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After the Musée du Louvre and the Château de Versailles where Jan Fabre’s and Jeff Koons’ works were respectively presented, the Bibliothèque nationale de France also opts for contemporary creation, inviting the worldwide famous American artist, Richard Prince. Especially well-known for his cow boy photographs illustrating Marlboro advertising campaigns and for his series of « nurse » paintings, the artist is the best at depicting the American fin de siècle. This is the first monographic exhibition on Richard Prince organised in Paris. The title « Richard Prince – American prayer » refers to Jim Morrison’s poem. The exhibition focuses on a feature of personality never presented before. Richard Prince is a passionate booklover and a collector of American pop culture and countercultures from the 50s’ to the 80s’. This artistic movement has inspired his work as photographer and painter.Thanks to a musical background - including works by Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground – and to his collaboration with the designer David Adjaye, Richard Prince portrays an American continent scoffing at its myths, introduced in a beat, hippie or punk context. Rare books and manuscripts by Rimbaud, Céline, Cocteau and Genet, European underground magazines and popular books, were selected among BnF’s collections. Richard Prince has planned to re-appropriate some of them, building bridges with several treasures from his private collection of books that were never previously put on display. Documents connected to the key beat generation figures are presented such as an annotated copy of William Burroughs’ « Naked lunch » or the handwritten scroll of Jack Kerouac’s « Big sur », Prince’s collection of « pulp fiction » focusing on the erotic and disturbing nurse character or his collection of editions of Nabokov’s « Lolita » in about twenty languages. Paintings, drawings, photographs, artists’ books, manuscripts and objects illustrate the artist’s personal universe between high and low culture, between America and Europe. The exhibition ends with a reading room which walls have been covered with fake books conceived by Richard Prince and treasures rarely presented before.

18 March to 12 June 2011

The Contemporary Art Center of Málaga, in collaboration with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, is presenting the first exhibition in Spain of the Swiss artist, Sylvie Fleury.

It comprises a survey of her output over the last 20 years and will allow the visitor to see some of her most important works through which she offers an ironic vision of consumer culture and the angst that prevails in contemporary society.

Sculptures, murals, videos and neons constitute the key pieces in a comprehensive display of works which demonstrates that nothing is what it seems while revealing the most destructive side of present-day aspirations.
The artist guides the viewer through the world of fashion, luxury and leading brand names, using the vehicle of art to criticise the superficiality of a capricious, dissatisfied world.

http://www.cacmalaga.org/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.

This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by:  Curtis Mann, Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.

From 30 March 2011 onwards the work "Ten Thousand Waves" by Isaac Julien will be presented for the first time in Germany in the Museum Brandhorst. Ten Thousand Waves is a 9-channel video installation which the artist worked on for almost four years and it was finished in 2010.

MUSEUM BRANDHORST
Kunstareal
Theresienstrasse 35a
80333 Munich | Germany
http://www.museum-brandhorst.de

P: +49 (0)89 23805-2286

The Udo and Anette Brandhorst Stiftung has contributed to the financing of a new work by Isaac Julien, which was completed in 2010 and will be presented in Germany for the first time starting 30 March 2011 in the Museum Brandhorst.

Ten Thousand Waves is a 9-channel video installation which the artist worked on for almost four years.  The main scenes were filmed in China under participation of several internationally-celebrated actresses, including the legendary Maggie Cheung and Zhao Tao. The video artist Yang Fudong, as well as the poet Wang Ping and calligraphy grandmaster Gong Fagen also stood before the camera.

The starting point for Julien was a Chinese legend concerning the goddess Mazu whose special powers include the safe escorting of those imperiled at sea to quieter shores. Clips of old photographs conjure up this story; however, Julien relocates the main character, played by Maggie Cheung, to modern-day China where scenes are repeatedly filled with tumultuous traffic jams in Shanghai. These are contrasted with wonderful riverscapes, bordered by bamboo forests and sandstone mountains, in which a few river boats have gone astray. A second storyline focuses on the death of 23 illegal Chinese immigrants in England who worked as cockle pickers.  Being unfamiliar with the tide times of the Atlantic Ocean, they perished in 2005 during the incoming spring tide. Mazu was unable to help with this situation. The only thing that “survived” the tragic accident was a major media response. A third level is manifested in sequences that relate to the first decades of the 20th century when Shanghai was granted special status, enabling the production of important films like, among others, The Goddess, which traces the fate of a young unemployed woman who turns to prostitution in order to support herself and her child. In Julien’s version, which evokes the atmosphere of the 1930s, this role is played by Zhao Tao.

With Ten Thousand Waves Julien resolutely continues to make use of those elements that already characterize his earlier works (including Western Union / Small Boats in the collection of the Museum Brandhorst). His video installations all address aesthetic, social and psychological aspects of various living environments in which Western ideas of global culture are partly questioned and partly formulated in a new way.  It is, as it were, the interleaving of post-colonial strategies with post-structuralist rudiments that assigns Isaac Julien’s oeuvre the outstanding role it has achieved within the spectrum of contemporary art.

18.06.11 - 02.10.11

17.04.11 - 19.06.11

28.01.11 - 08.05.11

This survey presents a spectrum of the artist's most recent and ambitious projects created between 2005 and 2010.  Featured among the exhibition's ten works is the artist's latest graphite and steel sculpture, Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (2009); and Epic (2009), a monumental graphite wall installation. Resembling an immense, cascading branch, Vertigo (sotto en su) (2007) includes eight layers of precision-cut, highly polished metal woven into an intricate, reflective arboreal pattern that suspends from the ceiling high above the viewer.

Projections de presse:

- Mardi 1er Mars, à 11h

- Jeudi 17 mars, à 11h

- Mercredi 6 avril, à 11h

A l'Espace Saint-Michel, 7 place Saint Michel, 75005 Paris

Réservation 01 55 79 03 43  ou jb.emery@cinepresscontact.com

13.03.11-13.06.11

Ida Tursic et Wilfried Mille ont fait l’objet de plusieurs expositions monographiques. Ils ont pris part à des expositions collectives telles que La Force de L’Art à Paris en 2005 ou The Freak Show au Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2007, reprise l’année suivante au Musée de la Monnaie de Paris). Ils ont remporté le 11^e Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard en 2009.

Pour leur exposition au musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, ils présenteront une soixantaine d’œuvres récentes parcourant les thématiques de leur production (nus, scènes de genre, paysage). Elles rendront compte de leur relation particulière au monde de l’image, exprimée par des procédés plastiques variés. La scénographie de l’exposition tissera un fil d’ariane autour de ce questionnement sur le visible et sa représentation. Elle se basera sur le principe d’une déambulation orientée depuis la périphérie de l’espace pour se diriger vers son cœur, visant à mettre en œuvre « une expérience physique de l’exposition.

www.musees-franchecomte.com