Yesterday was the opening of the first show by Uwe Wittwer at the new Zurich gallery Lullin + Ferrari. It was the opening weekend for several galleries in that area of Zurich and it was a busy but also relaxed night, with a lot of interesting and interested people. Installation shots of the exhibition can be found here.

Click here for more photos

The show titled "The Unknown Photographer" runs until October 23rd.

The exhibition at Lullin + Ferrari holds the character of a concentrated intimate play, which focus on the different ways of seeing. The lifesize painted, unknown photographer is the thematic leitmotiv of the exhibition: in a clearance he points his camera towards the public. He is completely absorbed in his occupation and requires from the public the same attention towards the paintings in the show he lends to the subject in front of his camera.
In the first room the large format painting Rotation (Diptychon) (2010) welcomes the visitors. In this image Wittwer positions a rollercoaster in a fun fair stupendously into the picture. The wagon of the rollercoaster itself can't be seen in the diptych, but its chattering resonates in the wooden construction and the noise of the fun fair surges up the construction. Beside the loud Rotation Wittwer places a contained Wall Piece (2010); on a black wall piece a large and old photography is painted, showing three attentive posing children.
In the middle room of the gallery hang the paintings Riders and Flurry (2010) in which Wittwer refer to previous groups of works. In the painting Riders a merry-go-round is depicted, turning in circles from the left to the right. Behind the boy in the left part of the painting a black drapery is raised, clearing the view onto a sunny landscape. On the right side of the image, menacing and darker hues predominate. The wooden horses suddenly allude to the horses in the battle paintings of the Florentine Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello, Wittwer had appropriated in previous, large works on paper. The painting Flurry inspires through the parallel order of the picture ground, through the outline of people shown in the snow and through its flush of colours. In the foreground of the painting sledges are visible, reminding of Wittwer's snow pieces from East Prussia. (from the gallery's press release)

How cool is that?! Japan’s rice crop art, which is created by carefully arranging different colors of rice plants in the field.
Red the whole article with many more pictures and videos on Pink Tentacle Blog.

© Extracts from Ariane Michel's film, Les Oiseaux de Céleste. Copyright Galerie Xippas, Ariane Michel and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, 2008
www.barbican.org.uk

27 February 2010 - 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London

Free admission
Times: Open daily 11am-8pm
Open late every Thu until 10pm

windowzoo on the ferry

It doesn't get much better

'Meet the heir to Tracey Emin's throne... The best of the new young British artists'
Andrew Johnson, The Independent on Sunday

'Sarah Maple is giving feminism a make over'no more potlucks

Sarah Maple was born in 1985 and grew up in Sussex, where she lives today. She did her BA in Fine Art at Kingston University and in October 2007 won '4 New Sensations', a new art prize for graduates, voted by the public online, organised by Channel 4 and The Saatchi Gallery.

Much of Maple's inspiration originates from being brought up as a Muslim, with parents of mixed religious and cultural backgrounds. Blurring the lines between popular culture and religious devotion in an unfailingly mischievous manner, Sarah's aesthetic narrative urges the viewer to challenge traditional notions of religion, identity and the societal role of women.

visit the sarah maple website

and read more here

Six artists and a film crew went to an abandoned 1970s village on the west coast of Scotland to paint. The idea and the outcome are remarkable. Some eerie beauty here by the Agents of Change!

The Ghostvillage Project was created over 3 days on the west coast of Scotland. 6 artists - Timid, Remi/Rough, System, Stormie Mills, Juice 126, Derm - were given free reign to paint in an abandoned 1970s village. Working together on huge collaborative walls and individually in hidden nooks and crannies all over the site the artists realised long held dreams and were inspired by the bleakness and remoteness of the site. Drawing on the history of the village the artists' stated intent on completion of the project was to populate the ghostvillage with the art and characters that it deserved.

Visit the project site and watch the film and have a look at the photo page too.

Demons, Yarns & Tales is the title of a exhibition that took place in November 2008.
Christopher and Suzanne Sharp founders of the rug company invited a group of internationally renowned artists to explore a medium foreign to their usual practice, we were asking them to take a voyage into the unknown, leaving their area of comfort to work in unfamiliar territory. The medium was that of Tapestry; a lost art made redundant by the sheer expense of its production and non-compliance within a world impatient to conform to the ease of mass-production in an era of convenience. The art of Tapestry and the knowledge of its craft faded long ago in much the same way as the magnificent tapestries themselves disintegrated.

