EVA

Von: Carolin A. Geist 7. August 2020

Chasa Adam & Eva, Ardez, 8. August & by Appointment.

https://www.instagram.com/chasa_adam_eva_ardez/

Bustart, Art of Bust.

Graffiti-Pop-Up-Shop St.Moritz, Opening 28. November 2020. Ein Einheimischer und ein Schweizer Graffiti–Star (Thiery Niggeler und Bustart): ein mutiges Duo. Ein Graffiti-Pop-Up-Shop für St.Moritz: Think outside of the Box ! Der Winter der Pop-Up-Galerien«Think outside of the Box» ist sicherlich das Credo (der Kunstwelt) von 2020 und auch und besonders in der Wintersaison 2020-2021 in St.Moritz. Unter dieser Prämisse fragt man sich nicht nur, wie Kunstakteure sich an die neuen Situationen anpassen, sondern wie überhaupt die Wintersaison aussehen wird. Feststeht, dass St. Moritz, ja das ganze Engadin, mit seiner sehr starken Kunst- und Kulturszene auf jeden Fall mehr spannende Aktivitäten dem Wintergast bieten wird, als eine Winter-Destination, die «nur» auf den Sport setzte. Eine noch spannendere Beobachtung, ist die Vermutung, dass der Durst nach physisch erlebbarer Kunst, der nach St.Moritz reisenden Binnentouristen, so stark sein wird, dass dieser Winter ein interessantes Phänomen ins Rollen kommt: Pop-Up Kunstgalerien spriessen vermehrt. Ein Graffiti-Pop-Up-ShopEin neuer Akteur im Herzen von St.Moritz, direkt an der Plazza da Scoula 10, ist der heute eröffnende «Graffiti Pop Up Shop» von Thiery Niggler und dem Graffit Shooting Star «Bustart». …. «Think outside of the box» liebe etablierte Kunstliebhaber. Über Kunstgeschmäcker lässt sich streiten, doch was auf ersten Blick als Spassprojekt einer Gruppe junger Freunden scheint (ist es auch), könnte durchaus ein spannender Zuwachs für St.Moritz werden. St.Moritz will sich verjüngen? Bitte. St.Moritz will nicht nur das Alpine Städtchen der Pelzmäntel sein? St.Moritz will mutig sein? Die Einheimischen fahren Snowboard, Skateboard und feiern die Lässigkeit. Jede Galerie will viel mehr sein als ein Ausstellungs- und Verkaufsort von Kunst, alle Galerien wollen ein Treffpunkt für Gleichgesinnte sein. Nun gibt es einen für diese Szene. Eine Fassaden Bustart in Berlin Tegel.2020: gibt die Schweizer Post eine Briefmarke von Bustart gestaltet heraus. 2019: Bustart im Musée d’Art Urbain et de Street-Art MUSA VAUBAN. Graffiti-Pop und eigene Briefmarke Längst hat sich „Urban Art“ auf dem Markt als «echte Kunstrichtung» etabliert, und mancher Urban Art Künstler geniesst einen Erfolg von dem Andere nur zu träumen wagen. Bustart, der seine Kunst „Graffiti-pop“ nennt, ein Mix aus Pop-Art und Cartoons, hat 26 Tausend Follower auf den Sozialen Medien, zahlreiche Auftragsarbeiten auf Hausfassaden von Berlin bis Baku, Azerbaidjan über Frankreich und Usa ausgeführt, und kann zu seiner Laufbahn schon einige museale Ausstellungen zählen, wie 2019 im Mausa Vauban, Musée d’Art Urbain et de Street-art, in Neuf-Brisach, Frankreich (Foto). Nun hat 2020 die Schweizer Post sogar eine offizielle Briefmarke mit einem seiner Werke herausgebracht. Diese sind ebenfalls an der Plazza da Scuola St.Moritz ausgestellt. Heute Samstag wird von 11.00 bis 18..00 Uhr eröffnet. St.Moritz Art News wünscht viel Erfolg. Und St.Moritzer… Think outside of the Box ! Opening 28.11.202011.00 bis 18.00 UhrPlazza da Scoula 10www.artofbust.com
Die kleine Geschichte der ST.MORITZER PLAKATE 1894- 2021

