Aziz Art Jan 2020
Competition
Nabil Nahas Hamid Hashemi
Etel Adnan John Baldessari
1-John Anthony Baldessari 14-Review by Professor Hamid Hashemi 16-Competition 17-Nabil Nahas 20-Etel Adnan
Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari Iranian art department: Mohadese Yaghoubi
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com
John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020)was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.He created thousands of works which demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced that of Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux, and Barbara Kruger among others. Early life and career Baldessari was born in National City, California,to Hedvig Marie Jensen (1896-1950), a Danish nurse,and Antonio Baldessari (1877-1976), an Italian salvage
dealer. Baldessari and his elder sister were raised in Southern California.He attended Sweetwater High School and San Diego State College.Between 1960 and 1984, he was married to Montessorian teacher Carol Ann Wixom;[9] they have two children. In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He kept teaching for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968. At UCSD he shared an office with David Antin.In 1970, Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers, and began teaching at CalArts. His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Ken Feingold, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, and Troy Brauntuch.While at CalArts, Baldessari taught "the infamous Post Studio class" 1
which he intended to "indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation."The class, which operated outside of medium-specificity, was influential in informing the context for addressing a student's art practice at CalArts, and established a tradition of conceptual critique at CalArts that was carried on by artists such as Michael Asher.He quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008.At UCLA, his students included Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.
because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement "A TWODIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE" (1967).
Another work, Painting for Kubler Early text paintings (1967–68) presented the viewer By 1966, Baldessari was using theoretical instructions on how to photographs and text, or simply view it and on the importance of text, on canvas.His early major context and continuity with works were canvas paintings that previous works. This work were empty but for painted referenced art historian George statements derived from Kubler's seminal book, The Shape contemporary art theory. An early of Time: Remarks on the History of attempt of Baldessari's included Things. The seemingly legitimate the hand-painted phrase "Suppose art concerns were intended by it is true after all? WHAT THEN?" Baldessari to become hollow and (1967) on a heavily worked ridiculous when presented in such a painted surface. However, this purely self-referential manner. proved personally disappointing
Disowning of early work text from an amateur photography In 1970, Baldessari and five friends book, aiming at the violation of a burnt all of the paintings he had set of basic "rules" on snapshot created between 1953 and 1966 as composition. In one of the works, part of a new piece, titled The Baldessari had himself Cremation Project. The ashes from photographed in front of a palm these paintings were baked into precisely so that it would appear cookies and placed into an urn, and that the tree were growing out of the resulting art installation his head. consists of a bronze His photographic California Map commemorative plaque with the Project (1969) created physical destroyed paintings' birth and forms that resembled the letters in death dates, as well as the recipe "California" geographically near to for making the cookies. Through the very spots on the map that they the ritual of cremation Baldessari were printed. In the Binary Code draws a connection between Series, Baldessari used images as artistic practice and the human life information holders by alternating cycle. Thus the act of disavowal photographs to stand in for the onbecomes generative as with the off state of binary code; one work of auto-destructive artist Jean example alternated photos of a Tinguely. woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it Juxtaposing text with images away. Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials Another of Baldessari's series (such as film stills), take them out juxtaposed an image of an object of their original context and such as a glass, or a block of wood, rearrange their form, often and the phrase "A glass is a glass" including the addition of words or or "Wood is wood" combined with sentences. Related to his early text "but a cigar is a good smoke" and paintings were his Wrong series the image of the artist smoking a (1966–1968), which paired cigar. photographic images with lines of
These directly refer to René Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar",as well as to Rudyard Kipling's "… a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke." In "Double Bill", a 2012 series of large inkjet prints,Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari then names only one of his two artistic "collaborators" on each canvas's lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP Arbitrary games Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his
works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film. The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) as an early example of post-conceptual art.This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari. He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies. Following Baldessari's seminal statement "I will not make any more boring Art", he conceived the work The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73), composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump,
