The 53rd International Art Exhibition, titled Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…, directed by Daniel Birnbaum and organized by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, opens to the public from Sunday June, 7th to Sunday November, 22nd 2009 in the Giardini (50,000 m2) and the Arsenale (38,000 m2) as well as in various other locations around the city. The press preview took place on June 4th, 5th and 6th.

The Director of the 53rd Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, has been Rector of the Staedelschule Frankfurt/Main and its Kunsthalle Portikus since 2001. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, presented in the renewed Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and in the Arsenale, is a single, large exhibition that articulates different themes woven into one whole. It is not divided into sections. Considering collectives, it comprises works by over 90 artists from all over the world and includes many new works and on-site commissions in all disciplines.

“The title of the exhibition, Fare Mondi // Making Worlds –says Director Daniel Birnbaum– expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world. The strength of the vision is not dependent on the kind or complexity of the tools brought into play. Hence all forms of artistic expression are present: installation art, video and film, sculpture, performance, painting and drawing, and a live parade. Taking ´worldmaking´ as a starting point, also allows the exhibition to highlight the fundamental importance of certain key artists for the creativity of successive generations, just as much as exploring new spaces for art to unfold outside the institutional context and beyond the expectations of the art market. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings - this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale.”

For the direction of the exhibition Daniel Birnbaum is supported by Jochen Volz, artistic organization. Additional advice is provided by an international team of correspondents consisting of Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, and Maria Finders.

On the occasion of the 53rd International Art Exhibition – the La Biennale di Venezia Foundation inaugurates a number of important structural and organisational developments:

at the Arsenale, the Italian Pavilion has been enlarged from 800 to 1,800 square meters, now opening out to the Giardino delle Vergini and adjacent to a new public entrance. Here a newly constructed bridge links the far side of the Arsenale to the Sestiere di Castello. This renewed Italian Pavilion will be reserved for exhibitions organised by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs. The Italian participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition is curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. Furthermore, the Arsenale’s exhibition spaces have been extended by developing a larger part of the Giardino delle Vergini (Garden of the Virgins), now measuring 6,000 square meters and offering an enchanting new exhibition space for the main exhibition.

In the Giardini, the historic Italian Pavilion has been renamed Palazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale and extensively transformed, now providing a permanent exhibition and multi-functional venue opened to the public throughout the year. The transformed Palazzo delle Esposizioni includes a newly refurbished wing housing the library of the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), made available again to the public after ten years of closure. The Archives comprise documents, books, catalogues and periodicals, freely consultable by researchers and exhibition visitors. Apart from exhibition spaces, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni also comprises a new bookstore, a new café and new spaces for educational activities, respectively designed by three artists participating in the main exhibition. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni will therefore become an important platform for the Foundation’s permanent activities and a point of reference for the other Pavilions in the Giardini.

Ca’ Giustinian, the beautiful 15th-century palace on the Grand Canal near St Mark's and the traditional site of the Foundation’s headquarters, reopens in June after several years of renovation. Apart from housing the offices of the Biennale, it will then also become an “open house” for the general public, among others boasting a café on the Grand Canal.

The Awards and Opening Ceremony of the 53rd International Art Exhibition took place on Saturday June 6th in the Giardini. Following Director’s suggestion, the President and the Board of the Foundation have this year awarded two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, to Yoko Ono and John Baldessari.

The other Golden Lion Awards – the Golden Lion for Best National Participation of the 53rd International Art Exhibition; the Golden Lion for the Best Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds; and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds – have been selected by an International Jury chaired by Angela Vettese (Italy), and comprising Jack Bankowsky (USA), Homi K. Bhabha (India), Sarat Maharaj (South Africa), and Julia Voss (Germany).

The National Participations of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, presented in the historical Pavilions in the Giardini, in selected areas of the Arsenale and in numerous venues throughout the city, are this year amounting to the record number of 77 Nations participating, including first-time participations of Montenegro, Principality of Monaco, Republic of Gabon, Union of Comoros, and United Arab Emirates.

Furthermore, there is a record number of 44 Collateral Events, proposed by international organizations and institutions, which organize their own exhibitions and initiatives in Venice during the occasion.

An exhibition dedicated to the Venetian artistic glass will be held at the Venice Pavilion. The exhibition organized by the Region of Veneto, in concomitance with the 53rd Exhibition and curated by Ferruccio Franzoia, is titled ...fa come natura face in foco.

