Artpaper. Issue #3

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REVIEW All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a century of painting life at Tate Britain

E X H I B IT ION Debbie Caruana Dingli’s exhibition of self-portraits is an instant sell-out

OPIN ION Patronage of the arts: The case for a contemporary art foundation in Malta

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13 MANY VOICES, ONE COMMON SONG

The Island is What the Sea Surrounds – the main exhibition of Valletta 2018, curated

by Austrian Maren Richter – is on an international scale.

Cont. Pg.13

The Case for a Contemporary Art Foundation in Malta

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Roy Lichtenstein, Foot and Hand, 1964.

n October 1959, six months after Frank Lloyd Wright’s death, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City. Some 16,000 people visited the museum on its opening day and it now has more than one million visitors a year.

OPINION: Art: What is it all about?

ART MARKET: Interview with Malta-based art consultant ART NEWS: Cape Town: More than just a pretty face FILM: Review Maud Herremans-Michali SPOTLIGHT: There’s a new Maltese art blogger: of Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson FEATURE: The great British art scam of the 20th Century BOOKS: Three all-time Eve Cocks favourites of architect Konrad Buhagiar INTERVIEW: French artist Julien Vinet is moving from Malta to Berlin

In 1976, Peggy Guggenheim transferred ownership of her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with the understanding that the works of art would remain in Venice. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection includes masterpieces by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Picasso, a rare Kazmir Malevich suprematist painting and 11 works by Jackson Pollock. >> Cont. Pg.18

Taste Milan Marketed and distributed by Farsons Beverage Imports Co. Ltd.The Brewery, Mdina Road, Mriehel, BKR3000 For trade enquiries please call 2381 4400

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Welcome / Team / Inside May – June ‘18

Executive Editor / Manager Lily Agius (+356) 99292488 Creative Director / Head Designer Chris Psaila Sales Manager Samantha Psaila (+356) 77880300 Contributors Daniela Apap Bologna Konrad Buhagiar Tony Cassar Darien Sarah Chircop Eve Cocks Joanna Delia Richard England Bruce Eynaud George Eynaud Judy Falzon Anna Marie Galea Maud Herremans-Michali Arabella Hogg Inez Kristina Fabrizio Mifsud Soler Giulia Privitelli Margerita Pule Gabrielle Spiller Julien Vinet Christine Xuereb Kenneth Zammit Tabona Artpaper is owned / produced by Lily Agius and Chris Psaila [ V ] Publications

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t can finally be said that an appreciation for contemporary art in Malta is finally becoming more widespread. It’s also a defining moment with the appearance of high profile shows such as the Picasso and Miró exhibition in Valletta, Manet in Gozo and the multi-site exhibition by the Austrian curator Maren Richter for Valletta 2018.

Things are starting to look up.

We are also blessed to have ambitious and unique galleries and art-spaces – all offering something different to the

NEWS 08. Blog / Malta New Blogger Eve Cocks

hunts for fresh Maltese talent

22. What’s On / International

Must-visit art fairs running this June

and July

22. Interview / Malta French artist Julien

Vinet is leaving Malta for Berlin 31. Art Market / Africa Cape Town: Not just a

pretty face

DESIGN

International Christies, London Fimbank Moco Museum, Amsterdam MutualArt.com Nicolas Van Patrick, London Soho Radio, London Sotheby’s, London Tate Britain Vineria,Venice Vitra

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30. Gubi ‘The perfect chair’ by husband and

wife design duo, Gamfratesi

OPINION 06. Patronage The case for a contemporary

art foundation in Malta 15. Art World Kenneth Zammit Tabona

questions what art is all about 15. Poem The Heart of an Architect

by Richard England

SPOTLIGHT 07. Exhibition / Malta A closer look at two

works from the exhibition Picasso & Miró:

The Flesh and the Spirit 08. Exhibition / Gozo Etchings of Edouard

Manet exhibited in Gozo 22. Exhibition / Malta

Italian painter Claudio Chiariotti exhibits

in Malta

some more attention to good quality art and design from those in charge, maybe things will really get going here.

We hope that Artpaper helps to inspire and direct creative traffic and dialogue on the island. For more information about contributing, do please contact us on info@artpaper. press

Hopefully, this year will give local artists the boost and confidence they deserve and everyone the chance to enjoy good quality art in their home country. With

08. What’s On / Malta A curated selection of

exhibitions and events in Malta

12. Vitra Panton Chair: The story of a

Vitra original Supported by / Malta AP Blitz Christine X Gallery Creative Works Fogli.com Gabriel Caruana Foundation Iniala5 Galleries Loft Malta School of Art Malta Tourism Authority Manoel Theatre Palazzo Falson Society of Arts St James Cavalier University of Malta Vamp Magazine Victor Pasmore Gallery

local art-scene – such as Blitz, with its regular residency programmes, Malta Contemporary Art with its consistent and adventurous shows and Valletta Contemporary – the gallery and Foundation created by architect and artist Norbert Francis Attard, which is finally open with a light installation show

by Spanish artist Carlos Coronas until 25 May.

ART MARKET 11. Interview / Malta French art advisor

Maud Herremans-Michali moves to Malta 19. Art World The great British art scam of the

20th Century

BOOKS / FILM 39. Recommended Three all-time favourites of architect Konrad Buhagiar 39. Review Phantom Thread

and its hazy cinematography

REVIEWS 39. Exhibition / London Bacon, Freud and a

century of painting life at Tate Britain 13. Exhibition / Malta Gabrielle Spiller visits

The Island Is What the Sea Surrounds

curated by Maren Richter for Valletta 2018

Competition

by Bruce Eynaud Which 5 famous paintings make up this figure?

Send your answers by email to info@artpaper.press by 26 May, with ‘Competition’ as the subject, for a chance to win First Prize: A year-pass to all heritage sites from Heritage Malta Second Prize: €20 voucher from VeeGeeBee Art Shop

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Art News / On the Scene May – June ‘18

05

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ON the SCENE. “ The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls ” –

FILM

BOOKS

INTERVIEW

DESIGN

ART SALES

SPOTLIGHTS

OPINION

ART NEWS

01

Elisa Von Brockdorff on Album Cover The cover for the recently released EP Kinda Good,

by Mexican music producer Mike Montano, brings together a collaboration between Electronic Music Label, Dazed & Confused Records and Maltese artist Elisa von Brockdorff. This is the first of a series of collaborations planned to take place this year between Elisa and the label, based in both Berlin and Malta, run by producer Dean Demanuele. Dazed & Confused Records has always been a platform that supports the creativity and endeavours of artists, encouraging them to showcase their work. After following Elisa’s work for some time, the label decided to work with her as her ideas and approach seemed to resonate with this year’s music.

Pablo Picasso

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Lost and Found Lucas Cranach The Elder’s captivating portrait of John Frederick the Magnanimous was presumed lost or destroyed for over 75 years. Its reappearance signals an unparalleled boon for scholars of early German Renaissance portraiture as well as a moment of longawaited justice for the descendants of Friedrich Bernhard Eugen Gutmann, from whose collection it was originally looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. This work was offered in Christie’s New York Old Masters Part I sale on 19 April, exceeding its estimate of $1,000,000-2,000,000 with $7,737,500. mutualart.com

Lucas Cranach I (1472—1553), Portrait of John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (1503—1554), half-length, Oil on panel, 24 ¾ x 15 5/8 in. (62.8 x 39.7 cm.)

Bellavista Street San Gwann T: 21385584 · E: art@vgb.com.mt Shop Online www.vgbart.com.mt

02

New Book Out Soon A new photographic book is in the making. Entitled Wiccna (Our Face), it will present about 200 photographic portraits of individuals from different backgrounds, generations and ethnicities, accompanied with quotes from the sitter to the often-complicated question “Where are you from?”

The book will feature aesthetical, anthropological and literary essays on aspects of physiognomy, identity and photography, each written in one of the various languages that have influenced Malta throughout its history.

This publication is supported by the Malta Arts Fund and is due to be out in September. For more information, and to get involved, contact Zvezdan Reljic on info@wiccna.com or call (+356) 7982 7522.

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Contemporary Spaces L a un chi ng w i t h Co n tem po rary M alta in 2 0 1 8, Con te mp ora r y Spac es is a series o f c ity gu ide s p ub l i s he d b y M A LTA CO N TE M P O RA RY A RT, m appin g out a n e tw or k o f key figu res, plac es an d e ve n t s l ea d i ng a n d redefin in g c o n tem po rary c u ltu re .

MCA EDITIONS

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Ma lta Contempora r y Ar t wa s founded i n Ma lta i n 2008 b y a r ti s t a nd c ura tor Ma r k Ma ng i on a nd qui c kly es ta b li s h ed i ts elf a s a lea di ng i nter na ti ona l for um for c ontempora r y a r t c olla b ora ti ng wi th ov er 100 a r ti s ts i n ov er 25 exh i b i ti ons a nd projec ts i nc ludi ng S i mon Sta r li ng , Cypr i en Ga i lla rd, S pa r ta c us Ch etwynd, Anth ea Ha mi lton, Jess FloodPa ddoc k & Ha r i s Epa mi nonda .

B etween 2011- 2015, i t opera ted a s a rov i ng projec t enti tled Pa ra llel B order s pres enti ng projec ts i n s ev era l Europea n c i ti es .

In 2017 MCA reopened new ga ller i es i n Va lletta pres enti ng a n a mb i ti ous prog ra mme of exh i b i ti ons b y repres ented a nd g ues t a r ti s ts .

MCA c ur rently repres ents Tom Va n Ma lderen, FenĂŞtreprojec t, Andrew B i r k & Fra nzi s ka v on Stengli n.

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Art News / Debbie Caruana Dingli May – June ‘18

Daniela Apap Bologna is an art historian and former curator of St John’s co-Cathedral. She met Debbie when she moved to Siggiewi in 2008 and have been close friends ever since.

ART EXHIBITION D A N I E L A A PA P B O L O G N A

Facing Myself An exhibition of self-portraits by Debbie Caruana Dingli

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ebbie Caruana Dingli is widely considered to be Malta’s leading watercolour portraitist. In recent years, the oil medium has taken centre stage in both her portrait paintings and her better known satirical cartoons. As a keen observer of everyday local life, she has a refreshingly uncomplicated way of conveying a message or mood through the visual medium. This time, her creative process has turned onto herself in an introspective exhibition of 15 self-portraits entitled Facing Myself (A sell-out exhibition held at The Malta Chamber of Commerce, Valletta, in April).

Closer

The near absence of self-portraits in Debbie’s oeuvre highlights the fact that, as a person, being the centre of attention is a source of discomfort for her – especially if elements of her femininity are being emphasised. The very notion of taking a digital ‘selfie’ and displaying it anywhere would make her burst into hysterical laughter. The need for introspection in her case is directly linked to an episode in her life that saw her at her most vulnerable. In May 2016 she was involved in a major car accident in which she sustained various serious injuries, amongst which was a broken right clavicle and a battered right hand which needed surgery and treatment, putting her prolific career on hold.

“ It is very revealing that she chose to ‘face herself ’ and confront issues of mortality and ageing without her full range of artistic talents in place. ” Debbie was forced to not use her right hand after a second operation on her clavicle in November 2016. As part of the healing process, she came up with the impulsive and almost bizarre idea of training her left hand to paint a series of self-portraits. It is very revealing that she chose to ‘face herself’ and confront issues of mortality and ageing without her full range of artistic talents in place. The idea was most certainly brilliant.

In her left-handed series she captures her likeness exceptionally well and retains a diluted range of her vigorous brushstrokes. Her palette is somewhat subdued but still bears hints of her favourite pinks and greens. As described by Caroline Miggiani, curator of this exhibition, she is ‘brutally honest’ in her renditions. In Winter Hat, one of my personal favourites, she paints herself clad in her thickest jersey, red scarf and woollen tasselled beanie, with her melancholic face and distant eyes peeping through her ever-present specs.

The Rock Fish

The items of clothing are not cleverly selected props but actual items I saw her wear that cold Frau Bra

day on her daily 10-minute walk from her house to her son’s studio, which is essentially a deep garage on the outskirts of Siggiewi. She chose to work outside the house as she needed more space for her full-length mirror but also probably because she needed to create a ritual to be alone with herself. This place would become Debbie’s creative cavern for the next three months.

Unlike her first self-portrait, painted in 1985, she keeps ambiguous eye contact with the viewer. The padded sling worn during the period of convalescence and the stylised stitches on her clavicle become ubiquitous symbols of her resilience in the face of adversity. Elements from nature, such as fish swirling dreamily around her face, and birds, find their way naturally in Debbie’s art and can indirectly have hidden subconscious meanings.

No longer painting with her left hand, Debbie’s mood shifts from a meditative one to a resolute and joyous affair. In The Rockfish, humour is back and she chooses to represent herself immersed in the sea, waiting to break out into a vigorous forward-moving breast stroke.

The Winter Hat

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Art News / Mark Sagona / James Micallef Grimaud May – June ‘18

EXHIBITION

The energy in her pose is palpable and emphasised by the red outlines of her arms.

The confidence in the handling of paint and the beaming smile in Debbie’s paintings with her dogs are testimony to the immense love she has for them and the joy they bring her. Their wellbeing and care was a source of major concern during her convalescence and being without them was “the lowest point” of her life.

