Art in NYC: Gerhard Richter Painting After All at the MetMuseum

March 10, 2020July 7, 2021 arts-NY 1 Comment

Art in NYC: Gerhard Richter Painting After All at the MetMuseum

While MetMuseum has temporarily closed, you can visit it online from anywhere

Presenting a major exhibition of works by German artist Gerhard Richter titled “Painting After All”, the exhibit spans the entire artist’s career

Gerhard Richter, S. with Child, 1995, Oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle,© Gerhard Richter 2019 / Image courtesy of The MetMuseum

Recognized as one of the greatest artists of our time, Gerhard Richter succeeds in combining the detailed pictorial approach with the haze caused by the fog of time. His celebrated blurred figurative paintings, large scale abstract compositions, and monumental glass sculptures are the treasures of the art museums all around the world. Originally scheduled to be on view at the Met Breuer from March 4 – July 5, 2020, the exhibition includes a range of artworks from the artist’s early experiments with the pictorial depictions based on the old photographs, the glass sculptures, and the most recent cycle House of Cards (5 Panes) (2020). Some of the works will be more familiar to the art lovers, while others like the cycles Cage (2009) and Birkenau (2014) are shown in the United States for the first time.

Well known for his effort to reconcile through art the historical past with personal memories, Richter is uniquely qualified to remind the viewers about the horror of war, the danger of manipulation through the isolated messages or images taken out of context, and the inconsistencies in the recollection of the past events. To accentuate the point of a fleeting chance of memory, his technique of smudging the clear image reminds us of the distortion brought on by the time.

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932, Dresden) Cage 4, 2006 Oil on canvas — Gerhard Richter, Cage 4, 2006, Oil on canvas, Tate: Lent from a private collection 2007,© Gerhard Richter 2019 / Image courtesy of the MetMuseum

The technique can be seen as a way to represent the perspective of time similar to the perspective of distance and space. It creates the fourth dimension (time) for otherwise ordinary snapshots. As the objects positioned far away are depicted proportionally smaller and with less visible details, the memories about the events from the past are covered in haze and come out with blurred outlines. One can still see the object, yet as years go by, the exact image loses its significance and is replaced by the vague outline.

Explore the show online by taking a virtual tour.

Virtual Tour

The exhibition at the Met Breuer is the first major expose of Richter’s art in the US in 20 years.

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Art in NYC: Obsession-Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, Picasso at The Met Breuer

July 26, 2018September 10, 2018 contact@arts-ny.com

Art in NYC: Obsession-Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, Picasso at The Met Breuer

Erotic watercolors, drawings and prints from The Met’s Scofield Thayer Collection on view July 3 – October 7, 2018

Obsession Nudes Met Breuer Schiele — Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1911; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982

An exhibition of about fifty works by the grand masters of the Vienna Secession movement Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele together with the early works by Pablo Picasso dives deep into artists’ obsession with male and female bodies. Bequeathed to The Met Museum in 1925 by Scofield Thayer, the collection is now coming on view for the first time. Thayer, a wealthy American publisher, and poet, collected the works in the early 1920s.

Klimt, while highly acclaimed in Austria, was mostly unknown to the American public. Schiele and Picasso were just starting to get attention and recognition in America. Thayer used some reproductions of the artworks in his avant-garde literary magazine Dial and for an exhibition at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1924. However he didn’t find much interest for them in his native Massachusetts.

His collection was assembled when Thayer was traveling between Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. It is an opening into the hidden obsession and fascination with the nude bodies, the emotions of the struggling souls and the complexity of desire. Don’t judge; just observe and contemplate.

Art in NYC: Like Life – Sculpture, Color, and the Body at The Met Breuer

March 30, 2018July 30, 2018 arts-NY 1 Comment

Art in NYC: Like Life – Sculpture, Color, and the Body at The Met Breuer

History of Sculpture from 1300 until Now on view from March 21 – July 22, 2018

Like Life sculpture color body Met Breuer Museum — Tip Toland, The Whistlers, 2005, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Dale and Doug Anderson, 2011 / Image courtesy of The Met Breuer

This truly fascinating exhibition at The Met Breuer covers seven hundred years of history from 1300 till now of sculptures, casts, tableaus, masks and even automatons to illuminate the perfection of likeness and its distortion. Covering a vast time window and the diversity of the approaches, the show is organized into 8 thematic sections located on 2 floors of the museum. Each section includes works from various places and times connected by either similarity or extreme contrast in the concept. About 120 works by old and new masters are selected including Donatello, El Greco, Rodin, Degas, Kusama, Koons, Cattelan and many many other.

