Thursday, November 25, 2010

Woman


Manuel Pereira da Silva
Woman, 2001
Plaster on aluminum structure
78cmx185cmx50cm

Family



Manuel Pereira da Silva
Family, 1958
Plaster on aluminum structure
52cmx128cmx30cm

Volume




Manuel Pereira da Silva
Volume, 1961
Plaster on aluminum structure
58x83x35

Untitled



Manuel Pereira da Silva
Untitled, 1962
Plaster on aluminum structure
58x83x35

Maternity



Manuel Pereira da Silva
Maternity, 1965
Plaster on aluminum structure
10x105x50

Photos of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"


Video of two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva


In this video we can see two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva, "Volume I" 1961 and "Woman" of 2001.

Video of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"


In this video we see the Director of the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes, Delfim Sousa, presenting three sculptures of Manuel Pereira da Silva to de President of Millennium BCP Bank, Carlos Santos Ferreira, the Secretary-General of the Foundation's Millennium BCP, Fernando Nogueira and art historian and curator of this exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction" Raquel Henriques da Silva.

Exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"



Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes, after a period of closure for major refurbishment supported by EU funds, opens its doors on November 16, 2010 with the inauguration, by 18 hours of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction".


In this exhibition will be on display some sculptures of Manuel Pereira da Silva.


This exhibition, sponsored by a prestigious bank institution, which aims to highlight the important national artistic heritage, as well as contribute to the cultural enrichment of the country, brings together a selection of 74 paintings representing the abstraction Portuguese and foreign.


Covered with great interest by the diversity of exhibited works, of which highlights a significant core of copyright Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, with twelve paintings. Beyond this, we stress the presence of works by the following artists: Alfred Manessier, Andrew Lanskoy, Angelo de Sousa, António Areal, Antonio Palolo, Arpad Szenes, Bual Artur, Artur Rosa, Augusto Barros, Eduardo Batarda, Eduardo Nery, Fernando Aguiar, Fernando Lemos, Jorge Pinheiro, Júlio Pomar, Júlio Resende, Justin Alves, Luis Demée, Dourdil Luis Manuel Cargaleiro, Manuel D 'Assumpção, Cesariny, Menez, Nadir Afonso, Nikias Skapinakisl, Paula Rego, Peter Casqueiro, Serge Poliakoff Teresa Magalhães, Zao Wou-TOM-Ki.


The Art Shared Exhibition don’t leave out the youngsters. Millennium BCP, Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes and Gaianima, EEM, launched a contest called "Discovering Collection Millennium BCP" which proposes the creation of creative works from the works on display at the exhibition. The top three entries will be awarded individual and team prize will be for the Class of school work to do in presenting creations of "Shared Art".


The show will be open to the public until January 30, 2011 and admission is free, and where the guided tours on Tuesdays, from 14:00 to 17:00, Wednesday to Friday, 10:00 to 17 h00 and Saturday Sunday and holidays from 10:00 to 17:00.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Mirror of the world: a new history of art


Julian Bell, himself a painter, interprets art from the standpoint of the creator, trying to establish a rapport between the viewer and the artist. Its purpose is to encourage the viewer to, first, look at the artwork, and only then, equate the essence and meaning. Challenge us here to look at art as a reflection - mirror - the human condition.

Mirror of the World traces the evolution of visual arts through time and space, breaking down boundaries between tribes, nations and religions, giving us an analysis - and cross-cultural - the diversity of works of art and how these may relate to from or even rooted in each other and in their social and political contexts.

Humans tell stories, and humans make objects to dazzle the eyes. Sometimes, these stories relate to those objects. This kind of narrative, which is called history of art, born from the desire to imagine how someone would live in another time, and be amazed at what these hands have done. Art historians have also tried to explain why objects are made of different ways, depending on the time and place. That is what this book intends to do.

But a report of this type has an inherent difficulty. A work of art seeks to capture and hold our attention: a story of art pushes forward, paving the way through the territories of the imagination. In an art history of general scope, like this, the voltage can be constant. At each step, the narrator and the listener will feel the desire to have a little more and look longer.

