Art FAirs internAtionAl newspAper 2010

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ART FAIRS INTERNATIONAL

www.art fairsinternational.com / www.nyartsmagazine.com / www.nyartsbeijing.cn/ www.art fairsnewspaper.com

A BRIDGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST ©2011 ART FAIRS INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER NEW YORK, Issue #12 2011 Presented by

Great Britain £ 4Japan ¥ 750

Canada $7.00USA $10.00

NEWSPAPER

Featured Artists

Duda PenteadoKristina SretkovaKerry GrønengClaire Phipps

Rosae NovichenkoValentina De’ Mathà

Hwang Ran

And Many More...

ARTS

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Re-public of China, the Eighth Edition of the China Interna-tional Gallery Exposition (CIGE 2011) will take place at the Exhibition Hall of the China World Trade Centre in Beijing from April 21 to 24, 2011 (Preview April 20).

With the auspices of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, China now arrives at an unprece-dented age of prosperity. Its remarkable economic devel-opments in the 21st century and its advances as a political

Center Stage: China International Gallery Exposition Destination: Armory 2011

VOLTA: The Insider’s Perspective

Featured Stories

Brian Fee

NEW YORK (January 28, 2011). VOLTA NY returns for its fourth consecutive year, filling its borders with an array of cutting-edge solo artists from 83 galleries, representing 23 countries and 45 cities, in its central midtown Manhattan location opposite the iconic Empire State Building.

Continuing the original VOLTA mandate to create a tightly-focused event that is a place for discovery and a showcase for current art production and relevant contemporary positions—regardless of the artist or gallery’s

age—VOLTA NY features exclusively solo projects of notable and emerging international artists, conceived to compliment the exciting program of art presented by its sister fair, The Armory Show. With direct shuttles to and from both fairs, VOLTA NY also shares VIP access and the Open Forum Talks Program.

Alexandre Joly, Dersou. 2008. Peau de mou-ton, bois, carapace de tortue, dents de cheval, bottes et gants en cuir, moquette, 320 (diam.)

La Vi En Rose ArtParis

The Tale Unfolds In SharjahSharjah Biennial 10

Performance in Motion Biljana Ciric

Seducing Gender’s InterludeAna Borralho & João Galante

Architecture RebornGeorge Stolz

Ghosts of the Big Screen Youssef Nabil

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and economic power have secured the country as a leading international force in the world.

While China plays an important role to fortify the network between Asian regions, CIGE 2011 serves as a critical exchange platform to internationalize the lo-cal arts environment. As the world continues to keep on eye on the booming developments of Chinese contemporary art and its impact on the global art world, the future of contemporary art market in China remains promising to art professionals worldwide.

Looking back at the global economic decline in 2009 and its in 2010, the Chinese arts market has re-mained strong and the economic power of Chinese

art continues to grow substantial-ly. China’s grow-ing consumption levels for luxury goods gives the local art market further confi-dence.

The Armory Show is one of the top international art fairs devoted to the most important artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its twelve years, The Armory Show has become an international insti-tution, combining a selection of the world’s leading galleries with an unsurpassed program of art events and exhibitions at the fair venue and throughout New York City. Every March, artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world make New York their destination during Armory Arts Week.

The Armory Show 2011 will again present two sections, Contem-porary and Modern. The Armory Show – Modern features a selec-tion of renowned galleries special-izing in Modern and secondary market material on Pier 92, while The Armory Show – Contemporary

on Pier 94 continues to be a venue to premiere new works by living art-ists. With one admission ticket, visi-tors to The Armory Show on March 3–6, 2011 will again have access not only to the newest developments in the art world, but also to the masterpieces that inspired them. 0

1) The Armory Show, Piers 92 & 94, 12th Ave at West 55th St.Wednesday–Saturday:Noon–8pmSunday: Noon–6pm

3) Volta NY7 West 34th StreetMarch 3-6

7) Red Dot82 Mercer StreetMarch 3-6

Gabriel Kuri, Untitled (merci thank you), 2008. Courtesy of Armory 2011.