Inaugurating the renovated headquarters of the Biennale as yet another exhibition venue, The Vision Machine: Futurists in the Biennale exhibition will be presented at Ca’ Giustinian from June to November 2009. The exhibition explores the presence of Futurist artists, ideas and works in the Biennale. Curated by IUAV, International Semiotics Laboratory Venice, it is the result of a research undertaken at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC).

The two-volume catalogue of the 53rd International Art Exhibition is published by Marsilio.

The 53rd International Art Exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of: Aci - Automobile Club d’Italia, Foscarini, Nivea, Artek, Micromegas, Casamania, Matteograssi, Bisazza, Link, Mediacontech. We wish also to thank the firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP.

The Maramotti Collection opens its space for temporary exhibitions with a group show of works from its own recent holdings: thirty works by twenty-one artists who, independently of their various nationalities, all live and work in New York. Thirty works that have more in common than simply the period in which they were produced (2001 to 2008) and which first of all are marked by a conspicuous willingness further to expand the territories in which to seek out the conceptual and formal instruments through which to investigate painting in an epoch in which technology effectively dazzles the viewer with novelties of perception and sensorial experience that ever more distance from the humanistic history of the visual arts.
With the beginning of globalization and the need on the part of artists to operate in a linguistic territory of international scope, painting too was to undergo a transformation, entering into dialog (and at times into rupture) with its own particular history, and also taking cognizance of the evolution of the new media. From this point forward, the strategies of painting which have been put into practice are as numerous as the artists who practice them. Yet, none of the works presented in Transitions will entirely reduce to a discourse on method: their method is always a medium of iconographic discourse.
Painting must hold its own in the face of two different forces. In the construction of the painting, the artist doesn’t hesitate to make use of instruments from the worlds of industry and technology, and thus can articulate forms and surfaces that are physically consonant with the modes of perception promoted by mass products and mass emotions, no less than by the image pool of technology. Painting moves through areas that range from refuse and the found object to Photoshop.
Some of the artists (Perez, Rich, Domburg, Cotton, Craven, Ruyter, Gonzales, Loeb) appropriate their images from photographs or other media (newspaper clippings, post cards, books, film frames, digital elaborations, etc.) that preconstitute the represented subject, but this strategy of painting events that emerge from real rather than ideal worlds is used by the various artists in various different ways, and with various different goals in mind.
Henricksen, Jackson, Stockholder and Walker work with surfaces that share no more with traditional oil or acrylic on canvas than the aspiration to reconvene the historical ambitions of painting into the service of roles which are more advanced, even to the point that Walker’s works address themselves to painting only by alluding to it.

For some (Perez, Rich, Domburg), the architectural image is a powerful vehicle for the inscription of history, with open political connotations, as an allegory of the social environment, as an allusion to the rites of mass society, and never in the service of an act that exalts the painting as pure surface.
For other artists who are present in the show (Perez, Zucker, Rich, Cotton, Ruyter, Gonzales, Barbeito) the process deployed in their work is of central importance. In the work of Schutz, Barbeito, Degen and Koether, the figures that appear in the paintings (or which disappear from them) speak clearly of the return of an archetype.
Today, in fact, the newness of an image is often in direct proportion to the extent to which it reveals itself to be the reinvigorated return of an archetype which is constantly subject to re-elaborations and interrogations on the part of our consciousness.
Modes of “abstraction” and “representation”, often coexist within the work of each of these artists. De Balincourt, working with the objective and non-objective represents the two faces of the coin of his subjectivity. The apparent minimalism of Walsh’s series of concentric geometric figures alludes more to magical inscriptions than to any declination of a rationalized and totally flat surface. The vast monochrome spaces which are anchored in the work of Tremblay into elementary serial geometries find their dominant form not in the rectangle, but in the archetypical figure of the oval: ovals of various sizes cluster together on the canvas like living cells in constant proliferation.
The paintings of Essaydi offer a clear and open criticism of the bogus realism and lack of experiential authenticity that typify an entire phase of western painting. The works subvert the “colonial” vision that permeates the structure of “Orientalist” painting. An analogous use of the iconography of interior spaces—without description of anecdotal situations, and intent, instead, on shaping a project for painting—likewise defines the work of Zucker, whose architectures allude to social spaces without in any way representing them; they project an alternative mental realit, and are more on the order of interior landscapes.

Works by
Pedro Barbeito, Will Cotton, Ann Craven, Matthew Day Jackson, Jules de Balincourt, Benjamin Degen, Bart Domburg, Lalla Essaydi, Wayne Gonzales, Kent Henricksen, Jutta Koether, Damian Loeb, Enoc Perez, Daniel Rich, Lisa Ruyter, Dana Schutz, Jessica Stockholder, John Tremblay, Kelley Walker, Dan Walsh, Kevin Zucker

The 3D Project Room Installation is a collaboration with the artist and designer Emre Erturk, who will be doing a performance with Gulay Alpay during the opening Reception. For love and peace!