One may agree or disagree with the overarching thesis about the use of colors and the influence of religion and societal biases on how we perceive the body in its nakedness and likeness, but it all comes back to how we see ourself and how we are perceived by others. Allow yourself enough time to observe, compare and read. Read More

Art in NYC: Provocations by Anselm Kiefer at the Met Breuer

January 12, 2018May 1, 2018 arts-NY

Art in NYC: Provocations by Anselm Kiefer at the Met Breuer

Kiefer’s works from the Met Museum collection on view until April 8, 2018

Met Breuer Museum NYC Provocations Anselm Kiefer — Anselm Kiefer, Bohemia Lies by the Sea, 1996 © Anselm Kiefer / Image courtesy of the Met Museum

The exhibition at the Met Breuer “Provocations: Anselm Kiefer” presents selected works from the Met collection covering artist’s 50-year career. Well known for pushing the boundaries of comfortable art and sleepy consciousness, Kiefer’s paintings, watercolors, and collages shake the norms by questioning the stale and tired concepts. The art lovers, sophisticated and novices, will appreciate the introspection and depth of thought that this expose projects. The exhibition is on view from December 13, 2017 until April 8, 2018. Read More

Art at NYC: Edvard Munch at the Met Breuer

January 3, 2018May 1, 2018 arts-NY 1 Comment

Art at NYC: Edvard Munch at the Met Breuer

Edvard Munch: “Between the Clock and the Bed” on November 15, 2017 – February 4, 2018

The Met Museum Edvard Munch Between the Clock and the Bed — Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed, 1940–43 © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Munch Museum / Image courtesy of The Met Museum

The Met Breuer exhibition of works by Edvard Munch (1861-1944), a Norwegian Expressionist artist, gives the viewers a chance to see the paintings from the Munch Museum in Oslo and other European and private collections. Some of the paintings are shown in New York for the first time.

The exhibition makes a moody and sobering impression as one would expect at a mention of the artist’s name. Munch is known for powerfully presenting the emotional moments of life repeating the same situations in multiple versions. Opening up with the self-portrait which gives the title to the exhibition, the show explores the themes dear to the artist to which he kept returning to at different stages of his life. The exhibition will run through February 4, 2018.

Edvard Munch was born in 1861 to the family of a medical officer. His mother and then his beloved sister Sophie had died from tuberculosis when he was 14. These tragic events made a very strong impression on the future artist and were later depicted in many of his works. Munch himself had suffered from many of diseases in childhood. Later he was haunted by depression and alcohol dependency. His personal life was stressful and unhappy. So, naturally his works are full of high tensions and despair.

Starting drawing from a young age, Munch had enrolled into the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, Norway where he experimented with various expressionist styles. He visited Paris and Berlin and sampled the artistic scenes there coming under the influences of major artists of the early 90s. In that productive period, he sketched or created the first versions of many of the themes to which he kept returning, again and again, later in life.

While he came to fame rather early in his career in the late 1880s – early 1890s, Munch himself believed that he reached his breakthrough in art when he was fifty. By that time he already resettled back in Norway after a turbulent life on the move between France, Germany, and Denmark. In 1908-1909 he suffered a mental breakdown from which he recovered upon his return to his native Norway. The result of the emotional torments gave us his famously high-strung paintings.

This current exhibition at the Met Breuer presents about 50 of Munch’s works. Each gallery in the exhibition is dedicated to a theme: Self-Portraits, Nocturnes, Despair, Sickness and Death, Puberty and Passion, Attraction and Repulsion, and In the Studio. This thematic rather than a chronological arrangement allows the viewer to follow the artist’s maturity of style and the changes in technique. As Munch was coming back to the same subject repeatedly with years in between, the ascents of colors and the pace of strokes conveys his personal take on the same situation over time. The FT review points out that “these juxtapositions is at once stunning and depressing, a showcase of genius and delusion.” A group of works under the Despair theme includes a lithograph of “The Scream” from 1895.

Munch’s landscapes and life scenes en plain air are characteristically unsoothing and moody. The low skies, the broody sunsets and eery reflections of in the water are alarming. The tensions continue in the paintings of his studio. Even the tender embrace of “The Kiss” surrounded by the dark background while sensual and tender, doesn’t promise a happy ending. Munch’s great genius of catching the emotional dread and the pain of the soul is in full view here. “Who better to guide us through our own fatalistic age?” asks rhetorically the review of the exhibition in The New York Times.

Time: November 15, 2017 – February 4, 2018

Venue: The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave, NY

With the New York Pass your can enjoy a free visit to the Met Breuer!

While you are at the Met Breuer stop by another exhibition there Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason which will be closing on January 14, 2018.

Tag: The Met Breuer