Why then insist on this model? We live smothered by images. Worldwide, streets and screens offer a diverse jumble of visual information and rambling. We are confronted with an amalgam of quotes art - Japan century. Nineteenth-century France, Thirteenth-century Rome XVI, Aboriginal Australia - and it would be good to know the vocabulary where it came from what. And it would be good to understand your grammar. How they interact images? How are rooted in the experience of others? What we have in common with the perpetrators?

Questions like these lead stories, not scientific certainty. The story below is told by someone in England in the early twenty. XXI, which tries to encompass thousands of items of clothing on six continents, hoping that on this basis, the reader can continue their own stories. It's more a general introduction to objects and subjects of art history than a comprehensive set of conclusions about them. Do not want to define or redefine what constitutes art, but describes its range of content commonly accepted. The aim is more amplitude than the depth, the opening than be precise.

However, the method of this work could be considered to be relatively thorough. The narrative is woven around objects that have a large reproduction seems good result on the page. The art is not just a question of image compact and easy to fit, although the reader may have that impression here. In this respect, I must admit a personal bias.

I undertook this task after a lifetime of painting. As such I have a habit of being in a room before a given subject that I hope will have a life and stick to a speech of their own. In this work, I see the images the same way: the kind of art on which it focuses less on what is around us - an environment, buildings, decorations, utensils, clothes, jewelry - than what we face, from painting up to the statues and monuments. The immobility of each image introduces another limitation to the discussion.

In writing this report, I worked under three general rules. First, if there is no way to show one thing, it is better not to refer. Choose something like three hundred and fifty works to encompass the history of world art means a difficult balancing act. Many will be disappointed with what was left out, others upset that I mention too many names, without giving them a face. When necessary proved to mention the name of some important figure or phenomenon that cannot be illustrated, I opted for a policy of "looks a lot like". In other cases, preferred to ignore what I cannot offer.

Second, keep the chronological sequence. This directive advantageous for the reader not always proved possible at all, because the analysis varies from one country to another, but I hope that, if working, have a perspective of contrasts from region to region, as well as the affinities between cultures.

My title, Mirror of the World, suggests a third of my premises. I understand the history of art as a frame within which we continually reflected universal history in all its breadth - and not as a window that opens to an independent aesthetic realm. I admit that the records of the changes are related to artistic records of social changes, technological, political and religious, however reversed or reconfigured show that these reflections.

The mirrors can only work with the light they receive, although they may show us things in a different way. My title also indicates what I believe - that the works of art can reveal otherwise invisible realities and act as frames of truth. However, it is mostly the way these objects are made, not its final status, which will dominate the story. The main reason why I got interested in the history of art is the fact that she seemed to make me closer to some extraordinary things and the people who made them.


Questions, confluences

Europe, 1909-1914

Because in reality, the art consists of objects created so refined, is not it? Objects that demonstrates its intrinsic value: that is not what the market wants? Thus, any artist should create a niche for professional products, whatever their mode of expression.

The "imitation of nature", an old European recipe for paint, no longer relevant.

The doctrines of the "new era" gained momentum and visibility with the arrival of the century. XX. By 1910, several raids were on the march in pure visual music, the "abstraction," among the artists of Eastern and Western Europe - the Czech and Lithuanian Frantisek Kupla Mikalojus Ciurlionis, to mention just two. The moment of rupture of Kandinsky, as he describes it, occurred when he entered the studio one night and saw a bridge over the "image of elusive and glowing beauty who posed no identifiable subject." Did not recognize one of his vibrant landscapes, which was on its side. From that moment on, filed Kandinsky, the painting could go without representation. The visual elegance that pervades composition VII his masterwork of 1913, undoubtedly inspired by the Russian folk ornaments, with its lovely colors, however, he insisted, all the elements dictated by the spirit, and were filled with symbolic intent.

The visible world is not simply evaporated in the new art. Their essences had been distilled and freed, as formulas with which one could build a new pictorial universe. They were not only those things that the eye loves to do: recognize contrasts discern images and limited ways, wander, focus and twist, dip in intensity of color, rush and jump to the side. During a concentrated period of four days, the brush of Kandinsky raged on the huge canvas of three meters, with the joyful innocence of a bee to explore a flower.