Courtesy of CIGE.

http://www.thearmoryshow.com/cgi-local/content.cgi

5) Scope New York320 West StreetAcross from Pier 40March 3-6

6) The Art ShowPark Avenue AmoryPark Avenue at 67th StreetMarch 2-6

4) Fountain New YorkPier 66 Maritime, Hudson River Park26th Street & 12th AvenueMarch 3-6

2) PulseMetropolitan Pavilion125 West 18th StreetMarch 3-6

Moving Frames of ChinaGallery at REDCAT

Coming out of a generation that witnessed the ramifications of the Cultural Revolution, the 1989 Ti-ananmen Massacre, and the in-famous 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art and its subse-quent closing by state authorities, Hangzhou-based artist Zhang Pei-

Li and Beijing-based artist Zhu Jia use video to navigate the complex and shifting terrain that character-izes contemporary China. Not Only Time: Zhang Pei-Li and Zhu Jia at the Gallery at REDCAT is the first Los Angeles presentation of these two influential contemporary artists who pioneered the field of video art in China.

Though both artists trained in oil painting at the Central Acad-emy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou respectively, they have exclusively worked in video and photography since the late 1980s/early 1990s.

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Zhu Jia, Forever, 1994. Video stills, single-channel video, 27 min. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai.

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Art FAirs internAtionAl newspAper 2010

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Featured ArtistKristina Sretkova Featured Artist

Abraham Lubelski

“Sretkova has aligned herself with a new generation of artists that signal a return to subjectivity, a return to sensitivity, and a return to a responsive art.”

Different frequencies of radio waves have varied characteristics in the Earth’s atmosphere. Specifically, long waves may cover a part of the Earth with regularity. In contrast, shorter waves can bounce off the ionosphere and zip around the world. Often, we take this instantaneous reverberation for granted. As a sensation it can be measured, yet primarily it is felt. Such is the case with the vivid, abstract oil paintings of Kristina Sretkova. Suf-fused with an intense emanating light; they reference poetry, sound, na-ture, and the history of Abstract Expressionism. Swirling animated brush-strokes of indigo, crimson and white fuse to create dense, otherworldly realms. Throughout her body of work, an impassioned vision conjures up elemental sensations of fire, water, fractals, and flowers. Some works have been lovingly, almost feverishly, smothered in unfurling’s of violets, and blues. Sretkova remarks “while I paint I focus on my inner world and listen to the inner voice by taking power, intuition, rhythm, intelligence and in-spiration from my soul. I then project my inner light on the canvas. I feel the colors are like different frequencies they cover areas, which are behind the real world we see.” The results of her inspiration are bold, romantic works that do not let up.

Kristina Sretkova is a hot, accomplished young painter whose work will be on view at Broadway Gallery in New York this February. Residing in Berlin, her work is slated to exhibit this year in Moscow, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria and Italy. Spending 8 years of her childhood in the Children’s Choir of the Bulgarian National Radio has granted her an expansive vocal range. It is a range that has led to a personal discovery. She relates, “I understood that singing and painting have got a lot of common! When I create paintings, my soul is singing and I put the sounds on the canvas. My art, in that sense, is music on the canvas!” Some carry the fast, bombastic nature of a Mozart allegro others carry the sweet, melancholy refrain of a Chopin nocturne. Her latest works lean towards the latter. Their gestalt is due to the framing of soft, colorful, gestural forms by dark swaths of viscous paint. This is most easily seen in works like My Heart, (Oil on Can-vas, 100x100cm, 2010). Bisecting the canvas at a diagonal, an aorta-like shape is captured in cerulean blues, bright yellows, rose reds, and deep black. It is suspended and dangling in the center, surrounded by a smoky, deep blue-black field. The heart shape is an amorphous amalgamation of impasto swirls deftly applied and overlapping like flower petals in bloom. The central form functions as a gateway to Sretkova’s subjectivity. She disarms us with the wistful, organic paint handling and invites us into an inner-world of mesmerizing beauty. It is a sorrowfully sweet and seduc-tive internal self-portrait. Her work shares an affinity with the other highly influential, abstract painters. She is the contemporary bridge between the sublime, evocative vegetative imagery of Georgia O’Keefe and the gestural, heroism of Cy Twombly. This work in particular is reminiscent of Twombly’s Peony Blossom Paintings series. His series exploded the im-age of the flower and distorted it by using a massive scale. The blossoms were rendered with expressionist, textured brushstrokes conjuring up as-sociations to planets, hearts, or leaves of grass. The sense of reverence felt within these closely observed images of nature is powerful. Twom-bly’s process highlights his fascination with creation and destruction, birth and decay.