In 3D Project Room Installation Alpay creates an innovative world within a world. Each of these “worlds” are in the creating with a variety of mediums by Alpay and the several other collaborating artists and non-artist friends and guests during the show. Turkish artist Gulay Alpay has developed a reputation for poetic epic works that display both delicacy and fragility, revealing a deep respect for something fundamental, some primal, indigenous sense of shape and color, yet she creates with bursts of contemporary idioms. Her paintings are playful, spirited, freeform and deceptively complex. There’s not a single corner, hard edged, geometric line to be found in her composition, instead the shapes are as fluid as the submerged sounds that fuel her imagination.

Gulay Alpay began the invoative piece in Istanbul, and will continue the piece and the creative process in the gallery space here in NY. Utilizing every inch of the project room space; her artistic vision will not be hampered by the gallery walls limits. This is a method Alpay’s come to be known for during her many years of artistic discourse. Leaving an open space only through which to accept the visitors, the artist will also welcome visitors to interact and participate in her world and work of art.

Alpay will re-create and bring her studio into project room of the gallery and create an “Open Studio Tour” where the artist and visitor can both exist inside the picture and therefore exist within the artist’s state of creation. Alpay includes hundreds of submissions by means of her social and technological networks, by artists and non-artist’s alike. All these submitted doodles will appear in Alpay’s installation creating a multi-colored foundation for further creation within the gallery space.

This world made of silk, ink, and acrylic paint will then offer many surprises including painting, being embraced with clothing of silk painting that will have its last strokes of paint spontaneously added by the artist or by selecting the measurements of a silk scarf that will be completed right there and then as a collaboration by the artist and the visitor. An other special art work on silk which Gulay Alpay began in Istanbul, will be continued by artist and designer Emre Erturk here in New York. Both artists will be selling the piece to help fundraise money for www.strength.org. Anti-hunger organization that mobilizes industries and individuals to contribute their talents to fight hunger. Alpay is looking forward to the exchange, combination, and fusion over her ever so volatile and brilliantly colorful energy with each and every person visiting her studio at project room, playfully, spontaneously—all for the sake of peace and beauty.

For further information please go to www.gulayalpay.com

Tacita Dean
Still Life, 2009
Location shot
Commissioned and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan
Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan


FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI presents STILL LIFE, a solo exhibition by Tacita Dean
Curated by: Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi

Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is proud to present STILL LIFE, Tacita Dean's first major solo exhibition in Italy, in Palazzo Dugnani, an historic building in the centre of Milan opened in collaboration with the City of Milan's Department of Culture. The exhibition will present fourteen films, including two commissioned and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.

Tacita Dean's films are monuments to the country of last things, revelations shot and reproduced rigorously in analogue form. With her slow contemplative films, Dean transforms atmospheric phenomena, pastoral landscapes and abandoned places into sublime panoramas and cinematic frescoes. For the exhibition with Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Dean has chosen to show only film, making a circular journey through the rooms of the palazzo, moving from works related to portraiture to those about natural phenomena, landscape and the sea, and then into a recent group that reference still life.

With help from the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Dean was invited to visit the studio of the painter, Giorgio Morandi, recently reinstalled in the apartment in Bologna where he lived and worked for fifty years. Still Life (2009), a film in black and white, focuses on the meticulous markings and measurements found on the paper Morandi placed underneath his objects. Day for Night (2009) looks at the objects themselves. Unable to touch or move them, Dean filmed them singly, making random groupings in contrast to Morandi's studied and mathematically rigorous compositions.

In 2002, Tacita Dean made what became the first in a series of portrait films, Mario Merz (2002) - an intimate moment with the master of Arte Povera, to be shown for the first time in Milan, the city of his birth. Her recent six film installation on the great American dancer and choreographer: Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS… (2008) will have its European premiere in this exhibition. Also included will be four of her works about nature - romantic vistas that harbour unexpected surprises, like the cloudy solar eclipse on a dairy farm in Banewl (1999) and the accident that produced a work in Diamond Ring (2002); the single frame capturing the refracted green of the last ray of sun as it passes over the horizon in The Green Ray (2001), to the difficult crossing of The English Channel on a stormy day in Amadeus (2008). With the same attentiveness, the British artist films seemingly insignificant objects, like the pieces of fruit cultivated inside bottles for schnapps: a praise of slowness, Prisoner Pair (2008) is a microscopic analysis of time in detail and detail in time.