INSTALLATION

Debbie’s son George Eynaud in a note to his mum about her works writes: “It is a real step forward in an interesting and introspective area after painting other people for so long. It’s a bit Paula Rego, a bit Soutine, a bit Manet but totally unique!”

I couldn’t agree more!

Giraffa At Dock 6 James Micallef Grimaud’s installation entitled Giraffa at Dock 6 also highlights the need for changes in our view of nature and in our relationship with the environment.

The expressive vision of herself comes full circle in her final painting, entitled Me in my Frau Bra. This is most certainly a statement piece and exudes confidence not in her self-image per se but in the person she has become as a consequence of this journey.

EXHIBITION

Mark Sagona at the Gozo Citadel – The Annunciation, Death and the Resurrection: a conversation with Favray

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his installation was conceived specifically for The Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale held between November 2015 and January 2016.

Now, through an agreement between the Gozo Culture and Information Office, Ministry for Gozo and the artist, the work is currently installed at the Chapel of the Citadel Cultural Centre at the Gozo Citadel, where it will hang until September 2018.

As the title indicates, this site-specific painting installation is made up of two abstract works originally produced to hang in the Late Baroque architectural setting of the 18th-century chapel of the old seminary of Malta (now the Mdina Cathedral Museum), flanking the Annunciation of the Virgin (1748), a masterpiece by the French artist Antoine Favray (1706-1798). The measurements of the contemporary canvases are intended to reflect Favray’s dimensions so that a ‘triptych’ is created, with the Annunciation as its central panel. The setting here tries to reconstruct the original scenario.

“ Abstraction is a true manifestation of spirituality and the artist’s spirit ”

This project aims to create a rapport between the old and the contemporary in several levels of exploration and creativity. The idea stems from the artist’s strong conviction that abstraction is a true manifestation of spirituality and the artist’s spirit; thus its existence in a sacred space, and its juxtaposition to a work which, although sacred in theme, is not necessarily spiritual.

The concept is intended as a conversation through the bringing together of two seemingly different worlds which are then linked and interrelated through the choice of themes. This relationship is then embodied in the language of light and colour which is consonant with Sagona’s latest developments of his abstract language. It yearns for a tension between the academic and the contemporary, the figurative and the abstract, between the fixed and the suspended, the ethereal and the tangible.

Opening hours: Daily 9am until 5pm. Next door to Gozo Cathedral Museum, Triq il-Foss.

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orming part of a wider exhibition The Island is What the Sea Surrounds, a Palumbo crane at what is known as the Red China Dock, is being spray-painted to look like a giraffe, in acknowledgement of the proximity of Malta to Africa. The artist explains: “Since Grand Harbour is a haven against all kinds of natural threats I envisaged this crane/giraffe within an enclosed and protected environment – having in mind the Kordofan giraffe, whose habitat is in one of the most hostile environments in central Africa, due to constant warfare and poaching. These giraffes will, metaphorically, find in the Maltese dockyard and the surrounding bastions the protected habitat that has evaded them for so long.

They may also, hopefully, be adopted by the Cottonera community, become a place of public memory and influence their daily lives in a positive way.”

Curated by Maren Richter, Giraffa is part of The Island is What the Sea Surrounds (Dal-Bahar Madwarha) – a visual arts exhibition mounted on behalf of Valletta 2018 – European Capital of Culture.

Design News / Loft May – June ‘18

DESIGN

Is Gubi’s Beetle Chair the Chair of Our Time?

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tude of the couple who created it. Gamfratesi are self-confessed social media recluses, contactable only via email, each of which they attend to personally. Their commitment to being present in the moment translates to a distinct sense of clarity, a trait that is visually evident in all their designs. Their overarching aim? To create modern furniture that is “honest, humble and natural”.

here have been many attempts to create the perfect modern chair.

The best of them, the Barcelona Lounge Chairs or Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7, manage to capture a particular mood, operating as a reflection of the times in which they were designed. It’s a task that never seems finished because we each have such an intimate connection with being seated. We spend most of our lives sitting down, we fight for the best spot on the sofa and hand down designer chairs to our children. One explanation is that a chair is never merely a place on which to perch – it’s a place to reflect or, as Charles Eames once said, a piece of architecture that you can hold in your hands.

And yet the Beetle Collection (now expanded to include a Barstool, Sofa, Ottoman, Lounge Chair and Office Chair) is equally at home in an exclusive restaurant as in a minimalist loft in Reykjavik.

So, what about now? In the era of Hygge and Lagom, which of the gorgeous designer chairs on the market today best meet our need for cocooning comfort and 21st-century style? If Instagram, the oracle of our digital age, is to be believed, there is one clear winner.

Gubi’s Beetle Chair was first conceived in 2013, the result of years of experimentation by husband and wife design duo, Gamfratesi. Inspired by the intriguing anatomy of its namesake, it has prompted a velvet revolution that shows no sign of waning.

The sculpted curves of the Beetle Chair’s gorgeous shell and tapered legs immortalise this unusual relationship, creating a charming modern chair that

is understated yet somehow still luxurious.

Contrast – as essential in the natural world as it is in design – is key to the chair’s success. The visually strong and sculpted shell is offset by the softness of its lush velvet upholstery. Contrasting piping mimics the sutures of a beetle’s segmented body, outlining the

two ever so slightly unbalanced shells.

Clean, Scandinavian lines are met by Italian warmth, evident in the luxurious upholstery and gold painted legs – a testament to Gamfratesi’s respective heritages.

If this contemporary chair conjures up serious feelings of old-school glamour, it’s because this is somewhat the atti-

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All of which leaves design lovers with one burning question: Is the Beetle Chair the defining chair of our time?

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Art News / Picasso + Miro / Vitra May – June ‘18

EXHIBITION

DESIGN

The Faun and the Bird: a closer look at two works from the exhibition, Picasso & Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit

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hrough a collaboration with Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti and The Office of the President of Malta, the entire Vollard Suite by Pablo Picasso, and a selection of paintings by Joan Miró, have been brought to Malta by Fundación MAPFRE for a first ever major exhibition entitled Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit.

The exhibition forms part of the international project Picasso-Méditeranée, an initiative from the Musée Picasso in Paris focused on Picasso’s relationship with the Mediterranean and featuring the participation of 60 museums between 2017 and 2019.

Sarah Chircop and Giulia Privitelli focus on two works by the Spanish masters – one etching and one painting, respectively – helping us explore and experience the exciting labyrinth of The Vollard Suite, in dialogue with the work of another Spanish master of the 20th century, Joan Miró. Continued pg 15

Panton Chair

The story of a Vitra original ‘Rolf (Fehlbaum, son of the Vitra founding family) came to visit us one day and spotted a prototype of the Panton chair: it wasn’t stable enough to sit on.

Rolf asked: “Why isn’t this chair being manufactured?” and I answered: “15 to 20 manufacturers have tried it but have all rejected the project for different reasons.” A well-known American designer – not Eames – even declared that something like that shouldn’t be called a “chair”, claiming it was not suitable for sitting on. Rolf was immediately on the phone to a Vitra technician, Manfred Diebold... Without Rolf, there would have been no Panton Chair.’ Verner Panton The history of the Panton Chair dates to the latter half of the 1950s, when Danish designer Verner Panton developed the idea of a plastic cantilever chair. However, manufacturers did not want to pursue this daring concept. Willi Fehlbaum, the founder of Vitra, was interested in the idea but only agreed to it when Rolf Fehlbaum and the head of product development, Manfred Diebold, paid a visit to Panton and returned with glowing reports.

1963 marked the start of a collaboration between Vitra and Verner Panton

with the development of one of the most iconic chair designs of the 20th century. It turned out to be a nearly impossible challenge, as the bold contours imagined by the designer had to be reconciled with the physical limits of plastics technology and manufacturing requirements. Several years of research, testing, discarded designs and continuous prototype development were involved and the final shape of the chair was the culmination of 10 prototypes made of manually laminated, glass-fibre reinforced polyester.

Verner Panton and Vitra developers worked persistently and steadfastly on the project, sacrificing their evenings and weekends.

A small pilot series of just 150 pieces was manufactured in 1967 using coldpressed, glass-fibre reinforced polyester. It was the first all-plastic chair to be made in one piece with a cantilever design and its sculptural shape, in Panton’s trademark vibrant colours, caused quite a sensation. However, the costly and complex procedure made it impossible to keep up with the ensuing demand. After further tests with rigid polyurethane foam from Bayer proved successful, mass production commenced with an innovative moulding technique in 1968. This yielded larger quantities but still required time-consuming manual finishing. >>

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Interview / Julien Vinet May – June ‘18

Margerita Pule is a cultural programmer, artist and writer, with a Master’s degree in Fine Art. Her art practice and research is concerned with the contradictions of political and social realities

PERSPECTIVE

all, a feeling or a connection.

He talks about the “personal experience between you and the work”: only you can have the connection you have with a work of art – nobody else can have that same experience.

We talk about why he works in this way; in monoprints, pressing paper onto a glass sheet that’s been inked with a mixture of printing ink, glue and oil. (He’s been working in this way for the past 15 years). He tells me that the technique allows him to relinquish control. Indeed, it’s a technique that forces him to allow some serendipity into the process of creating. It strips the artistic act back to strokes and gestures, to a distillation of spirit.

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ask him why he chose to work in Malta. “The light” he says, as if he’s a lost impressionist spending his days painting the shimmer on the waves of a sun-clad Mediterranean. But his work is exclusively black on white: thick, viscous ink on an off-white page, perfectly balanced, perfectly commanding and perfectly in control of its own space.

For Julien Vinet, it seems that the most beautiful contrast in the world is that between black and white. Black and white is the alpha and omega: a perfect duality contained in one composition.

And the light in Malta allows him to investigate this contrast further, to see the graduation within the black and the variations in the white. This is because, as you look deeper, you see that the black is not really black: it possesses a lustre and a sheen that almost make it vibrate in the evening light. And the white is not clinically white, but consists of delicate variations of cream, pale browns, and gentle, sloping offwhites.

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As I visit Vinet in his studio in Valletta, he is working on a series of pieces using black viscous ink on old, used naval charts that he salvaged from a Maltese smuggling boat. The contrast between the strong, viscous black surfaces and the fine navigational detail, as well as the age of the paper, is striking: there’s something that draws you in, pulls you closer.

We talk about lots of things – from his time as a young man in Japan to the changes he has seen in Valletta over the last few years. He gets excited talking about a particular busker on Republic Street in Valletta as if it’s a deliberate, contemporary art performance, but he also remembers Austin Camilleri’s Żieme installed in front of Malta’s Parliament Building in 2014 and the reactions it attracted from passers-by.

‘What sent you to Japan? I ask him.

Vinet travelled to Japan at the age of 22 and lived there for almost a decade, before moving to Malta with his Japanese wife. “I like when things change” he replies, “When things are open”. There’s a

The influence of Japanese aesthetic is evident in Vinet’s work, from the calligraphy-like gestures in the ink and the purity of his strokes, to the balanced compositions they create. In particular, he emphasises the negative spaces in his work: the empty space left around the black is as important as the black itself. What is left out is as strong as what is put in. It’s the alpha and the omega again, but this time in space rather than colour.

Vinet’s Frenchness comes through in our conversation, somehow. It’s there in his egalitarian belief that art should be for everyone and not confined to an elitist contemporary-art cohort. It’s also there in his work: in the confidence that’s contained in his brushstrokes and in his confidence that his abstract work can speak for itself without a theoretical explanation or defence.

For Vinet, art should “strike you in your soul” – creating or viewing art is not only a cerebral process. He describes seeing five of Monet’s Water-Lily paintings in the Chichu Art Museum (ChichzBijutsukan) in Naoshima as being a spiritual experience. For him, art provokes feeling: devotion or even disgust but, above

Somewhere there’s a contrast between his secularist or egalitarian outlook, and the almost spiritual qualities he attributes to art: it’s a gentle contrast that is reflected in the balanced tension in his work.

The only colour you’ll see in his work is the bright red mark made by his ‘seal’, which was made for him by the same stamp master as the Japanese Imperial Family - a calligraphy and stamp master certified as a Living National Treasure.

It’s Vinet’s signature, that he only places in a carefully-considered spot on a work, once he considers the work to be finished and fit to leave his studio. The act is like a blessing but it also contains a contradiction that provides another balance-point. Now the visceral black and white is on one side of the equation – on the other is the small bright red square of Japanese characters.

Does an artist’s work reflect his character and how he lives his life? Can an artist’s character be distilled in the brushstrokes of his work? Whether Vinet himself is a perfect balance of strength, subtlety, spirituality and serendipity, I don’t know. But there’s something in his work (and in his conversation) that is simultaneously abstract yet meaningful that makes it compelling.

All paintings from his studio in Malta can be viewed at Lily Agius Gallery with a solo exhibition open until 24 May, Tuesday to Saturday 9.30am – 1.30pm or by appointment.

The alpha and the omega:

strength evident there, a determination – somehow – in the act of embracing a different culture, of self-challenging and looking for change. Indeed, after about eight years in Malta, Vinet is ready for change again; this time to the not-so-far away city of Berlin.

We also talk about art in Malta, about how sometimes it can be too self-referential and not sufficiently open. We discuss the Malta Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale – a big moment for Maltese contemporary art – and while Vinet is not harshly critical of it, he does suggest that the transcendence of Malta’s national identity could have been more open, and more universally-themed for an international audience.

