An exhibit that deciphers the concept of phantoms or ‘spirits’ across cultures

The Asian Art Museum hosts ‘Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past’, a significant exhibition that explores the complex and vastly cross-cultural perspectives of Asian cosmology and spirituality through a compelling interplay of about 140 artworks drawn from the past and present.

Curated by Mami Kataoka, chief curator of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, in conjunction with the Asian Art Museum’s assistant curator of contemporary art, Allison Harding, it’s the first major exhibit of contemporary art organized by the world-renowned institution. Providing art lovers with highly immersive experiences, it offers insights into a wide range of curious belief systems and mythologies, which have shaped Asian cultures over time.

“The concept of phantoms or ‘spirits’ is rather elusive. It’s still often felt and shared across the various different cultures and time periods. Through its apparent emphasis on interconnectivity, this exhibit gives an opportunity to experience those ‘invisible forces’ in a tangible and slightly provocative way - with Asian art at the center,” states its director Jay Xu

It includes works of art by several renowned and upcoming artists from Canada, China, Singapore, Tibet, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the US, Hong Kong, and India. Many of the contemporary installations are new or site-specific commissions. When combined with the museum’s collections, they seem to represent a contrasting array of themes, materials, forms as well as media - stone, metal, fabric, wood etc; and masks, textiles, film, video, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, and paintings.

Communication between plants, animals and humans plays a major part in the mythologies of several cultures. Artists deal with this theme in a showcase at Osher Gallery. In Jagannath Panda’s work, ‘The Cult of Survival II’, endless cycles of consumption and production are symbolized in the form of a snake crafted from pipes. On the other hand, Adeela Suleman from Pakistan utilizes stainless steel reliefs of natural objects like birds, flowers, trees to serve as storytellers.

Retrospective survey of a world renowned photo artist

Cindy Sherman is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art.

Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Bringing together more than 170 photographs, a retrospective survey at the New York-based MOMA traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present.

The exhibition explores dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at the museum.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Sherman has selected films from MoMA’s collection, which are being screened in MoMA’s theaters during the course of the exhibition.

A mélange of memories, experiences and our life journey

Artist Ranjith Raman is known to sew together many of his elusive thoughts and images coupled with fleeting feelings as if they would disintegrate if not molded in a solid form. A mélange of memories, experiences and our life journey are a bit like that! If we do not hold on to them, they tend to slip away into oblivion…

And yet, what’s it we are really holding on to but just a few sensations, which can barely be imparted with any tangible form? Ranjith Raman’s art, to paraphrase Paul Klee, does not create the visible, rather it makes visible! We see an abstract at times and representational depiction of space other times. The very essence of various locations gets embedded in the geometry or in those organic forces, which have shaped them.

Expansive textured topographical views of both housing amid coconut trees in monochrome are there. Then there is a quiet little temple that evokes the calm of being present in an austere place in another composition. Contrast the same with the large untitled diptych apparently teeming with vibrantly colored and differently shaped fabric patches, often reminding one of a seemingly  unorganized urban skyline dotted with concrete blocks of modest dwellings and tall buildings. These shifts in language reflect the artist’s temperament.

Color is central to his artistic expression. The medium of smooth silk and cotton fiber embroidered on fabric employing different stitches embodies his vocabulary and underlines his intent. Fibers and fabric do the job of paint, brush and canvas. Much as it may seem a touch improbable for this offbeat medium, spontaneity is apparent in the current body of work.  He prepares the cotton fabric surface covering it with the running stitch in one color from edge to edge much like someone would prime a canvas. The time-consuming process marks the work with an instinctual idea of what the artist wants to create.

Ranjith Raman’s fascinating fiber art

Lately there has been an upsurge in the use and interest in textile and embroidery in contemporary art practice across continents. While multi-disciplinary artists have used the medium on and off in their practices, there are an increasing number of artists like Ranjith Raman for whom embroidery is the principal form of expression.

His new series of works, entitled ‘Intangibles’, takes place at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai.  In his works done with silk and cotton fiber, one can see stitches, like brushstrokes, veering off in different directions, creating texture. One becomes aware of the power of line. Loose strands, exposed knots, superimposed appliqué and layers of differently colored cloth are some of the complex techniques used in these panels. As light falls on fibers their dynamic tonal qualities add another dimension to the imagery.

Writer and curator Jasmine Shah Varma notes that Ranjith Raman’s work falls within the vast genre of fiber art, which includes wall work, installation, and sculpture relating to a vast scope of contemporary concerns. Bold, controversial and cutting edge work with this age-old medium has relocated the boundaries of art and craft. He doesn’t subscribe to the medium’s prevalent associated metaphorical meanings suggestive of gender politics, violence, pain or fragility. For him it’s not about conceptualizing or contextualizing historic traditions of textiles and embroidering either.

Fibers and fabric are the stuff of his voice and visual language. The gradual repetitive process where every little stitch adds up to make the tactile image is japa, a meditative act for him. The tactile and textured quality of the material is almost a necessity in order to grasp or reach out. The artist quips, “Stitching is like a prayer for me. I am trying to create an inner space.” So it is important to him that he does all his work with minimal assistance. The process of art making is part of his quest and not an agenda.

