editorial

Being an Art Platform...

Dr. Kubilay Akman

EuroArt Web-Magazine has been an art platform for artists, art lovers and critics since its foundation in 2006. We have followed our principles in consistency from the first day up to today. Representing the “under-represented” ones is one of our important principles and we strive to realize this in every new issue. The summer issue is very colorful, expresses all diversity of contemporary arts and also shows out this sensitivity: providing an expression channel to under-represented art scene. This is the difference of EuroArt: You may see news, articles and reviews on the “centers” and “peripheries” of the art world equally. For the next issue we are preparing a surprise for you, based on this principle. Enjoy your reading. We wish a summer full of arts… more...

article

From a Fractured World to a Quest for Inhuman Purity

The Photography and Painting of Wols

Victoria Z. Alexander

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), known to the world after 1937 as “Wols”, produced an enigmatic body of photographic well work before participating in the development of an important post war movement in painting often referred to as “gestural abstraction” or art informel (see Bois, 1997:138). In this essay I wish to examine both the photography and painting of Wols and explain why, in my view, despite some consistency of vision, Wols’s paintings are not concerned with rendering the world more enigmatic, as are his photographs. I argue that his painting becomes rather, a search for a way of visualizing the inhuman (following the end of World War II). Indeed, it may be what led Wols to give up photography for painting. The motive behind his post-war paintings is then quite different from that behind his pre-war photography. more...

article

Louis I. Kahn – The Timeless Art of Light and Form

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Only a year out of architecture school Kahn designed six enormous buildings for Philadelphia’s 1926 Exhibition marking the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. With these temporary structures Kahn began a life long love affair with monumentalism (the six buildings totaled 579,000 square meters), and the ephemeral. Thirty-five years after his passing this paper points to his extraordinary importance to architecture in the 21st century and beyond. (...) Everything is a ruin in process and a ruin is a melancholy marker of the passage of time in both directions. Kahn’s life was wrapped by a form of contented melancholy which found its way into his buildings as he came to wrap ruins around them. He gave us a singular view of the world and a thoroughly unique approach to the problem of architecture in time. more...

article

Shoichi Ida in Chicago

dedicated to Kazu Toki

Robert Kushner

A recent memorial exhibition of Shoichi Ida's paintings, sculpture and prints at Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, gave viewers a rare in-depth glimpse into this remarkable body of work. Ida has long been one of Japan's most highly regarded, contemporary nonobjective, artists with prestigious awards and museum retrospectives. Although he has lived and exhibit regularly in America and kept up extensive professional relationships with American artists, his work is less known than it should be outside of Japan. In contrast to the current glut of East Asian art, Ida's works fall far from contemporary trends that favor kitsch, irony and slick execution. more...

article

Review Essay: The Photography Book And the Horizon of the Post Photographic

Dr. Gerry Coulter

This essay engages with ten recent publications on photography. These books are aimed at both a scholarly audience and those who think seriously about the image in contemporary society. My approach is to view each book as a snapshot of the state of photography and its theorization / presentation at the dawning of the post-photographic era. The following ten sections, each of which assesses a different book (on photography’s history, the photographer’s voice, a collection of twentieth century images, a curator’s eye, two photographer’s looking at their own work, photographic icons, a century of colour photography, contemporary photography, and the present state of photography theory), cast a wary eye upon writing about the digital and photography’s object. more...

interview

Ananatural Production: The Project Of Artistic “Escape Route”

Interview with Ana Prvacki

"When i started Ananatural Production in 2003 one of my main interests was multitasking, multitasking as a manifestation of Deleuzian interconnectedness, and all terrain, all range activity. Contortion and collapsibility are I think good examples of this multitasking, both as system and a methodology. I have always been fascinated by contortion and collapsibility, not just as displays of flexibility and efficiency but also in their playfulness and the immense freedom thy offer. There is a loss of "figurative" in contortion, it implies becoming and transmuting, a real physical and conceptual alchemy. It is something that I apply to all of my projects, from the initial idea to the manifestation of it, like taking an idea for a ride, a rollercoaster, taking it from spark to product to quality control." more...