Art News / Vitra / Gabrielle Spiller May – June ‘18

Gabriele Spiller is a Swiss-German author and journalist who lives between Berlin and Gozo. She looks forward to playing a part in promoting Malta’s emerging art scene.

24

Continued from pg 11

Verner Panton and Vitra were not satisfied with the status quo and continued to search for better alternatives. They believed they had found a solution in a new thermoplastic material developed by BASF, as the injection moulding process considerably reduced the need for finishing work. However, technology at that time did not enable variations in material thickness, which led to several modifications to the design – the most noticeable being a series of ridges in the transition zone between the base and seat. The material subsequently proved to be far less resistant to ageing and weathering than was initially assumed, causing the chairs to break and threatening Vitra’s im-

age. Production was therefore discontinued in 1979.

It took years for Vitra to recover from the shock of this quality defect. However, interest in the Panton Chair lived on over those years and Vitra resumed production in 1990 – returning to rigid polyurethane foam with its complex finishing but greater resistance to breakage.

Further advancements in plastics technology and new injection moulding options inspired Vitra and Panton to pick up the project again in the 1990s. Working closely together, they developed a new version made of polypropylene. Thirty years after the initial market

launch, one of Panton’s key goals was finally reached: the plastic chair as an affordable industrial product.

Verner Panton died shortly before the chair was presented in 1999.

Vitra has manufactured the design – which can be found in numerous museums and exhibitions – in two models ever since: the Panton Chair Classic in rigid polyurethane foam with a glossy surface and the Panton Chair in polypropylene with a matt finish. Since 2007, the latter has also been available in a children’s version, Panton Junior, in keeping with the designer’s original plans.

PERSPECTIVE

MANY VOICES,

one common song

The Island Is What the Sea Surrounds intends to provide a lot of food for thought. Maren Richter’s approach is typical of the European contemporary art

Heba Amin

T

hey know each other: they have met in Venice or Berlin – where many of the artists shown live. Raphael Vella is the one who recalls the actual use of the site. He places those single tables and hard chairs in reminiscence of the exams taken at St Elmo’s. And in his Archipelago installation, he asks: “Is an island a place one escapes to or escapes from?”

He does that with Maltese artists in mind who, after leaving school, wonder if they should stay or go. As he himself has no answer, he invited other artists who have lived on islands around the Mediterranean Sea to contribute their texts, videos and images. He calls the collaborative work “the beginnings of a dialogue”.

scene – being an intellectual debate on social and political issues. If only it was a debate!

All these artists seem to be on the same wavelength; many of them deal with the migration crisis – and some present easy solutions to difficult matters. The Center for Political Beauty, for example, a German ‘assault team’ as they call themselves, presents its video The Jean Monnet Bridge (2016). They propose

the building of a 230 km-long bridge between Africa and Sicily in an attempt to save lives and curb people-smuggling. Additionally, and until it would be finished in 2030, the European Union will install a thousand rescue platforms across the sea. Who would not want to see an end to the drowning? But is it really that simple? To me, “Free your mind and the rest will follow”, is not an adequate answer to the humanitarian challenge.

Having experienced similar exhibitions, I find that artists of the hour – such as Syrian-German Manaf Halbouni – produce to meet a demand. While the catalogue attempts to put his work, entitled Uprooted (an old car with an open boot in which to sleep), into a context of “the Maltese relationship with cars, real estate developments and displacement”, Halbouni suggests booking a night in his installations in Valletta, Birzebbugia or Qala/Gozo in order to feel what it is like to have no home anymore. Again, is it an appropriate reaction to the gentrification process, or is it just a fashionable statement of the artist who gained international fame with his Monument: three upturned buses seemingly from Aleppo in the heart of Dresden and later in front of the Brandenburg Gate?

Continued pg 14

No.3__ Artpaper / 13

Art News / V18

Highlights

May – June ‘18

EXHIBITION

Heba Y. Amin (from Egypt) leaves the stronger impact as she digs out former colonisation plans to evaporate the Mediterranean Sea to create a supercontinent. And, right, Malta wouldn’t be an island anymore.

Her project is also a feminist statement as she slips into the role of a dictator who oversees the ‘Operation Sunken Sea’. In May, she will deliver a speech in uniform in Valletta.

Art as research is a trend and, accordingly, Maltese Kristina Borg actually collected ethnological material when she interviewed mayors and residents of the Greater Sliema area and created an imaginary map.

Her concept of No-Man’s Land explores how natives move out and foreigners move in. She combines her

work with a public intervention in June, using a traditional – but electric-powered – luzzu boat.

Two artists were invited to use other public ground in Valletta: one is the Documenta 14 participant Ibrahim Mahama. He draws A Straight Line through the Carcass of History at the Pixkeria. His site-specific work is on a larger scale and wants to reflect the atmosphere of the old fish market and traces of the people who were employed there. So the Ghanaian installed a wooden frame, like the ones used for smoking fish in his home country, reaching from the gutter up to the ceiling. The structure divides the building into two halves and leaves the visitor with the question: Where do you stand?

Maybe the most impressive installation comes from Turner prize-recipient Susan Philipsz OBE. A good deal of the work has been done by nature, however. People queue in Republic Street to enter a cistern built by the Knights of St John underneath the Law Courts. They are overwhelmed by its height and the long fine roots which tangle like lianas from the trees in the street above into the room. When Susan Philipsz’ sound installation begins, some may shiver in this World War II shelter: You hear the ringing of a war-damaged bell and her voice intonating “Who by fire/who by water”, a Leonhard Cohen-song, meaning who decides in which way you die? (until 1 July)

Kristina Borg, No Mans Land, St Elmo Exam Centre

Heba Amin, Operation Sunken Sea, Installation View. Del-Bahar Madwarha

Ibrahim Mahama, A Straight Line through the Carcass of History, Pixkeria

Valletta Underground Cistern with artist Susan Philipsz

EXHIBITION

The Tao of Nature

The exhibition entitled The ‘Tao’ of Nature presents Yang Zhiling’s recent achievements in the medium of watercolour. His method of ‘flowing colours’ develops the characteristics of this aqueous art of nature to their fullest extent.

His process, characterised by ever-changing hues which are at once ‘flowing’ and ‘painting’, necessitates a tilting of the canvas to control the flow and

No.3__ Artpaper / 14

direction of the colours and forms. It also requires the constant addition of more colours, flowing, tilting and adding until he achieves the desired result. This method embodies a kind of visual logic that could be described as ‘modelling through flowing water’, which has a strong connection to the ‘intervention’ in the Western oil-painting tradition. It is a body of work which embodies

the poetic charm of the East, while at the same time subverting the Chinese tradition.

The ‘Tao’ of Nature runs until 20 May at Spazju Kreattiv, St James Cavalier, Valletta, on Mondays from 9am to 5pm, Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am to 9pm & on Saturdays & Sundaysfrom 10am to 9pm.

Art News / Picasso + Miro May – June ‘18 EXHIBITION Continued from pg 11

Exercising unconscious and spontaneous invention to illustrate his deep-seated interest in the renewal of symbols and forms, in Tête, oiseau, Miró revisits and builds on the lines of some of the central themes of his previous work. It particularly refers to his obsession with birds and the outward-looking eye, a motif that went well with his unwavering concern for independence and freedom.

Tête, oiseau points to yet another quality of Miró’s preceding work, particularly of the 1960s, in which he had adopted a more noticeable gestural approach, characterised by his fascination with what he calls the ‘Japanese soul’. Indeed, Miró had travelled to Japan twice: the first time precisely a decade before this work was painted and again in the early 1970s to decorate the pavilion of the Japanese Gas Association at the International Exposition in Osaka.

The expressive and large, black brushstrokes – like strong calligraphic signs – are an allusion to Miró’s fascination with Japanese calligraphers who, quite evidently, left a lasting, indelible mark on his working method. This often entails working hours on end, in a heightened ‘state of trance’, as Miró puts it, relying less on sensory experience and more on physical gesture. In contrast, he would further incorporate accidental, loose marks: a testimony, perhaps, to his life-long faith in chance and unexpected, yet timely, encounters, all of which translate into his ability to create a recognisable, personal universe out of lines and

fields of colour.

In other words, Miró was like a scribe who wrote in colour what could not be put into words. Indeed, the relationship between expression-laden script and image, both signs in their own right, characterised most of Miró’s artistic output in his later years.

Essentially, this was a practice rooted in the enigmatic, carved signs of prehistory: an interest that was especially perpetuated in the 19th century. Pioneering artists such as Wassily Kandisnky, Frantisek Kupka, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, among others and many more who followed in the succeeding century, eventually came to mould their creations on theosophy, on ancient wisdom, on mysticism and the universal principles governing the cosmos.

that of a basil which, according to Mediterranean folklore, has the power to transform animals into delightful creatures, especially during a full moon.

The Vollard Suite comprises a series of a hundred etchings produced between 1930 and 1937 and commissioned by Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). It can be described as an allegory of the relationship between the artist and himself, and where the conflict of creation must be resolved. The body of work offers a variety of themes, including the sculptor in his studio contemplating his creation, love and eroticism, as well as Greek mythology, where he very loosely interprets the myth of the minotaur as he was fascinated with his “human, all too human” side.

Moreover, the print is directly based on Rembrandt’s Jupiter and Antiope of 1659, where the faun may be a cipher gently uncovering Antiope – who is Marie-Thérèse.

One could also see a pagan twist to the iconography of the Annunciation scene, where both flesh and spirit arrive to take possession of the sleeping woman, drawing back her sheet and this time contemplating her with affection rather than burning passion.

Finally, one would also do well to remember that 1936 saw the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, adding yet another layer to this intricate and powerful etching.

The Suite further illustrates Picasso’s deep understanding of the purity of line as well as its expressivity in various forms. He makes use of a range of techniques throughout the series, including etching, aquatint and

The structure of the entire partition for the Picasso and Miro exhibition was manufactured and installed by local furniture veteran Joinwell. Commissioned because of their experience with similar projects, Joinwell was tasked with the design of the layout together with the organisers, manufacturing all the structures and installing them on site, taking great care with respect to the existing decor of the Palace rooms. The work was planned around the availability of the exhibition rooms due to Presidential events being held in the same space, and the team was also responsible for liaising with other third-party contractors to ensure a smooth and timely installation ahead of the exhibition opening.

drypoint. Here we are presented with the sixth and final state of the copper plate, where simple black lines and slight shading have been worked into richer tones, bringing out a dramatic play of light and shade.

The painterly quality and subtle layers of the aquatint technique further emphasise the air of mystery and eroticism. With each state, the faun himself grew more refined and classical-looking, whereas minor details such as the plant in front of the balcony, transformed from that of a strawberry into

This was a journey upon which Miró similarly embarked and continued, a journey through which he produced modern-day icons that frame what is boundless and envisage what cannot be seen, if not with the eye of the spirit.

The works illustrated are currently on show in the exhibition Picasso & Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit, organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the Office of the President of Malta and Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. The exhibition will be open to the public until 30 June at The Palace, Valletta.

Joan Miró, Tête, oiseau Tête, oiseau (Head, bird), 1976 Oil on canvas 65 x 54 cm © Successió Miró 2018

“I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” In other words, for Joan Miró, the application of paint to canvas was more than a mere arrangement of colour and form in space; it suggested a profound reality guided by the microcosmic details which fill the natural world and his own untethered memories of the past.

of the half-goat/half-man: they are worlds apart. This etching was made when the 10year love affair between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse was beginning to fizzle out.

Dated June 1936, Picasso’s faun uncovering a sleeping woman is the last print from The Vollard Suite. Here we are presented with a melancholic scene, with something quiet, subtle and full of symbolism, especially when compared to the passionate energy of the previous prints. Without disturbing her, the faun gently uncovers the figure of yet another homage to Marie-Thérèse, as light streams in from behind him. The soft, maternal lines that make up her figure are contrasted with the harsher, twisted lines

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Art Market / Collecting May – June ‘18

Anna Marie Galea is a journalist and writer with a passion for all things beautiful.

She has written for multiple newspapers and magazines focusing on fashion, the arts and culture.

Highlights

ANNA MARIE GALEA

THE ART OF COLLECTING. Interview: Maud Herremans-Michali

It was around this time that Maud’s focus became even more centred on the impressionists, post-moderns and moderns. “After New York, I went to work for one of the creators of Art Price in Paris. At the time he was a private dealer at a gallery on Avenue Matignon and wanted me to manage it. I enjoyed my time in Paris but the truth is that I didn’t really want to work in the contemporary art field; to me, art-collecting is made of history and investment and with contemporary art you can never have the former. If you look at what was popular 15 years ago, only five or six of those names will still fetch money now; there’s simply too little time to be able to tell whether or not something will retain its value. With contemporary artists you can never say with certainty what will stand the test of time and what won’t.”

Having lived all around the world, Maud has a variety of stories to tell but her favourite one so far involves the famous painter, Peter Doig. “I was selling an early Peter Doig painting when

So what advice does Maud have for someone wanting to start their own collection? “If you’re looking to invest, you should always go for a piece by someone who is already established. A big contemporary picture may be the same price as a small Picasso sketch, but the Picasso will always give you your money back, should you want to sell, whereas many contemporary collectors have found themselves in situations where they want to sell their pieces but there is no market for them to do so.

“Of course, what you choose to buy and invest in is entirely dependent on you and your character. Apart from buying, selling and looking for pieces for my clients, I can also help them to build their collections based on what kind of people they are, and catalogue any existing pieces they already have. I take great joy in meeting families and looking at their homes and their tastes: it’s only after this that I can help them source or choose the right piece for them personally.

