Art Online: 3 Exhibition Highlights In December
Artemisia, National Gallery London, until January 24, 2021
The Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi was the wunderkind of the early baroque. Her moving life story, which could also run under the hashtag #Metoo is just as captivating as her dramatic paintings. Born in Rome in 1593 as the daughter of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia was brought up by her father and trained in his workshop. In a world dominated by men, she soon proved to be exceptionally talented. When the young woman was raped by one of her father's employees, the fight for her honor began. She continued her career as a painter in Florence and became the first woman to gain admission to the renowned Accademia dell’Arte del Disegno in 1616.
The much-anticipated blockbuster exhibition Artemisia at the National Gallery in London is dedicated to the work and life of this extraordinary female Old Master. During the lockdown, the museum has also launched an online tour. In a half-hour video, the exhibition's curator, Letizia Treves, takes viewers on a walk through the museum, showing great details of the paintings accompanied by exciting stories from Artemisia’s life.
Louise Bourgeois. The Heart Has Its Reasons, Tarmak 22 and on hauserwirth.com, until February 3, 2021
The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois has played many roles in her life: daughter, mother, wife, an unrecognized sculptor at a young age. Until she passed away in 2010, one of the most successful contemporary artists in old age. Her emotional artworks are closely interwoven with Bourgeois’ traumatic childhood experiences. They explore complex human experiences, such as love, fear, and dependence, the ones that cannot always be explained rationally.
A new exhibition featuring a selection of Bourgeois’ sculptures and drawings at Tarmak22 Gstaad and online on hauserwirth.com, takes its title from Blaise Pascal’s phrase: “The heart has its reasons [of which reason knows nothing]”. Before she devoted herself fully to art, Bourgeois engaged intensively with Pascal during her mathematics and philosophy studies at the Paris Sorbonne Université. The exhibition outlines the interplay of oppositions as a recurring theme in Bourgeois ’oeuvre, between mind and body, man and woman or consciousness and subconsciousness.
Kandinsky, Guggenheim Bilbao, until May 23, 2021
The abstract works by Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky are world-famous and with their bright colors and geometric shapes quite unmistakable. A new exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao explores how his work evolved, from early figurative landscape painting to his recognizably visual language of abstraction. The American industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim met Kandinsky in Dessau in 1929 and began collecting his works. With over 150 works, this collection is one of the largest and most impressive Kandinsky collections in the world.
A total of 62 paintings and works on paper from the Guggenheim collection are on display and chronologically divided into Kandinsky's different life phases. Viewers can follow the artist on his path to becoming a pioneer of abstract art, from his beginnings with the Blauer Reiter group in Munich to his time in Moscow during the First World War and the last few years in Paris around 1930. The virtual tour with the exhibition’s curator Megan Fontanella gives many insights into the work and thinking of the artist.
