Blaffer Gallery
University of Houston
120 Fine Arts Building
TX 77204-4018
Houston, TX
Texas
North America
p: 713 743 9528
m:
f: 713 743 9525
w: www.blaffergallery.org
Tomás Saraceno, The Endless Photo, 2006 C-print mounted on aluminum behind Plexiglas; edition 5 of 5 39 15/16 x 55 7/8 in. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY
Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air May 14 - July 31, 2010 Opening Reception: Thursday, May 13, 6 - 8 p.m
Blaffer Gallery presents Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air. Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and showcasing Saraceno’s installations, sculptures, and photographs made since 2003, the touring exhibition is the artist’s first large-scale museum presentation in the United States. By reexamining the conventions of art and architecture, Saraceno suggests imaginative solutions to complex questions about how we populate and coexist in the world. His architectural proposals use the interdependencies of systems to ponder ecological questions that go beyond the natural world. Specifically, the artist contrives environments that anticipate new sociocultural platforms for experiencing and interacting with our surroundings. Following in the tradition of architects and theorists such as R. Buckminster Fuller, Peter Cook, Yona Friedman, and other visionaries, Saraceno looks to scientific principles and technological innovations to develop ideas for future sustainable communities and new models for social interactions. Conceived by the artist as an entire organism, the exhibition Lighter than Air closely integrates the displayed works formally and structurally to create a network of relationships as well as illustrate the breadth of his practice.
Two of the works in the exhibition will be powered by solar panels connected to a web of wires, receivers, and generators. One is 32SW Stay Green/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City (2007), a self-sustainable greenhouse outfitted with an irrigation system that waters grass on a cluster of inflatable spheres. Also on view are photographs as well as a wall-sized drawing, Air-Port-City (2009), depicting the artist’s vision for a floating city. Challenging concepts of nationhood and land ownership with his freely flying cities, Saraceno has created an urban form where residents are not bound to geopolitical borders. Tomás Saraceno was born in Tucamán, Argentina, in 1973, and lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The exhibition is made possible by generous support from John Taft. Additional support is provided by the Harpo Foundation. Tomás Saraceno’s artist residency at the Walker was made possible by the Nimoy Foundation. Artist materials were provided by 3M.
Gabriel Kuri: Nobody needs to know the price of your Saab
Organized by Blaffer Gallery director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli, this ten year survey is the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to Gabriel Kuri in the United States. Kuri began his studies at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City, spent four years working in the studio of sculptor Gabriel Orozco, and in 1993 moved to London to attend Goldmsith’s College where he studied with Liam Gillick. He now lives and works in Mexico City and Brussels, Belgium. Kuri’s spatial and sculptural accumulations combine the social tone of Conceptual Art with the poetry of Arte Povera. His work is a careful investigation into the physical and semantic weight of materials and their sculptural and allegorical abilities to sustain, shape, and accumulate meaning.
Blaffer Summer Exhibition Fuses Painting and Filmmaking First Take: Jacco Olivier on view May 14 through Aug. 7, 2010
HOUSTON (April 20, 2010) -- This May, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston presents an exhibition featuring Dutch artist Jacco Olivier, whose presentation of ten works inaugurates Blaffer's new "First Take" series. The exhibition is on view at the museum from May 14 through Aug. 7, 2010. Visitors are encouraged to attend a free opening reception on Thursday, May 13, from 6 until 8 p.m. Admission is free, and refreshments will be provided. Blaffer is located in the Fine Arts Building on the central campus of the University of Houston.
Olivier's luscious filmic vignettes are quiet meditations on painting set in motion. Technically, his work falls into the category of animation. Images are repeatedly reworked and rephotographed to create a narrative that unfolds through a camera-driven progression. Olivier likes to tell a story, but even in his most anecdotal works, the most interesting tale is the story of painting itself.
For each work, Olivier repaints the same canvas over and over again, carefully photographing each stage of development. In time the original image slowly degenerates and finally disappears altogether in the cumulative layers of paint. The final work, the photographic record, thus becomes an animated history of a painting, a slice of time that captures scraps of narrative and memories, and joins them together to form a moving picture with an atmospheric charge enriched by an ambient soundtrack.
Hunger, Birds, Submerge, all 2003, and Hide, 2004, delve into the animal realm. The viewer follows a polar bear across snowy plains on his hunt for fish, soars into the sky with a flock of birds, dives into the deep sea, or catches glimpses of a frog alternatively jumping and hiding in a grassy field. Other works, such as Sleep and Normandy, both 2004, serve as meditative windows onto simple moments of daily life: one shows a woman tossing and turning in bed, while in the other she enjoys the breeze on the seashore. In his more recent work, including Bath, 2009, Portrait, 2009, and Transition, 2010, Olivier has mined traditional genres, such landscapes and still lifes, bathers and portraits, often pushing the image to the edge of abstraction. With the new focus on painting as a historical discipline has come a shift in scale that emphasizes the viewer's relationship to the painting as an object. Where Olivier's early films read like intimate, jewel-like visual poems, the new ones add a surprisingly expansive spatial and physical dimension to an otherwise largely immaterial experience of sight and sound.
First Take, Olivier's first solo museum exhibition, brings together ten works created between 2003 and 2010. The artist was born in the Netherlands in 1972. He graduated from the Rijksakademie in 1998, and lives and works in Amsterdam. First Take: Jacco Olivier is on view concurrently with Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air.
Schedule of Events:
2 p.m. Thursday, May 13 Press Preview RSVP: 713.743.9528
6 - 8 p.m. Thursday, May 13 Opening Reception
12 p.m. Wednesday, June 16 Brown Bag Gallery Tour
About Blaffer: Founded in 1973, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston was named in honor of the late Sarah Campbell Blaffer, a noted Houston arts patron and collector. Since its inception, the museum has been a vital force in the presentation and promotion of contemporary visual arts in Houston. Blaffer is located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston's central campus, entrance 16 off Cullen Boulevard. It is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Sundays, Mondays and university holidays. The museum is ADA compliant. For general inquiries, please call 713.743.9521, or visit the museum online at www.blafferartmuseum.org.
Media Contact: For more information on this story, please contact Jeffrey Bowen, assistant director of external affairs, at 713.743.9528, or via e-mail at jbowen2@uh.edu.
