Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

Magdalena Dabrowski
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.

Initially trained as a lawyer, Matisse developed an interest in art only at age twenty-one. In 1891, he moved to Paris to study art and followed the traditional nineteenth-century academic path, first at the Académie Julian (winter 1891–92, under the conservative William-Adolphe Bouguereau), and then at the École des Beaux-Arts (1892, under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau). Matisse’s early work, which he began exhibiting in 1895, was informed by the dry academic manner, particularly evident in his drawing. Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, he began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language.

In its palette and technique, Matisse’s early work showed the influence of an older generation of his compatriots: Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). In the summer of 1904, while visiting his artist friend Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez, a small fishing village in Provence, Matisse discovered the bright light of southern France, which contributed to a change to a much brighter palette. He also was exposed, through Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, living in nearby Lavandou, to a pointillist technique of small color dots (points) in complementary colors, perfected in the 1880s by Georges Seurat (1859–1891). As a result, Matisse produced his Neo-Impressionist masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté (1904; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), so titled after a poem by Charles Baudelaire, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (spring 1905) to great acclaim. The next summer, in Collioure, a seaport also on the Mediterranean coast, where he vacationed in the company of André Derain (1880–1954), Matisse created brilliantly colored canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork, ranging from thick impasto to flat areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque-like line. Paintings such as Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), when exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, gave rise to the the first of the avant-garde movements (fall 1905–7), named “Fauvism” (from the French word fauve or “wild beast”) by a contemporary art critic, referring to its use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic brushwork to structure the composition. During his brief Fauvist period, Matisse produced a significant number of remarkable canvases, such as the portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Line (1905; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen); Bonheur de vivre (1905–6; Barnes Collection, Merion, Pa.); Marguerite Reading (ca. 1906; Museum of Modern Art, New York); two versions of the Young Sailor (1906), the second of which is in the Metropolitan Museum (1999.363.41); Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art); and two versions of Le Luxe (1907), among others.

Subsequently, Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover the “essential character of things” and to produce an art of “balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it in his “Notes of a Painter” in 1908. The years 1908–13 were focused on art and decoration, producing several large canvases such as Reclining Odalisque (1908; 1999.363.44); two important mural-size commissions, Dance and Music (1909–10), for the Moscow house of his Russian patron Sergei I. Shchukin; a trio of large studio interiors, exemplified by The Red Studio (1911; MoMA, New York); and a group of spectacularly colored Moroccan pictures. These were followed by four years (1913–17) of experimentation and discourse with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The resulting compositions were much more austere, almost geometrically structured and at times close to abstraction, as shown in the View of Notre-Dame (1914; MoMA, New York), The Yellow Curtain (1915; private collection), The Piano Lesson (1916; MoMA, New York), Bathers by a River (1916; Art Institute, Chicago), and a group of portraits in which a seated figure or the sitter’s head is positioned against a thinly brushed, neutral background. Yet he also created meticulously drawn portraits such as the famous Plumed Hat (1919; MoMA, New York).

In the autumn of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice in the south of France, and eventually settled there for the rest of his life. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse’s own creation. These paintings are suffused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate a hothouse atmosphere suggestive of a harem.

In 1929, Matisse temporarily stopped painting easel pictures. He then traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania. Dr. Albert Barnes, an important collector of modern art and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion in Merion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Bonheur de vivre. The mural (in two versions due to an error in dimensions) was installed in May 1933, and remains in place at the Barnes Foundation (Merion, Pa.). The composition highlighted the simplicity of female figures in exuberant motion against an abstract, almost geometric background. In preparation for the mural, Matisse began using a new technique—that of building up the composition from cutout shapes of previously colored paper. From 1940 onward, the paper cutouts became Matisse’s favored exploratory medium and, until the end of his life, the dominant medium of expression.

Another medium that Matisse explored and experimented with throughout his lifetime was drawing. As the most direct expression of the artist’s thoughts, drawing often helped Matisse to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas. During the mid-1930s, he created distinctive series of pen-and-ink drawings on the subject of the artist and his model, while in the early 1940s he conceived his famous sequences of Thèmes et Variations, sensitively drawn spare works in elegant, unshaded line, describing simplified forms of female figures or still lifes. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, his drawings become bolder, the contour line thicker, the forms even more simplified and devoid of detail. The latest large drawings of acrobats (1951–52), executed with a thick brush placed at the end of a long stick, are made up of contour only. They are contemporaneous with a cutout series of Blue Nudes (2002.456.58), and the two mediums seem to represent two different approaches to form and space. The relationship between figure-ground becomes ambiguous and space complements the intended form. The form appears almost sculptural.