Galerie 10 St.Moritz, St.Moritz, 17. Oktober – 15. Dezember 2020. Wie gut waren Segantinis «Marketing skills»? Ein Champagnerglas, der perfekter Schnee, oder doch die menschenleere Natur, ein kristallklarer sonniger Himmel und Ruhe? Wofür steht St.Moritz? Und was packt man auf ein Plakat um Gäste aus aller Welt nach St.Moritz zu locken? In der Ausstellung «Eine kleine Geschichte der St.Moritzer Plakate» trifft Kunstgeschichte auf junge einheimische Künstler. Drei Teilbereiche gliedern nämlich die Ausstellung: ein Geschichte Teil arbeitet die Geschichte der kommerziellen St.Moritzer Plakate seit dem 19. Jahrhundert auf und mündet im „nächsten Jahr“ 2021, mit dem Projekt der Manufaktura Engiadina.Im Sommer 2020 initiierte die Manufactura Engiadina ein Wettbewerb das St.Moritz Sommer Poster 2021 zu entwerfen. Alle 17 Beiträge, darunter das Siegerposter, werden dem St.Moritzer Meister Giovanni Segantini gegenüber gestellt. Teil 3: der Segantini-Fund: 2007 hatten Mario Häfliger und Marius Hauenstein auf dem Dachboden der Evangelischen Kirche St.Moritz eine Kiste gefunden, in der seit über 100 Jahren zwei Original Plakate von Giovanni Segantini im Dornröschenschlaf schlummerten. Die Geschichte dieses Fundes wird mitsamt der Hängung eines der beiden Segantini Plakate der Öffentlichkeit herangeführt. Die Ausstellung ist ein Projekt der Manufactura Engiadina und wurde von Carolin A. Geist und Virginia Fleming kuratiert.
Evelyne Axell: Body Double

