Airport, please! to see Bill Viola’s Journey of the Soul at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow

 

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, Russia

Good morning! Grab your coat. It’s bitter cold in New York and, interestingly, slightly warmer in Moscow.

Airport, please! is excited to be heading to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts to see the extraordinary video master, Bill Viola, The Journey of the Soul. This exhibition represents the first solo presentation of Viola’s work in Russia and the first significant exhibition of media art at the Pushkin Museum. Who better to represent this artistic genre than the pioneer of media art, Bill Viola?

The Pushkin State Museum

Bill Viola, The Journey of the Soul, is part of the ongoing “Pushkin XXI” project, which focuses on bringing together classical tradition and contemporary practice to offer new ways of engaging with art. Since the early 1970s, Viola has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.

Bill Viola
Fire Woman

Bill Viola has been instrumental in establishing video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in expanding its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. Bill Viola, The Journey of the Soul is curated by Olga Shishko, Head of Cinema and Media Art Department, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and Kira Perov, Executive Director, Bill Viola Studio.

 

Bill Viola
Martyrs (Earth, Fire, Water, Air)

More than 20 signature artworks presented in the exhibition were created in the period from 2000 to 2014. They demonstrate the artist’s mastering of moving image technology.  In the Museum’s main exhibition halls, visitors will see for the first time such large-scale works as Fire Woman (2005), Catherine’s Room (2001), The Quintet of the Astonished (2000) and four works from the Martyrs series (2014). This retrospective of Viola’s work of the last 14 years was curated by the Head of Cinema and Media Art Department, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Executive Director of the Bill Viola Studio.

For further information, contact James Cohen Gallery, New York, astuart@jamescohan.com

BIOGRAPHY

Bill Viola is a recognized master who has been a pioneer of video art since the 1970s. One of the most influential American artists living today, for more than four decades he has been creating single-channel videotapes, video and sound installations, acoustical environments, as well as media works that accompany large-scale concerts and opera productions. Viola represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 1995; selected solo exhibitions were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1997), the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2003), the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006), the Grand Palais, Paris (2014), the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (2017), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2017), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2019), the Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (2020); and in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014), and the video-triptych Mary(2016) were installed as permanent installations.

Bill Viola
Catherine’s Room

PUSHKIN MUSEUM OF THE FINE ARTS, MOSCOW, RUSSIA

The Pushkin Museum of the Fine Arts is the largest museum of European art in Moscow, located on Volkhonka Street, opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The building was designed by Roman Klein and Vladimir Shukhov and its construction began in 1898 and was completed in 1912. Its permanent collection of French art once belonged to the legendary Moscow collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, and represents one of the most famous collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist and avant-garde art of the 20th Century, featuring masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso.

The Pushkin State Museum

SOUND & IMAGE, an exhibition of current members of the Federation at Westbeth Gallery, February 3-24th.

 

The Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors presents Sound and Image,

an exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery on the theme of image and music.

In his On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote: “Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings.”

Ever since Kandinsky likened paint to music, modernists have been thinking hard about the influential ways that visual art and music come together.

This exhibition explores the sounds of paint, ink and other media through the works of a group that has been an ensemble for 78 years and whose artists have been and still are fascinated by the coming together of two art forms. Founding member Mark Rothko’s son Christopher writes about his father: “Music was central to my father’s world—to his own aesthetic sensibilities, certainly, but also to the structure and expressive modes he found as a painter. I think it’s fair to say he was a painter who aspired to be a musician.”

Nicholas Christopher
House of the Rising Sun

This February 3-24, 2018, the Federation will be presenting ‘Sound & Image’ at the Westbeth Gallery, New York City.  29 Members will exhibit their work melding their art with the music that inspired them.  Throughout the gallery there will be interactive displays in which the viewer can immerse oneself in the visual presentation along with music playing on their mobile phone through the use of a QR scanner.

TO CARRY ON HIS FATHER’S TRADITION TO WORK IN A CREATIVE FIELD, ANDREW BOLOTOWSKY, ILYA’S SON, HAS PURSUED A MUSICAL CAREER.

Sunday, Feb. 11^th will bring Sound & Image to life with a flute performance by Andrew Bolotowsky, world renown flutist and son of Ilya, another Federation founder.  Andrew will give a brief talk about his father and then perform to the inspiration of the exhibition.  Other musicians will also perform between 4 pm – 6 pm that evening.

THE LRFA BLOG IS PLEASED TO FEATURE THREE OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WHO WILL BE IN THE EXHIBIT BUT TO EXPERIENCE THE FULL IMPACT OF THE FEDERATION’S PRESENT ROSTER OF ARTISTS AND THEIR CREATIVITY, VISIT THE EXHIBITION AT WESTBETH GALLERY ON WEST STREET IN MANHATTAN.

Anneli Arms
Music Muse

ANNELI ARMS

Known internationally for sculpture and etching, it is her sculpture that sets her apart. By working with oversized creatures – human, marine and insect – she remarks distinctly on evolution, forcing the viewer to consider the beginning of future of humanity and his fears of both.  In time, the artist’s early paintings and relief works morphed into sculpture and gave birth to her “Human Creatures” and “Creature Creatures”.  None of the creatures, human or otherwise, are meant to be completely realistic. Instead, these parallel universes are individual and generic, seemingly modern and ancient at the same time.

http://www.anneliarms.com

Anneli Arms
Architect of His Dreams

JON SERVETAS

Jon Servetas
Oil on canvas

Jon Servetas started drawing as a child during WWll using poster paints and grocery bags from the market.
His work has evolved over the last 70+ years with the use of a warm color palette encapsulating everyday scenes.
His images are traditional in nature but are more of an impression of the scene with color taking over than true realism.

Jon Servetas

NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER

My fascination has always been in taking the tool of the Impressionists and early compositional photographers and moving the photograph into the realm of ‘true art’. Working only outdoors with available light I capture the visual juxtaposition of the shadows that play within a compositional ‘color’ palette. Dimensionality or lack thereof is a product of this interplay. Dimension and shadow increase during the assembly process taking my 2 dimensional compositions and adding depth. Now light & shadow play a new role in creating a 3 dimensional finished work. The assembly rests on a wall, which is now also part of the paradigm.

www.nccworks.com

Nicholas Christopher
Mondrian Memory
mixed media

THE LRFA BLOG IS VERY PLEASED TO WELCOME GERI THOMAS IN OUR NEXT POST, THE FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL OF A FIRM SPECIALIZING IN RECRUITING AND PLACEMENT OF POSITIONS IN THE ARTS. GERI WILL SPEAK OF HER NEW CONSULTING AND TEACHING VENTURES AS WELL AS ISSUES OF DIVERSITY, EQUAL PAY AND DISCRIMINATION IN THE ARTS’ PROFESSIONS.

STAY TUNED!