Sculpture was another medium pursued by Matisse since his early years, and although independent in expression, it was frequently used to find a solution to pictorial problems or became an inspiration to painting. More than half of Matisse’s sculptures were completed between 1900 and 1910; he also frequently worked in series, manipulating the form and simplifying it over the years. Among his best-known works belong the series of four Back reliefs (1903–31), the series of five Jeannette heads (1910–16), and the Large Seated Nude (1925–29).

Matisse’s creativity extended into the area of graphic arts and book illustration, the latter begun when he was already in his sixties, with the illustrations to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932), and culminated with the cutout compositions (1943–44) for his book Jazz (published in 1947). But the crowning achievement of Matisse’s career was the commission for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948–51), for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, even the vestments and altarcloths. The beauty and simplicity of this project constituted Matisse’s spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk and attested to his creative genius.

Citation

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Henri Matisse (1869–1954).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mati/hd_mati.htm (October 2004)

Perez Art Museum PAMM

Geometric Abstraction

Magdalena Dabrowski
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1907–8, Cubism subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding visual world in the illusionistic—post-Renaissance—perspectival space. The Analytic Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase—Synthetic Cubism, 1912–14—introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and “constructional” elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from the Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical “reality” of the explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of painting.

This process of evolving a purely pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia. In Holland, the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language was Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). Along with other members of the De Stijl group—Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960)—Mondrian’s work was intended to convey “absolute reality,” construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Mondrian’s geometric style, which he termed “Neoplasticism,” developed between 1915 and 1920. In that year, he published his manifesto “Le Néoplasticisme” and for the next two-and-a-half decades continued to work in his characteristic geometric style, expunged of all references to the real world, and posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

In Russia, the language of geometric abstraction first appeared in 1915 in the work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) (Museum of Modern Art, New York), in the style he termed Suprematism. Creating nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, Malevich strove to achieve “the absolute,” the higher spiritual reality that he called the “fourth dimension.” Simultaneously, his compatriot Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) originated a new geometric abstract idiom in an innovative three-dimensional form, which he first dubbed “painterly reliefs” and subsequently “counter-reliefs” (1915–17). These were assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form was dictated by their inherent properties, such as wood, metal, or glass. That principle, which Tatlin called “the culture of materials,” spurred the rise of the Russian avant-garde movement Constructivism (1918–21), which explored geometric form in two and three dimensions. The main practitioners of Constructivism included Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), and El Lissitzky (1890–1941). It was Lissitzky who became the transmitter of Constructivism to Germany, where its principles were later embodied in the teachings of the Bauhaus. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, it became during the 1920s (and until its dismantling by the Nazis in 1933) the vital proponent of geometric abstraction and experimental modern architecture. As a teaching institution, the Bauhaus encompassed different disciplines: painting, graphic arts, stage design, theater, and architecture. The art faculty was recruited from among the most distinguished painters of the time: Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, all of whom were devoted to the ideal of the purity of geometric form as the most appropriate expression of the modernist canon.

In France, during the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated broad use of geometric form for ornamental purposes in the decorative and applied arts as well as in architecture. In the 1930s, Paris became the center of a geometric abstraction that arose out of its Synthetic Cubist sources and focused around the group Cercle et Carré (1930), and later Abstraction-Création (1932). With the outbreak of World War II, the focus of geometric abstraction shifted to New York, where the tradition was continued by the American Abstract Artists group (formed in 1937), including Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. With the arrival of the Europeans Josef Albers (1933) and Piet Mondrian (1940), and such major events as the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (1939, now the Guggenheim), the geometric tradition acquired a new resonance, but it was essentially past its creative phase. Its influences, however, reached younger generations of artists, most directly affecting the Minimalist art of the 1960s, which used pure geometric form, stripped to its austere essentials, as the primary language of expression. Artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Dorothea Rockburne studied the geometric tradition and transformed it into their own artistic vocabulary.

Citation

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Geometric Abstraction.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm (October 2004)

Perez Art Museum PAMM

Visu Contemporary to Exhibit New Paintings by Raúl Cerrillo

The Artist’s First Solo Exhibition in Miami

Jan 21-Feb 25, 2023 — Opening Sat, Jan 21 – 6-8 PM

Visu Contemporary is pleased to announce Raúl Cerrillo’s Inner and Outer Worlds: Finding Balance as the next exhibition in the gallery at 2160 Park Avenue and 22nd Street, Miami Beach. 

This is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in Miami and will includes over 25 new paintings, full of energetic use of color, texture and narratives with various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint and collage- creating what Cerrillo describes as, “a perfect balance between the conceptual subject and the plastic and chromatic expression.”

In this show you will find paintings clearly influenced in expressionism and the CoBrA movement that break from the traditional rules of composition, figuration and abstraction. 