Short of sight, beyond sight

Europe, USA, 1920-1940

So then, these were some of the tears of the world's leading artists after traumatic wars and revolutions of the 1910s: a series of new - and mostly "harder" and leaner - colors, meaning open. The hypnotic power of what came to be known as the "culture industry": Hollywood, advertising, photojournalism, etc. Plans progressive reduction of visual, the idea of revolution of the masses on the Left, the uncompromising desire to break with all previous forms of human experience. And in contradiction with this, or blending with it, the yearning for stability, restoration and tradition. In this part and the following will make a visit to the ways in which a few artists and groups have made their way through all these pressures.

Other initiatives of the twenties reflected the Russian constructivism. In the Netherlands, formed a group of avant-garde design around the magazine De Stiff in 1917, while in Germany Walter Gropius created the seminal progressive and social design when he founded the school known as the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1912. In both projects participated painters. Piet Mondrian was one of the most important members of the Dutch group, like many visitors to Paris for ten years, this landscape and theosophy had been inspired by the experiments of the Cubists. Than Picasso and Braque had done suggested one could systematically examine the clues that gave us the vision. Was willing to cut the components of the images of landscapes such as Brancusi silhouetted their figures, and with similar intent: the closer one is its simplicity, is closest to a spiritual ideal. In 1920, he was with an absolutely minimal signs of grammar: vertical lines, horizontal lines and primary colors. The sequence of the holdings that led to this abstraction seemed to proceed with an inexorable logic reduction.

Piet Mondrian, Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921

From that moment the only way forward was to start building again. In Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921, Mondrian asked the eye that has focused in their own ability to judge the relationships and balances, and their own desire for clarity. Initially, the exercise seems vigorous, fresh, stunningly cold (like this old Dutch resurfaces by austerity that we saw earlier in Vermeer). And then slyly begins to conquer. The closed rectangle in the center and its larger cousin in the upper left of the address space to dance, and everything seems to revolve around him, as if they were catalyzing a chemical reaction, an explosion of order. The red, black and yellow open to the world beyond the edge of the frame, projecting through redesigned the dream that you liked De Stijl was undefined spaces that are out. Perhaps the abstraction was in fact a parallel with the newly created figurative painting, a more potent to induce illusions.

The Bauhaus in Germany, had hoped to get an honest progressive and established standards for a clean design lines, ergonomically efficient than would be replicated across the world. However its internal history, over 12 years of operation and change of location, varied because of the excruciating tension between the charismatic host of innovators who were there. One was Vasily Kandinsky, who joined them with a friend who had met in Munich before the war, Paul Klee. Klee - a dry and obstinate presence personnel - carried out a visual investigation honored with enormous implications. Would give the democratic aspirations of the school a whole new level of resilience.

Paul Klee, Twittering machine, 1922

Like Kandinsky, Klee mattered to him relate the painting to music, but brought a more analytical intelligence to the subject. Like Mondrian, Klee separated and isolated the fundamental components of conducting a painting. But in your hands is converted in a box of playthings. Played by testing many things without limits. In his drawings and watercolors, logical thinking academic stretched a hand and communed with the anomalies of the imagination alone, who discovered the dignity and scribbles a resonant power in the fragile and wobbly. Klee's investigations were on par with those of psychology, a science that was expanding. From 1900 onwards, the researchers had opened his eyes to the children's art and the mentally ill. A kind of empathy turns the charm of a crazy experiment, pen and watercolor as machine chatter: in a sense, anyone take a chance to put their imagination on paper, whether skilled or not, is venturing into the absurd. The title contains that Klee had found himself doing: a device that geometric flowers organically, by clicking on a song. In fact, this sheet of 1922 is installed with a reciprocity between the hard and soft that it had begun to resonate through the field of "advanced" art. It is a masterpiece of innocent echo much wider and infinitely cooler than the absurd sexual mechanical Duchamp devoted his ingenuity between 1915 and 1923, called the Large Glass, one of the great black hole that absorbs all of the interpretation of modern art.

