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| | Arts Calendar / December 1 / Exhibitions |
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| Berenice Abbott: Photography and Science |
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 This exhibition presented by the Polytechnical Museum and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow is the first opportunity for the Russian public to see images of scientific experiments from Bereince Abbott, this luminary of American photography. Berenice Abbott was a relentless experimenter. Early recognition of her talent came in the 1920s in Paris, where she was acclaimed for her photo portraits. Next came her famous series featuring images of New York in the 1930s (exhibited by MAMM in 2004). Although Berenice Abbott herself regarded the science photographs balanced on a line between abstraction and the ultimate reality as her most significant professional achievement. They were continued throughout her professional career and made important contributions to the development of science photography. Abbott recognised photography's vast and largely unrealised potential to visualise science and communicate scientific truth to the general public. In 1939 Abbott wrote that photography must become "a friendly interpreter between science and the layman." "There is an essential unity between photography, science's child, and science, the parent." Abbott's most important science photography came in the late 1950s. The fear that the US was lagging behind in scientific achievement, and particularly in the preparedness of young people for scientific careers, led to national high school curriculum reform initiatives that culminated in formation in 1956 of the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In March 1958 the PSSC hired Abbott to prepare a large series of illustrations for the flagship PSSC project, a new high-school physics textbook. Over the next two and a half years at MIT Abbott produced some of her most accomplished photographs illustrating wave motion and other physical phenomena. A selection of Abbott's work for MIT was exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution as "The Image of Physics", which toured the country for six years beginning in 1960 and gave thousands of Americans their first glimpse of her bold, modernist photography and the new physics pedagogy. The focus of the MAMM exhibition is 32 original prints from the "The Image of Physics" series. They are accompanied by the texts Elizabeth McCausland (art critic and Photo League activist) wrote in collaboration with scientists from the institute. This series, the centrepiece of the exhibition, is shown in the context of other works by Berenice Abbott from different years. Also on view are scrapbooks she made to document her work, as well as letters, manuscripts and various publications. This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Ronald A. and Carol Kurtz, and was created by the MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Kurtz Gallery for Photography. All exhibited photographs and original documents are from the MIT Museum.
Multimedia Art Museum  |
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| Freedom Not Genius: Works from Damien Hirst's Collection |
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 MAMM is pleased to present selected works from Damien Hirst's private "Murderme" collection, exhibited for the first time in Moscow and uniting works from Hirst's British contemporaries with classics of Modernism and Pop Art, as well as unique curios collected by Hirst. As one of the most popular and groundbreaking artists of our time, Hirst has been active for over the last two decades on the international art scene. For this exhibition he appears as Damien Hirst the collector, revealing the sources of his inspiration, passions and tastes. Damien Hirst's attraction to artists who share his passions and anxieties has resulted in a conspicuously personal and idiosyncratic collection.. After trading works with his British contemporaries in the late 1980s, he has gone on to acquire some of the most significant works belonging to those artists who collectively came to be known as the YBAs. His collection has also grown to include works by many international artists of earlier generations: not only post-war masters like Bacon and Giacometti, but pivotal figures in the history of 20th-century art, such as Richard Hamilton, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Richard Prince and Kurt Schwitters The combination of the quotidian with the sublime, a familiar characteristic of Hirst's own work, is also a significant element of the Murderme collection. Two themes recur frequently - memento mori and the animal kingdom - and together they communicate the spirit of the entire collection, a combination of contemporary masterpieces and works of another kind: unique, unusual objets d’art that fascinate and at the same time intimidate - unexpected and surprising works. The theme of death remains a central preoccupation for him as an artist, and so it is only fitting that one of the rooms in the exhibition has been dedicated to his vast collection of memento mori. In a sort of contemporary Wunderkammer, viewers can admire amongst others a still-life by Pablo Picasso, a Takashi Murakami painting, 17th- and 18th-century vanitas paintings, as well as reinterpretations of the same theme by contemporary artists such as Peter Blake, Sarah Lucas and Vik Muniz. These reminders of our own mortality are counterbalanced elsewhere in the collection by a copious explosion of life: the animal world with its millions of species and the extraordinary variety offered by nature. Drawing inspiration from the Renaissance cabinets de curiosites (intimate and private spaces for the collector but also workshops for scientific research), "Freedom Not Genius" is crowded with stuffed animals from various periods; anatomical studies and bronze casts; an 18th-century plaster cast of a horse’s leg; drawings of African mammals; and more recent works by artists such as Banksy, Marcus Harvey, Michael Joo, Sean Landers and Colin Lowe, recreating the imaginary animal world that attracts Hirst the collector. List of artists: Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, David Bailey, Banksy, John Bellany, Nick Bibby, Ashley Bickerton, Peter Blake, Don Brown, Mat Collishaw, John Currin, Tracey Emin, etc.