Cerrillo has always been interested in the challenge of finding his center. His paintings bridge the two worlds we live in: the inner spiritual, and the outside aesthetic and artificial (ying yang). In these recent works viewers can see paintings depicting astronauts in yoga poses which evoke the idea of balance — as well as other paintings impregnated with a sense of personal and recurrent iconography. 

Raul Cerrillo (Mexico City B.1977) is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for his large-scale thick energetic paintings.  He is focused on finding and creating new paradigms for understanding the mystery of our past mother ancestral cultures with the future of our contemporary technological era. His work transits from a neo-baroque figuration to a visceral and immediate neo-expressionist abstraction with the consistency of distinctive simple archetypal symbols creating a subjective narrative for the spectator. He conceives his work with vast layers of paint and meaning, as his way of understanding the conformation of individuality and life itself through layers and layers of experience as a consequence Raul´s body of work reveals a tremendous amount of evolution in practically all aspects of his craft: style, medium, composition and subject matter. 

Cerrillo trained at the National School of Art “La Esmeralda” (where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera taught) in Mexico City. He has had individual shows in most of the major cities in Mexico and his work has been part of collective exhibitions in Austin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Venice and London. His paintings have been awarded numerous grants and awards, as well as honorable mentions. In 2018 he received the Mexican National Award for Painting “Alfredo Salce”.

Visu Contemporary is an artist first gallery where emphasis is placed on quality and presentation. VISU Contemporary’s mission is to contribute to the art history canon by presenting provocative and inclusive exhibitions, projects, installations, collaborations and performances with the goal of making each exhibition a must-see, while inspiring curiosity and intrigue from every visitor. 

#Visu Contemporary 

Raúl Cerrillo, Inner and Outer Worlds: Finding Balance

VISU CONTEMPORARY 2160 Park Avenue, Miami Beach

Opening – Meet the Artist – Jan 21, 2023, 6-8 PM

Jan 21-Feb 25, 2023

Perez Art Museum PAMM

Open Call for Submissions

TIJUANA TRIENNIAL: 2. PICTORIC INTERNATIONAL ART

Tijuana Cultural Center
July 2024 – February 2025

First Call

The Tijuana Cultural Center, CECUT, an organism from the Ministry of Culture of Mexico, invite the international artistic community to participate in the public contest with artworks or projects that use the pictorial as a starting point to explore other poetics, new issues and drifts that allow the build-up of different aesthetic models.
The call´s objective consists of not being repetitive inside the creative tradition, trusting only in the figurative representation as the do-over of the plastic formalist components. The goal is to pursue the pictorial sense inside the disruptive as an image that expresses transformation and invites to implementation of hybrid strategies that stimulate a two-directional dialogue with the spectator.
The Triennial accepts the pictorial, recognizing its metamorphic, recursive, controversial, experimental, resurgent, unsolved, (in)tense, and ultra-dialectical nature. The pictorial can be expressed as a visual, tactile, auditory, static, or dynamic manifestation to build with certainty or uncertainty, with regular or vague, offering distinct perceptive opportunities and awake other insights, encouraging to speculate to not conforming and never to become an unmovable postulate. It also considers the significance of disassociating from rules that standardized contests since this action limits the creative potential. In this manner, The Triennial seeks to liberate the art from the restraints of formats, space, and supports, allowing the opportunity to think in the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary to a new creative independence.
In the spirit of liberation, democracy becomes a necessary referee to determine how to imbue the process of selection and award of the contest’s entries with certainty and trust. For that reason, the first step is to have the participation of a curatorship foreign to our context, avowed for its critical and ethical soundness that will select the entries that will become the Triennial exhibition without bias. As a second step, to determine with fairness the first-place award and honorable mentions through a three-part voting system (curator, participants, and popular vote) in which the sum of two or more coincident votes will allow to establish the awards; all of this under the scrutiny and legality of a certified public notary.

Guidelines

Participants

1.- All artists over the age of 18 of any nationality can apply to this call. (The only people excluded from participating will be the government officials, professional service providers of the Secretariat of Culture, and officials disqualified by law)
2.- Only one pictorial proposal will be accepted per individual and/or collective.
3.- Submitted artworks must be finished or be an in situ art-installation project, which must be thoroughly described in the application format.
4.- Submitted artworks must have been elaborated during 2021–2023 and, if it’s an in situ art installation, these must be able to be completed, at least, five days before the exhibition’s opening day.
5.- Submitted artworks must be original creations and should not have participated in any previous contest or exhibition, nor participate in any other contest at the same time. Infringe upon this guideline Violating this rule is penalized with an automatic disqualification.
6.- There are no restrictions in formats or dimensions. The only limit is to be able to complete the artwork, as it is proposed, in the given space.