Curated by Anke Kempkes and Krzysztof Kościuczuk With Special Participation of Sylvie Fleury Muzeum Susch, Susch, 1. August – 6. Dezember 2020. Text by the Gallery: „Muzeum Susch presents Body Double, a retrospective exhibition of the Belgian Pop-Surrealist Evelyne Axell (1935-1972). With her original feminist approach in the 1960s Axell became one of the pioneers of Pop Art in Europe. Her distinct body of work is populated by an all-female universe, transcending the established iconography of Pop Art at the time and reclaiming the discourse of women’s sexuality. Evelyne Axell’s career was tragically cut short by her untimely death in a car accident, at the early age of 37. Subsequently, her contribution to early feminist art and Pop Art was left out of the dominant narrative of art history, alongside her fellow contemporaries such as Pauline Boty, Rosalind Drexler, Kiki Kogelnik, and Dorothy Iannone, who have received a long overdue recognition only in recent years. Co-curated by Anke Kempkes, international curator, art historian and art critic and Krzysztof Kościuczuk, artistic director of Muzeum Susch, this exhibition will present an overall of sixty exhibits spanning the broad spectrum of the artist’s entire oeuvre. Body Double brings together a large selection of collages, drawings, relief paintings, sculptures, filmic and photographic works – many of which have not been on view in decades. Axell experimented with novel artificial materials, such as her signature technique of car enamel paint on plastic. This exhibition is the largest museum retrospective of Axell’s work staged outside of her native Belgium, after an exhibition organized at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach in 2011. As a special contribution, the exhibition features the prominent installation Marcel et Robert (2009) by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury, entering into a cross-generational iconographic dialogue with Axell’s work. The rotating disk forming the base of Fleury’s work is designed as a giant Pop-coloured target mirroring the concentric composition in Axell’s painting The Wall of Sound (1966). Evelyne Axell, The Champions (Les Championnes), 1966, courtesy Collection Philippe Axell, copyright ADAGP, ProLitteris 2020, Photo: Paul Louis Born in Belgium in 1935, Evelyne Axell began her career as a charismatic theatre and film actress. She also authored the script for the 1963 movie Le Crocodile en Peluche, which portrays the prejudice faced by a multi-ethnic couple in Brussels as the Belgian colonial rule was coming to an end in the Congo. Taught for one year by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, Axell abandoned acting and turned to painting in 1964. She processed the contemporary vocabulary of Pop Art through a feminist reading of Surrealism expanding the radical legacy of her female Surrealist forerunners. Axell’s daring work was met with derision by the male-dominated scene of art critics at the time, which prompted the artist to sign her works solely with her last name ‘Axell’ to elude any gendered associations, a move shared by many female artists and writers in the first half of the 20th century. Body Double highlights various political themes in Axell’s work, situating her iconography in the international movements of the 1960s and early 70s. As an active witness of the era of sexual liberation, Axell focused on a female body freed from past conventions of depicting femininity. Throughout her work, Axell forged a signature iconography of empowered female nudes inhabiting the sphere of utopian homosociality. In her only public interview in 1969, Axell stated, ‘…The most extraordinary beings I ever met were almost all women, I find women most exquisite. They are everything at once: voluptuousness, luxury, frivolity, tenderness, courage, greed and total selflessness. That is to say the synthesis of the weaknesses and strengths of mankind’. The exhibition Body Double highlights the recurring motif of ‘the double’ in Axell’s compositions. Frequently based on the artist’s own image, identical female nudes appear as kindred gatekeepers gracing portals to a territory of unbeknown promises. Fragmented portraits impart the condition of the female ‘split self’. There are also female ‘homoerotic twins’ – typically absorbed in an embrace, a kiss, or in explicit love-making. Mirrored multi-ethnic female nudes – as in Axell’s cinematic experiment Noire et Blanche (1966/7) – constitute yet another aspect of the ‘double’, resonating with the nascent post-colonial emancipation and the ‘Black is Beautiful’ cultural pride manifestations during the Civil Rights movement at the time which Axell supported. In the wake of the May ‘68 events Axell was – alongside fellow artist Marcel Broodthaers – in the frontline of counter-cultural activities in the Belgian art scene. In 1970 she joined the local campaign against the imprisonment of the U.S. feminist activist and Marxist thinker Angela Davis, one of Axell’s female idols to whom she dedicated two portraits. Another aspect of ‘the double’ in Axell’s work appears in her vision of the ‘bio-botanique’ (Axell, 1970): exotic animals become alter egos, tropical vegetation consumes the body, and surreal beastly hybrids inhabit an alternative sphere of ‘bio-cultural companionship’. In the devouring embrace of the Le Homard Amoureux (Lobster in Love, 1967) the shape of the female nude merges into a human-crustacean union. Axell explores this new universe ruled by the dynamics of metamorphosis in her early 1970s ‘Paradise’ series where the female figure is dissolving in the composition – ‘Gradually she loses her voice. Then memory. And, finally, the reason’ (Axell, Poem, 1972). She erotically unites with plants and animals and is transformed into a botanical entity. The rich iconography of the Body Double culminates in one of Axell’s most prominent works La Grande Sortie dans l’Espace (The Great Journey into Outer Space, 1967), a futuristic vision of a pagan dance where identical cosmonautic nudes float in an abstract space: a zone ruled by female sensuality. It is the artist’s Arcadian vision of a joyful, anti-authoritarian future dimension. Evelyne Axell’s work remains highly evocative today in its transgressive iconography, feminist agenda and utopian outlook.“
Francesco Clemente: 7-23 2020, Pat Steir: Paintings From The East, and Bob Colacello: On The Road.