as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification. Pointing Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings (1969) series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by " to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being
painted.Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now (1973), entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others. Dots Circular adhesive dots covering up the faces of photographed and painted portraits are a prevailing motif in Baldessari's work from the mid-1980s onward.The artist himself suspected that, despite the broad array of approaches he's taken over the course of his career, he will be best remembered as "the guy who puts dots over peoples faces."Examples of the "dot portraits" would include—for example—Bloody Sunday (1987) or Stonehenge with Two Persons (2005), though these works are numerous and it is difficult to identify an exemplar. The dots in these paintings evoke brightly colored price-stickers sometimes seen at garage sales,
thrift stores or placed on retail items during a sale. Indeed, these stickers appear to have been the inspiration for the method.. Describing his initial intuitive leap in this direction, Baldessari said, "I just had these price stickers I was using for something else, in some graphic way and I put them on all the faces and I just felt like it leveled the playing field."The dotfaced works may sometimes be described as paintings, collages, or may be released as print editions. Prints Baldessari began making prints in the early 1970s and continued to produce editions. He created his first print – I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) - as an edition to raise funds for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax. The lithograph was created in conjunction with the now renowned exhibition for which – at Baldessari's request – students endlessly wrote the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. The artist has since worked internationally with premier publishers including Arion Press of San Francisco, Brook Alexander Editions of New York,
Cirrus Editions of Los Angeles, Crown Point Press of San Francisco, Edition Jacob Samuel of Santa Monica, Gemini G.E.L. of Los Angeles, Mixografia of Los Angeles, Multiples, Multi Editions of Los Angeles, Inc. of New York, and Peter Blum Editions of New York. His 1988 prints, The Fallen Easel and Object (with Flaw), represented a major shift in Baldessari's approach to presentation, allowing a more complex relationship between his found imagery. In both prints, Baldessari expertly contrasts unrelated photographs to suggest a mysterious and/or ominous undercurrent. In the 1990s Baldessari began working with Mixografia Workshop to create three-dimensional prints utilizing their unique process of printing from metal molds. Baldessari's interest in dimensionality has carried over to recent editions from Gemini G.E.L., including the Person with Guitar series (2005) and the print series Noses & Ears, Etc. (2006–2007) in which screenprinted images are constructed in three layers on sintra with hand painting.
A 2007 publication from Gemini is God Nose, a cast aluminum piece that is designed to hang from the ceiling.Baldessari also contributed to the 2008 Artists for Obama portfolio, a set of prints in a limited edition of 150 published by Gemini G.E.L.. Performance and film Originally conceived in 1970, Unrealised Proposal for Cadavre Piece would have visitors look through a peep-hole and see a dead male body laid out with its feet towards them inside a climate-controlled vitrine,made to resemble Andrea Mantegna’s painting, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1480). Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery and Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, first attempted to realize Baldessari’s idea in 2011 and the resulting paperwork of failed attempts to procure a willing male cadaver was displayed in the exhibition "11 Rooms" at the Manchester International Festival. Sculpture Baldessari created his first ever sculpture, Beethoven's Trumpet
(with Ear) Opus # 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 (2007), a series of 6 resin, fiberglass, bronze, aluminum, and electronics components in the form of a gigantic bronze trumpet extending off an oversized ear sculpted on the wall.When the viewer speaks into the trumpet, the sounds causes a short recital of a phrase from a Beethoven string quartet. Baldessari has gone on to create sculptural works that often incorporate resin, bronze, and steel, such as the approximately 2.4 m carrot (Fake Carrot, 2016) and an elongated bronze figure trapped wearing a wooden barrel in a nod to Giacometti (Giacometti Variation, 2018). Baldessari's film Police Drawing documents a 1971 performance, Police Drawing Project. In this piece, the artist walked into a class of art students who had never seen him, set up a video camera to document the proceedings, and left the room. Subsequently, a police artist entered and, based on the students' testimony, sketched a likeness of the artist.In the blackand-white video I Am Making Art (1971), Baldessari stands facing the camera; for nearly 20 minutes
he strikes and then holds various poses — crossing his arms over his chest or swinging one arm out to one side or pointing directly at the lens, for example — and with each new gesture, he states "I am making art."In a 1972 tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sang lines from LeWitt's thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs. Other films include Teaching a Plant the Alphabet and the Inventory videos, also from 1972.
