domenica 16 novembre 2008

LUCIAN FREUD

Early Works 1940-1958

9 October - 12 December 2008

Monday - Friday 9.00am - 5.30pm
Saturday 11.00am - 4.00pm

38 Bury Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BB

Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry BFI

The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore-Techno Version)

Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry

12 Sep 2008 - 23 Nov 2008 tue-sun 11-20

The new Gallery commission at BFI Southbank is a collaboration between visual artist Pierre Bismuth and acclaimed film director Michel Gondry. For the BFI they have created a new version of The All-Seeing Eye, an installation which explores, this time in the visual arts field, the themes at the core of the feature movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Gondry and based on an original idea by Bismuth, and for which they got the 2005 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making Bismuth the only contemporary artist to ever have received an Oscar.

The exhibition explores one of the most successful collaborations to date between a contemporary artist and a filmmaker and exemplifies how today film and art are interconnected. Like the film, The All-Seeing Eye shows subtraction as the metaphor for a world without communication and relationships: a room is stripped bare, the non immediately apparent visual erasure taking place creates a moment of displacement in the spectator comparable to the feeling experienced when a memory is lost, despite its strength and against one‘s will, simply by means of time passing. The theme of memory and its erasure links The All-Seeing Eye with Eternal Sunshine, a connection that is underlined by a television in the room playing a scene from the film throughout the piece. The subtractive process of scenery changes, seemingly high-tech, was instead manipulated off-screen in real time while filming, an example of Bismuth and Gondry’s shared fondness for special effects created by low-tech or non-digital means.

The exhibition is accompanied by Today is the Tomorrow of Yesterday, a series of films selected by Pierre Bismuth and Elisabetta Fabrizi, BFI Head of Exhibitions, on the theme of erasure.

Gerhard Richter

Current
Gerhard Richter
4900 Colours:
Version II
23 September – 23 November 2008
Open daily, 10am - 6pm Admission free

Gerhard Richter (born Dresden, 1932) is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Since the early 1960s he has tirelessly explored the medium of painting at a time when many were heralding its death. He has produced a remarkably varied body of work, including photography-based portrait, landscape and still-life paintings; gestural and monochrome abstractions; and colour chart grid paintings. This autumn, the Serpentine presents 4900 Colours, a major new work comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid formation to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic colour.

4900 Colours comprises 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares that can be reconfigured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings. Richter has developed a new version especially for the Serpentine Gallery exhibition: 4900 Colours: Version II, formed of 49 paintings of 100 squares.

4900 Colours is in the context of Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced the stained glass that was destroyed in World War II. Cathedral Window, unveiled in August 2007, comprises 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colours that are derived from the palette of the original medieval glazing.
http://www.gerhard-richter.com/

troikart 01

http://www.troika.uk.com/cloud.htm

CLOUD' - A DIGITAL SCULPTURE FOR BRITISH AIRWAYS TERMINAL 5

Troika has been commissioned by Artwise Curators to create a signature piece at the entrance of the new British Airways luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5.

In response, we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.

By audibly flipping between black and silver, the flip-dots create mesmerising waves as they chase across the surface of ‘Cloud’. Reflecting its surrounding colours, the mechanical mass is transformed into an organic form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting with the onlookers that pass by from both above and below.

The sculpture is located in Terminal 5 in the atrium hall which leads to the British Airways First Class Lounges. The brief from British Airways was open and simple: to create a signature piece that will mark the entrance of the First Class Lounges and signify the transition between the busy shopping floor and the calm and serenity of the lounges.

We started to work on the metaphor of clouds as one’s flies, and the contrast which exists between the busy, hectic airport experience, and the calm, luminous and ethereal world which we discover as we fly through this dense layer.
Another of our inspiration came from the old electromagnetic flip-dots which were used in railways and airport signs from the mid 70s. Those signs, with their characteristic flicking noise which instantly reminds us of travel, represent to us a golden age of technology, when analogue and digital started to merge. The indicators, dots which can flip from one side to the other with an electric impulse, have a fantastic materiality, a physicality which more modern technologies often lack, de-materialised into the virtual.

photo © Alex Delfanne/Artwise Curators 2008

We dreamt of applying this redundant technology to our sculpture, to create a sort of living organism, a cloud which we could animate, exploring the aesthetic potential of the flip-dots.

As the flip-dots flick we are instantly reminded of rippling water, of the mesmerizing movements of snakes and schools of fishes. We chose for that particular reason to create one side of the dots as silver mirror, to accentuate this feeling.

The project took 8 months in development, manufacturing and installation. Troika was responsible for the concept, design, executive design and engineering, project, production and installation management, and over-viewing all the operations from start to finish.

We would like to thank British Airways and Artwise Curators for giving us the opportunity to create our most ambitious works to date, Mike Smith Studio for the manufacturing of the sculpture, Pharos Architectural Controls, and Alternative Access for the installation.

CREDITS:

Cloud, 2008
Troika

Digital Sculpture for British Airways,
T5, Heathrow, London

Curated by Artwise Curators
Manufactured by Mike Smith Studio
Controls by Pharos Architectural Controls
Installation by Alternative Access ltd

Location: Atrium outside entrance to BA First,
Concorde and Club Galleries lounges, Terminal 5