“ I FEEL THAT IT’S MY DUTY TO GIVE A PICTURE THE RIGHT HOME. THERE ARE MANY TIMES WHEN I FALL IN LOVE WITH THE PIECES MYSELF AND, IN A SENSE, THEY BECOME MINE ” Passionate, articulate and extremely approachable, it’s little wonder that Maud Herremans-Michali has such an illustrious list of clients.

Born into the art world, Maud grew up surrounded by great beauty and it is this love that she brings to her work as a freelance art procurer and advisor. Anna Marie Galea talks to Maud about her adventures around the world, the people whom she’s met along the way and why she and her husband decided to relocate to Malta a year ago.

in 2003, moved to Sotheby’s in 2004 and spent 2005 working completely free-lance until she moved to America. “I went to Miami during the 2007 Art Basel and the vibe was absolutely amazing. The only problem was that, as the season changed, so did everything else and when things died down, I found myself wanting to spread my wings again. So, in 2009 I opened a gallery on the Lower East Side in New York where we sold pieces by New York-based artists.

I lived in New York and this particular piece was unlike what he usually paints as it was set in Manhattan. One day, a man comes in and tells me that it can’t be a Peter Doig because it’s nothing like what he usually paints, and after I confirmed that indeed it was, this man tells me that he’s from Trinidad and that Peter Doig is his neighbour. I got Doig’s details from him and contacted him myself to ask him more about the piece and being able to hear all the information from the man himself was just thrilling.

Why art? “My father had a gallery, so you could say that art was part of my life from day one. Whenever we travelled, we would always visit museums but growing up, I thought that I might become a politician or a journalist. In fact, I even studied science-related subjects. I eventually opted to study business at HEC Montréal Business School in Canada and went into the art world later.”

“The secondary market I dabbled in consisted of impressionists, post-modern and modern artists but, at the time, many buyers who would usually be interested in those genres wouldn’t be caught dead visiting the Lower East Side: they would stick to the Chelsea neighbourhood and that would be it.

Now, things are very different, and the Lower East Side is booming, but at the time it was almost impossible to get people there. By the end of 2009, I

“I love how cosmopolitan the world has become and, in fact, one of the reasons why we fell in love with Malta when we came here last June was the fact that we can travel anywhere from here in a really short time. This island is blessed with so many things: we love the view of Valletta from where we live; the people have welcomed us with open arms and let’s not forget the beautiful sunny weather. I can also work here remotely

Always looking to expand her horizons, Maud went to work at Christies in Paris

closed the gallery and started to work freelance for private collectors again.”

with ease and help people everywhere build their own dream collections.”

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“At the end of the day, they have to love the piece and live with it and I feel that it’s my duty to give a picture the right home. There are many times when I fall in love with the pieces myself and, in a sense, they become mine. In fact, when I see them on the market again to be re-sold, I always feel as if it’s my painting that is going to a new home.

Ultimately, what makes me happy is to see beautiful pieces going somewhere where I know they will be appreciated: that’s what makes my job worthwhile.”

Words / Feature May – June ‘18

I

n June 2000, MGM bought the rights to film what has been called ‘the largest art fraud of the twentieth century’, involving the sale of at least 200 fake modern paintings. Various threats of libel scuppered the Hollywood deal – which was to star Michael Douglas and his future wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones. However, this did not stop this complex and bizarre tale from making headlines all over the world.

TONY CASSAR DARIEN

The Great British Art Scam of the 20th Century

And behind this most audacious art scam, are the two main actors: John Drewe, conman, and John Myatt, accomplice, working successfully in tandem until the day a scorned woman unleashed her wrath.

Music and art were the twin passions of John Myatt’s youth. In 1968, he graduated from the Cheltenham College of Art with top honours and, with a desire to teach, he attended Bristol University, where he obtained his PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate of Education). Not finding teaching entirely to his taste, in July 1970 – when he was around 25 years of age – he switched to painting.

Four years later Myatt contracted meningitis and since, he was also a versatile pianist, he decided to try his luck on the London pop scene. He was befriended

by Ken Lewis, the songwriter from the pop group The Ivy League, and in 1979 he wrote the song Silly Games, sung by Janet Kay, which climbed to No. 1 in the UK charts.

He married Anita Bailey in 1981, and sired two children, but the couple divorced and Myatt was left with two young offspring to bring up on his own.

Having to stay at home to care for his children meant that his visible means of support swiftly deteriorated.

At this point he recalled how his boss at the recording company had once mentioned his deep yearning for a painting by the Frenchman Raoul Dufy.

Myatt had then, in less than a month, completed two ‘signed’ Dufy’s which he gave to his boss. This incident made Myatt realise that painting ‘copies’ in the style of other painters could provide a source of income while working from home, thus allowing him to properly care for his children. He immediately booked a small advertisement in

paid a percentage of any profits.

If Myatt proved to be an extraordinary artist who painted in many styles, often at remarkable speed, Drewe was the master forger. He procured old stretchers which he used on Myatt’s canvases, applied sea water to the tacks to make them rusty, and used teabags, coffee and even mud, to age the final products.

Drewe preferred modern abstract artists because they proved unpredictable and thus more difficult to classify. But his secret weapon lay in the ingenious methods he employed for validating Myatt’s fakes, through bogus provenances. He infiltrated the major art archives of top museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum’s National Art Library and the Tate Gallery, altering the provenances of genuine paintings and inserting into catalogues false references pertaining to the pieces Myatt was producing.

At New Scotland Yard, meanwhile, the Art and Antiques Squad led by Charles Hill had become vividly aware of John Drewe. Hill had become world-famous after helping the Norwegian government recover the stolen Edvard Munch’s The Scream. In the summer of 1995, Batsheva Goudsmid, Drewe’s former partner, gave the police the documentary evidence she had found of his criminal activities.

Private Eye offering Genuine Fakes.

Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century paintings from £150. The scheme proved to be an instant success, with the most significant response coming via ‘Professor John Drewe’.

relationship had soured as Batsheva grew progressively uneasy when a steady stream of paintings by famous moderns, like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, started appearing at her house.

John Drewe has always been a bit of a mystery man. Born John Cockett in 1948, he attended a grammar school in Kent where he was an average student.

From the little that is known about him, at some stage of his life he changed his name to ‘Drewe’ and, for a short time, worked as a laboratory assistant at the Atomic Energy Authority in Amersham. In later times, this humble occupation must have fuelled his imagination when he candidly introduced himself as a nuclear physicist, or even as an advisor to the Atomic Energy Authority, British Aerospace or the Ministry of Defence.

Initially, Drewe would telephone Myatt requesting, say, ‘a Braque’ based on a picture which he would then mail to Myatt’s home. On executing the order, Myatt would take the painting by train to Euston Station, meet Drewe over a drink, hand over the canvas and pocket the money. At the end of each transaction, Drewe would also commission more paintings. Myatt came to admire the suave fellow whom he regarded as his generous benefactor.

In 1980, he courted Batsheva Goudsmid, a wealthy Israeli immigrant who lived in a posh mansion in the up-market Golders Green’s area. Although they had two children, the couple never married. By the late 1980s, their

One day, Drewe asked Myatt what he would like to paint. Myatt’s preference was Cubism, and he painted a Cubist painting of an army doctor from a design by the French artist Albert Gleizes.

A few days later, Drewe informed him that he had taken the painting to Christie’s where it was valued at £25,000. He offered his accomplice half the amount and, from that moment on, Myatt was

The trial of the two Johns began at London’s Crown Court on 23 September 1998 and lasted five months.

Myatt pleaded guilty and was given a 12-month sentence. On his release, he successfully rehabilitated himself and became a much-followed television celebrity.

Drewe, who defended his own case, got six years. When he left prison, he disappeared off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what has become of him, but the Art Squad’s Charles Hill is convinced that Drewe will one day re-surface. And that’s not good news for the Art world!

Lillies, Morning Effect, Monet, by John Myatt

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Opinion / Patronage

Highlights

May – June ‘18 Continued from Cover

JOANNA DELIA

The case for a contemporary art foundation in Malta

O

n 18 October 1997, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was opened by King Juan Carlos I of Spain. It was built at a cost of US$89 million and in its first three years almost four million visitors helped to generate about €500 million in economic activity. It is estimated that the money visitors spent on hotels, restaurants, shops and transport resulted in €100 million in taxes, which more than paid for the cost of building the museum.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was created for the “promotion and encouragement and education in art and the enlightenment of the public.” Over the years, it has collaborated with – and been supported by – some of the world’s largest corporations, including Deutsche Bank, UBS, Hugo Boss, and BMW, and has made alliances with institutes like The Hermitage in St Petersburg.

The legacy of the Guggenheim family is now almost solely entrenched in the immeasurable wealth they left in the form of the ever-growing collection owned by the Foundation and, even more valuable, is the opportunity the spaces and the Foundation’s reputation provides for launching an immeasurable number of emerging artists into the world and exposing to the international public the power of art to influence.

If we are concerned about people’s seemingly increasing inability to think for themselves, it is to art that we must turn. We need to divert their sources of provocation and distraction from market forces and misleading political ideologies to the widely diverse questions posed by the soul of the collective spirit of art made flesh.

The Foundazione Prada was established in 1993 and since then its activities have analysed intentions and relevance through an evolution of projects.

According to its website, the central

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question today is: “What is a cultural institution for? We embrace the idea that culture is deeply useful and necessary, as well as attractive and engaging. Culture should help us with our everyday lives and understand how we, and the world, are changing. This assumption will be key for the Fondazione’s future activities.”

Internationally, there are, of course, countless foundations dedicated to art – and contemporary art specifically – and there is also a growing number of ‘vanity’ galleries opened by collectors in their own name which offer the possibility of their work being viewed by the general community.

The larger institutions, however, have survived the test of time and this would not have been possible without generous patrons who understand the value of what they are supporting in concept.

Society needs art and Patrons recognise that supporting art solidifies their legacy.

Patrons Possibly one of the most recognized names in the history of modern art patronage in the UK is sugar magnate and art collector Sir Henry Tate, after whom the four British museums are named.

Tate offered to sponsor the building of a new National Gallery of British Art, as it was then called, and also left his art collection to the museum. Once again, Tate enshrined his name in history and his connection with the selling of packets of sugar has now been more or less forgotten.

Patronage can take many forms. Buying art can be seen as being both an investment and a form of patronage. Very few of the world’s greatest, form-breaking, policy-shifting and morality-shaking artists would have made it into eternal fame, had it not been for their patrons and the supporters of the foundations and institutions.

Malta Malta has been blessed with a strong patronage of the arts, mostly by the

nobility in the Baroque period and subsequently. The British made some attempts at showing themselves as patrons of the arts here by sponsoring certain projects with the help – and insistence – of several prominent Maltese art aficionados and patrons.

The Malta Society of Arts is Malta’s oldest arts institution and was established in 1852 as The Malta Society of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce in order to promote art and encourage young artists at a time when parallel arts societies were being established in all the other British Colonies. It is considered by many to have been an educational and cultural catalyst in Malta, and its 166-year history is, in fact, intertwined with that of many great Maltese and Gozitan artists who were sponsored through exhibitions or grants to further their artistic studies both locally and abroad.

Today, the Society operates from the 17th century Palazzo de La Salle in Valletta and has about 600 members. It offers some 35 different courses in visual, applied and performing arts, and its art galleries and concert hall are open to the public throughout the year.

It is a not-for-profit NGO and although it receives nominal funding from the government, it is mainly self-funded through its art courses, the hire of spaces and fund-raising activities.

The current team, with Architect Adrian Mamo at its helm, has seen the Society transformed once again and it is now a beaming hub, reinventing itself as a source of inspiration for the Maltese and Malta’s visitors.

The last few years have also seen a sharp rise in the opening of private art galleries such as the Lily Agius Gallery in Sliema and Iniala in Mosta and Valletta. With regard to the contemporary art scene, Valletta-based BLITZ and Malta Contemporary Art – or MCA – in St Lucy Street and Felix Street respectively – showcase local and international emerging artists. BLITZ and MCA are finally giving the Maltese a chance

to appreciate high-quality installation and multi-media art and also the possibility to be part of a thriving art market.

Both of these are financially sustained through private funding by individual and corporate donations and art sales, while BLITZ has a membership scheme and, currently, also has a partnership with the Arts Council Malta.

Another Arts Council partnership is currently ongoing with the META Foundation, the only Maltese Foundation that has at its heart the aim of promoting contemporary art.

META Foundation The META Foundation is the brainchild of founder Norbert Francis Attard, an artist who has been practicing his art for more than 50 years. It was established to run the premises of Valletta Contemporary, or VC, and to provide the policy guidelines and support necessary to do so. Its main objective is to promote contemporary art, particularly by showcasing all the disciplines in the visual arts, including architecture and design as well as other art genres.

Valletta Contemporary The Valletta Contemporary gallery is intended to showcase the work of highly influential and recognised local and international contemporary artists, and will provide a home for Malta’s diverse cultural community. Located at the lower east end of Valletta – on the city’s periphery and away from the main centre – VC is playing an important role in the regeneration of a lesser known part of the city. It merges the past with the present and offers forward-looking contemporary art in a city richly steeped in history. VC champions contemporary art as a catalyst for discussion, social cohesion and cultural discovery and its team thrives through constant dialogue, an exchange of ideas and a collective desire to bring contemporary art to Malta.

