New York Legs. Tommy Agriodimas

Legs over the city, legs on the stairs, legs in the bushes – inspired by Guy Bourdin, Tommy Agriodimas’s independent new project “Legs” seeks to capture just those in new and strange settings. As a fashion photographer, Agriodimas has found himself in a number of unusual situations where the opportunity to create a strangely beautiful image presented itself.  He’s captured these provocative parts jutting, stretching, and kicking out of any number of surprising backdrops.   We caught up with him via e-mail with a few questions on the Legs project. Read the rest of this entry »

THE RACE: Tomas Dzadon and Valentino Diego

Holy motorbikes, Batman! They’re on Futurism’s tail!

Since Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the act of repairing (or also not repairing) a motorcycle can have pop-philosophical connotations. So whether you choose to view artist Tomas Dzadon’s 5-year project of restoring a 1940s NSU German motorcycle as a Pirsig-esque meditation on the “classical,” or just to say that the artist took inspiration from motorcycles, the time spent on the machine did lead to the contemplation of the mechanisms of the modernist era and contemporary art, as well as to the perhaps obvious, but nonetheless elegant, similarities in form to Otakar Švec’s iconic Futurist sculpture Sunbeam Motorcycle that can be seen in the National Gallery in Prague.

Alongside collaborator Valentino Diego, Dzadon has presented an interesting and fresh contribution to the critical dialogue surrounding the medium of sculpture, its historical direction and development, and its role in contemporary art. By placing an object sculpture, the restored motorcycle, next to a replica of Švec’s bronze, and all of this placed on top of a site-specific sculpture that creates a framework and impending physical challenge for our frozen racers with its steep incline, we are invited to consider the future of sculpture in terms of Newton’s first law of motion: “An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.” Have these two young artists provided enough of an unbalancing force to change the outcome of the race?

July 30 – September 26, 2010 at hunt kastner artworks, Kamenická 22, 170 00 Praha 7, Czech Republic. Tues. – Fri. from 1-6 pm and Sat. 2-6pm, or by appointment.

Planning to visit the exhibition, or indeed Prague itself, the ICON Hotel & Lounge is just a short motorbike blast away from the gallery.

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Categories: Prague, Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

GRAND TOUR: Matts Leiderstam

This week White Line Hotels welcomed the Schlossberghotel in Graz to its family of individualistic hotels. Boasting a collection of over 400 original artworks in every room of the hotel as well as public areas, Schlossberghotel is “the art hotel.” Should your visit to Graz be in the autumn, take a short stroll over to the Grazer Kunstverein to see artist Matts Leiderstam’s Grand Tour.

Starting some 300 years ago, young Englishmen of means made their “Grand Tour” through the European Continent. With nearly unlimited time and funds, they travelled a fairly standardized itinerary to learn about the roots of western culture, perfect their language skills, hobnob with the elite, and commission paintings. While making obvious connections to the era of the “Grand Tour,” Leiderstam invites his viewers on a different sort of tour, one in which the standardizations of content and display of artworks are sometimes quite literally put under the magnifying glass. Leiderstam thrives on producing a constant productive confusion in the canonical order of art. Using methods borrowed from the art historian’s, he draws his viewer to the repressed power, political and sexual subtexts of art. After taking Leiderstam’s Grand Tour, will you look at art the same way?

September 25 – November 11, 2010 at Grazer Kunstverein, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4, 8010 Graz, Austria. Monday until friday 10.30am until 6pm. Saturday 10.30am until 4.30pm.

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Categories: Graz, Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

Peter Liversidge: Proposals for Town Hall Hotel & Apartments

Town Hall Hotel & Apartments, London

In the latest in a series of exhibitions by London East End artists on its hotel’s grounds, Town Hall Hotel & Apartments offers its visitors the opportunity to question what is possible and the invitation to participate in, or even become a patron of, the shift from abstract possibility to realization. Read the rest of this entry »

Basquiat. A retrospective

Basquiat – a retrospective on the occasion of a what would-have-been 50^th birthday

Foundation Beyeler, Basel

Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful body of work. This slight twist on the phrase “live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse” seems to be a ground rule for membership in the “27 Club,” the morbidly popular term for a group of artists and musicians that died at the age of 27, mostly from drug overdoses. Like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison before him, or artist Dash Snow after him, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untimely death secured that history could never look at him the way it can look at those who didn’t check out quite so early; the height of his cultural relevance will remain forever unsoiled by possibly questionable later creative moves or the very simple and inevitable fate of growing old. Read the rest of this entry »