Procedure for the submission

This call will remain open from the day of its publication in the official digital channels of the Secretariat of Culture (cultura.gob.mx/convocatorias), and CECUT (trienal.cecut. gob.mx/en/calling/), until April 28th, 2023.
Applicants must send an email to the following address: [email protected], up until April 28th, 2023 with the following documentation in a single PDF file titled as: Trienal de Tijuana – Artist’ full name

1.- Personal data (full name, artist name, email, address, and telephone with zip codes and local area codes).
2.- Copy of an official current ID.
3.- Title of the artwork or project.
4.- Characteristics of the artwork: technique, materials, size (in centimeters), weight (in kilograms), and year of elaboration; technical need for its installation and, if it’s an in situ art-installation project, the specific description of the technical needs for its installation and estimated time to produce it. If it’s a polyptych, attach the final disposition of the pieces and, if necessary, an instruction manual to its proper installation.
5.- Statement of the artwork (maximum 4,000 characters).
6.- Individual curriculum summary (maximum 6,000 characters). If it’s a collective project, the concept or trajectory as a group and a curriculum summary of each member must be presented.
7.- Three to five images of the artwork that clearly shows the shape, volume, and dimensions. If possible, one of the images must be taken showing the final position of the artwork and using the same material needed for its installation.
8.- In the case of a proposal for an in situ art-installation project, sketches with the final measures and a work schedule must be included.
9.- Production appraisal* of the artwork or project in USD to cover the transit insurance.

*The production appraisal is the approximate value of the artwork, or the cost invested to produce it. It will always be less than the retail appraisal and it allows to acquire a less expensive transit insurance.

Procedure for selecting the finalists

1.- Starting from the publication of this call, the Curatorial Committee will be formed, and its members will be announced at the right time.
2.- In response to the global demand for gender equality in the art world, this Curatorial Committee will choose, at least, 50% of female artists, with special emphasis on the diversity of gender identities.
3.- The selected artworks will reflect the current state and innovation of the pictorial, as well as the technical and thematic diversity.
4.- The selected artworks will be published on the official website of the Triennial, on October 20th, 2023.
5.- The Committee reserves the right to exclude any artwork that does not faithfully correspond to the images sent or that does not have the proper documentation attached and/or in the requested format. Any author who submits two or more artworks will be automatically disqualified.
6.- If the selected artworks or project is conceived to be exhibited outside of CECUT facilities, as urban art projects —either art-installation or in situ works—usually are, CECUT will inquire and process the permits needed to the proper government instances, who will decide the acceptance or rejection. If the permit is not granted, CECUT will notify the participant to search for other options.
7.- Because it’s exposed to the environment, all urban art projects will be exposed to the natural damage done by atmospheric phenomena and climate, as well as ossible vandalism. CECUT is not responsible for this kind of contingencies and the participant accept such things can happen the moment it sends its proposal.

Shipment

1-. Selected artworks must be properly physically sent from 9:00 to 14:00 hours, in business days between November 6th, 2023 and March 1st, 2024, to CECUT’s address: Paseo de los Heroes 9350, Zona Urbana Rio Tijuana, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, 22010 (zip code).
2.- The artworks must be sent properly packed in a wooden box or crate that fulfills phytosanitary international regulations, completely immobilized and isolated to prevent damages, with its lid screwed on to allow that the same package is used to return the artwork when the exhibition is over.
3.- The author must cover the shipping costs of its artwork, and it must purchase transit insurance, which should be acquired using the production appraisal as the base value.
4.- In the case of artworks that require specific electronic components (such as adapters, cables, batteries, etcetera) the participant must include them in the shipping, as well as a replacement if the component has an expiration date.
5.- If the packing does not comply with the stipulated safety features or it arrives damaged because it does not follow the instructions above this paragraph, the Tijuana Triennial organization will not be responsible for its restoration and keeps its right to exclude them and have them returned to the author, at his or her expense.
6.- Once received and reviewed for good status, CECUT will insure each artwork from its arrival until its return to the author at the end of the exhibition.

In situ art-installation projects

1.- CECUT will be responsible for the installation of all artworks, except the in situ art-installation projects, whose value resides in the manual labor and the care of the author. The artist is responsible for the installation of this kind of project and he or she must come to CECUT —during business hours and days— to complete it, at least five days before opening day.
2.- Artists must solicit the dates they will require to work on their piece inside the facilities, which will be reviewed by the Tijuana Triennial organization in order to accommodate them. The stipulated time frame to complete the artwork cannot be exceeded, except a major emergency occurs.
3.- The artist must cover the cost of his or her travel and lodging and should comply with the safety measures and technical possibilities of CECUT.