His work has since been exhibited in: Documenta V (1972) and VII (1982) the Whitney Biennial (1983) the Carnegie International (1985– 86) the 47th Venice Biennial (1997) Solo presentations of his work at museums have included exhibitions at: the Albertina, Vienna (1999) Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1999–2000) Museo d'Arte Moderna Contemporanea di Trento e Exhibitions Rovereto, Trento (2000–2001) Baldessari has been in over 200 Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung solo shows and 1,000 group Ludwig Wien, the Kunsthaus Graz, shows in his six-decade career. and Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin He had his first gallery solo (2004) exhibition at the Molly Barnes Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017) Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968.His Retrospectives of his work was first retrospective exhibition in shown at MOCA, Los Angeles, the U.S. in 1981 was mounted by which traveled to SFMOMA, the the New Museum of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Contemporary Art in New York Garden, the Whitney Museum and ,and traveled to the Contemporary the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Arts Center, Cincinnati, the CAM, Montreal in 1990-92; at Houston, the Van Abbemuseum, Cornerhouse, Manchester, and Eindhoven, and the Museum traveled to London, Stuttgart, Folkwang, Essen. Ljubljana, Oslo, and Lisbon in 199596 entitled
"This Not That"; and Pure Beauty opened at the Tate Modern, London, in 2009 and travelled to MACBA, Barcelona; LACMA, Los Angeles; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 2011.
There was an "Artist's Choice: John Baldessari" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1994, and the artist was invited to curate the exhibition "Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2006, and he created the exhibition design for "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the 2017/2018 season at the Vienna State Opera he designed the large-scale image (176 m²) "Graduation" for the ongoing series "Safety Curtain", conceived by museum in progress.
Collections Baldessari's works are part of major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Broad Collection. Position in the art market Baldessari set a personal auction record when his acrylic-on-canvas piece Quality Material (1966–1968) was sold for $4,408,000 at Christie's New York in 2007. In 1972, Ileana Sonnabend agreed to represent him worldwide. In 1999, after twenty-six years with the Sonnabend Gallery, Baldessari went to Marian Goodman.He has also been represented by Margo Leavin (1984-2013),[8] and Sprüth Magers (since 1998)
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Aziz Anzabi's style is unique in comparison to the works of other artists in Iran. His brave use of browns which is present in most of his works with the use of cold colours produces a feeling of imprisonment within the viewer,illustrating the power of Anzabi's works. Talking about the techniques of his works, it is clear Anzabi has clear strength in perspective, maintaining a visual balance and organising the scene in his artworks. In all his works it is obvious that there is clear intention behind every placement of each character within a perspective that inspires beauty within the artwork and immediately captures the attention of the audience. The characters placed within a reasonable equation with the horizon line , while Anzabi plays with the placement of the characters within the painting, without tiring the eye, allows the viewer to focus on the individual aspects of the work without forgetting about the main character. Furthermore, our focus should be drawn to Anzabi's intentions and thoughts
behind his works.Today art is moving towards more innovation. Anzabi's works which at first might seem effortlessly created take a lot of time, clearly illustrating the artists talent. The likeable paradox of looking at a creative creation in the moment vs the time that has been put into it, demonstrates the value of thought process behind every one of Anzabi's works. His unique world view creates a thought in the current times, which he tries to convey to others, which is why the audience can appreciate the conceptualisation behind his works. To conclude it is clear that his four series are completely created out of knowledge and thoughts .His marriage of the Surrealist style with the Qajar symbols in a contemporary world demonstrate his fluency on society,politics, culture and history which are present in his work. Finally, if people are looking to appreciate high value art in today's Iran, which is filled with colours and thoughts they have to see it in Anzabi's works. Review by Professor university of art Hamid Hashemi 14
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Nabil Nahas born 18 September 1949 in Beirut, Lebanon is a Lebanese artist and painter living in New York.
Sometimes he combines these traditions in brightly colored paintings, suggestive of the richness of nature and of the imagination. One of Nahas’ motifs is starfish, sometimes cast in acrylic Biography paint, on top of which he layered Nabil grew up in Cairo and Beirut, high-chroma acrylic paint. before moving to the United States for college to study at Louisiana In his most recent work, Nahas State University. He is the younger introduced recognizable Lebanese brother of the Lebanese/Brazilian cedar, pine and olive trees in his businessman Naji Nahas. most direct references yet to his He earned a BFA in 1971 and an native land. In 2018, Nahas was MFA from Yale University in 1973. commissioned to produce a cedar Encounters with contemporary painting to be featured on a new painters at Yale influenced stamp in Lebanon. Nahas to move to New York after graduation Painting career He exhibited regularly at important New York galleries and received critical acclaim for his work. Usually working "in" an abstract idiom, Nahas repeatedly reinvented himself. Nahas’ paintings have made use of geometric motifs and decorative patterns inspired Levantine art architecture. Nahas also employs traditional Western abstract painting, pointillistic and impressionistic techniques.