Individual and corporate support makes an important difference to what VC can achieve in its scope and reach and level of quality. Financial sustainability is a

Dr Joanna Delia is a medical doctor who specialises in cosmetic medicine. She is also a cultural consumer and art collector who tirelessly supports local contemporary art and culture.

Opinion / Patronage May – June ‘18

Carlos Coronas: Los Territorios Soñados (The Dreamed Territories) at Valletta Contemporary open until 25 May

key concern in a project such as this, and patrons help to ensure that the gallery can continue to showcase globally recognised art, host community engaging events and provide state-ofthe-art premises as a backdrop for all its diverse activities. In return, its patrons have a seat at the table of Malta’s most relevant discussions on art and culture.

of contributing to ensure the survival of an art foundation for which its founder and administrators have worked so hard to bring to life is to become members and contribute on a yearly basis, while enjoying several benefits such as invitations to show vernissages, an opportunity to meet the artists and a preferential rate when attending engaging events and workshops.

the ability to question life: to question purpose and priorities; to understand issues, both simple and complex, that are alien to them but which constitute everyday occurrences for people from other cultures and other parts of the planet. Art somehow proposes the experience of emotion which cannot be felt by those not physically exposed to certain realities and circumstances.

Donations by corporate patrons to recognised institutions such as the META foundation benefit from a 150% tax rebate on the value donated. Other ways

Support of the arts is crucial for society. The exposure of people of any age and from any walk of life to contemporary art is mandatory in order to have

And in conclusion, the launch of a contemporary art foundation and its galleries in Malta is a truly momentous occasion which deserves celebration.

It augers well for a future in which a source of enlightenment and inspiration is literally around the corner and down the street. In a time where humans are increasingly being pressured to live in a virtual reality, and be satisfied by short-lived packets of virtual delights and sensorial stimulation which is usually shallow and borderline unintelligible, it is remarkable when someone literally digs out a place in the city to offer quite precisely, the real thing.

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Art News / New Find / Manet May – June ‘18

EXHIBITION

“ As soon as an idea for a painting comes to mind I begin to sketch it as quickly as I can. I then take a walk and continue to build a better picture of it in my head. If I decide to paint it, I prepare a detailed drawing - whether it is one of my simplest paintings or not they are all treated the same way. ”

The Scoop

A

rtist Claudio Chiariotti’s early years were influenced by Greek mythology and ancient Greek paintings, with their vigorous and instinctive lines. Following his studies in violin-making, his style became more classical, being more inclined to the classical rules of both the Renaissance and the Flemish schools of art. Today, his works continue to relate to the classical world of painting and allegory, with the addition of a contemporary touch of his own, while presenting the unsaid word of the person he presents.

Chiariotti is an artist who embraces the tradition of drawing and technical perfection. He manages to pull us in to his parallel world of mystery and emotion, where the people he paints have a deep, dark story to tell but will never share it. They cannot let us in on their secret, and their silence – together with the positioning of their hands or bodies and the intensity in their eyes – creates a feeling of unease, whilst keeping us interested in their mysterious lives.

status, wealth and etiquette were everything and yet nothing. Inside the mind of each of his sitters is a story of salvation – a yearning for life.

Annunciazione Oil on canvas 119x90cm

Visit Lily Agius Gallery at 54 Cathedral Street, Sliema and online on www.lilyagiusgallery.com For more information on Chiariotti’s art and exhibition, contact Lily Agius Gallery on (+356) 9929 2488 or by email on info@lilyagiusgallery.com

The technical yet elegant results also depict a bygone era, where Untitled, Oil on canvas 160x120cm

EXHIBITION

Edouard Manet in Gozo

O

n the occasion of the 135th anniversary of the death of the great French artist Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Gozo will provide the backdrop for an extraordinary collection of his etchings. Entitled Manet Etchings: The Alfred Strölin Edition of 1905, the collection comprises 30 works that were printed posthumously by this important German collector and dealer in Paris from the original plates by Manet. The plates were eventually cancelled by Strölin himself to avoid further impressions.

The exhibition comes directly from Urbino, where it was recently exhibited in the house of Raphael, under the prestigious patronage of the Accademia Raffaello of the same city. It is the very first time that works by this art giant, who shook the international art world with his paintings in the 1860s, are being exhibited in Malta.

The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Mark Sagona PhD, visiting lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, together with Dr Chiara Gatti, a prominent Italian curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art. The exhibition is being organised by Italian art dealer Valerio Ballotta, in conjunction with Abraham’s Arte under the distinguished patronage and collaboration of the Ministry for Gozo, the Accademia Raffaello of Urbino, the Department of

Art and Art History of the University of Malta, the Galleria Ceribelli of Bergamo and the Arts Council Malta, and is endorsed by Valletta 2018.

Manet’s experimental and innovative graphic production is considered seminal in the development of the printing medium – in particular etching and lithography. Most of the etchings included in this exhibition were produced in the early 1860s in the tremendously important years that led to the production of some of his most notorious paintings. A catalogue with essays by Dr Sagona and Dr Gatti will be published.

The exhibition is open to the public from 8.30 am to 4.30 pm, Mondays to Fridays, and on Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 12 noon, at The Exhibition Hall at the Ministry of Gozo until the 20th of May.

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This temple of the earth surrendered to the sky across the tide of time a sanctuary of prayer a shrine in homage to the goddess of the earth a solstice marker its spiral form and fecund shape mapped by the patterns of the sun the cycles of the moon

Then as in trance she speaks in somnolent voice and long lost tongue translated by the wind through a thousand centuries of the rings of time her words I understand and her answer I perceive as she reveals a secret never known.

Then as by my side she sits I ask her sorcerer of sortilege messenger of meaning why this temple sings why its stones enthrall and to this day enchant.

From the distant shores of unknown seas a plangent priestess hovering in the constellations of time carried by the wind borne by the waves walks the sacred shrine this goddess from past time balanced between there and now leaves her time to reach my space.

As the moon freed its hold on the water’s tide I lay myself to sleep within the temple walls ancient stones my bed under the starlit mantle of a menstrual night a dancing dream I thread in the summer lanes of sleep a dream within a dream I dream.

Words / Poem

May – June ‘18

PERSPECTIVE

RICHARD ENGLAND

the heart of the architect Drawing by Richard England

Art News / Malta / Japan May – June ‘18

TRANSFORMER Creative spaces by Blitz Transformer is a two-year cultural project to create relationships between Maltese and international artistic networks through a series of exchanges with the UK, Spain, Morocco and Greece.

Produced by Blitz (Malta) and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, the project includes research, artist residencies, public talks, workshops and an online platform and multi-site exhibition in various locations across Malta.

Dex creates the perfect workspace for local software provider A project with tight deadlines for the setting up of 23 work stations, a managerial office, a director’s office, a meeting room and additional cabinetry throughout for Uniblue Systems Ltd did not prevent Dex from ensuring that the work was completed on time, and to the highest professional standards. Cost was also an important consideration, but Dex was able to offer the perfect solutions to Uniblue through suppliers Quinti and Newform.

Dex is part of the Vivendo Group and specialises in creating spaces in which professionals can work comfortably and productively. It offers a complete range of solutions for office furniture, including the supply, delivery and installation of workstations, raised flooring, acoustic systems, lighting and partitions.

For more information, contact Dex on (+356) 22773000.

Transformer is supported by the Multi-Annual Support Grant, Malta Arts Council, and is part of the European Capital of Culture programme. The exhibition will run from 1 September to 14 October. For more information, contact Blitz on contact@thisisblitz. com or (+356) 2122 4992.

Diaries with drawings of Malta on sale in Japan Malta-based Japanese watercolour artist and illustrator Miyuki Sugihara has created a book called Introducing Malta Picture Book in collaboration with Faber-Castell, as well as a calendar and a pocket diary.

Inside, you will find drawings of everything she sees in Malta – from food, people in conversation, wild flowers, the sea, stormy weather and cats to Maltese farmhouses and orchestras.

RICHARD ENGLAND

Now you know why the temple sings because he who shaped these stones not only forged and formed a temple to the gods but also in the making of a magic myth put his heart into the work.

Then from my pleated skirt I drew a flint carved blade (we had no metal then) and tore out his beating heart and placed it in this altar stone where to this day it lies.

Then at noontide as the sun peaked at its apex he crossed the sacred threshold walked the hallowed ground and knelt in homage at my feet to offer me his labour’s love a model of the shrine.

Long ago at a summer’s solstice dawn as the sun cast it nascent rays on this altar shrine there I was to inaugurate this place and receive this temple gift from he who etched the alphabet of these stones the syntax of their space and the language of their form.

These shrouded secrets my architect a sibyl and a seer practiced and performed and with cabalistic cognizance magician that he was fashioned well this shrine an arcane and sacred time-piece scrolled from beyond time.

and the movement of the stars a temple to mark the rhythmic seasons of recurring time.

For more information you can contact Miyuki by email at meyoukeysugi@gmail.com

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Film / Phantom Thread May – June ‘18

BRUCE EYNAUD

Phantom Thread + the danger of becoming a muse Any new film by Paul Thomas Anderson is cause for excitement and celebration amongst film fanatics. At the age of just 48, he has already established himself as an auteur who ranks among the greats, alongside Kubrick, Scorsese and Altman.

The man behind Boogie Nights and There Will be Blood has acquired such critical acclaim and status that he is free to make films exactly the way he wants to and, doing so, attract major stars and sizeable budgets. This is a rare privilege for a young director in the studio-controlled Hollywood of today.

This level of artistic control makes Anderson’s films rich subject matter for re-examination and analysis. Themes recur throughout his filmography, such as outsiders, loneliness and surrogate families. One theme that he has explored more than once is the relationship between a creator and a muse. This is a central theme in Boogie Nights, a 1970s-set ensemble about a porn star, The Master, a 1950s-set drama about an alcoholic sailor joining a cult and, again, in his latest release, Phantom Thread.

Phantom Thread, set in a London of the 1950s, concerns a middle-aged fashion designer named Reynolds Woodcock, who becomes enamoured with Alma, a European waitress, and takes her in as his model and muse. While the film is ostensibly a romance, it seems

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to place more emphasis on the falling out of love than it does the falling in.

It depicts something that seems to be a pattern for Woodcock: becoming enamoured by someone and then losing interest in them. Alma senses this and fears she is destined to be cast off as just another old flame. The scene of their first breakfast together, where Alma disrupts Reynolds’s ritual by loudly scraping toast, is very evocative of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, another film about the cyclical nature of falling in and out of love.

The film’s hazy cinematography lends it a ghostly air, with the feel of a Gothic tale and is the closest Anderson has come to something resembling horror.

Reynolds’s seduction and subsequent possessiveness of Alma recalls Stoker’s Dracula. Day-Lewis even resembles Christopher Lee’s depiction of that character, with his gaunt frame and combed-back hair. The close-up shot of Reynolds’s eye looking though a peephole is a nod towards Hitchcock’s Psycho, as well as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. To be a muse to Reynolds, the film suggests, is to be his victim.

Of all Anderson’s films, it is Phantom Thread that bears a close resemblance to his divisive 2012 film The Master – and could be considered The Master’s upper-class English cousin. They resemble each other aesthetically, both being set in the 1950s and shot on 70mm film, and thematically, since they both focus on the creator-muse rela-

tionship, this time between two men.

In The Master, the troubled drifter that Freddie Quell becomes meets the enigmatic and charismatic writer Lancaster Dodd, an L. Ron Hubbard-esque figure, and part of Dodd’s growing cult The Cause (a thinly veiled depiction of the early days of Scientology). Much like Reynolds, Dodd is adored by high society and, on meeting Freddie, finds himself given a new creative lease of life.

As Dodd’s wife Penny tells him: “He’s been writing all night. You seem to inspire something in him.” Just like Alma, Freddie willingly falls under Dodd’s spell, but soon becomes disillusioned by his rhetoric and control.

Taking an earlier look at Anderson’s filmography, Boogie Nights shows the artist-muse relationship between ageing porn director Jack Horner and young buck Dirk Diggler. Just like Phantom Thread and The Master, there is romance between them, platonic though it may be. Anderson plays the moment Horner lays eyes on Diggler, working his shift at a nightclub, in slow-motion: it is clearly love at first sight. There is an archetypal story arc throughout the film that fits very neatly into Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey. Dirk is young man from humble origins but who, thanks to his inner gift and the help of a wise mentor, rises to greatness – although he must endure great hardship and suffering along the way. This classical structure means that, narratively, Boogie Nights

is the most mainstream of Anderson’s films, despite the risqué subject matter.

Once again, however, there is an ambiguity about the nature of the artist/ muse relationship: is Horner really the father-figure he presents himself as, or is he exploiting the desperate for his own gain, seducing them with riches and glamour until they find themselves unable to return to a normal life? The final scene of Diggler returning to Horner after trying – and failing – to get by on his own, is bitter-sweet. It can be seen either as a prodigal-son style happy ending or instead as our character willingly re-entering the same trap.

For this reason, Boogie Nights, The Master and Phantom Thread form an unofficial trilogy in Anderson's filmography, each a study of the joys and dangers of becoming a muse.

