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The Art of Fashion

January 24th, 2012 // View Comments // Kathleen Delaney

Alta Roma is an artistic fashion show with all of the qualities of a traditional cat walk event. In addition to fashion, it features many other events. This amazing show is in collaboration with the famous fashion magazine, Vogue Italia. Alta Roma is aimed at launching new faces in the fashion industry, and it receives its contributions from well established designers and new designers. Exhibitions of clothing, fashion conferences, and photographic galleries are also held at this event.

Where and When

Alta Roma is a biannual event held twice a year during the winter months of January-February and the months of July-August in Rome, the capital city of Italy. Like the previous years, the first event of 2012 will be hosted in Saxia at the Complesso monumentale Santo Spirito. The event has to be scheduled from January 28th to January 31st, 2012.

Enjoy Fabric and Have Fun

This year’s event includes ventures like Ethical Fashion. Ethical Fashion is a project between the Alta Roma Franchise and the International Trade Center. Its purpose is to equip the fashion industry with the best possible tools to maintain standards of the highest quality. This year’s event will also feature an exhibition called Limited/Unlimited. Limited/Unlimited will showcase the talent and enthralling works of new designers in collaboration with Swarovski and Yoox. The Alta Roma will conclude with the presentation “Who is on next?” from Pitti Imagine Filati and Vogue. This popular event will be a highlight for the third year since 2009. “Who is on next?” will feature renowned personalities in the prestigious jury for judging the best designers from the group of upcoming designers in collaboration with Italian magazine Vogue Italia.

A Show Packed with Dazzling Events

Fashion on Paper is an event organized by Maria Luisa Frisa.  Fashion on Paper will engage the fashion-minded individuals in round table discussions. Their discussions will be based on the current artistic events and scenarios in the fashion world. Popular fashion magazines will be organizing musical events along with debates and presentations on fashion. This event will also mark the advent of a new dawn in local fashion.  Mainstream technology will play an important role in Alta Roma in the form of social media and new fashion blogs. The biannual magazine, Artisanal Intelligence, will also be featured. ‘The Tailor Made Tour‘ is another notable feature that will take place during this event-filled fashion show. Features will also include the much anticipated Vogue Talents Corner. The beloved Vogue Talents Corner features 14 budding fashion designers who are taking the art form to a new level.

If you have a passion for the art of fashion, then be sure to get the most out of Rome by taking the time to enjoy The Alta Roma. Mark January 28-31, 2012 on your calendar. You will not want to miss the fashion conferences, clothing exhibitions, and detailed photographic galleries that The Alta Roma is famous for. Visit this amazing event and immerse yourself in the art of fashion. For more information visit: http://www.altaroma.it/

An Amazing Night of Art

January 18th, 2012 // View Comments // Dorothy

For lovers of history, artifacts, sculptures, coins, and various others forms of art, the Long Night of Museums is full of golden opportunities. This amazing art event spans for about 400 sq kilometers. The strip of artistic exhibitions is between the Waterplant Friedrichshagen museum and the Local History Reinickendorf. About 100 different museums will offer free visits to visitors. The museums are offering visitor access to their unique museum collections and featured exhibitions. This unforgettable event is hosted twice a year in the capital city of Berlin, Germany. The next event takes place during the months of January/February 2012. This amazing night of art not only features a variety of exhibitions, but it also features recitals, performances by well known celebrities, theatrical performances, and much more. This event is a highly anticipated night of enjoyment for local people and visitors from all over the world.

© PhotographerPaul Prescott

Where and When:

The Long Night of Museums is a biannual event that will be held in Berlin on January 28, 2012. The participating museums will remain open from 6 in the evening until 2 in the morning for visitors. All visitors will receive a significant discount since the tickets will be priced at an equivalent to that of a single visit. Tickets, directions, and bus routes are available online. The tours through these museums offer an excellent ethical and artistic evening of enjoyment to visitors. Though the time span for the complete tour is 8 hours, you will probably want far more time than that in order to enjoy each museum’s exhibition to your heart’s content. There are many collections and exhibitions to see, so choose wisely. Each museum has an enthralling display and its own unique permanent collection.

An Occasion for Art Enthusiasts

There is nothing more frustrating for an art enthusiast than to be surrounded by inspiration and not have the chance to take it all in.  Each visitor can get the best out of this event by learning about each and every museum exhibition and making a list of the ones they want to visit.  Visitors can also chalk out a suitable route that will allow them enjoy each of the museums on the list. The museums in Berlin are based on various themes and topics. Some of the museums depict a particular culture, while others may depict a particular period in history. The museums that deserve special mention include the Natural Museum of History, the New Synagogue at the Jewish Center, and the National Gallery. The Long Night of Museums is held in remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin wall. This amazing evening signifies artistic unity.