Return

1.- The selected artworks will be returned once the exhibition is finished. CECUT is responsible for the return of the artworks, and they will be shipped back using the same container/packing used by the author and through a shipping company designated by CECUT.
2.- An exception will be made to urban art, in situ art-installation projects, murals or any piece that, given its ephemeral nature, does not require to be returned.
3.- The winning artworks will become part of the CECUT collection and part of the organization’s patrimony

Award selection process

In a spirit of democracy, criticism, and reasoning, the organization establishes that the process to choose the selected artworks that will form the exhibition will be in the hands of the chief curator, invited for that purpose; and the process to choose the winning artwork and two honorary mentions will be based on a triple vote:

Curatorial vote

A second curator will be invited exclusively for this stage, and he or she will select the artworks that fulfill the spirit of the event and he or she considers had merits to be acknowledged with the prizes.

Participant vote

Each selected artist or collective will have one vote to select an artwork, refraining from voting for themselves, according to an agreement of procedure, confidentiality, and ethics that will be signed in due course.

Popular vote

The public may vote electronically on the official website of the Triennial. If at least two of these three votes coincide, the artwork that had more votes in these coincidences will be declared the winner, and in descending order the two honorary mentions will be awarded. These decisions will be backed, always, by a certified public notary.
If there is no coincidence in the votes or in case of an eventuality disrupts the process, the organization will meet again, under the scrutiny of the public notary, and will decide on publicly and with a sustained reasoning, the controversy, seeking to be as transparent as possible at all times

Awards

To encourage participation and recognize the work of artists, the organization —in accordance with the unappealing ruling of the jury and with the ethical confirmation of the designated notary— will deliver the following incentives through a bank transfer in Mexican pesos or the equivalent to another currency:

First place:

$ 1,000,000.00 (one million pesos) (MXN).

Two honorable mentions:

$ 250,00.00 (two-hundred and fifty-thousand pesos) (MXN), each.

Winners must have a bank account in their name in which the payment will be made, submit their documentation for registration in the Accounting and Budget System (SICOP) and the Federal Integrated Financial Management System (SIAFF).
Payment will be deposited in the account once the corresponding procedures are completed.

Opening day and award ceremony

The opening day will be on July 26th, 2024 in the facilities of CECUT.
The award ceremony will be on August 23rd, 2024, at 18:00 hours in the facilities of CECUT.
The selected artworks will be exhibited from opening day until February 2025, at they cannot be removed from the exhibition, unless CECUT gives a precise and justified decision.
Note: CECUT is not responsible for any damage that the artworks suffer because of the quality of the material used in its production; however, it will try to repair the damage, to the extent of its abilities and possibilities, in accordance with the author.

Use of personal information

By participating in this call, the author gives authorization to the Tijuana Triennial organization to reproduce the images of its artwork and the information of its curriculum vitae on the platforms they deem appropriate.

Observations

The rules and guidelines of this contest are accepted by the applicants at the time of sending their application to this call.
Any circumstance not foreseen in this call will be resolved by the organization, together with the Award Jury, as the case may be.

For more information, please contact:
[email protected]
Phone: +52 664 687 9652

trienal.cecut.gob.mx

Call for Submissions: Language | English

Convocatoria abierta: Language | Spanish

Perez Art Museum PAMM

JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT

Brooklyn, New York, United States

1960 – 1988

“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”

                  – Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (b. 1960, New York – d. 1988, New York) is widely considered to be one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. As a young adult, Basquiat experimented with street art and became well known by the moniker SAMO in the downtown art scene in New York City. In 1981, he was included in a groundbreaking exhibition at MoMA’s PS1 outpost in Long Island City, titled “New York/New Wave.” Throughout his brief and glamorous career, the artist explored issues of black identity in America, colonization and consumerism.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. 

Wikipedia
Born: December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York, NY
Died: August 12, 1988, Great Jones Street, New York, NY
Periods: Contemporary art, Neo-expressionism, Primitivism
Buried: November 3, 1988, The Green-Wood Cemetery, New York, NY
Siblings: Lisane Basquiat, Jeanine Basquiat, Max Basquiat
Parents: Matilda Andrades, Gerard Basquiat
On view: UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Jean-Michel Basquiat (b. 1960, New York – d. 1988, New York) is widely considered to be one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. As a young adult, Basquiat experimented with street art and became well known by the moniker SAMO in the downtown art scene in New York City. In 1981, he was included in a groundbreaking exhibition at MoMA’s PS1 outpost in Long Island City, titled “New York/New Wave.” Throughout his brief and glamorous career, the artist explored issues of black identity in America, colonization and consumerism.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contributions to the history of art and his explorations of multifaceted cultural phenomena––including music, the Black experience, pop culture, Black American sports figures, literature, and other sources––will be showcased through immersive environments providing unique insight into the late artist’s creative life and his singular voice that propelled a social and cultural narrative that continues to this day.