Spotlight /Events / Malta May – June ‘18

ART + CULTURE

04-05.18

A curated selection of local events

Events until July

16.04. 18 Until 15 May

THE SHAPE OF VOLITION Zhang Tingqun’s exhibition at the China Cultural Centre in Valletta presents 16 paintings and a long scroll intended to break the boundaries between artefacts and paintings and adding to the oriental atmosphere. The minimalist style of each distinct image reveals the essence of Zhang’s artistic interpretation, bringing viewers into proximity with the substance of each artwork and the spiritual core of the artist.

China Cultural Centre, 173 Melita Street, Valletta.

Monday-Friday 9am12.30pm and 2.30-5pm (excluding public holidays)

18. 04. 1 8 Until 12 May

2 7 .0 4 .1 8

2 7 .0 4 .1 8

Until 2 June

Until 23 June

F L U I D S PA C E

J O H NN Y ’ S B A R

Fluid Space is a collaborative project that merges video, photography and research to question the dynamics of Malta’s changing urban landscapes, social structures, networks, conflicts, communities, strangers, time and space.

The project, which presents artwork by Duška Malešević, Raffaella Zammit and Aidan Celeste, is an introspective venture as well as an exploratory journey of Malta’s urban fabric – its forms and the way in which we construct and shape our environments.

By focusing on public art, lived-in spaces and Malta’s material traditions in relation to The Mill and Gabriel Caruana’s art history legacy, Fluid Space is an invitation to ponder on what has been gained and what has been lost, the beauty of the frequently unnoticed and the ugliness that is destroying a rich heritage.

Malta Contemporary Art presents a series of photographs by German artist Franziska von Stenglin, documenting framed photographic narratives in vacant public spaces. Von Stenglin studied photography at the London University of the Arts and fine art at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is a visual artist, whose projects intertwine the personal narrative with local myth and lore. In 2016, von Stenglin wrote, produced and directed her first short film entitled I’m a Stranger Here Myself and in November 2017, she shot her second film, The Dust of Modern Life, on 16mm in Kon Tum in Vietnam. She lives and works in Berlin.

ZAHRA AL-MAHDI AND HANAN A L - A L AW I , K U WA I T

Malta Contemporary Art, 12 Felix Street, Valletta Tuesdays-Fridays 1-6pm and Saturday 10am-1pm

The Mill, Birkirkara.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 5-7pm and Saturdays 4-8pm

Zahra and Hanan will explore the role of memory in rethinking the national historical narrative of citizenry, gender roles and sexuality in Kuwait.

The focus will be on the counter-memories of mobile identities such as transsexual and transgender citizens, by forming points of connection with Maltese multi-cultural constructs.

Their findings will take the form of video installation, a mobility map and models built from animation, sketches, randomly found material, photographs, mixed media images and other material.

Blitz, 68 St Lucy Street, Valletta. 7 June: Public talk and drinks, 7pm. 21 June: Presentation of final work opening: 7-9.30pm.

22 June: Exhibition open 1-5pm

0 1 .0 6 .1 8 Until 28 June

9 DIPS Curated by Norbert Francis Attard, Valletta Contemporary will present the work of nine emerging Maltese artists: Matthew Attard, Maxine Attard, Aaron Bezzina, Kane Cali, Ryan Falzon, Matyou Galea, Roxman Gatt, Patrick Mifsud and Teresa Sciberras.

Valletta Contemporary, 15-17 East Street, Valletta.

Tuesdays to Fridays 10.30am-2.30pm and 3-7pm, Saturday 10.30-14.30.

04.05.18

10.05.18

Until 27 May

Until 31 May

(MET) A F O UR I S M S

SEA - SHE SEES

(Met)afourisms presents the work of four artists and the writing of their respective collaborators.

Paired with writers Irene Biolchini (Italy), Niki Young (Malta), Clive Zammit (Malta) and Sara Dolfi Agostini (Italy) respectively, Klitsa Antoniou (Cyprus), Trevor Borg (Malta), Vince Briffa (Malta) and Stuart Franklin (England) responded by means of an artwork (or series of artworks) to their assigned aphoristic text. The role of each artist was to translate the aphorism to extrapolate and generate new meanings from existing ones. This project is supported by Arts Council Malta – Malta Arts Fund Project Support Grant.

This exhibition presents 40 mixed media artworks by 15 Malta-based female artists from eight different countries: Nadette ClareTalbot Bettridge, Ruth Bianco, Debbie Bonello, Celia Borg Cardona, Debbie Caruana Dingli, Caroline Cavallo, Janette Danel, Mary de Piro, Sally Jane Fuerst, Gulja Holland, Sallyanne Morgan, Caroline Navarro, Arja Nukarinen Callus, Laura Swale and Miyuki Sugihara – all inspired by the magical azure waters surrounding Malta. A donation from sales will be given to the Women’s Foundation: Dar Merhba Bik. Malta Maritime Museum, Birgu Daily 9am-5pm (last admission 4.30pm)

St James Cavalier, Castille Place, Valletta. Mondays and Tuesdays 9am-5pm.

Wednesdays-Fridays 9am-9pm, Saturdays and Sundays 10am-9pm

Also, do not miss: Dal-Bahar Madwarha (The Island is What the Sea Surrounds) at the Pixkerija, the Underground Cistern and St Elmo Examination Centre (See review by Gabrielle Spiller on page 11) open Tuesdays to Sundays (closed on Mondays) from 11am to 7pm (last admission 6.30pm); Carlos Coronas: Los Territorios Soñados (The Dreamed Territories) at Valletta Contemporary (see article by Joanna Delia on page 28); and Picasso & Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit at The Grandmaster’s Palace in Valletta. You can also attend a free guided tour any day of the week at 12.30pm (see page 13).

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Words; / Kenneth Zammit Tabona May – June ‘18

Kenneth Zammit Tabona is the Artistic Director of the Valletta International Baroque Festival and Teatru Manoel. He is also one of Malta’s best known visual artists and illustrators.

Highlights

PERSPECTIVE

What effect to they have on the people who are either listening to, or looking at, them? One would like to think that they create a visual and aural feast of the senses, irrespective of how well-informed or not the audience or viewer is. The wider the appeal, the better the artist.

Painting, Music & Other Animals….

A

rt: what’s it all about?

The question is always lurking somewhere in both my conscious and subconscious and I feel that my thoughts and feelings have always been too strong to challenge my intellect for logical reasons, because I feel that sometimes, when it comes to the arts, intellect – or too much of it – can kill spontaneity. Balancing the two out would be the ideal solution, but not everyone has the luxury of time and application to do so.

We could include in this argument all art history going back as far as Lascaux, but let’s try to narrow it down to one specific genre, the Abstract! This is a subject that I can also relate to music which, to me, is always inextricably tied to visual art. Music is intrinsically abstract.

So let me start off here. I had been reviewing music since I was 17. I was not a musician and many at the time considered me to be unqualified for the position – the ‘many’ being the musicians

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themselves. I always considered myself to be a professional and informed member of the audience and it was primarily for the audience that I wrote.

My aim was, and still is, to remove the veils of obscure jargon of the soi-disant high priests and make music accessible, enjoyable and comprehensible to a much wider spectrum of people, especially those who used to stop me in the street to apologetically inform me that they would have loved to have attended this or that concert but were afraid to as they feared that they wouldn’t understand it! I always retorted: “Do you enjoy listening to music?” and the reply was invariably a “Yes”. “So, therefore,” I continued, “you understand it!”

The same applies to abstract art and a very clear parallel can be drawn here.

What is music? An abstract but ordered concatenation of sounds making up a whole would be an interesting way of describing it in a nutshell. What is painting? The deliberate application of line, colour, light and shade on a tabula rasa could be an apt description. What is important is what these descriptions do.

To return to abstract art, this idea that one must understand ‘art’ stultifies the enjoyment of it. I sometimes think that art critics and cognoscenti are too highfaluting for their own good and there is no greater anecdote than the one of the couple who were trying to make out a large canvas depicting three naked black men sitting on a park bench. The question was that the penis of the man in the middle was pink! Along came the museum curator and, noticing the puzzled couple, explained at great length the question of white and black supremacy, the history of the slave trade and perorations into obscurantism that left the poor couple even more befogged than before. When the bigshot had left, a little man materialised and said: “Do you really want to know what that painting is all about?” “Yes, of course”, replied the couple, a tad worried that they were in for another learned pontification. “Well then,” said the man, “these are three coal miners having a break except the one in the middle went home to lunch!”

A trifle silly, you may say, but yes that is most times the fundamental truth of art.

I wonder what Picasso was thinking when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – apart from them being a collection of beautiful nudes. But the challenge is what Mondrian wanted to convey with his coloured squares and what Rothko wanted us to understand when presenting us with those colossal canvases of colour gradations! Did he want us to understand his suicidal state or did he merely want to create a new way of feasting the senses? I am a firm believer that primarily an artist creates his own idea of beauty and it is a total waste of time trying to analyse it in any other way than the celebrated Sister Wendy method.

It would be the height of presumption to attempt a psychological analysis of an artist’s state of mind from his output.

It simply doesn’t tally. Mozart wrote his most genially beautiful work when facing bankruptcy and despair. Can you think of an object of greater revulsion than Grunewald’s Christ on the Cross and yet fail to see its beauty and its pathos?

Would this mean that Grunewald was a manic depressive? I do not think so.

I am, therefore, more than ever con-

vinced that there is absolutely no need to ‘understand’ abstract art – or any art at all for that matter – in order to be able to appreciate it and, above all, be moved by it. Here, however, I give a caveat: the enjoyment of a work of art can be intensified by knowing more about it. I have been moved to tears of ecstasy by so many works in my life. Can anyone ever prepare you for the impact of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery? Is there not a fundamental reason why crowds stop, speechless, in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the MOMA or in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre?

One can compare it to the best-loved pieces of music such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, sometimes ignored by the cognoscenti as hackneyed, obliterated by their own success.

But then why are these greats so great?

There must be a very good reason and it’s because they are flawlessly crafted but, above all, they appeal directly to the emotions which is why they could uplift a Hottentot who has never seen or heard anything like them before! Dante says somewhere that “L’Arte al Iddio Nipote” which means that art is God’s grandchild. Never a truer word….

Stand very close to one of Monet’s vast water-lily paintings and you will see the layers of colour flung about a humongous canvas by Jackson Pollock. The beauty of the kaleidoscope that both styles present is mesmerising. So why go through the agonies of trying to fathom some obscure reason as to why Monet and Pollock did this, as long as they can emotionally move you?

What was art after all? Why did the cavemen of Lascaux decorate their walls?

Why did the mosaic artists of Ravenna do the same? Why did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel? Apart from the fact that, like everyone else, artists do have to earn a living, it’s man’s basic instinct both to create and to enhance nature with the beauty that comes spontaneously from within the mind and heart of an artist. That is why being intensely moved by a work of art is most of the time inexplicable, but such a wonderful experience. It just does! And that, for me, is more than enough.

So the next time you are standing in front of an abstract, don’t try and fathom what it means but just let it work its magic on you like a great work by Richard Strauss or Messaien!

Spotlight / Events / Global May – June ‘18

ART + DESIGN

06-07.18

A Pick of international art fairs until July

Events until July

01.06. 18

11. 06. 1 8

1 2 .0 6 .1 8

1 2 .0 6 .1 8

14.06.18

27.07.18

Until 3 June

Until 16 June

Until 17 June

Until 17 June

Until 17 June

Until 29 July

C O NT E MP O R A RY A RT RUH R ( C A R )

V O LT A 1 1 – 1 6 J UNE

L I ST E

P H OT O B A S E L

ART BASEL

Contemporary Art Ruhr (CAR) began as a cooperation project and official part of the programme of the European Capital of Culture RUHR 2010. The first part of CAR, the Media Art Fair & Photo Special, is the first of its kind in Germany and takes place in the World Cultural Heritage Site Zollverein.

Exhibitors present video and media art, installations, performances, environmental sculptures, multimedia projects and photography as one main theme.

Volta, Basel’s art fair for new, international art, had its debut in 2005.

The aim was to secure a platform for international galleries beyond young art stalwart Liste and market heavyweight Art Basel. Noted for being a ‘space for discovery’, this year’s edition sees the inauguration of a new space to mark the beginning of a neighbourhood-wide rejuvenation plan, which will include a school and a variety of creative start-ups and ateliers happening in 2019. This year’s edition will feature approximately 75 galleries from across the globe. This Volta Basel follows a successful 11th edition of Volta NY in March.

Since its inception in 1996, Liste has developed into one of the most important fairs for mostly new – but also, to some extent, a middle generation – of galleries.

It focuses on introducing young galleries with primarily emerging artists.

Each year, approximately 80 galleries from over 30 countries are presented, of which around 15 galleries are introduced for the first time. Liste’s mission is to promote these new galleries and introduce them to an international public.

Since 2015, Photo Basel has been Switzerland’s first and only international art fair dedicated to photography-based art, bringing together galleries from around the world to create a hub for artistic photography in the cultural capital of Switzerland.

Photo Basel strives to include and combine new galleries with those that are already renowned, Swiss exhibitors with international ones and those with a bold contemporary programme with others with strong historic positions.

Art Basel brings the international art world together, with 291 of the world’s leading galleries showing the works of over 4,000 artists. As well as a full programme of talks each day, exhibitions and events are also offered by cultural institutions in Basel and the surrounding area, creating an exciting, regionwide art week. Founded in 1970 by gallerists from Basel, Art Basel today stages the world’s premier art shows for Modern and contemporary art, sited in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique, which is reflected in its participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition.