Enjoy the Night Out

There are also venues that show movies, hold concerts, and present dancing shows. There will be buses carrying passengers between the museums. Your ticket gives you free access to local transportation. So whether your passion is of sculptures, history, artifacts, coins, or other forms of art, be sure to take advantage of this amazing night of art. For more information visit Berlin’s site dedicated to the event.

This is the first blog post from one of our new bloggers, Kathleen Delaney. Kathleen had her first literary work published in 1990. Since then, she has been published in various publications and blogs. Delaney won a Georgia writing contest for 3 years in a row, between the years of 2001-2003. After 2.5 years of study, she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in 2003. Delaney is finishing a Science Fiction novel for young adults, and she is writing and illustrating several children’s books. She writes fiction and non-fiction on a regular basis, and she stays busy with creative projects through her freelance business, Mimosa Creations.

Rubbish Art

January 13th, 2012 // View Comments // Paper Boat Creative

Collecting junk from the local dump and bringing it back home as ‘art’ might make most people hold their breath and politely ask you to return it, but upcycling is a booming trend. Dutch photographer Alexandra Brand is an enthusiastic fan, claiming that she enjoys the idea of creating harmony from chaos.

Arranging her found objects into a harmonious whole in preparation for a photograph is a meticulous process, each shot requiring considerable effort to set up – often an entire day. But Brand’s selective colour palette and meticulous positioning of objects makes her work both intriguing and easy on the eye.

17^th Century Dutch art is known for its soft colours and lighting, reflecting the character of the Dutch landscape itself, but in the 19^th Century Van Gogh upturned that tradition with his bold colours. But in Brand’s work at any rate, Holland’s flat landscape and delicate light have reasserted themselves.

Brand is a fine artist reflective of her Dutch artistic ancestors, except she uses very modern tools – and what we could controversially call a modern trend – as her chosen medium.

East meets West on canvas – Yang Na

January 11th, 2012 // View Comments // Dorothy

As the West focuses ever more intently on doing business with rising superpower China, attention is also turning to Chinese art. It would be unfair to call China ‘emerging’ artists, since the nation’s practitioners have been creating highly sophisticated art for a lot longer than Europe.

But it must be admitted that when we think of British art, images by – or possibly of – Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin will probably spring to mind, while when asked to think of Chinese art, our mind’s eye will conjure up a Ming vase. In fact, China has been busy creating contemporary art for a several decades, although it is only in the past ten years that Europe and the US has started to focus on such works.

Aesthetics of Christmas Past

December 21st, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Deck the halls with boughs of holly fa la la la la la la la…… What makes you feel Christmassy? Is it the transformation of familiar space into a winter wonderland? Decorating the tree, putting up lights, hanging a wreath, making paper chains – these are the rituals of Christmas, the traditions that centre us down the years. The whole family or office or class participates in making over their surroundings, bonding as they do. Then there’s the food. To you, Christmas might taste of mince pies and turkey. It might smell like pine. It could feel like an itchy jumper. Christmas is a familiar feast for the senses.

But the sensual worldof a 21^st century Christmas is a rather new invention. What told the Jacobeans or the Georgians that it was the most wonderful time of the year? What were their traditions? Neon reindeer and the X Factor single didn’t feature. A seasonal show at the Geffrye Museum of the Home celebrates British Christmas traditions in Christmas Past: 400 Years of Seasonal Traditions in English Homes. The museum’s eleven period rooms are painstakingly decorated and marvellously evoke long gone Christmas aesthetics.

One room shows a feast in the hall of middle class London family in 1630.  The table’s set with the second course, comprising sweet and savoury foods. Sugar was an expensive commodity in the 17^th century, so the family might have looked forward to this meal all year. Some sweets were made to look like boiled eggs, bacon and walnuts instead. You can also see crystallized fruit and a silvery chequerboard of leach, a milk jelly sweet not unlike Turkish Delight. Ancient pagan traditions still informed many of the major Christmas celebrations at this time. For example, Britons used to celebrate the end of Christmas at Twelfth Night with elaborate games and role-reversal. Cooks would prepare a Twelfth Night cake containing a bean and a pea. The lucky man and woman who discovered the hidden prizes became the King and Queen for the night, served by the other revellers.