Vito Schnabel Gallery St.Moritz, St.Moritz, 23. Juli – 5. September 2020. Text by the Gallery: „Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of three new summer exhibitions at its St. Moritz space: Francesco Clemente: 7-23 2020, Pat Steir: Paintings From The East, and Bob Colacello: On The Road. This trio of exhibitions presents important paintings and photographs by three iconic New York-based artists and friends who are part of the gallery’s program. 7-23 2020 will present four new large-scale paintings made by Francesco Clemente in the months of April and May of this year during the coronavirus quarantine in New York City. While the artist is acclaimed for his unique ability to render imagery that transcends time in an ongoing exploration of spirituality and identity, the works on view in this exhibition find him engaging this specific moment, deploying his distinctive figurative language and vibrant palette to capture the emotional experience of a global pandemic. Inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Clemente has dated each work in a bold, stamp-like rectangle, a new motif in his renowned oeuvre. The date itself becomes integral to the imagery in each in the painting, as Clemente counts each day passed in quarantine with a different visual expression of isolation, love, loss, and the passing of time. The final work in the series, titled 5-26 2020, depicts a chameleon and a butterfly—predator and prey. Here, Clemente alludes to both the coronavirus pandemic, in which society’s most vulnerable have suffered the most, and the current political unrest in the United States. Clemente’s paintings are being presented alongside a focused exhibition of six new paintings by his friend and neighbor Pat Steir. During the quarantine, they have spent time together in the shared garden adjoining their respective MacDougal Street homes in the West Village. Since Clemente and his wife Alba were introduced to Steir in the early 1970s by their mutual friend Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press, Clemente and Steir have enjoyed a long, ongoing dialogue about art, life, and the ways of the world. Steir’s exhibition Paintings From The East features the latest paintings from her critically admired Waterfall series, an ongoing body of work begun in the 1980s. Completed at the end of 2019, these paintings on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery extend Steir’s ongoing exploration of intention and chance, gravity and control. While Steir’s signature technique of pouring, dripping, and throwing paint onto the canvas removes pure determination of the outcome, she creates the parameters for her work by controlling the colors, sizes, and gestures of her works. The Waterfall works begin with the artist applying multiple layers of different colors onto the canvas. Shades of green peak through the deep blue of Untitled XXVII, 2019 (Taipei), yielding a web of vertical lines of vibrant, altered versions of the original hues. After such a base is completed, Steir holds a wide brush dipped in paint against the upper part of her canvas, allowing the pigment to flow downwards, guided only by gravity. The works in Paintings From The East immerse viewers in the veils and skeins of optical effects that come from Steir’s conceptual approach, a process rooted in her studies of Daosim and her early influential friendships with avant-garde composer John Cage and artist Sol LeWitt. The third summer exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery is Bob Colacello: On The Road, a small selection of black and white photographs Colacello made in the 1970s and ‘80s during his travels as editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. In those years, Colacello seemed to go everywhere and anywhere, from Warhol’s Montauk compound, to Valentino’s Gstaad chalet, and from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s residence in Bonn, to the deepest Amazon jungles. In 1976, Colacello acquired a Minox 35 EL, the first miniature camera capable of making full frame 35 millimeter photographs. “It was like a spy camera” says Colacello, “I’d keep it in my inside jacket pocket, and take it out when I saw someone interesting doing something interesting.” On The Road is Colacello’s second exhibition with Vito Schnabel Gallery. Last year, the gallery presented over 170 photographs at its space in New York. The gallery will be open Tuesday – Saturday, from 2-6pm and by appointment. Virtual tours of all three exhibitions will be available online. About the Artists Francesco Clemente Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples, Italy. He studied architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza in Rome in 1970, before turning his focus instead to art. In 2002, Clemente was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Clemente’s work has been presented at numerous international institutions, including Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli; and Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. His work is featured in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Clemente lives and works in New York, Chennai (formerly Madras), and Varanasi, India. Pat Steir Pat Steir was born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey. She studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. She is a founding board member of Printed Matter Inc., New York, and the feminist journal, Heresies. She was also a board member of Semiotext(e). Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions and projects including: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; …
MILAN KUNC: FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA AND BACK