Palazzo Dugnani was built as a patrician house in the 17th century and contains a magnificent fresco by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In this extraordinary setting—which once housed Milan's natural history museum and later became the first school in Italy that taught art history, but which has since fallen into disrepair —Tacita Dean's exhibition will reveal the building's majestic architecture and private rooms in a new way. Reopened by the City of Milan's Department of Culture in collaboration and with the support of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Palazzo Dugnani is being used for the first time as a venue for a contemporary art exhibition—an event that celebrates a new synergy between the City of Milan's Department of Culture and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, both committed to making historical buildings accessible to wider audiences.

With STILL LIFE, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues to produce works by today's most interesting artists for the forgotten monuments of the City of Milan. Since 2003 the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has organized exhibitions with, among others: Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Darren Almond, Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Paola Pivi, Martin Creed, Pawel Althamer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, and Tino Sehgal.

STILL LIFE by Tacita Dean is a project by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organized in collaboration with the City of Milan's Department of Culture and under the patronage of Region Lombardia and the Province of Milan. Thanks to MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna.

BRIDGE BASEL, SWITZERLAND AT DREISPITZHALLE
June 10-14, 2009

APPLICATION DEADLINE: April 15, 2009
Download Application >>

Bridge Art Fair is proud to announce its inaugural edition of Bridge Basel to take place June 10-14, 2009, in Basel, Switzerland concurrent with the esteemed Art Basel. Basel draws the largest international audience internationally of all the major contemporary fairs, and Bridge Basel enjoys built-in guarantees to ensure attendance by collectors, curators and art professionals from around the world.

During the 40th Anniversary of Art Basel, Bridge Art Fair has been accepted to stage the Bridge Art Fair in a new facility, the Dreispitzhalle. Dreispitzhalle is the event facility centerpiece of the up-and-coming hot spot in Basel, Dreispitz. In the coming years, this area will host a design school, top-notch galleries and many other art institutions. The Dreispitzhalle, the anchor of the neighborhood’s future international art and cultural activities, will host Bridge as the first-ever art fair in the Dreispitz area of Basel during the Art Basel fair. Bridge boasts a degree of local support, to deliver a fair that balances cultural and commercial interests, enjoyed by no other satellite show.

Dreispitzhalle

Bridge Art Fair in the Dreispitzhalle will take place almost across the street from the largest private art collection in the world, the Schaulager. The Schaulager open house is an important draw every year for art professionals and major art collectors from around the world during Art Basel.

If there is any market in the world where collectors and galleries want to go right now, it is Basel. Bridge is also working with event producers at Triebwerk, who helped make the Volta Show Basel a success.

Verge Edition of Bridge Basel
Download Application >>

Bridge will also stage Verge in an office building next door to the Dreispitzhalle. Premiered as an alternative edition of the Bridge Art Fair in Berlin during the 2008 installment of Art Forum Berlin, Verge Basel will be presented as a unique companion showcase to Bridge: a showcase of only artist-run spaces and projects. Verge will expand on the artistic and cultural focus of Bridge by providing a previously unavailable non-commerical platform for artist-run spaces.

This exhibition will be the first comprehensive presentation of Hussein Chalayan's work in the UK. Spanning fifteen years of experimental projects, the exhibition explores Hussein Chalayan's creative approach, his inspirations and the many themes which influence his work such as cultural identity, displacement and migration. Exhibits will include -Afterwords' which explores the notion of -wearable, portable architecture' in which furniture literally transforms itself into garments; -Airborne' bringing the latest LED technology to fashion design with a spectacular dress consisting of dazzling crystals and over 15,000 flickering LED lights and -Readings' a dress comprising of over 200 moving lasers presenting an extraordinary spectacle of light.

Presenting fashion as a site of exploration and as expressions of concepts, Hussein Chalayan challenges preconceived notions of what clothing can mean, rather than as garments with only functionality in mind. Motivated by ideas and disciplines not readily associated with fashion, Hussein Chalayan's pioneering work crosses between architecture, design, philosophy, anthropology, science and technology. Since 2003, Hussein Chalayan has also directed art projects, including the short films -Temporal Meditations-, -Place to Passage- and -Anaesthetics-. In 2005, he represented Turkey at the 51st Venice Biennale with Absent Presence, featuring Tilda Swinton. Hussein Chalayan's presentations demonstrate his unique ability to combine beautiful and wearable clothes for today with an intriguing vision of the future.

In response to prevailing market concerns, Bridge has modified its floorplan to provide more affordable options for galleries seeking participation in the New York art fair market during Armory Show week, March 5-8, 2009.