Klee and Mondrian, with his desire to re-educate the eye, seem to cast doubt on any possibility of painting based on observation.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Universal Art History of the XIX and XX century


The abstraction will definitely be the great achievement of the XX century sculpture. Abstract art, without any specific meaning, shaped in three dimensions, allowing your gaze total, around, in all its facets and perspectives, turning on its axis, allowing the sculpture will develop a variety of ways and possibilities, and full fruit - except for color, which will be replaced by the type of material, although in some cases the paint is applied to the sculpture as a termination. The abstract sculpture, very similar to the architectural modules of the XX century, but without the functionality and size, the scale is much smaller, space conquest also the basis of the combination of modules and elements predominantly geometric, with density, design and related volumes, concatenated, which will show the actual value solidified material, standing in a vacuum, denser air, settling in an allegorical space in the same way that the paint adheres to the tissue. It thus suggesting a sculpture full of strength and attraction, eminently tactile, woven with metallic materials, organic or inorganic.


In short, for Ana Maria Preckler, XX century sculpture, results rich and varied, a large fertility and creativity, following the vanguard found their own paths, such as abstraction, where you find and hold its majority, a total and absolute fulfillment.

The Second Half XX Century

The Abstract Sculpture

Abstraction was the great achievement of the XX century, movements that constituted the historical vanguards brought the greatest creation, originality, and artistic innovation, changing its structures, proceeding to the moral destruction of traditional art and his amazing reinvention. Starting from Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which were the pillars upon which it is impressive artistic change, this set of avant-garde movements had to be shut down and formulated in Fauvism and its anti-conventional variety of colors in Cubism, and rupture of the fragmented reality; in Futurism, which shaped the sequence, the dynamics and movement, Expressionism, which had a print man's spirit, in Dada, who idolized the absurd and the object of desire; in Surrealism, who played the subconscious the pictorial way, and abstraction, which broke even more.

Louise Bourgeois (1911 -)

Coming from France, Louise Bourgeois is the North American nationality, a country that arrived in 1938. His artistic training happens in Paris, his birthplace, the Ecole du Louvre, The Academy of Fine Arts and The Academy Julian. He began his work in painting in the decade to reach the forty to sculpture, which unfolds his true vocation, acquiring great fame in his adopted country. His style evolved from the enlarged sculpture, with notes surreal, preferably in painted wood, up to inconcrets forms, anthropomorphic and reports on matters more solid as bronze and stone, which unleashes your imagination and fantasy. From its first production: Spring, 1946-48, bronze painted in white, enlargement and bulbous forms Sleeping Figure, 1950, wooden, primitive, semiabstract.

Richard Serra (1939 -)

Abstract sculptor North American close of minimal art by the grandeur of his compositions, which usually includes a sculpture in her surroundings, turning it into a part of the architecture or nature in which it lies. In its production, uses industrial materials, we highlight: Right Angle, 1969, his series of Prop, quadrangular lamina in vertical construction on the terrace of a wall in the center of which juxtaposes a tape at a right angle with rounded edges.

Max Bill (1908-1994)

Architect, abstract painter and sculptor Max Bill was born in Switzerland in Zurich and studied first at the School of Arts and Crafts, and shortly thereafter the German Bauhaus Dessau, where it relates to Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee and Albers, receiving his rationalist influence. It also has a relationship with the Dutch Neoplasticism by Mondrian and Vantongerloo, belonging to the group "Abstraction-Creation" of Paris, in which he focuses his entire artistic career to the constructivist geometric abstraction. It is considered a pioneer of abstract sculpture, performing with great freedom and without regard to rigid structural frameworks, using motion and curved line on some sculptures. In 1951 he obtained the Prize for Sculpture Biennial. Among his sculptures are: Endless Loop, 1947-49, corrugated tubular shape, simple and elegant.

Minimal Sculpture

Minimal Art was a form of sculptural and painterly geometric abstraction of such monumental despite their main condition of sculpture can enjoy themselves with their authors in the section of the Latest Trends in Contemporary Art in the general context of the painting, since these currents latest trends and extremes produces a differentiation between the sexes.

The Abstract Sculpture in Spain

As with abstract painting in Spain produces a real outbreak of sculptors in the chain, some of which may be termed extraordinary. Only Spain alone could fill the pages of the history of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, such is its richness, variety and originality, no wonder the principles Picassian Cubists were the origins of abstraction, but also the Hispanic print, the force of race, the fertile artistic streak Spanish accumulated over the centuries that shaped the early twentieth century, in virtually all styles and avant-garde, a distinctive art. Abstract sculpture in the second half of the century not just schools, only independent individual figures that stand out for themselves, and surprised by how many different shapes and styles that each of these artists can give a unique art as abstract as arid and austere at times.