Organized and curated by the family of Jean-Michel Basquiat, this exhibition of over 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts tell the story of Jean-Michel from an intimate perspective, intertwining his artistic endeavors with his personal life, influences, and the times in which he lived.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contributions to the history of art and his explorations of multifaceted cultural phenomena––including music, the Black experience, pop culture, Black American sports figures, literature, and other sources––will be showcased through immersive environments providing unique insight into the late artist’s creative life and his singular voice that propelled a social and cultural narrative that continues to this day.

Organized and curated by the family of Jean-Michel Basquiat, this exhibition of over 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts tell the story of Jean-Michel from an intimate perspective, intertwining his artistic endeavors with his personal life, influences, and the times in which he lived.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol.

Who Was Jean-Michel Basquiat?

Jean-Michel Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name “SAMO” in New York City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets before his painting career took off. He collaborated with Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a show of their work. Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, in New York City.

Early Life

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration.

He left home as a teenager to live in Lower Manhattan, playing in a noise band, painting, and supporting himself with odd jobs. In the late 1970s, he and Al Diaz became known for their graffiti, a series of cryptic statements, such as “Playing Art with Daddy’s Money” and “9 to 5 Clone,” tagged SAMO. In 1980, after a group of artists from the punk and graffiti underground held the “Times Square Show,” Basquiat’s paintings began to attract attention from the art world.

A self-taught artist, Basquiat began drawing at an early age on sheets of paper his father, an accountant, brought home from the office. As he delved deeper into his creative side, his mother strongly encouraged him to pursue his artistic talents.

Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti in New York City in the late 1970s, under the name “SAMO.” Working with a close friend, he tagged subway trains and Manhattan buildings with cryptic aphorisms.

In 1977 Basquiat quit high school a year before he was slated to graduate. To make ends meet, he sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets of his native New York.

In the 1981 article “The Radiant Child,” which helped catapult Basquiat to fame, critic Rene Ricard wrote, “We are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals. This is no piece by Samo. This is a piece of Samo.” This statement captures the market-driven ethos of the 1980s art boom that coincided with polarizing views played out in government and media, known as the culture wars. In this context, Basquiat was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception, whether it took the form of positive or negative stereotypes. In his work, he integrated critique of an art world that both celebrated and tokenized him. Basquiat saw his own status in this small circle of collectors, dealers, and writers connected to an American history rife with exclusion, invisibility, and paternalism, and he often used his work to directly call out these injustices and hypocrisies.

Before his tragic death in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven, Basquiat expressed seemingly boundless creative energy, producing approximately a thousand paintings and two thousand drawings. Over the decades, the study of Basquiat’s paintings and drawings has offered textured insights of the 1980s and, importantly, continued reflections on Black experience against an American and global backdrop of the white supremacist legacy of slavery and colonialism. At the same time, Basquiat’s work celebrates histories of Black art, music, and poetry, as well as religious and everyday traditions of Black life.

Crown Motif

In his earlier works, Basquiat was known for using a crown motif, which was his way of celebrating Black people as majestic royalty or deeming them as saints.

Describing the crown itself in further detail, artist Francesco Clemente posited: “Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion. Jean measured his skill against all he deemed strong, without prejudice as to their taste or age.” 

Paintings

Three years of struggle gave way to fame in 1980 when Basquiat’s work was featured in a group show. His work and style received critical acclaim for the fusion of words, symbols, stick figures, and animals. Soon, his paintings came to be adored by an art-loving public that had no problem paying as much as $50,000 for a Basquiat original.

His rise coincided with the emergence of a new art movement, Neo-Expressionism, ushering in a wave of new, young and experimental artists that included Julian Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg.

Many of Basquiat’s works have been likened to the improvisational and expansive compositions of jazz. Often themes accumulate through multiple references on the surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams. Most images in Basquiat’s works have double and triple meanings, some of which the artist discussed and others that he left undefined, remaining open to viewers’ interpretations. Basquiat sought and enjoyed unlikely collisions of imagery and words, massive influxes of information and stimuli that recreated the experience of being in a world by turns exciting, inspiring, oppressive, and toxic.