Multimedia Art Museum |
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| Gijsbert Hanekroot: From Abba to Zappa. Rock Photo 1970 |
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 The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography is pleased to present solo exhibition of musical photographer Gijsbert Hanekroot "From ABBA to ZAPPA. Seventies Rock Photography" that will take place in the largest space of the Center. The seventies. Hectic, exciting, creative. It was a golden age of rock music and time when Dutch photographer Gijsbert Hanekroot devoted himself to the music and photography. Working with magazines such as OOR, Nieuwe Revu, Margriet, Viva, he has attended hundreds of performances and filmed numerous interviews. His concert shots, bright and expressive, captured the most powerful moments of the show. Hanekroot shot Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart, John Lennon and Keith Richards, David Bowie and Blondie, Bob Marley, Joe Cocker and Miles Davis. Spending a lot of time with people who have been sung along by millions, Gijsbert tried to look deeper than the stage image and to capture not a star, but a person. That is why his portraits are so natural and intimate, relaxed and sincere. Gijsbert Hanekroot's "Abba...Zappa Seventies Rock Photography" was published in 2008 and includes more than 300 photographs of rock stars of the 70s. The book has become a guide for rock music history indded. Gijsbert Hanekroot will attend the opening of his first solo exhibition in Moscow to present the book along with signing session. Hanekroot's exhibitions have been held in Amsterdam, Leiden and Rotterdam and his prints are presented in galleries in Amsterdam and Paris. There will be around 100 photographs carrying us to the atmosphere of the 70s presented in Moscow exhibition, including 20 unique vintage prints made in 70s.
Lumiere Gallery |
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| Igor Shelkovski: The Continuity of Change |
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The theme of the city has become a living, all-embracing metaphor in Shelkovsky’s work: the demonstration of a consistent accumulation year after year of his own creative tasks in a growing ensemble of artistic practices. Or in other words, a world of plastic microsystems that comprise a multidimensional polysystem: a world of diverse exhibitions forming a universe of plurilingualism; a world of various techniques, images, rhythms, tonal contrasts and chromatic concords; a world of never-ending dialogue where painting speaks with the intonations of sculpture and sculpture is expressed by painting. In each instance the words accumulation, formation, co-ordination, concord, correlation and complementarity should be used in a musical rather than mechanical sense. Here there is another possible orientation point from analogous cues - the visual musicality of Walter Ruttmann's film "Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grobstadt" ("Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis"). These can be enumerated as: landscapes, architecture, human figures, heads, faces, flags, blades of grass, trees, animals, clouds, proverbs, bouquets in vases and finally, just compositions. Essentially Shelkovsky's City bears a similarity to the artist's own studios in Elancourt and Moscow. The first studio where Shelkovsky worked after returning to his native land was situated on the top floor of a nine-storey building with a panoramic view of Moscow. Naturally this led to the appearance of elongated images, the serrated silhouettes of an urban landscape: high-rise blocks, industrial structures, smoking chimneys and the clouds above... The artist assigns them the role of horizon in his exhibits. Any "city as such" is an imagined city. We cannot fully visualise a city. Each time we are confronted only by vistas, sketches, projects, plans, pictures, photographs, points of view or fragments. Shelkovsky's City is a complex multiformity: the rhythm of heterogeneous spaces, volumes, plastic and chromatic surfaces and the living energies of poetic transformations. Next to the reliefs hung on walls there are always sculptures. Towers, vegetation or city dwellers. Shelkovsky presents the City's inhabitants as a component in a single semiotic system, translated into the constructive graphic language of the symbol. Shelkovsky's City is a city of symbols. The symbols of the artist. Hence the monuments are not heroes, not "The Burghers of Calais", but genre figures in an urban scene, "people walking", "people sitting", "people standing": "Sportsman", "Sitting