuses perception, while Jan Van Der Ploeg’s circular forms allow for an appreciation the pureness of color and the simplicity of shape. Anne Eastman’s mirrored mobiles skew our reflection and observation, as does Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam’s large-scale aluminum and silverpoint mobile bleacher material. Alternatively, Jonas Wood translates tenets of mobile sculpture into 2-D drawings, taking inspiration from the forms of Alexander Calder and tethe organic geometry of houseplants. Finally, the avant-garde score and movements of marine life in Jean Painlevé’s short films serve to complement both the implied and literal movement of the mobiles and the ever-present pull of gravity itself.

Newtonland opens this Saturday, February 27, 2010. The opening reception will take place between 7 and 10 PM. The exhibition will remain open through April 3rd. For more information on this exhibition and other upcoming events, please visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Follow Saint Louis Art Map on Twitter

A number of the Saint Louis Art Map institutions are now on Twitter. You can follow everyone by following this list>> — or follow us individually here:
@contemporarystl
@kemperartmuseum
@thepulitzer
@sheldonSTL
@whiteflagprojects

Happy tweeting!

TONIGHT OPENING of International Artist in Residence Wilhelm Neußer at Boots

Boots Contemporary Art Space is pleased to announce the 2009/2010 International Artist in Residence, Wilhelm Neußer.

BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE      February 19th – March  2010

GUY OVER SEES INSTALL AT BOOTS

Guy, Boots new gallery dog has been hanging out during the install of BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE, an exhibition by International Artist in Residence, Wilhelm Neußer. The space is looking good and is slowly being filled with paintings and sculptures.

For the last couple of days Neußer had been focusing on installing 2 sculptures in the front gallery space.  With high hopes Guy wanted to join in the efforts but “that whole not having thumbs thing” turn out to be a problem…. maybe next time Guy.

Hope everyone can join us this Friday on the 19^th for our opening reception. 6:30pm – 10:00pm.

For more information please visit our web site at http://bootscontemporaryartspace.org/blog/home/

About Wilhelm Neußer

Wilhelm Neußer lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He studied with the sculptor Harald Klingelhöller at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and in 2007 he was awarded the prestigious ZVAB Phönix art prize for emerging artists.

For more information on the artist visit: www.wilhelmneusser.de

Upcoming show International Artist in Residence Wilhelm Neußer

Boots Contemporary Art Space is pleased to announce the 2009/2010 International Artist in Residence, Wilhelm Neußer.

BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE      February 19th – March  2010

Opening reception February 19th 6:30pm- 10:00pm

For his upcoming show at Boots, opening February 19^th, 2010, Neußer embarks on an unusual expedition in the wild world of domesticated animals. With the notion of “bird house in cat tree” the artist presents the animal lover as architect, thereby revealing our desire to construct nature.

What Lingers with Mike Bidlo

Mike Bidlo has made his career recreating and appropriating the art of other artists, replicating the work of everyone from Jackson Pollock to Marcel Duchamp to Henri Matisse to Julian Schnabel. Though the popular revival of appropriation-based art (1980-90’s) has passed, the practice continues to be relevant in part because of its reliance on the idea of re-contextualization. While other artists – such as Bidlo’s contemporary Sherrie Levine – make vast changes to the original work, Bidlo’s reproductions seek to imitate precisely the image, scale, and materials of their source. What’s more, he does not work from the original, but from reproductions, making his pieces twice-removed from their selected source material.

Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawings, featured in our current exhibition, are novel only in their complex way of commenting on the hegemony of art historical influence. By meticulously reproducing Rauschenberg’s bold erasure of an actual de Kooning drawing (1953), these works disrupt the notion of a historical canon by independently asserting whom from the past we should – or should not – consider our creative forebears. Bidlo, here, is asserting which historic works are contemporarily relevant.

Rauschenberg, with his gesture, called the precious nature of art into question and challenged the status of proposed masters such as Willem de Kooning, who was at the height of his career at the time the piece was made. Bidlo, on the other hand, seems to want to re-instate the combined significance of Rauschenberg and de Kooning in the contemporary moment, offering, through the new piece, a kind of double-bind of anarchy and reverence.

The last day to view Love & Theft is tomorrow, February 13, between noon and 5 p.m. For more information about this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Engaging with Asher Penn

Kate Moss has inspired countless fashion designers and artists; W Magazine even had a special issue purporting just that— the timeless and boundless nature of Moss’s influence. Moss has been a muse to so many because her ubiquity has rendered her somewhat of a blank canvas. Most of the art she’s present in really isn’t about Kate Moss, it’s about the work’s creator. In this case, it’s about Asher Penn and his 300-part artwork Kate Moss Rorschach.

In his riff on the now-unreliable psychological test designed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, Penn literally uses Moss’s image as ground for his improvised near-Rorschachs, appropriating three Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs of the model and overlaying them with vibrant red patterns. By using a Tillmans photograph, Penn is not only taking on the model and all of the associations that come with her, but he’s also taking on high-art. The gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs removes the image from its glossy, high-profile context and makes it more accessible.

The accessibility of these images is heightened by both the gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs and the fact that they strongly imply a viewer. Moss’s gaze, which is either framed or obscured depending on the individual pattern, serves to implicate the viewer through a direct stare that draws you in or a sideways glance that suggests your presence. Looking at the images, the viewer is forced to come to terms with their desire for meaning and for possession—possession of images, of commodities, and even of others. Moss’s status as one of high fashion’s most sought-after advertisers coupled with the interpretive nature of Rorschach patterns allows viewers to project their own meaning and desires onto Penn’s work and engage with it on a level beyond the surface.

Love & Theft is on view through this Saturday, February 13, 2010. For more details on this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

Catching up with Laumeier

Mike Venso, the director of Communications at Laumeier Sculpture Park, interviews Kim Humphries, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, and Mark Newport about Newport’s art in the exhibition Self-Made Man.

• Art Organization: Laumeier Sculpture Park

Mark Newport: Self-Made Man at Laumeier

The early February weather may not be all that inviting, but that’s no problem for Sweaterman!

Join us tonight (February 5) for the opening reception of Laumeier’s spring exhibition, including a performance by the artist as Sweaterman.  Laumeier Sculpture Park presents Mark Newport: Self-Made Man, an exhibition that explores the role of modern man and modern-day heroes.  Newport’s human-scale, hand-knit superhero costumes, photographs, video and embroidered comic book covers will be shown in the Park’s indoor galleries.

Mark Newport is a man who knits like no other.  The Michigan-based artist creates human-scale, acrylic-knit superhero costumes that question the role of heroes in contemporary culture. Some of these costumes reflect the comic book legends that many of us grew up with.  Newport also expands on the genre with creations of his own. Batman and Captain America are presented on equal terms with Newport’s Sweaterman and Y-Man.

Free Opening Reception: February 5, 6-8 PM