MIRAGES LX

Richard Long, Courtesy the artist and Lisson GalleryThis month we will remember how the most important Art Fair for new and emerging Galleries, LISTE Art Fair, started25 years ago, what is its course and who were the Galleries that started there and then moved to Art Basel. In 1995 two young gallerists (Eva Presenhuber and Peter Kilchman, both from Zurich), contact Peter Bläuer, curator in Basel, to discuss the possibility of founding a new fair in Basel for a new, young generation of gallerists and artists, LISTE was originally founded as “LISTE-The Young Art Fair in Basel”. From the beginning LISTE has focused on introducing new galleries representing young, emerging artists to an established art scene.  The intentionally low number of galleries and the strict selection policy of the jury (composed of museum professionals) contribute to a feeling of vitality and dynamism at the Fair.

In Greece the equivalent of LISTE Art Fair is the Platforms Project Independed Art Fair  that its 8th Edition will be held at the “Nikos Kessanlis” Exhibition Hall of the Athens School of Fine Arts. The Platforms Project is an international exhibition of independent artists that work together, which aims to create channels of communication and collaboration, to exchange projects and to promote artists internationally. This year the parallel program of Platforms Project is even more expanded, including parallel exhibitions of Greek and foreign artists, talks, with participating historians, theorists and art critics, academics, museum directors, artists and curators. For our magazine is a great honor to be Media Partner on Regular Basis  with LISTE Art Fair and Platforms Project Independed Art Fair

As for the exhibitions in Museums and Galleries, each exhibition is better and more important than the other(!) “Judd”  at MoMA is the first major US retrospective dedicated to the work of Donald Judd in over three decades. The exhibition explores the remarkable vision of an artist who revolutionized the history of sculpture, highlighting the full scope of Judd’s career through 70 works in sculpture, painting, drawing, and prints, from International Public and Private Collections. The major group exhibition, “ZERO IS INFINITY, ZERO and Yayoi Kusama” at Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, features Yayoi Kusama’s activity in Europe during the 1960s, introducing ZERO’s art practices and also explores their relationship with Yayoi Kusama. The solo exhibition “What Remains”  at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg shows six series of works by Sophie Calle and is one of the most extensive work shows of her work in Germany. On the basis of existential topics such as blindness, family relationships, love, loss, grief and historical culture, the different groups of works focus on the absent and their survival in memory. Stedelijk Museum presents “The Future is Now”, a major retrospective of Nam June Paik, one of the most visionary and influential pioneers of early video art.  The retrospective takes a definitive look at the artist’s oeuvre and features two spectacular room-filling installations: “TV Garden” (1974-77), where television sets seem to flourish among abundant foliage, and “Sistine Chapel” (1993), the iconic culmination of the exhibition in the IMC gallery (Hall of Honour), a sensory inundation of sound and images from 34 projectors, for which Paik received the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. All along 2020 several works by Giuseppe Penone will travel over the territory of the Grand Est Region, establishing between Metz and Sarrebrück cross-border links dear to the Centre Pompidou-Metz ever since its collaboration with the Saarlandmuseum in 2016 on the occasion of the exhibition “Between Two Horizons. German and French avant-gardes from the Saarlandmuseum: at  Centre Pompidou-Metz, John Baldessari’s influence on the art world extends over decades and generations, and the exhibition at Moderna Museet with 30 wprks is the first in Sweden to present his work on a greater scale. In his solo exhibition “A Rolling Stone To Now”, Richard Long presents a selection of works which illustrate the four key facets of his practice : sculpture, photography, text work and mud works. Renowned for his travels and ability to transform a journey into a work of art. This exhibition highlights the enduring themes of his work, including time and space, while referencing the importance of his roots in the West of England.

Finally, do not forget the artists and the architects whose names are interwoven with this month, at the column “Traces” the artists: Hannah Wilke, Alberto Burri, Anish Kapoor, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, Jannis Kounellis, Rebecca Horn, Shirin Neshat, Daniel Spoerri and Agnès Varda. As for the Architects they is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

And do not forget that on March 31, 2016, the famous Architect Zaha Hadid passed away.

Photo: Richard Long, Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery

Good Month (!)
8/3/20
Efi Michalarou