The 1695 room looks rather different. Christmas was banned by the Puritans between 1644-60 and many ancient customs had fallen out of favour. Celebrants munched anchovies and olives and drank punch as they listened to flute music. One pagan symbol of eternal life had survived the Puritans – decorating with evergreen branches.  By 1745, Christmas was still an austere affair. People drank cordial, received guests and went to church instead of holding raucous feasts. Christmas presents became popular during this time, supplanting the earlier practice of giving alms to the poor. A 1790s parlour is also on display, but with no turkey and stuffing in sight. The traditional Christmas meal of this period was roast beef served alongside plum pudding.

In the 1830 room, you can tell that the Victorian era saw a revival of the old customs. For example, there’s a pack of Twelfth Night cards. Celebrants picked a card at random and played the character on it, turning the role-reversal into a game similar to today’s charades. The Twelfth Night cake has become an elaborate Christmas cake, decorated with a sparkling crown and plaster of Paris.

Then you come to the 1870 room, which the viewer recognizes immediately. Many of our modern-day Christmas traditions come from the Victorian era. Although Britons had always decorated with evergreen, it took Queen Victoria’s German husband to popularize Christmas trees. Christmas cards are often on display, written in beautiful copperplate handwriting. Parents used to send them out as proof of their children’s penmanship, not unlike today’s parents displaying their charming offspring in card form. It would take another thirty years for the Dutch tradition of leaving out stockings to reach Britain by way of America.

Christmas Past is a fabulously nostalgic exhibition. As we bustle into the next few days of chocolate and Downton Abbey, it’s interesting to look back on how much we’ve changed. Merry Christmas from blur. And if you want a historically aware piece of artwork, you could be choosing pitches before Twelfth Night if you brief the Exchange.

Wild and Wonderful Winter Art

December 19th, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Baby, it’s cold outside. For centuries, the harsh beauty of wintry weather has inspired artists. Here are our favourite winter artworks.

Avalanche in the Grisons Here, Turner shows us the awesome power of winter. Tonnes of snow cascade down the mountain, ripping up trees and smashing boulders. The pine trees give us some idea of the scale of the avalanche. Turner is well known for his depictions of the sublime, extreme forces of nature, which I explained earlier. The snow is moving at such a steep angle that it looks as if it’s coming directly out of the sky, about to crush the viewer. A stimulating antidote to twee winter scenes.

Piss Flowers When it snowed, Helen Chadwick didn’t roll snowballs or build snowmen. She made sculptures. Chadwick urinated into deep snow and made casts of the melted spaces. It’s a rather disgusting methodology, immediately bodily. But the resulting forms are abstract and beautiful, like alien fungi or underwater growths. Even if you don’t how they were made they’re recognizably organic. A great example of how art can make the familiar strange.

Blotter I’ve been a fan of Peter Doig ever since his 2008 exhibition at the Tate Modern. Doig is fascinated by reflections in water and ice. This painting shows a typical Canadian winter scene. See more here. But Doig puts his own unsettling twist on the composition. Off-kilter horizontal lines dominate the composition, with clashing patterns in between. There’s no easy place for the eye to ‘rest.’ The horizon is also unusually low, forcing our attention on the lake. Although the boy appears to be standing on the lake, ripples run out underneath him. Is the ice solid? Is the boy about to fall through, or could he be walking on water? Doig’s paintings toe the line between fantasy and realism, so anything is possible.

Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch Clearly, Rev. Walker takes skating very seriously. No slipping or flailing for him. He skims along in perfect balance, arms folded in, looking off into the distance. The indistinct wilderness in the background emphasizes the precision of his clothes and movement. Henry Raeburn transforms the fun and comical act of skating into a controlled meditative exercise. Guardian critic Jonathan Jones wrote that this reverend represents the Scottish Enlightenment, the triumph of Protestant reason over Catholic superstition.

Lavacourt Under Snow What colour is snow? You’d probably say white. But in this painting, Monet shows us how colourful snow can be. Amazingly, there’s no pure black or white here. Instead, Monet uses blues and pinks and greens to pull out the different tones and shapes of a country snowscape. His impression of the frozen Seine, the bleak sky and shuttered cottages make the viewer feel cold over a hundred years later.

Do you need seasonally-inspired artwork? You can have a piece before springtime when you Brief the Exchange.

Street Artist Swoon

December 13th, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Swoon has captured our imagination with her decaying street art. She’s not a graffiti artist, rather she prints her works on paper before hand-painting them and pasting them onto walls. The pieces decay after a while, becoming ragged and faded. Eventually they disappear completely. Right now, her installation ‘Murmuration’ is on display at Black Rat Projects in Shoreditch. We’d encourage you to go.