Basquiat is a 1996 biopic/drama film directed by Julian Schnabel based on the life of American postmodernist/neo expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, born in Brooklyn, used his graffiti roots as a foundation to create collage-style paintings on canvas. Jeffrey Wright portrays Basquiat, and David Bowie plays Basquiat’s friend and mentor Andy Warhol. Additional cast members include Gary Oldman as a thinly-disguised Schnabel, Michael Wincott as the poet and art critic Rene Ricard; Dennis Hopper as Bruno Bischofberger; Parker Posey as gallery owner Mary Boone; and Claire Forlani, Courtney Love, Tatum O’Neal and Benicio del Toro in supporting roles as “composite characters”.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Documentary on Youtube

The Radiant Child

Director: Tamra Davis

2010

1 hr 33 min

A thoughtful portrait of a renowned artist, this documentary shines the spotlight on New York City painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring extensive interviews conducted by Basquiat’s friend, filmmaker Tamra Davis, the production reveals how he dealt with being a black artist in a predominantly white field. The film also explores Basquiat’s rise in the art world, which led to a close relationship with Andy Warhol, and looks at how the young painter coped with acclaim, scrutiny and fame.

23 Things You Didn’t Know About Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat had an affair with Madonna and the two eventually dated.

Basquiat produced a rap record with Fab Five Freddy and Rammellzee called “Beat Bop.”

At the age of 6 he was already a Junior Member at his favorite museum, the Brooklyn Museum. His mother often took him to art museums in Manhattan when he was still young and encouraged his artistic talent.

At 17, he left his home in Brooklyn for good to live in Lower Manhattan.

He survived in Lower Manhattan by couch surfing, panhandling, drinking wine with winos, and eating 15-cent bags of Cheese Doodles.

He was hit by a car as a child and suffered a broken arm and internal injuries that could have killed him.

After the car accident, his mother gave him a copy of the medical book Gray’s Anatomy, which later inspired the name of his band, Gray, and remained a major reference for a lot of his artwork.

He played the clarinet and other instruments in Gray, despite not knowing how.

The TIME art critic Robert Hughes said about Basquiat that he was the “Eddie Murphy of the art world,” and that what people like about him was his “young, loud… invincibly dumb” persona. He also said of Basquiat’s close friend Keith Haring that he was nothing but a “disco decorator”.

At 21, Jean-Michel was the youngest artist ever to show at Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art rejected Basquiat’s work.

In the early ’80s, he didn’t have a bank account. He kept his money around his loft on Crosby Street—under rugs, in books, and under the couch.

He threw a pie at his high school principal and never graduated.

By the age of eleven, Jean-Michel Basquiat spoke three languages : English, French and Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and father Haitian and both spoke to him in their native tongue.

Dean & Deluca was his favorite food store.

He was in Blondie’s music video for the song “Rapture.”

Debbie Harry (from Blondie) and her boyfriend Chris Stein bought Jean-Michel’s first painting for $200.

Before the world knew him as Basquiat, he wrote graffiti under the moniker “Samo” (same old sh*t) with his friend Al Diaz.

At seventeen years old, he left his parents’ home in Brooklyn to live in Lower Manhattan. He managed to survive by crashing at friends’ places temporarily, or living in the streets with winos and druggies. He supported himself by selling t-shirts and homemade postcards.

He lived in Larry Gagosian’s home for a year. He worked in a basement type space. His paintings were exhibited in the West Hollywood Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles. He was in a relationship with Madonna at the time, and she lived with them for a couple of months.

When he was a kid, he was hit by a car causing very serious internal injuries. To distract him while he was at the hospital, his mother gave him a medical book, Gray’s Anatomy, which later inspired the name of his band Gray. More importantly, this book was a major reference in his artistic work as his style was defined by the symbols and imagery of the anatomical language.

He started out as a graffiti artist and used the nickname “Samo” (which stands for Same Old Sh*t) with friend and collaborator Al Diaz. He would strategically place his art near galleries and museums and where artists hung out in order to make a name for himself. In 1978, the magazine Village Voice congratulated him for getting noticed this way.

He had a noise rock band named Gray. He also produced a hip hop record called “Beat Bop” featuring K-Rob and Rammellzee. Basquiat designed the cover of the single, which appealed to both art and record collectors.

Source:

1. https://www.biography.com/artist/jean-michel-basquiat
2. https://www.basquiat.com/
3. https://www.thebroad.org/art/jean-michel-basquiat

Perez Art Museum PAMM

Art Palm Beach 2023
PALM BEACH COUNTY CONVENTION CENTER
650 Okeechobee Blvd, West Palm Beach, FL 33401
January 25 – 29, 2023