T H E OT H E R A R T FA I R , B R I STO L 2 7 - 2 9 J U LY

World Cultural Heritage Site Zollverein, Essen

Elsässrstrasse 215, Basel, Switzerland

Burgweg 15, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Volkshaus Basel, Switzerland

The Other Art Fair returns for a fourth Bristol instalment this summer, presenting a variety of works by 80 contemporary artists hand-picked by a committee of art industry experts. Celebrated for its unique and immersive visitor experience, The Other Art Fair’s Bristol edition is set to inspire visitors with a distinguished guest artist, interactive theatre performances and live music.

The Passenger Shed, Station Approach, Bristol

Cartoon by Inez Kristina

Messe Basel, Switzerland

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Spotlight /Event / Vienna May – June ‘18 EXHIBITION

29.07.18

WOW! VIENNA;

The exhibition WOW! The Heidi Horten Collection presents never-before-seen works by a who’s who of 20th-century art history until the 29th of July at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.

The exhibition is showing 170 works from a hundred years of art history, offering a unique insight into the spectrum of art and artists as assembled by Heidi Goëss-Horten since the 1990s. Works include those

by Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Gustav Klimt, August Macke, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Egon Schiele, and Andy Warhol.

Klimt, Church, Unterach by Lake Attersee, 1916

August Macke, Two Women infront of Hat Shop, 1913

Munch, Self Portrait, 1904

Andy Warhol, Four-foot Flowers, 1964

Francis Bacon, Study for portrait of Henrietta Moras, 1964

Chagall, Les Amoureux, 1916

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Review / Exhibition / Amsterdam May – June ‘18

Highlights

AMSTERDAM

Roy Lichtenstein is back in Am

T

he Moco Museum is presenting an exhibition of the work of Roy Lichtenstein, one of the greatest contemporary art interpreters and a master of Pop Art. The influence of his art is still evident in many forms of artistic expression, from painting to advertising and from photography to design and fashion.

You recognise Lichtenstein’s work at first glance: he has become part of the unconscious cultural heritage of all of

Moco Museum, 3D Room

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us; he has a ‘lasting influence’. He was the first to put Mickey Mouse in a painting – before Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and numerous others did – and the applications you have seen in current daily fashion images are a direct translation of his work.

Starting with images taken from advertisements in newspapers and everyday objects, he discovered cartoons as both inspiration and source material for his art. His preferred material was romance or war-inspired which, reinterpreted by Lichtenstein, is full of irony.

He explained his choice of comic pieces

for his works like this: “From the beginning, I felt that comic-strip painting had to be de-personalised. It had to express great emotions – passion, fear, violence – in an impersonal, removed and mechanical manner... I try to look for something that says something mysterious, or absurd, or obvious or extremely simple or extremely complicated. Something visual or, if there are words to it – something that, when it’s a painting and not part of a comic strip, will strike you as funny or, more usually, fun. It’s the drama and heroics and, of course, none of the consequences – we still think of war in that way.”

The exhibition also includes a 3D interior room installation based on Lichtenstein’s painting Bedroom at Arles, which he made in 1992, inspired by a postcard of Van Gogh’s famous The Artist’s Room at Arles 1888-89). He remarked about his version of the Arles Room: “l’ve cleaned his room up a little bit for him and he’ll be very happy when he gets home from the hospital to see that I’ve straightened his shirts and bought some new furniture. Mine is a rather large painting and his is rather small His is much better, but mine is much bigger.”

Review / Exhibition / Amsterdam May – June ‘18

sterdam after exactly 50 years.

Foot and Hand, 1964

Seascape, 1964

Crying Girl, 1963

“It’s about setting up rules and not obeying them”

Thinking Nude, 1994

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Spotlight / Tate Britain

Highlights

May – June ‘18 LONDON

GEORGE EYNAUD

All Too Human; Bacon, Freud and a century of painting life

A

s the 20th century progressed, the depiction of the human figure in western painting inevitably captured something of the turmoil of a society amidst the horrors of two world wars and the existential crisis engendered by the development of nuclear weapons. Whether this was by design, or simply due to the fact that we naturally seem to relate to images of the body and endow them with emotion more easily, is sometimes hard to discern.

The exhibition All Too Human, which is running at Tate Britain until 27th August, posits a much more insular vision of modern figurative painting in Britain, particularly London, from the turn of the century to the present day. The show also presents a number of prominent contemporary artists as a sort of coda to a tradition of figurative painting over a century long.

Jenny Saville, for example, is represented by an impactful image of a seemingly battered woman’s face in extreme close-up, rendering each gleam of light and strand of hair into an expressive abstraction. This is most evident as one moves away from the canvas, and the subject only comes together as a recognisable image with distance. Saville engages the viewer in a kind of dance between the presented image and the painterly surface, her monumentally large canvas demanding your attention by amplifying the face into a sort of corporeal landscape where every protuberance becomes an alien landmark for your eye to catch upon.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is another recent painter of note, providing a much-needed update of the black body in western figurative painting, spotlighting figures which, for far too long, only existed on the periphery of artistic tradition. One cannot help but connect the subjects of Yiadom-Boakye’s lyrical paintings to the tragic news stories that we hear all too often of politicised and racially-motivated violence. However, the artist’s elegantly painted subjects do not come across as nameless victims but as self-contained individuals. They are as lucidly painted as any Singer Sargent portrait, with a gritty contemporary edge to boot.

It is Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, however, that curator Elena Crippa chooses to position front and centre as the predominant painters of the human figure from this time.

Once close friends and providing an important influ-

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ence on one another, Bacon and Freud eventually had some sort of falling out that left them locked in a bitter feud. Freud, with characteristic meanness, refused to ever lend Bacon’s 1953 masterpiece Two Figures, which he owned, to any exhibition. This especially dismayed Bacon who was rightfully proud of that important work depicting two men locked in a sexual embrace, frank and unapologetic. Produced in a society in which homosexuality was still a punishable crime, it was decades ahead of its time and should have been seen publicly much earlier than Freud’s sense of rivalry would allow.

Bacon’s stylistic iconography – those empty, haunted spaces and contorted fleshy masses – lingers on in the work of younger painters, including artists such as Cecily Brown. Brown emulates a similarly painterly approach in deconstructing the human figure, and especially in displaying bodies coupled in some sort of sexual union. She does so in a way at once obscured by corporeal swathes of paint and yet still somehow candid to the point of pornographic. She makes the viewer feel complicit in some guilt-inducing act – for example, by placing us in the position of some dirty-minded voyeur spying on coupling lovers in the park (Teenage Wildlife, 2003).

One does not sense any similar shame in Bacon’s work, all the more remarkable given the sense of depravity that his horse-breeding father must have imparted upon him as a gay adolescent, bullying his son with cruel physical punishments that, by his own admission, played no small part in his tendency to masochistically chase violent older men as lovers.

Bacon recalibrates the trauma of his youth to craft his own unique world view, distilling a sparse and unwieldy beauty out of raw pain and isolation. One never senses the artist claiming any sort of moral stake in what he posits is an emphatically amoral world – placing Bacon much closer to the sentiments of the Parisian Existentialists than the rather staid pontifications of many of his compatriots (and indeed, Bacon was appreciated and celebrated in France far more than on home ground, at least for most of his lifetime). This is further underscored by the presence of one of Alberto Giacometti’s cadaverous bronze figures, encapsulating the haunting sense of loss felt just after the end of the war, as the victims of the Holocaust were still being uncovered in camps across Europe.

There is, nonetheless, a yearning for human connection in Bacon’s later paintings. One of his greatest triptychs (Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer from 1971, not included in this exhibition) depicts the suicide of the artist’s lover George Dyer, slumped over dead at the bathroom sink (a classic Baconian merging of the banal and the terrible.) In the adjacent panel, a proxy for the artist himself turns to lock the door to his studio building, glancing back mournfully towards the empty room where a single light-bulb glows poignantly, illuminating the hallowed space with an ephemeral gleam.

Crippa culled the name for her show from a particularly existentially-charged line from Friedrich Nietzche’s book of aphorisms “Everywhere he looked… what he saw was not only far from divine but all-too-human.”

Spotlight / Tate Britain May – June ‘18

This phrase could very well have been written about Lucian Freud. Students of the artist’s grandfather Sigmund might have a field day with the unflinching nude portraits of the artist’s own daughters, or the naked lovers apparently basking in a post-coital haze next to his elderly, buttoned-up mother, yet Freud resisted such psychoanalytical readings by viewing human beings simply as animals to be observed in mind and in body, more objects of biological study than psychological analysis.

An Austrian-German Jew (though later naturalised British citizen), his family fled Austria during Hitler’s rise and their exile in Britain was facilitated through Sigmund’s aristocratic associations. Freud always felt something of an outsider, and, although not an observant Jew, he spoke of encountering anti-Semitism in his adopted homeland, where his beloved cabbies would regularly complain about those “bloody saucepans” (saucepan lids – yids.)

Through talent, charisma, guile and connections, he was able to integrate himself within the upper echelons of society, but one never stops feeling that Freud was only able to relate to other people as subjects through the act of painting. Slowly he picked away the psyche of his sitters to reveal their emotional core just as his storied grandfather must have spent

countless hours coaxing out his own clients’ deepest secrets, fears and desires.

not destined to last much longer –another victim of Freud’s chronic philandering.

An early painting included in this show is his closely observed still-life of a squid and sea-urchin, betraying the artist’s enduring obsession with capturing the fleshy surface of his subjects in unremitting detail. Its dimensions are modest, amplifying the intensity of the artist’s vision and it is a small miracle of a painting.

Freud produced some of his most emotionally affecting work when portraying those to whom he was most keenly connected – such as his first wife, Kitty Garman, who he depicted with icy accuracy almost strangling a kitten in her fraught embrace (Girl with a Kitten, 1947). This telling portrait is both tender and yet undercut with such an uneasy sense of violence simply waiting to erupt.

What to say of the other artists featured in this show?

Well, due to space constraints and at the risk of sounding glib, I will provide a very brief summary. I am not a huge fan of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof’s often stodgily painted canvases depicting mainly London street views and portraits, although I realise that there is something of an undeniable spectacle in the thickly layered paint that protrudes in an almost sculptural manner in the work of both artists.

In another, much larger, canvas, she crouches on a sofa staring out as if transfixed by the viewer’s entrance, a white pit bull terrier (one of a pair the newly-married couple received as wedding presents) resting its immaculately rendered snout on her leg, her similarly pale breast escaping the confines of her gown. It is an electrically charged, bizarre picture.

Kitty’s eyes are glassy, as if filled with tears for having been kept open so long. She wears a slim gold band on her finger, a wedding ring, but this marriage was

Stanley Spencer- Patricia Preece 1933

John Deakin’s photographs are included mainly to highlight Bacon’s painterly process, working from and incorporating photographic images. Stanley Spencer’s naked portraits of his second wife Patricia are charged with an unsettling intensity that somewhat anticipates Freud’s inward-looking worldview, and Walter Sickert’s impressionistic views of everyday Camden Town life and sex-workers provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between painting and photography at the turn of the century.

With all this painterly grandstanding and male gazing at prone, naked female bodies, it is something of a relief to come across the work of Paula Rego, who leads the viewer through her carnival-like reinterpreta- >>

Francis Bacon- Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud 1964

Celia Paul - Painter and Model 2012

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Spotlight / Tate Britain

Highlights

May – June ‘18

LONDON

NEW YORK

Stocking nationlistic sentiments for a Brexit–era

er and capitalist endorsement that underlines artistic validation and success through museum shows. This is a shame, as doing so will not discredit the creative voice of the artists involved – indeed, it will place their work in a new light and allow us to understand the social and cultural context of its time.

Crippa does remedy this somewhat by ensuring a female perspective is provided in the work of Saville, Rego, Brown and Yiadom-Boakye, but this feels shoehorned in as a kind of curatorial afterthought.

Only Rego is afforded an entire room to herself, while the other three disparate artists are placed somewhat awkwardly together in the last gallery of the exhibition. Meanwhile, the more problematic notions of the female nude as seen through the male gaze, which brings up all sort of queasy connotations today, is politely ignored.

tions of Portuguese folk tales, where social status and scale are readily inverted and seem to have little bearing on the rules of her world. Aged crones are infantilised, left bereft of their senses, while animals and inanimate objects are given a spooky cognizance.

Rego places women resolutely at the heart of her work and by so doing readjusts the idea of art as a historically male-dominated activity in which women are often side-lined. Here women are portrayed as undertaking a variety of activities, as victims, culprits, carers, passive observers and sexually-charged creatures. Her pastel-on-paper works, usually copied after live models posing in the studio, thereby capture her own desires and fears, allowing the artist to confront personal memories. In spite of the abuse they endure, Rego imparts her women with a sense of determination. They often seem to be colluding together against their male oppressors, as if to regain control of their own narratives.

If any criticism is to be made

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of this entirely respectable and handsomely mounted show, it might be that it plays things a little bit safe in a curatorial capacity. It is an unfortunate reality that some sort of commercial pandering is often necessary to keep big-brand institutions such as the Tate operating effectively, but this often means that exposing lesser-known artists has to give way to showcasing wellknown and therefore profitable names.

There has already been one comprehensive Lucian Freud exhibition in very recent memory and no end of Francis Bacon displays across a number of museums, publications and even television documentaries.