Solo Exhibitions 1973 Yale University, Connecticut 1977 Ohio State University, Ohio 1978 Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1979 Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1980 Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1987 Holly Solomon Gallery, New York 1988 Galerie Montenay, Paris 1988 Holly Solomon Gallery, New York 1994 Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado 1997 Sperone Westwater, New York 1998 Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, DC 1998 Milleventi, Milan 1999 Sperone Westwater, New York 2002 25th Bienal De SĂŁo Paulo 2002 J. Johnson Gallery, Jacksonville Beach, Florida 2005 Galerie Xippas, Paris 2005 Sperone Westwater, New York 2009 Galerie Tanit, Munich, Germany 2010 FIAF Gallery, New York 2010 Beirut Exhibition Center (BEC), Beirut, Lebanon 2011 Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates 2011 Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, England 2013 Sperone Westwater 2013 Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE 2014 Ben Brown Fine Arts, London 2016 Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon 2019 Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon
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Etel Adnan born 24 February 1925 in Beirut, Lebanonis a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: MultiEthnic Literature of the United States. Besides her literary output, Adnan continues to produce visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world. She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.
and most of her later work has been first written in this language. At 24, Adnan traveled to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the University of Paris.She then traveled to the United States where she continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard University.From 1952 to 1978, she taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael. She has also lectured at many universities throughout the United States.
Adnan returned from the US to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al-Safa Life (newspaper0, a French-language Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in newspaper in Beirut. In addition, Beirut, Lebanon. Adnan's mother she also helped build the cultural was a Christian Greek from Smyrna section of the newspaper, and her father was Muslim Syrian occasionally contributing cartoons and a petty officer.Though she grew and illustrations. Her tenure at Alup speaking Greek and Turkish in a Safa was most notable for her primarily Arabic-speaking society, front-page editorials, commenting she was educated at French on the important political issues of convent schools and French the day. became the language in which her In her later years, Adnan began to early work was first written. She openly identify as lesbian. also studied English in her youth,
Visual art Adnan also works as a painter, her earliest abstract works were created using a palette knife to apply oil paint onto the canvas – often directly from the tube – in firm swipes across the picture's surface. The focus of the compositions often being a red square, she remains interested in the "immediate beauty of colour".In 2012, a series of the artist's brightly colored abstract paintings were exhibited as a part of documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. In the 1960s, she began integrating Arabic calligraphy into her artworks and her books, such as Livres d’Artistes . She recalls sitting for hours copying words from an Arabic grammar without trying to understand the meaning of the words. Her art is very much influenced by early hurufiyya artists including; Iraqi artist, Jawad Salim, Palestinian writer and artist, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan al Said, who rejected Western aesthetics and embraced a new art form which was both modern and yet referenced
traditional culture, media and techniques. Inspired by Japanese leporellos, Adnan also paints landscapes on to foldable screens that can be "extended in space like freestanding drawings".
In 2014, a collection of the artist's paintings and tapestries were exhibited as a part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Adnan's retrospective at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, titled "Etel Adnan In All Her Dimensions" and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, featured eleven dimensions of Adnan's practice. It included her early works, her literature, her carpets, and other. The show was launched in March 2014, accompanied by a 580-page catalog of her work published jointly by Mathaf and Skira. The catalog was designed by artist Ala Younis in Arabic and English, and included text contributions by Simone Fattal, Daniel Birnbaum, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, as well as six interviews with Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
In 2017, Adnan's work was included in "Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction," a group exhibition organized by MoMA, which brought together prominent artists including Ruth Asawa, Gertrudes Altschul, Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, among others. In 2018, MASS MoCA hosted a retrospective of the artist, titled "A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun", including a selection of paintings in oil and ink, as well as a reading room of her written works.The exhibition explored how the experience of reading poetry differs from the experience of looking at a painting. Published in 2018, "Etel Adnan", a biography of the artist written by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, inquires into
the artist's work as a shaman and activist. Awards and recognition 1977: Awarded the France-Pays Arabes award for her novel Sitt Marie Rose. 2010: Awarded the Arab American Book Awards for Master of the Eclipse. 2013: Her poetry collection Sea and Fog won the California Book Award for Poetry. 2013: Awarded the Lambda Literary Award. 2014: Named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Adnan also has a RAWI Lifetime Achievement Award from the Radius of Arab-American Writers.
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com