Man", "Striding Man", "Sitting Man with Burden", "Refectory" (two figures at a table), "Two People with a Dog", "Women in Long Dress", "Woman in White", "Woman in Full Height", "Special Forces Soldier", etc. Each figure, even with precise visual characteristics, is an ideogram, i.e. a symbol that conditionally portrays a concept while at the same time representing a "gallery of images". Some of them, "tin people", are figures comprised of the simplest elements, devoid of individual and gender characteristics, "people in general". Others are like anthropomorphic reinterpretations of the latticed white cube modules of Sol LeWitt: the forms of human figures transparent to the onlooker. Some are impassively monolithic, while others beyond the logic of cubic schematics are emotionally charged, expressive, or "portrait-like". An example is provided by the graphically contoured three-dimensional heads in the "Metro" series: masterfully depicted mesh profiles of passengers trapped in the crush. The creative power of the transformations is revealed with expressive clarity in Shelkovsky's graphic laboratory. Here the scope of the metamorphoses is extraordinarily wide-ranging. Plein-air landscapes and still life with Indian ink, "Matisse-like" nudes sketched by continuous-line drawing, detailed linocut landscapes, finely drawn linear portraits with a carpet of flowers in the background, stippled heads... Like all Shelkovsky's series, cycles and exhibitions - about Reality. Reality in the experience of the artist, the reality of his work in the vanishing reality of art. About the reality of art in the vanishing reality of life. About the reality of life at the boundaries of doubt and belief. About reality that is not illusory, but poeticised, each time revealed anew by the artist and recreated again by the trusting recognition of the observer. A reality encountered beyond the threshold of what we are accustomed to, by the revelation of veracity.
Multimedia Art Museum |
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 Legendary photography, painter, and maker of objects and films, Man Ray was on the most versatile and inventive artists of this century. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray showed evidence of being artistically and mechanically inclined from childhood. After graduating from Boys' High School in 1908, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. In 1911, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray's younger brother Sam, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, thereafter used the single name Man Ray. In 1915, Man Ray had his first one-man show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled "Self-Portrait", was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918. While living in New York City, he formed the American branch of the Dada movement, which began in Europe as a radical rejection of traditional art. He co-founded the group of modern artists called Others. After a few unsuccessful experiments, Man Ray stated, "Dada cannot live in New York", and in 1921 he went to live and work in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, France during the era of great creativity. For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray revolutionized the art of photography. Great artists of the day such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau posed for his camera. With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Masson, Joan Mir?, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Gallerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Man Ray also directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, such as Le Retour ? la Raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), etc. "Man Ray. Portraits" is the first major retrospective of this innovative and influential artist's photographic portraits. The exhibition highlights Man Ray's central position among the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements and the significant range of contemporaries, celebrities, friends and lovers that he captured: from Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso to Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller and Catherine Deneuve. Featuring over 150 vintage prints and key works from international museums and private collections, the exhibition also demonstrates Man Ray's use of revolutionary photographic techniques and early experiments with colour, as well as surveying his published work in leading magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Museum of Private Art Collections |
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