Gondelor et ses petits
Jean Arp: A COLLECTION OF WOOD RELIEFS AND COLLAGES
In keeping with the art theme for this week, allow me to introduce to you the talented works of Jean Arp. His reliefs and collages are the subject of a major exhibit at Blain|Di Donna, a gallery located inside the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. Since its opening late last year, the gallery has been THE destination for serious art lovers and collectors. Jean Arp, A Collection of Wood Reliefs and Collages, will be on view starting today, November 1st until Tuesday, December 11th, 2012. The core of this whimsical and colorful exhibition is a collection of unique painted wood reliefs and collages coming on public view for the first time in America.
This group of works by the artist, demonstrates the importance of the interplay between form and color, as well as the developmental nature of the works’ physicality–from the streamlined surfaces of his paper collages to the heightened sculptural dimensionality of the wood reliefs.
De continent qui aurait
Arp’s forms are amoebic, embryonic, and referential of natural organisms. The “moving oval,” (you simply have to see it in person, it’s gorgeous!) so evident in these works, was the basic form that the artist referred to throughout his oeuvre, and which he never relinquished. The colors are vivid and joyous. Arp’s ambition was to harmonize man and nature and he used his art as a vehicle to achieve this. He aimed to create art as nature creates life, and his collages and reliefs employed a fittingly biomorphic vocabulary.
Sans titre
All images courtesy Blain | Di Donna
“The cycles of nature and of art—from collage to wooden form to print to painted form—are reconciled, as light and dark, sun and night are included in a redemptive circle of creative energy.”
Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature
at the Graduate School of the City University of New York
Arp and the print publisher Louis Broder collaborated on many projects and publications, beginning in 1957. Their most ambitious was an album published in 1966 titled Le Soleil recerlé (The Re-circled or Re-ringed Sun). Arp created the paper collages in this exhibition as a prerequisite for this publication’s prints and then created the unique painted wooden reliefs on view. Therefore, each medium informs the other directly, forging their interdependence; spatial tensions result from their oscillating relationship between flatness and depth, light and dark. Early Friday morning, I will post more pictures of the press preview on our
Facebook Page. Say tuned!
BLAIN|DI DONNA is located at: 981 Madison Avenue, New York City. The opening reception for the show is today, Thursday, November 1st from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.
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Gondelor et ses petits
De continent qui auraitArp’s forms are amoebic, embryonic, and referential of natural organisms. The “moving oval,” (you simply have to see it in person, it’s gorgeous!) so evident in these works, was the basic form that the artist referred to throughout his oeuvre, and which he never relinquished. The colors are vivid and joyous. Arp’s ambition was to harmonize man and nature and he used his art as a vehicle to achieve this. He aimed to create art as nature creates life, and his collages and reliefs employed a fittingly biomorphic vocabulary.
Sans titre
René MagritteDangerous LiaisonsThe Carlyle Hotel981 Madison AvenueNew York City28 October — 1 December 2011Blain|Di Donna is getting ready to present as its inaugural exhibition, Dangerous Liaisons, a survey of paintings, works on paper and objects by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.What’ll you see at this noteworthy exhibit is over twenty five major oils, gouaches and drawings. This is the first Magritte show of this scale to be presented in New York in almost fifteen years, and comes at a time of renewed interest in Surrealism and its key exponents.The exhibition’s title is derived from Magritte’s seminal early work, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1935), an enigmatic painting thought to have been inspired by the eighteenth century French novel of the same name, in which two rival lovers deploy sex as a weapon to humiliate others. As with many of the works in the artist’s oeuvre, it delights and disturbs in equal measure; uncanny, poetic, playful and erotic, it underlines his unsettling ability to pull at the threads of philosophical and psychological certainties, and in doing so eloquently sets the tone of the exhibition as a whole.