His academic background compels him to create and review, stitch, unstitch and, on creative impulse make decisions when to stop embroidering a work. He doesn’t have a detailed sketch before he embarks upon the process. He uses the principles of drawing and painting that he’d use with more conventional material. These are paintings where colored thread and fabric are used to create imagery pixel by pixel. The relationship between process and concept is prominent.

A glance at The Museum of Modern Art shows

Artistic dismembering or reassembling of the body

Artists from André Masson and Joan Miró to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Gober to Mark Manders and Nicola Tyson have distorted and disoriented many of the familiar of referents, playing out personal, cultural, or social anxieties and desires on unwitting anatomies.  If art history reveals an unending impulse to render the human figure as a symbol of potential perfection and a system of primary organization, these works show that artists have just as persistently been driven to disfigure the body.

In a collaborative, chance-based drawing game known as the exquisite corpse, several Surrealist artists subjected the human body to distortions and juxtapositions that resulted in fantastic composite figures. A group exhibition, entitled ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’, considers how this and related practices - in which the body is dismembered or reassembled, swollen or multiplied, propped with prosthetics or fused with nature and the machine - have recurred in art throughout the 20th century and to the present day.

Shaping Modernity (1880–1980)

Recent acquisitions are featured in a reinstallation of highlights from the design collection covering a century of dramatic aesthetic and technological innovation—from the late 19th to late 20th centuries. Diverse types of modern design representing various geographic origins and styles are organized around period-specific themes: The International New Art 1880–1918; Metal and Glass 1920s–1950s; and Out of the Box: Italy 1960s–1980s.

Diego Rivera’s mystical murals

This exhibition brings together key works made for Diego Rivera’s 1931 exhibition, presenting them at MoMA for the first time in nearly 80 years. Along with mural panels, the show includes full-scale drawings, smaller working drawings, archival materials related to the commission and production of these works, and designs for Rivera’s famous Rockefeller Center mural, which he also produced while he was working at the Museum.

Focused specifically on works created during the artist’s stay in New York, it draws a succinct portrait of Rivera as a highly cosmopolitan figure who moved between Russia, Mexico, and the United States, and will offer a fresh look at the intersection of art making and radical politics in the 1930s.

A blockbuster auction sale proves the art market strength

Soaring to $87 million, a Mark Rothko oil painting done in 1961 set a new auction sales record for post-war art, whereas works by Yves Klein, Alexander Calder, Gerhard Richter and Jackson Pollock, smashed artists' records at the recent Christie's event that scaled the highest-ever amounts for post-war art category.

The global auction house drew a total of $388.5 million (inclusive of commission calculated against $236 million- $330 million pre-sale estimate), led by Rothko's stunning ‘Orange, Red, Yellow’. This large-scale painting from the Pincus collection went for a whopping $86,882,500. The figure broke the artist's own record of $72.84 million, eclipsing the $86.3 million for a 1976 ‘Triptych’ by Francis Bacon sold in 2008.

‘Orange, Red, Yellow’ thus became the most expensive post-war work of art ever at auction. Out of the total 59 lots on offer, three failed to find buyers, a near-unprecedented sell-through rate as bidders carried prices beyond their high estimates for many top-priced works. Five works sold for over $20 million, whereas 11 of the 40 artists set new records. Works from the collection of David Pincus, a renowned art patron and humanitarian from Philadelphia who died in December, were ably led by the Rothko. It achieved an impressive total of $175 million, easily above the estimate of $100 million.

The staggering numbers apparently bore out officials' contention that the market, at the top echelons at least, continues to successful tackle global economic and geo-political concerns. "It was phenomenal. It proves there is insatiable demand. The interest is just so deep," remarked the Christie's specialist Koji Inoue (in charge of the sale). He termed it ‘something unprecedented’.

The Christie's international head (post-war & contemporary art), Brett Gorvy, said, "The market really responded, It is a very sophisticated market, a very knowledgeable market, The total global market bidding and a strong American bidding was well evident. We saw seasoned collectors, apart from new collectors who were coming forward.”

A spotlight on Mark Rothko and his philosophy

One of the preeminent painters of his generation, Mark Rothko is identified with the New York School, a group of painters, which emerged during the late 1940s. It was recognized as a new voice in American art. During a career spanning well over five decades, the artist created a new impassioned form of abstract art. Here's a spotlight on Mark Rothko and his philosophy:

• Rothko's work, an extensive note on the website of Washington, DC-based National Gallery of Art mentions, is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
• In their manifesto in the New York Times Rothko and Gottlieb had written: "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We’re for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."
• By 1947 Rothko had virtually eliminated all elements of surrealism or mythic imagery from his works, and nonobjective compositions of indeterminate shapes emerged. His work began to darken dramatically during the late 1950s. This development is related to his work on a mural commission for the Four Seasons restaurant, located in the Seagram Building in New York City. Here Rothko turned to a palette of red, maroon, brown, and black.
• He largely abandoned conventional titles in 1947, sometimes resorting to numbers or colors in order to distinguish one work from another. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination. He eventually withdrew from this project, due to misgivings about the restaurant as a proper setting for his work.
• The artist had, however, already produced a number of studies and finished canvases, two of which are included in the present installation. In the Seagram panels, Rothko changed his motif from a closed to an open form, suggesting a threshold or portal. This element may have been related to the architectural setting for which these works were intended.