Galerie Andrea Caratsch, St.Moritz, 20. Juli – 5. September 2020. Text by the Gallery – by Samuel Gross: „For some years now Milan Kunc has been living in Prague again, the city where he was born in 1944. Even though he fled to Western Europe, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and then lived mainly in Cologne, Rome, and New York, his heart has always belonged to Prague. Indeed, his entire work is permeated with an energy of the strange, a reality in limbo, and a poetics of mystery, which are also characteristic of the streets of the capital of Bohemia. This exhibition, which presents an extensive ensemble of paintings and sculptures, makes it possible to perceive the various contours of the geography of Milan Kunc’s work. Even though their techniques are classic (to the extreme of their possible refinement), he performs a balancing act with his works. Since he plays with all energy fields, the artist penetrates into the weak points of our realities. The pictures are simple. They are balanced, fantastical images that are structured at the limits of the possible. They show the logic of a chemical composition and the empirical fragility of an alchemical experiment. Milan Kunc balances between the contemporary and a broader continuum into which he seeks to escape. Like other artists, he too believes that art is a different state of the visible. In this way, Milan Kunc has always emphasized that our fate is connected to our natural balance. For him, our history is a weak scanning across the entire planet; our ideologies, our wars, our struggles are only a brief flash in comparison to the forces of nature that we can observe. For Milan Kunc it is not a question of juxtaposing culture and nature, but of turning around all the justifications for such a distinction. This determination to play the precise counterpart frees him. The world, its pictures, and all imagined spaces are available to him. He also avoids any chronology, any attempt at narrative and taste. He finds his way back to the possibility of expressing himself as an artist in the traditional sense—rebellious, same time sharp-sighted. In his works he offers us the reading of the world of a cruel optimism. In 1921, Karel Čapek’s science fiction play R.U.R. (Rozumni Univerzální Roboti) was performed at a theater in Prague and was a sensational success. Quickly translated into numerous languages, it was also performed in New York starting in 1922. In this play the author coined the word robot to refer to machines invented by humans as mechanical doubles. The story is apocalyptic. The biological machines destroy humanity. People almost completely disappear from the surface of the earth; they are destroyed by their doubles. But despite the destructive forces that came to power, the plot finally ends in a love story: the world is saved and repopulated by the love that two machines discover for one another. All of Milan Kunc’s works seem to express the same thing. Despite the technological and ideological explosion, despite the shameful reluctance that we use to excite ourselves, despite the barriers that we build around our simple sensations and the images of our world, this world will be saved by love, creative power, and art. Milan Kunc’s work follows in this Prague tradition of a perspective with cheerful pessimism. The artist is in love with his city. He loves to observe nature there, which penetrates into the urban space. He is amazed at the variety of life paths that he crosses. He sharpens his ability for observation in service of a generous worldview. As with this back and forth between utopia and dystopia, Milan Kunc’s works lead us to take seriously any will to reveal the absurdity of our reality, but they also reassure us of the joy that we could gain from taking stock of it. Samuel Gross“ www.galeriecaratsch.com
John Chiara — Engadin Valley in Camera Obscura

Fundaziun Nairs, Tarasp, 10. Juli – 18. Oktober 2020. Einzelausstellung mit dem Fotografen John Chiara. „John Chiara captures with his handcrafted 127 x 76cm camera obscura the soaring verticality of the valley’s mountainous terrain with the clarity that comes from shooting directly onto large sheets of photographic paper. Driving the camera around the valley in the bed of a pickup truck, the primeval and visceral qualities of the Engadin come into focus. There is a pulse coming from above and below: how the rivers course with a deafening power; how deep in the Alps, the mountains shed mineral tears that flow like cascading bands of cement.“ (Text by the Exhibitors) https://nairs.ch/de/ausstellungen/john-chiara-engadin-valley-in-camera-obscura/