Art Fairs

Please visit Galerie Gmurzynska online at the VIP Art Fair for a selection of modern and contemporary masters, important monumental sculptures and installations.
www.vipartfair.com

Art Kabinett:

Yves Klein/ John Cage
PLAYING WITH FIRE

curated by Joachim Pissarro

Yves Klein and John Cage are two of the most influential artists of their generation. And while each is widely recognized for his innovative experimental artistic principles and practices—especially in his respective native country—rarely have they been seriously discussed together. The exhibition Yves Klein / John Cage: PLAYING WITH FIRE will mine and explore one particularly intriguing affinity between these two formative artists: their attraction to and manipulation of fire as an art-making tool.

Throughout their careers Klein and Cage each sought out purposefully unpredictable techniques and (anti)materials by which to create art. Both artists were eventually drawn to the volatile—potentially destructive, unquestionably magnetic and awesome—power of flames. In 1961 Klein made a series of “Fire Paintings” by launching an open flame at chemically modified paper. Similar to the technique he used to create his famous “Anthropometries” series (wherein nude models covered themselves in paint and then rolled directly on the canvas), to create the “Fire Paintings” Klein used models who were coated in flame retardant. Wherever the models’ bodies touched the surface of the paper, the action of the flames was, to a certain extent, blocked. The “Fire Paintings” were made with the assistance of the Centre d'Essais du Gaz de France (the central research laboratory of the National Gasworks of France) and are a breathtakingly beautiful component of Klein’s oeuvre.

Decades later, in a far less dangerous working environment, Cage experimented with fire as a way to produce unsystematic imagery on paper. While working at the Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cage created a series of monoprints on smoked paper (“Variations.”) To infuse the paper with smoke and achieve random burn marks, buckles and crackles, Cage would build a small fire directly on the printing press and then smother it with dampened paper. Cage honed this technique while working with Ray Kass at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. In 1990 he created the “River Rock and Smoke” series—sixty-one unique drawings and watercolor on smoked paper that represent some of his most graceful and poetic visual works. The crispy burn holes and organic shapes left by the smoke and fire are aesthetically in tune with Klein’s fire paintings.

Conceptually, Klein and Cage both enjoyed the fact that fire itself could take responsibility for the look and feel of each unique final work. They welcomed the unpredictable forms, texture and colors produced by flames and smoke. Cage and Klein’s experimentations with smoke and flames manage to capture the wildness and hypnotic allure of fire in two distinctive and equally innovative styles. Seen together, Klein’s “Fire Paintings” and Cage’s smoked paper works reveal a rich and heretofore unexplored parallel between these two seminal artists.

- Joachim Pissarro
Mara Hoberman

Winner of Best Fine Art Object:

Kurt Schwitters, Sword, 1935

Special Exhibition:

REBELS

curated by Isabelle Bscher
booth design by Karl Lagerfeld

Booth C05 designed by Zaha Hadid.

Zaha Hadid and Suprematism explores the formative influence of the masters of the Russian Avant-Garde on the practice of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. The Kabinett will be curated by Hadid within a newly created design environment she has prepared for Galerie Gmurzynska at Art Basel Miami Beach. Pieces by masters such as Malevich, Suetin, Chashnik and Rodchenko are juxtaposed with architectural and design works by one of Time's 'Most Influential People' of 2010. The link between Hadid and these artists has spanned her entire career, beginning with her 1976-1977 graduation project for the Architectural Association, Malevich’s Tecktonik, which took the visual deconstructed influence of Malevich and used it as the starting point for a London hotel design. Following in this interest, in 1993 Zaha Hadid was asked by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to create an exhibition design for their encyclopedic show of the Russian Avant-Garde, The Great Utopia. This selection will expose the dramatically influential relationship between the artists of the Russian Avant-garde and the most important architect working today.

Galerie Gmurzynska presents at the Pavilion of ART & DESIGN London with a booth designed by Zaha Hadid. October 13- 17, 2010 in Berkeley Square.

Galerie Gmurzynska returns to Abu Dhabi for a third consecutive year to participate in Abu Dhabi Art this November 19-22. With an exhibition of near 40 Impressionist, Classic Modern and Contemporary works, this year's highlights include paintings by Edgar Degas, Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon and Alfred Sisley, and sculptures by Fernando Botero, Alexander Calder, Robert Indiana, Zaha Hadid and David Smith.

Please visit us this year in Stand B2.

Preview: Wednesday, November 18
Open to Public: Thursday, November 19 - Friday, November 22, 4pm - 10pm

Galerie Gmurzynska returns this year to Art | 40 | Basel in Booth V1.

For more information on the Fair, please visit: www.artbasel.com

Special Exhibition:

Calder/ Rodchenko