Additionally, Sretkova illustrates Roger Fry’s concept of formalism that was so crucial to 20th century abstraction. Fry was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which played a special role in the genesis of British psychoanalysis. As a painter and critic, he looked at psychoanalysis to inform his aesthetic experience. Formalism eschews anthropological or social considerations and challenges autobiographical readings of art-work. It is a philosophy that examines the plastic qualities of tactile mate-rials, in Sretkova’s case, oil paint. Fry in conjunction with Clive Bell termed the phrase “significant form.” Modernists were concerned with finding a form that alluded to ‘truth’ or primal significance. In distinction to this purely formal reading of art are the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Leo Stein. In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens summarized Stein’s position as having improvised a definition of art. That, when in nature, we seen the light of its significance and that this significance was itself a form. In effect he united the formal and the significant. Sretkova merges these contrasting philosophies to create an art that is wholly aware of its formal and psychological connotations.

Spending time with her work one realizes how they are intimately con-nected to nature. Nature is both chaotic and ordered, held together by

Kristina Sretkova, The Noble Lady, 2010. Oil on canvas. 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

way of random organization. Sretkova’s paintings hone these contradictory impulses to create dualities. These dualities are envisioned in her microcosmic and macrocosmic interpretations of the universe. They are similar to fractals found in nature. A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is at least approximately a reduced-size copy of the whole. This amazing property is called self-similarity. In the natural world vegetative life display self-similar structures over an extended, but finite, scale range. Clouds, snowflakes, pulmonary vessels, and rivers all possess this quality. It is not surprising that fractal patterns can be found in Jackson Pollock’s’ mature splatter and drip abstractions. At first glance what appears to be a chaotic abstraction is actually composed of repeated, ordered fractal patterns. This is because as Sretkova states “I think, that we don’t only live in the world, because the world is also in us. I believe that the quality of my works is, that they are alive and radiate positive light, which ends up in an energetic metamorphosis with the viewer. The intensity of my vibrations creates a third dimension beyond the canvas, a kind of illusion, of something present, from the world behind (the fine world) which we see.” This holistic, cosmological view is refreshing at a time in which humanity seems dismissive of metaphysical discourse or utopian visionaries.

In other works such as The Noble Lady, (Oil on canvas, 100x100cm, 2010,) dense, opaque ceruleans, cyans, and cobalts create a blooming vegetative shape. The paint application is graceful and dreamy as though cut directly out of a pensive Thomas Gainsborough landscape. Upended brushstrokes rush towards the left hand corner of the canvas with heartfelt intent. The glimmering, concentrated blues that create the flower-like shape echo with celestial radiance. The white center of the budding form creates a penetrating void in the middle of the painting; it is a strong focal point. Is it an orifice…an existential void…or simply the stigma of flower? Whatever its significance it is the entry point for the viewer. Historically, flat abstractions on a perfect square resist central-ization. The eye scans the piece as a continuous whole without any singular resting point. Unlike a horizontally or vertically dominant shape, it does not make any references to the body or landscape. Here though the white center acts as a portal to metaphysical inquiry. The lush surface draws us in, disarming preconceived notions of what it is or claims to be. Such is the nature of melancholy; it acts as a lulling agent seducing us into a romantic, sorrowful, and occasionally erotic zone. The deep enclosure created by a blue-black haze of oil paint seems to en-