"We are always happy to provide more ways for great art to find its market," says Founder and Director, Michael Workman. “Art fairs have become too expensive and in the current climate, it’s important that we try harder to help galleries go further on less.” The final application deadline has been extended to January 17 in order to provide exhibitors sufficient time to respond.

New plans includes the addition of a 100 sq. ft. “Verge” section booth that, at $5,000, represents the most affordable rate of any art fair in New York. The 200 sq. ft. standard booth is now available for $10,000, and a premium booth size of 300 sq. ft., the most spacious booth ever offered by the fair, is now available at $14,000.

These new Bridge rates and booth sizes provide a way for exhibitors to access an audience in 2008 well in excess of 12,000 attendees, for the price of a single page ad in Artforum. Unlike magazine advertising, however, participation in Bridge ensures direct face-to-face encounters with some of the top collectors in America and around the world, as well as museum, private collection and corporate curators, and large numbers of the national and international art press.

Galleries are encouraged to apply using a newly modified application now available for download at http://www.bridgeartfair.com/newyorkapplication.html

Bridge New York '08 will present more than 60 international exhibitors from such diverse locales as Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States.

DOWNLOAD APPLICATION
Please download application (link)
http://www.bridgeartfair.com/applications/BridgeNYC09_app.pdf
For additional information, please write to us at: info@bridgeartfair.com

Verge booth: 100 sq ft, $5,000
Standard booth: 200 sq ft, $10,000
Premium booth: 300 sq ft, $13,000

ABOUT BRIDGE ART FAIR
Bridge Art Fair, the Independent International Exposition of Art and Visual Culture, is a transnational art fair organization currently staging events in Berlin, Miami, New York, London and Basel, Switzerland.

Bridge Art Fair currently presents a combined total of nearly 300 galleries and over 2,000 artists at four expositions throughout the year. Visitors will discover a truly global selection of contemporary work from every imaginable medium, including but not limited to painting, prints, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, film, video, new media, and conceptual art. In the short time since the premier of Bridge Miami Beach in 2006, total sales of nearly $30 million and more than 100,000 visitors have confirmed Bridge as a leading voice in the global art market.

MEDIA CONTACT
For more information, interviews or to register for press credentials, contact our marketing department at (312) 421-2227 or email at marketing@bridgeartfair.com

PRESS HIGHLIGHTS from Bridge NY08
- NYTimes.com homepage lead video
- Artinfo.com: Relaxing at the Pool, Bustling at Bridge
“…gallerists said Thursday’s preview and opening night reception were packed, and they had the red dots to prove it.”
- Armory Week in Review: A Scorecard
“It was a pleasure to welcome this Miami native to New York City, and to find it in an excellent venue…this was a solid first appearance, and I believe we can now regard Bridge as a regular on the New York fair roster.”
- Artfacts.net: Interview with Michael Workman
- Bloomberg Press
- Artinfo.com

Anish Kapoor (b. 1954, Bombay, lives and works in London) is one of the most celebrated sculptors of our time. Since the early 1980s, his investigation into notions of scale, volume, color and materiality has redefined contemporary sculpture. Kapoor is best known for his explorations into the concept of the void. His sculptures, installations and public art test the phenomenology of space, and have historically been characterized by intensely tactile or reflective materials, including colored pigments, wax, fiberglass, stone, polished stainless steel and PVC that resist any narrative or aesthetic reading. What interests Kapoor is what lies below the surface - in the potential of the object to be self-evident. With large-scale sculptural installations such as Marsyas (Tate Modern, 2002) and Cloud Gate (Chicago Millennium Park, 2004), viewers are drawn into powerful sensory encounters that merit total physical immersion.

Deutsche Guggenheim's ambitious commission titled Memory is an intervention in the gallery that prevents any one complete viewing or experience of the work. Fabricated of 24 tons of rusting Cor-Ten steel, with industrial tiles and bolts exposed, the sculpture loosly resembles a balloon or egg-shaped object. The sculpture's steel surface engages the extremities of two of the gallery walls, including the ceiling, with the utmost precision. A temporary route through Deutsche Guggenheim will connect three distinct access points to view the sculpture, including one interior view of a cavernous, seamless void in Cor-Ten steel. In negotiating this inaccessibility to view the work in its entirety or walk around it as an object, a viewer's memory thus becomes a methodology for understanding. As part of the Guggenheim Museum's Asian Art initiative, the commission is scheduled to travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2009. The accompanying catalogue offers a multi-disciplinary approach to contextualize the work through sociology, philosophy, postcolonial and architectural theory and structural analysis.

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