West Palm Beach, Fla. (Jan 3, 2022) – Art Palm Beach, now under new ownership and directed by the producers of the prestigious LA Art Show, is thrilled to announce the inclusion of immersive experiences focused on the climate crisis and the impact humans are having on our planet.
For the first time, DIVERSEartPB will launch in Palm Beach, a sister to the LA Art Show signature curatorial project DIVERSEartLA. Renowned Curator Marisa Caichiolo who is behind DIVERSEartLA, is leading DIVERSEartPB. “Humans are changing the earth’s natural systems in rapid and unprecedented ways. This has propelled our planet into a new geologic era: the Anthropocene,” said Caichiolo. “Contextualizing through immersive experiences and installations, we can all work together on solutions.”
For its debut, DIVERSEartPB will be supporting Florida based non-profit arts organizations and museums and is pleased to present a special exhibition by internationally renowned multi-media artist Marcos Lutyens. In his installation, Lutyens takes the viewer on a hypnotic journey addressing the current drought in California and the rest of the world. DIVERSEartPB is also proud to introduce a collaboration between artist Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi and scientist Dr. Eric Larour from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. The immersive experience and art exhibit in rising sea levels will also include a sculpture by Vezzosi, bringing new life to discarded waste.
Art Palm Beach will be held January 25th to 29th, 2023 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. There will be more than 80 prestigious contemporary, emerging and modern art galleries. Art Palm Beach will donate 15% of all ticket proceeds to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For more information about the show please visit www.ArtPalmBeachShow.com.

Tickets can be purchased here

Event Details
Art Palm Beach is internationally renowned as the premiere mid-winter contemporary art fair in The Palm Beaches along Florida’s coastline by both art critics and enthusiasts. The fair taps into the booming market of Palm Beach, one of the world’s most culturally sophisticated and affluent cities, during the peak winter season.

Featuring some of the most prestigious contemporary, emerging and modern art galleries, the show will provide a new entrée for collectors to explore and acquire the best of a broad selection of global contemporary and modern art in the vibrant cultural hub of South Florida. Geared to benefit from the current real estate boom, proximity to Miami and wealth of the Tri-County Area, Art Palm Beach 2023 will focus on presenting international modern and contemporary galleries featuring work by notable emerging artists as well as top names from the contemporary, modern, classical modern, post-war and pop eras.

A portion of all ticket sales supports the lifesaving mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.® Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food – because all a family should worry about is helping their child live. By purchasing a ticket and attending the show, you are supporting the lifesaving mission of St. Jude where its purpose is clear: Finding cures. Saving children.®

OPENING NIGHT PREMIERE
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
6pm – 10pm
Opening Night Ticket + Art Party, $150
VIP Gold Card, By Invitation Only

SHOW HOURS/TICKETS
General Admission, One Day Ticket $30
Thursday, January 26, 2023
12pm – 7pm

Friday, January 27, 2023
12pm – 7pm

Saturday, January 28, 2023
11am – 7pm (Early entry, VIP Gold Card, By Invitation Only
and Opening Night Ticket)
12pm – 7pm (General Admission)

Sunday, January 29, 2023
11am – 6pm (Early entry, VIP Gold Card, By Invitation Only
and Opening Night Ticket)
12pm – 6pm (General Admission)

For more information, please visit us at https://www.artpalmbeachshow.com/

FURTHER ENQUIRIES

[email protected]

We look forward to seeing you at Art Palm Beach 2023!

Opening Night Premiere

About the Show

Art Palm Beach is internationally renowned as the premiere mid-winter contemporary art fair in The Palm Beaches along Florida’s coastline by both art critics and enthusiasts. Before its acquisition by the Palm Beach Show Group, which also owns the LA Art Show, the fair was previously organized by IFAE founders Lee Ann & David Lester, the original founders of both Art Miami and Art Asia Hong Kong. It is Palm Beach County’s longest running fair dedicated to contemporary, emerging, and modern master works of art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Building on the LA Art Show’s reputation, expertise, success and growth, Art Palm Beach will be held January 25 to 29, 2023 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. Featuring some of the most prestigious contemporary, emerging and modern art galleries, the fair will provide an exceptional forum for gallery presentation in front of the affluent demographic of collectors in the vibrant cultural hub of South Florida.

About Palm Beach

Palm Beach, founded by Henry Flagler, has been the winter home of America’s elite industrialists and Wall Street icons since the early 20th century. Over 24% of the world’s wealthiest families reside in South Florida from January through April. In addition to offering galleries access to America’s wealthiest towns during the winter, Palm Beach is the crown jewel of cultural life in Florida. It boasts the highest percentage of arts and cultural institutions per capita of any town in America. The average age is 44 years and residents spend four and a half times the national average on art and cultural events. Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue is world renowned for international luxury brands attracting buyers from the Miami-Palm Beach metro area of 4.5 million residents.

Every corner of this county boasts world-class art, music, theater, and cultural events equal to many major cities. Now home to many of New York’s leading top blue-chip galleries and international auction houses, Palm Beach has become Florida’s collector “must-see” gallery district during the winter season.

Perez Art Museum PAMM