Kristina Sretkova Featured Artist

Kristina Sretkova, My Heart, 2010. Oil on Canvas. 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Kristina Sretkova, Delicious, 2010. Oil on canvas.100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Residual Reverberations

capsulate this vegetative form; it is frozen in time yet constantly resound-ing in empty space. It is a visual echo. An echo is classically defined as the repetition of a sound resulting from reflection of the sound waves. In Greek mythology, echoes originated from a mountain nymph transformed into a disembodied voice. Supposedly, her babbling distracted Hera from the infidelities of Zeus, thus the goddess penalized her by depriving her of independent speech, rendering her able only to repeat the last words uttered by another. When Narcissus failed to return her love, she faded away into nothing but a voice. Sretkova’s flower form is a fragment; a disembodied voice given image and enshrined within a meditative cavity.

Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings are similar in fashion. She remarks that “I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my state-ment as well as or better than the whole could...I had to create an equiva-lent for what I felt about what I was looking at...not copy it.” O’Keefe received widespread recognition for playing a major role in bridging the linear Precisionism of Charles Demuth with the tenets of Abstract Expres-sionism. Perhaps most well known for her paintings of flowers, animal bones, and landscapes; she effectively synthesized abstraction and repre-sentation. She handled her subject matter with dexterous skill rendering forms with crisp contours and subtle tonal variations; they are deeply mov-ing. Yet O’Keefe always holds onto the referential nature of her abstrac-tions. They never entirely lose their specificity and are therefore highly symbolic. Sretkova in contrast revels in the ambiguities of image making. Many works suggest vegetative forms only to collapse once again into complete abstraction. Each work is infused with symbolism yet without a specific referent; they represent a sign that only points to itself. This is a remarkably, personal gesture. It is a gesture that steps directly in line with contemporary abstraction.

In works such as Delicious, (Oil on canvas 100x100cm, 2010) there is the faintest reference to a landscape. A deep, crimson sky serves as the backdrop for rosy pink, yellow, and red splotches of color. These impasto laden ovals cluster together within the right hand corner of the painting. Flecks of light blue paint stray around the edges of the shapes. This ac-tivated corner acts as a precipice for declarative marks. As if seashells washed ashore, they are emotive residual castaways. These forms seem to rise like a wave oscillating in the water’s surface. For oscillations to ex-ist and spread, like a vibrating guitar string, there must be a cyclical force that brings equilibrium. The tensions in a guitar string and air pressure in the atmosphere are such forces. Without this tension, the guitar string cannot produce tones. In a wave, the oscillations that are passed to the air travel in widening spheres outward. In the air their returning force is the compression of the air molecules. In surface waves, the returning force is gravity, the pull of the Earth. This painting pulls and pushes on the viewer both visually and physically. Our eye rises with the tide of oval forms to the peak. We remain transfixed there as we wait for the impending crash. It never comes. The suspense creates a pressure felt deep within the body. From a phenomenological standpoint, the body is the locus of physical sensations experienced, the eye merely gazes. Together these function to create the haptic sense. In its entirety, this work creates an impressive mind-body duality.

Kristina Sretkova’s cropped abstractions fathom partial views of lush, opaque natural forms. Operating between the symbolic and the expres-sive, her work is metaphysical yet entirely grounded in perception. Her refulgent, thick application of paint generates voids and crests, which transfer us to a higher plane of awareness. Here is an artist palette, re-fined. She relates that her work comes out of “jumping fantasies, hot ad-ventures, passionate erotic interludes, a story from the future, a balance, a healthy excitement, a devotion or just the feeling that life is joyful…ev-erything around us is full of vitality. I try to deliver to the viewer joy, hope and the ability to love, a push to think about and just to feel.” For decades critics and curators have denigrated the value of the Abstract Expression-ist impulse. Some 50 years ago since its heyday, many now categorize it as either pompous or overly emotional. As a result, much painting of the past 40 years has felt withdrawn, distant, and dispassionate. This main-stream trend has now run its course. Sretkova has aligned herself with a new generation of artists that signal a return to subjectivity, a return to sensitivity, and a return to a responsive art.