Some of the most significant abstract sculptors of the generations that occur in the second half of the century, as a show of abstract sculpture of two types: the one corresponding to the first generation of abstract sculptors, artists were created in the first third of the century, and works in which matter However the following form and sculptural tradition, changing the nature of figurative to abstract, and the sculpture of the second generation, whose artisans are born in the second third of the century, in which matter is multiplied, and introducing new combinations of all sorts of elements (with abundance of organic material), and the way it expands in space, breaking the previous formal unity, sometimes doing architecture, sometimes air suspensions and other installations of great complexity whose pieces spread through soil, and some other inconcret morphologies of nature, pseudo-organic, a versatile and imaginative variety.

Enbil Jorge Oteiza (Orio, Gipuzkoa, 1908 - Donostia, Gipuzkoa, 2003) was a famous sculptor, designer, painter and writer Basque, born in the region of Navarra.

Modernist declared, in 1962 published the book Quosque tandem, which dealt with the prehistoric art in the Basque Country, during which much was inspired.

Of great importance to Spain and ultimately to the Basque Country, his works can be seen in the best museums of your country and Europe. The disarrangement of the space, for example, one of his best known works, is now exposed at the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
At their inception, Oteiza makes figurative work in which one perceives the influence of Henry Moore, for his return from Spain introduces herself completely in the path of geometric abstraction, with a free personal creation, influenced by the Master of Suprematism, Malevich .

Palazuelo Pablo de la Peña (Madrid, 6th October 1916 - Galapagar, Madrid, 3 October 2007)

Palzuelo, another large abstract sculpture of geometric forms that his work of great beauty of line and modeling, in the most advanced of its kind and poetic. The clean geometric lines, elegant and soft, finely drawn, modernity and beauty of great design, the basic geometric forged steel plates in laminar, with angles, plans, sections and meetings of great simplicity and play of light and shade; blades gently curved and the modules in L; Interception of plans found are some of the predominant characteristics of his sculptural work.

Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, January 10, 1924 - San Sebastian, August 19, 2002) was one of the most famous sculptors and engravers Spanish modernists. Along with Jorge Oteiza, Chillida is considered the most prominent sculptor in the twentieth century.

The tradition of Pablo Picasso, after abandoning his studies, he entered into a drawing course and starts, finally, to carve iron.

In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he became friends with Pablo Palazuelo, who influenced him deeply in his career, giving him a taste for abstraction.

Chillida sculptural abstraction applies to maximum strength, strength, structure and free expression, and in contrast, the maximum beauty, delicacy and poetry, which has already done since their early days in their beautiful titles. Large structures Chillida, full of poise and strength, rise up as volumes in space of freedom, the embrace solidified with air. Its buildings, never rigid in form, always free and moved about linear design, the alternate geometric compositions of lines and curves, projecting into the void and changing all laws of gravity, with the boldness of the sculptor poet who in his desire to sublimate the material, make it light enough to skim the intangible. Chillida is one of the greatest sculptors abstract Hispanics, emerging only in his climb to the impossible, in his work has a lot of poetry, a poetry that could link with the German poet of the sublime and the impossible was Rainer Maria Rilke, and much of musicianship that he had composed another superb German, Bach, with which the sculptor is identified, as has much of the thinking, perhaps by her attraction to Goethe and Heidegger.

Earlier in his career he used materials like wood and iron. But when he begins to explore abstract art, begins to concern itself with the most diverse materials as stone and light.

Six years later held his first solo exhibition, this being the first show of abstract sculpture held in Spain. After this exhibition, is invited by architect Ramón Vázquez Molezún to participate in the Triennial of Art in Milan, Italy, receiving then the Diploma of Honor.

Participated in 1959 in the second Documenta in Kassel.

In the 1970s, Chillida is dedicated to observe nature in search of information about the shapes and colors of plants and inspiration, and since the 1980s, begins to reconcile his art with natural areas, and minority, urban.

In 1987, it is academic of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and two years before his death, one realizes their dream, opening a museum dedicated to him, the Museo Chillida-Leku.