Swoon, real name Caledonia Dance Curry, is worlds away from more traditional street artists like Banksy. There’s something macho about Banksy’s graffiti work. He uses stencils to quickly spray cheeky or shocking images onto walls and bridges, often touching on political themes. Rats often appear in his work, and he filled his exhibition in Notting Hill with over 100 live ones. We’re Banksy fans, but we have to admit his work his impactful rather than subtle.

By contrast, Swoon draws ordinary people, often women and children. The images are large-scale reproductions of her drawings with the pencil lines clearly visible. They retain that hand-drawn feel, meaning they feel intimate despite their size. Swoon also hand-paints each image, after printing them using a linoleum block. You can watch a video of Swoon putting up a piece and explaining her methodology here.

It’s clear that Swoon puts a lot of thought into her images. The woman she pastes up in the video is her vision of Thalassa, an ancient Greek water goddess. Swoon came up with the drawing in New Orleans, where she worked after Hurricane Katrina. She sketched her friend Naima, a performer in a show called Hurricane Season. The original print was over 3m and formed part of an installation at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

We often associate street art with political statements. And some of Murmuration’s images like this one could be interpreted as political. It shows a cut-out of a fat and evil-looking man towering over a woman adjusting her headscarf. The woman’s dress shows the corrugated rooftops typical of a refugee camp. Other drawings could be inspired by Swoon’s time living and working in post-earthquake Haiti. She doesn’t belabour the point though, allowing the viewer to reach his or her own decision.

So who is Swoon? Her real name is Caledonia Dance Curry and she grew up in Florida. Like countless aspiring artists she was drawn to Brooklyn, where she fell in with other hippie types. She wandered the streets and papered the walls before becoming interested in working collectively to tackle bigger projects. Her band of helpers is now known as the Toyshop Collective. They’ve built houses from local materials in Haiti and New Orleans. More famously, they created performance art by sailing down the Mississippi and up the Venetian Grand Canal in ragtag collections of handmade boats.

Swoon is pushing the boundaries of street art. Do you need a groundbreaking piece of art? Let our artists help – brief the Exchange.

Intelligent Installation: the Turner Prize

December 7th, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Controversy is the lifeblood of the Turner Prize. Each year, the public thrills with horror at the entrants, proclaiming the death of art. Pieces like Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Martin Creedy’s The Lights Going On and Off and Simon Starling’s ShedBoatShed have made the British public ask “What is art?” each year. Of course, the amount of criticism directed at the Turner Prize also raises its profile.

So we were surprised by the lack of buzz around this year’s Turner Prize. Many people didn’t even realize it was happening. This might be because it’s moved from London to the Baltic gallery in Gateshead. But it might also be because this year’s winner Martin Boyce presented a more palatable piece.

Do Words Have Voices is an installation starkly evocative of an urban park. Light filters through aluminium leaves, a bin structure is lined with a rag and a desk has letters scratched into it. Boyce depicts organic structures using entirely straight lines. He was inspired by a 1925 Modernist park design containing four concrete trees, by Joel and Jan Martel. In this interview, he explains that the tree “just sort of blossomed” in his mind. He created iterative works and sketches of the layout, which evolved into a unique typeface. The letters cascading down the walls and scratched into the desk structure are written in that font. Do Words Have Voices is full of layered references to modernism, making it more academic than previous winning works. It’s an intelligent installation, which might explain the lack of public outcry.

The judges praised Boyce’s installation for its “new sense of poetry.” Boyce seemed to agree – he replied to a question with with “I guess it has something to do with hope and finding the poetic in the abject.” This philosophy may have been informed by his experiences of studying and living in the bleak city of Glasgow.

Press reaction to Boyce’s victory has been mixed. The Telegraph pointed out that the public favoured George Shaw to win, criticising the judges’ choice as “a conscious slap in the face to popular taste.” The Telegraph is apparently opposed to “the increasing academicisation of contemporary art.” Perhaps they preferred the dismembered cow. A Guardian blogger was “enraged” by the selection. Elsewhere, though, The Guardian described Boyce’s piece as a “quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal sculptural installation.”

Do you need a Modernist installation? Or perhaps an art-noir vision of urban parks? We can help, brief the Exchange.

The Art of Berlusconi

November 28th, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Silvio Berlusconi resigned this month, ending a turbulent political career marred by scandal and outlandish antics. He was best known for his ‘bunga-bunga’ parties and cannibalization of the Italian economy, though he remained a prominent political figure for 17 years. We’d like to mark the occasion of his resignation with four pieces of Berlusconi-related art.