The exhibition was an experiment within this lost world and addresses themes of translation and transformation. The works pose visual and tactile questions concerning the translation of meaning. Three years in the making, the exhibition reveals the shifting transformation of each artist’s unique visual style from his or her known medium into the uncharted and the unknown. Initially, the physical medium itself becomes apparent and appears engaging and challenging. The artist is preoccupied with technical matters: unfamiliar colours, the texture of the material, the properties of the different 'threads' and the complexity of the weave. Then, as the work develops, the new medium begins to contribute to, rather than compromise, the finished work; giving birth to a thoroughly contemporary art form, evolving naturally from its historical past. The handwoven setting proves itself to be an alternative 'soft' canvas; warm, tactile, able to represent ideas and images on a vast scale, both in terms of imagination and physical presence.

The artists that participated in the project are:
Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Batriz Milhazes
Fred Tomaselli, Ghada Amer & Reza, Gavin Turk, Jaime Gili, AVAF, Paul Noble, Julie Verhofen, Gary Hume, Farancesca Lowe, Shahzia Sikander, Pater Blake

Kara Walker

Peter Blake

Shahzia Sikander

With the exhibition came a beautiful book. With an introduction by Sarah Kent .

I would have loved to see the exhibition, luckily I have the book. The Tapestry are all all amazing. It's very impressive to see the transformation from one medium to the other.

read this extract from sarah kents introduction :

"With its infinitesimal variations on the colour grey, Paul Noble’s minutely detailed drawing must have presented an almost impossible challenge. Then there’s the problem of how to achieve diagonals and curves; because a tapestry is made from interlocking vertical and horizontal threads, it is virtually impossible to create curving or diagonal lines that don’t have a stepped profile. With its fleet of triangular shapes aligned on the diagonal, Jaime Gili’s painting could have been made for the express purpose of testing the weavers’ ingenuity. And with her web of interlocking arcs and circles, Beatriz Milhazes must have created similarly intractable problems. Yet in each case, the weavers have managed to produce clean, sharp outlines that, to the naked eye, appear absolutely fluent – not a zig-zag in sight! The weaving house making the tapestries is in China, where this is not a traditional craft. The company was set up only ten years ago and employs the Flemish weaving techniques used by the famous tapestry makers of Aubusson. It takes a long time to produce each tapestry partly because of the intricacy of the work, but also because the factory is situated in a rural community north of Shanghai and the weavers, all of whom are women, work part time so they can be free to help in the fields and gather in the harvest."

I've been very touched by Kara Walkers Tapestry "A warm summer Evening in 1863" it's based on a engraving first published in a newpaper; it shows rioters burning and looting an orphanage for colored children in New York. As the flames take hold, black children flee the building only to be met by the angry mob. The scene is partially hidden by the silhouette of a hanged woman - the victim of a lynching.
The incident happened in the civil war during the draft riots. The whole scene is incredibly cruel yet very beautiful and on the medium of tapestry it get utterly confusing.

visit the Demons, Yarns & Tales website www.bannersofpersuasion.com

I came across this beautiful ceramic in Paris. Made by the swiss artist Christiane Perrochon.
What I like about it is the very special jet very subtile colors she uses plain shapes.
www.christianeperrochon.com

Still looking for christmas presents?  Here I would go if I had the money.
They also produce the beautiful Hella Jongorius Vases and ceramics

On a Spanish map from 1572, today’s location of Royal Tichelaar Makkum’s factory is already marked ‘bricaria’: a brickyard. It is the oldest proof of the company’s more than four centuries of uninterrupted ceramic history. By 1670, domestic pottery had replaced bricks as core business and from 1890 Royal Tichelaar Makkum concentrated on ornamental earthenware. The family company owes its continuity up to the present day to its appreciation of tradition, though with an eager eye for innovation.
Frysian clay, a passion for quality, modesty and impeccable craftsmanship, those are the values that make Royal Tichelaar Makkum unique in the ceramic industry. Makkum is a source of honest products, in which history and contemporary developments in ceramic workmanship are inspiringly blended, with always recognisable the master’s hand: the designer artist’s as well as the artisan’s. In Makkum artist and craftsman join to symbiotically explore the future.

http://www.tichelaar.nl