art agenda

Dalí: Painting and Film

New York, USA 29th June–15th September, 2008

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor’ MoMA Bringing together more than 130 paintings, drawings, scenarios, and films by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), this exhibition explores the role that cinema played in the artist's work. Both an inspiration and an outlet for experimentation, film was Dalí's passion, and cinematic vision became a model for his own work. Collaborations between Dalí and legendary filmmakers are displayed alongside his paintings and other works, illuminating the ways in which ideas, iconography, and pictorial strategies are shared and transformed across mediums. more...

art agenda

Montenegrin Contemporary Painting

Ljubljana, Slovenia 19th June – 7th September 2008

The Art Gallery in Cetinje (Umjetnička galerija) was founded in 1950. It was the first institution in Montenegro, dedicated to visual arts research in the former Yugoslav territories and, above all, in Montenegro. By collecting, keeping and exhibiting important works of art it has worked towards an overview of the Montenegrin artistic patrimony and creative achievement. ts intense growth through the 1970-ies transformed it into the Montenegro Museum of Art (Umjetnički muzej Crne Gore) that keeps over three thousand works of art arranged into ten collections. more...

art agenda

“The best of 2007-2008”

Athens, Greece 12th June–11th October 2008

Medusa Art Gallery welcome art lovers with a group exhibiton in this summer. The exhibited artists are Costas Coulentianos, Voula Massoura, Giorgos Rorris, Miltos Michailidis and Panagiotis Linardakis. Costas Coulentianos, remains in the history of sculpture as an artisan, with the complete meaning of the word. His work started with the essential theme of the female figure, naked, sited, lying, standing, acrobat and dancer. Gradually he was lead to dispute the traditional conceptions and liberated himself from specific views towards the human body, his work did not pay tribute to something visible, but to the internal dynamics that seek expression. more...

art agenda

Cuban Cultural Festival

London, UK 11th July – 12th August 2008

The Cuban Cultural Festival takes place London-wide throughout July. The Chambers Gallery will be participating in the celebration of Cuban culture and will house an exhibition of recent paintings by Alain Martinez along with collography by Choco, one of Cuba’s most renowned painters. At the opening night, we have the pleasure of presenting authentic Cuban music by Hammadi Rencurrell and Ahmed Dickinson. The Cuban Cultural Festival will also consist of several other colourful events: Cine Cuba will show films celebrating the culture’s musical heritage at the Barbican; the famous Cuban band El Guayabero, will herald a night of salsa dancing more...

art agenda

Unexpected paths

Florence, Italy 23rd March-14th September 2008

They are unexpected paths, those that will open up before the visitor, breaches of Montalian memory to be accepted and embraced instinctively or to be traced through to their historical and critical correlations. This type of extension, moreover – albeit of a much more coherent completeness – was already proposed in the late fifties by Licia Collobi Ragghianti, who had scheduled the crucial expansion of the Gallery of Modern Art, with the section on the twentieth-century works to be displayed in the rooms of the Palazzina della Meridiana. This amply documented project was unfortunately not carried through. However, a reading of the plans illustrates how, albeit in an incomplete manner, more...

art agenda

The Renaissance Portrait

Madrid, Spain 3rd June – 7th September 2008

The broad time span covered by this exhibition in the Prado Museum (1400-1600) and its Europe-wide approach make it the first to provide an overview of Renaissance portraiture. It explores portraiture as a genre in its own right, focusing principally on painting but including medals, sculptures, drawings and engravings while leaving aside the donor portrait. When did the autonomous portrait emerge? Around 1335 Simone Martini painted Petrarch’s beloved Laura, and the poet devoted the following sonnet to the portrait, describing the characteristics of the modern portrait: a likeness that more...