Artist Gianni Motti attracted attention in 2006 when he displayed a bar of soap ostensibly made from Berlusconi’s own body fat. Motti claimed he obtained the fat from a plastic surgery clinic in Ticino, Switzerland where Berlusconi received liposuction. Berlusconi’s penchant for plastic surgery is well documented, so it’s not entirely implausible. The work was named Clean Hands after a 1990’s campaign to eliminate political corruption in Italy. Many politicians were jailed and some parties fell out of existence altogether. Berlusconi entered the world of politics during this period, quite possibly to avoid investigations of corruption in his own businesses. Ironically, this most corrupt of politicians rose to power at a time when the public were highly focused on ending corruption. The soap’s an interesting political comment, whether or not it’s 100% Organic Silvio.

Berlusconi’s enthusiasm for plastic surgery apparently extends to classical works of art. In 2010, Berlusconi stirred up controversy in the art world when he ordered a replacement penis for a Roman statue of Mars. The 1,835-year-old statue of Mars and Venus was damaged at some point, leaving Venus without a hand and Mars without a member. It was on loan to the Prime Minister’s office from the Baths of Diocletian Museum in Rome. Berlusconi had the missing parts re-carved and attached with magnets, at a cost of £60,000 to the Italian taxpayer. The international press gleefully reported the incident.

One of the earlier Berlusconi sex scandals involved a young TV presenter and former topless model called Mara Carfagna. Berlusconi told her on TV that he’d marry her if he weren’t married already, and was forced to publicly apologize to his then wife. He then appointed Carfagna to his Cabinet and asked her to stand in for his estranged ex-wife at the G8 conference. In response to this very Italian drama, artist Filippo Panseca created an oil painting in the style of the Old Masters. It shows Berlusconi and Carfagna as winged nude angels, with Berlusconi’s modesty protected by a drifting scarf. He’s about to whisper in her ear while she keeps her eyes on the prize.

Berlusconi doesn’t just inspire art, he creates it. Free of the burden of leadership he recently released an album called ‘True Love.’ The former cruise-ship singer has serenaded many lucky world leaders, although his voice isn’t heard in the new album. Mariano Apicella sings 11 songs written by Berlusconi during his time in office and you can listen to some samples here. Perhaps Berlusconi’s real talent lies in music rather than politics. We envision him representing Italy in 2012.

Do you want a piece of political art? Our artists can create anything you like – including a nude portrait of you and your mistress. Brief the Exchange.

Art of Protest: Ai Weiwei

November 23rd, 2011 // View Comments // Katherine Sola

Earlier, we wrote about Egyptian protest design and now it’s time for China. Artist Ai Weiwei has mobilized his supporters to strip naked to show their opposition to the government’s ongoing vendetta against him.

Ai is an internationally renowned artist, famous for works like Sunflower Seeds where he filled Tate’s Turbine Hall with 100 million ceramic replicas of sunflower seeds. He also openly criticises the Chinese government’s approach to human rights and democracy, unusual in a tightly censored country. As an example, he investigated government corruption in places like Sichuan, where 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed in the 2008 earthquake. Ai blamed corrupt local officials who cut corners on construction for the deaths of thousands of children. This didn’t go down well with the government.

Chinese authorities are now clamping down on Ai, trying to find a reason to jail the artist. They detained him for 3 months this spring and eventually accused him of economic crimes. He was ordered to pay £1.5 million in overdue tax but his persecutors were flummoxed when supporters sent in at least one-third of that. So last week they accused him of spreading pornography with works like One Tiger, Eight Breasts, which shows four nude women giggling around a nude Ai.

The charge of pornography is nonsensical in a few ways. Ai is hardly a pinup, and the women in the photo are equally ordinary looking. The photo isn’t sexually charged. Chinese artists have been photographing themselves nude for years with not a whisper from the government. Real pornography is also widely available online in China. In Ai’s words, “If they see nudity as pornography, then China is still in the Qing dynasty.” It’s quite clear to the Chinese public that the government is pursuing a vendetta against Ai, and they’re hitting back online.

Ai’s supporters are tweeting nude photos of themselves in a bid to show the government that nudity is not pornography. The photos have been collected on a photo blog here, with the tagline “Listen, Chinese Government. Nudity is not Pornography.” The Huffington Post has a good selection. The fans are getting creative. Some have covered their parts with pictures of Ai or stuffed animals while another posed like Michelangelo’s David. One man put up several pictures of himself smoking a cigar in his bath. Look elsewhere for titillation because these photos are defiantly unsexy. In their saggy glory, China’s citizens present an eloquent argument that nudity is not pornography.

We sincerely hope Ai’s supporters can tweet him to freedom. And if you want some nakedly political art, brief the Exchange.