Reinforcing the mythologising aspects of these ‘Great British Artists’ does feel somewhat insular and self-congratulatory – stoking nationalistic sentiments for a Brexit-era audience keen to be reassured of Britain’s lasting cultural relevance.

For such reasons, curators and scholars often end up failing to properly interrogate the edified system of patriarchal pow-

Ultimately, however, this show does manage to raise a compelling and persuasive argument for the deceptively simple act of looking at the human figure, both as a way of gauging the development of modern British painting and as a source of beauty and inspiration in its most immediate and engaging form, and it is therefore unfair to judge the curatorial decisions on any other basis.

Seeing the huge crowd gathered to enjoy this exhibition, and subsequently wandering through the rest of Tate Britain’s collections, only made me hope that large institutions such as the Tate choose to vary their programme to further include as diverse a variety of artists and ideas, outside those well-established names on which they could be sure to hedge their bets commercially.

I am convinced that doing so will only encourage members of the public to visit the museum time and time again, to enjoy the thrill of the new and the familiar alike.

Raising The Bar: Masterworks from the Collection of Morton and Barbara Mandel 16 MAY 2018 | 6:30 PM SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK

Willem de Kooning Untitled VI 1980 Est $8,000,000-12,000,000

Joan Miró Femme, oiseau 1969-74 Est $10,000,000-15,000,000

Andy Warhol Flowers 1964 Est. $2,000,000-3,000,000

Roy Lichtenstein Still Life with Head in Landscape 1976 Est. $7,000,000 –10,000,000

NEWS / MALTA

‘Open Artists’ Studio Trail Allura, the ‘open studio’ concept in Malta is born – where the public can meet artists informally in their place of work to gain an insight into the making process itself and to spark their own creative imagination. The process to identify suitable premises to house the new Arts Centre is underway and substantially-sized spaces in appropriate locations are currently being considered.

Meanwhile, Allura is currently inviting artists from all over Malta and Gozo to participate in its first high-profile public event, designed to illustrate the ‘open studios’ concept. A ‘walking trail’ of artists’ studios will be organised for 27 and 28 October at multiple locations in Sliema and St Julian’. Artists with studios in the area are invited to open their premises to the public, or alternatively be accommodated at pre-selected ‘host venues’, together with artists from outside the area. Artists interested in taking part in this event should apply by 1 June through the open call at www.allura.com.mt As well as the Trail, Allura is planning residencies, workshops, exhibitions and community projects. The founder of Allura, Laura Swaile, is keen to establish a collaborative approach to work in the sector, and welcomes contact with galleries, creative professionals, service-providers, teachers and anyone who is interested with a view to working together to expand audiences and support the creative industries and cultural sector in Malta.

Spotlight / Africa May – June ‘18

AFRICA

T

he beautiful beach city of Cape Town in South Africa has turned itself into a cultural hub now that the world-class 100,000 square foot Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art opened its doors in September 2017.

Cape Town’s annual February art fair and gallery district were already getting the global attention they deserved.

CHRISTINE XUEREB

CAPE TOWN; more than just a pretty face

Jeanne Gaigher, an emerging artist from Cape Town, will exhibit her work at the Smith Studio from 31 October to 1 December whilst Sam Nhlengethwa, known for his hard edge collage-cut artworks, will be exhibiting at the Cape Town Gallery from 8 November to 8 December.

Trevyn McGowen, the owner of Southern Guild, said “artists [South African] thrive on political turmoil” and it’s in times like these, when we see South Africa experiencing one of its roughest political periods, that Cape Town should prove to the world that, apart from its beauty, it also has a voice.

Jochem Zeitz’s permanent exhibition at the new Zeitz Museum, which is taken from his personal collection, adds to that voice. His collection is made up of artwork from Africa and the diaspora since the year 2000. There is no doubt that the Zeitz Museum would allow Africans to tell their story and preserve what is theirs.

An art exhibition currently featuring 15 inspiring young South African artists who have carried the burden of South Africa’s history of violence and injustice in the apartheid era, is that of Tell Freedom, by all means necessary, which runs until 6 May. The inspiring representative artists featured in this exhibition, being held at the art venue Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoot, the Netherlands, are: Bronwyn Katz, Neo Matloga, Donna Kukama, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Lerato Shadi, Madeyoulook, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Lebohang Kganye, Ashley Walters, Francois Knoetze, Mawande Ka Zenzile, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Dineo Seshee Bopape and Sabelo Mlangeni.

The Johannesburg gallery Kalashnikov will also feature South African artists Io Makandal, Vusi Beauchamp, Herman de Klerk and Thulile Gamadze at

sual of the Artist of the Year – will be the highlight of the National Arts Festival from 28 June to 9 July. September will feature an exhibition by installation and performance artist Buhlebezwe Siwani at WhatIfTheWorld and South Africa’s most famous contemporary artist, William Kentridge, is exhibiting at the Goodman Gallery from 13 October to 10 November.

South African artists who have been adding their voices and putting South Africa on the map are numerous. A few names to mention are: Athi Patra-Ruga (photography), Tracey Rose (multimedia artist), Ayanda Mabulu (political paintings), Wayne Barker (political paintings), Penny Siopis (paintings), Robert Hodgins, Mohau Modisakeng (self-portraits), and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop (photography questioning Muslim stereotypes).

the Stockholm Supermarket Art Fair in April.

Other exhibitions by South African artists in Cape Town and elsewhere in South Africa in the following months include Rose Mudge’s first solo In My Room with Mazzy Star at the exciting young gallery, Smith Studio in Cape Town, in April. Ground-breaking WhatIfTheWorld gallery in Cape Town

will show Rowan Smith’s exhibition in May and, also in Cape Town, a photographic exhibition by David Goldblatt, the legendary photographer described as South Africa’s ‘visual conscience’ and Peter Magubane, will run from 2 June until 14 July at the Goodman Gallery.

Talented performance artist Igshaan Adams – the selected artist for the Vi-

Other South African artists making headlines in recent years include Lawrence Lemaoana (fabrics), Ley Mboramwe (expressionist paintings), Simphiwe Ndzube, Erin Chaplin, Kirsten Sims, Blessing Ngobeni (paintings), Mary Sibande (sculptures probing the stereotypical contextualisation of the black female body), Bambo Sibiya (prints), Merwe Marchand (design), Richard Ndimande (paintings), Vusi Beauchamp (print/painting), Senzeni Marasela (drawings, prints, thread works), Nandipha Mntambo (sculpture), Lionel Smit (portraits) and Johannes and Collen Maswanganyi (sculpture).

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Interview / Malta May – June ‘18 BLOG

[ Q +A ] with Maltese art blogger Eve Cocks

Eve Cocks

Maxine Attard, No Food’s Land -Black Monochrome - 2015

Aaron Bezzina, Reflect Now Then T Here 2017 - Lenticular prints -Valletta Contemporary

When was your blog first online?

After months of planning and preparation, I was very happy to launch my very first blog post in mid-December 2017.

Local and foreign artists, art collectors, art historians – in a nutshell, people who contribute (or have contributed) to the modern and contemporary visual art sector.

How would you describe yourself?

Ambitious, hard-working, a perfectionist and humorous (when I’m not too stressed with deadlines).

What is the concept behind your blog and why did you decide to start it?

The concept is to create an online educational and informative resource on contemporary art and artists in Malta where art enthusiasts, students and the likes could discover and learn about this field of interest.

What else do you do for a living?

Running a blog is time-consuming, so I dedicate most of my time and energy working on it. I also lecture on the history of modern art and assist my partner in managing his catering business.

Who have you interviewed or what have you reviewed?

The idea started from some casual chats I had with my business partner Pierre Mizzi (of Logix Creative Ltd). I admit that he believed in my potential for being able to do this more than I did myself and it was thanks

D ELI

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CAF É

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to his charming persuasion and technical support that I took the plunge to commit myself fully to it.

Keeping up with the artists’ requests to be featured on the blog, and running the blog as a start-up on a tight budget.

What do you look for in an interviewee?

I usually tend to go for the suffering artist – meaning artists who are fully committed to their art practice, who invest quite some time in developing a well-informed, well-researched, distinctive visual language.

What keeps you going or inspires you?

My passion for art and people’s positive feedback and their showing interest in learning more about Malta’s modern and contemporary art scene.

What or who has been your most exciting find?

Each and every artist or topic that I’ve dealt with so far is exciting in their own way.

Who or what has been the most challenging moment since it has been online?

B AR

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Can you tell us who is up next or give us any clues?

There are quite a few contemporary artists in the pipeline: Tom van Malderen and Matthew Attard are two of them...

Check it out: www.evecocks.com

A PERI TI VO

200 Merchant’s Street, Valletta T: (+356) 2703 9547 Group Bookings: T: (+356) 9949 0456

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A Global Force in Trade Finance

www.fimbank.com

Books / Konrad Buhagiar

Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man (1977) There is no book I’ve read that has held up to me as stunning and accurate a mirror than The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennet. Even as I sit down to write about it, I need to catch my breath, for the task of capturing the essence of the incredibly well-researched and superbly insightful content of this book is an onerous one. I guess its intensity is not for everyone, but once you struggle through the first pages of anthropology-style language, you find yourself in that whirlwind of change that created upheaval in the economic, cultural and political stage of the knownworld on the cusp between the 18th and 19th centuries: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the rise of the Middle Class and, central to the theme of the book, the birth of the novel and the genesis of the cult of personality, which is what we and our time are all about Sennet’s family background, his American and communist parents, and the spirit of rebellion and individuality that characterised the 60s, are what perhaps sowed the seed for this seminal book, published in 1977. Even as I browse through it today, I realize it is nothing less than prophetic. It pins down, like so many flitting butterflies, the ineffable concepts that describe where we are coming from, what we are becoming and where we are going, from the roots of narcissism to personality-driven politics to the rise of role-models in the realm of theatre and cinema. In a nutshell, the harmonious society of the 18th century, where every individual was a public man, an indispensable cog in the machine of society, has given way to the confusing, albeit exciting, flux of unconnected and conflicting individuals. It is a book about who and what we are. If it is true that knowing oneself is the secret of a serene and successful unravelling of our personal life, than this book, as the New York Times has candidly put it, can perhaps provide a key to happiness.

Giorgio Vasari: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, sculptors and Architects (1550) Sometimes a book lands in your lap and your life is never the same again. I can say that about a book that arrived in the post from London one day when I was nine. It was sent by my polish aunt Marysia who was on a mission to nourish my imagination by keeping me stocked with a never-ending stream of secondhand books that she collected from the Oxfam shop she ran in Hampstead. I was attracted to it, I guess, because it stood out from the others in the package for its lack of colour, its austere, brown old cover and its thick yellowing pages. It was called ‘Knights of Art’ by Amy Steedman, an Edwardian book, published in 1907.

I remember that as soon as I started reading these stories of Italian painters, I was, in contrast to the monochromatic cover, transported into a world of colour and light, of form and myth and the open breadth of the Renaissance landscape and the free Renaissance mind.

She introduced the book with these words: ‘In telling these stories, I have been helped by an old book called The Lives of The Painters, by Giorgio Vasari, who was himself a painter. He took great delight in gathering together all the stories about these artists and writing them down with loving care, so that he shows us real living men, and not merely great names by which the famous pictures are known.’

That is when I first met the great and talented, ‘real living’ Italian men who created so much beauty and who, themselves, told the world so many intricate and timeless stories. Since then, I have read Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the foundation of art-historical writing, from cover to cover.

Like Plutarch’s Parallel Lives written a century earlier, which I discovered later, it taught me that no great art movement or personal achievement is separable from everyday chores, ambitions, feelings and even delusions of life. Just as Michelangelo saw and extracted magnificent beauty in a defective block of marble, so does eternity grow out of the weak yet noble efforts of human endeavour.

Douglas Coupland: Bit Rot (2015) Thank God for a book like Bit Rot that can help ground you in the present and dispel all traces of nostalgia for a past that will always seem so much rosier than today. Douglas Coupland is around my age. Like me, he has one foot firmly planted in modern times, the post-war period and the Cold War, and one in the Post-modern world of ambiguity, mass markets and globalization. As early as 1991 he wrote Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and earned himself the reputation of spokesman for a generation. Since then he has penned a series of books, including Shampoo Planet (1992), that describes the group now generally labelled Generation Y. Clearly a man of his times, he changes with them.

His latest book called Bit Rot is the most delicate, funny and forgiving description of a contemporary culture growing out of new technologies, especially social media, that are changing the ways we think, feel and interact with each other.

I cannot help thinking of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) as I read, like I do from time to time in order to keep myself positive, grounded and amused, Coupland’s short, idiosyncratic and surreal stories about the intrusion of these new technologies in our lives, sometimes causing havoc and sometimes providing solace. Quirky titles like: Superman and Kryptonite Martinis, Bartholomew is Right There at the Dawn of Language, or The Man Who Lost His Story, will give you a flavour of the entertaining take he has on the current situation. But the message is always clear. Like Walter Benjamin declared in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), when he describes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), we will always look back longingly at the past.

But a strong wing is irrevocably caught in our wings and we are propelled forcefully and relentlessly forward, no matter how much we resist. The name of that storm is Progress. We have no choice but to go with it. The best that we can hope for is not to be left behind.

“ We will always look back longingly at the past.”

May – June ‘18

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Big Bang Ceramic Blue.

Black ceramic case. Self-winding chronograph movement. Blue sunray dial. Blue alligator strap stitched to rubber. hublot.com